A Bathless Path

Brilliant boy vanishes into the hard world of monks who go begging food and dispensing happiness.

- Dnyanesh Jathar

It is unlikely that Jigar Shah will ever forget June 8, 2017. As he woke up at four on that Thursday morning in a friend’s vacant apartment in Surat, waves of memories swept his mind. Each wave heaved with images of his only son, Varshil, who would no longer be his son. One wave brought memories of him taking baby steps. Another carried the fragrance of flowers. “Our neighbours called him Galgota; it means bouquet of flowers,” Shah told me later.

Varshil had already woken up, so had his mother and sister. Affectionately, Shah patted his son, who had topped Gujarat state in Class 12 exam a few days before. Then he led the teenager, all of 17, to the chariot—a decorated horse drawn cart—waiting outside the apartment. Their relatives and friends were forming a procession behind the chariot. It would be the boy’s last journey on wheels. The chariot would take him to a hall where he would renounce the world and take diksha as a Jain monk. It would be his last journey as the son of his parents.

THE NAME VARSHIL means ‘one who brings rain’. “It rained, after a long gap, on the day he was born in August 1999. That is why we named him Varshil,” said Shah, 49, who is an income tax officer.

The Shahs live in Ahmedabad, in a two-bedroom flat in Amrapali Society in Paldi, an affluent locality known for the National Institute of Design and Le Corbusier-designed Sanskar Kendra museum. “Eighty of 140 flats in Amrapali Society belong to Jains,” said Shah. “So we have a Jain temple on the ground floor.” In a big room next to the temple, children gather every evening to play games and learn the basics of Jainism through stories told by an elderly lady.