Temple Uncle
One evening in Singapore I wandered into a Hindu temple. Having a look around, I ended up zoning out in front of a rack of candles. Before too long, an older Indian gentleman approached me. Apropos of nothing, he asked “do you know what’s burning in these lamps?” I did not, but he didn’t give me a chance to answer. “It’s ghee,” he said. “Do you know how to make ghee?” I did not. He then delivered a very detailed explanation on how to make ghee; I beg your pardon as I elide over it, mostly because I don’t remember it.
He quickly followed up, as if interrupting himself: “do you know we cannot make ghee with the milk we have in Singapore? It comes from Japan, Australia, and before they ship it they remove the fat, and we need that fat to make ghee.
“You see, raw milk is meat. When you boil the milk to remove the fat, you cook the meat. You are removing all of the essential nutrients from the milk. This is the same thing we do every day to all our foods, yes? We remove the nutrients.” He made a dramatic sucking gesture from his palm as he emphasised the word “remove.”
“There are many health benefits to ghee which we have lost in the modern day. In India there is four thousand year old ghee, people line up for days to take just a small amount. There are studies showing that ghee can cure cancer, and the people, they come from all over the world to consume this ghee.” His eyes noticeably met my head. “And to reverse hair loss also.” I continued to nod inquisitively.
“Now, as for the lamp flame, when you burn something, you produce a substance called ether. If you study physics, you will know what this is. When the concentration of ether in the atmosphere is high, it creates a connection, yes? It creates calmness and understanding. I will give you an example. In the jungle — you watch National Geographic, yes? In the jungle, there is a group of lions, a family, all sleeping at different angles all over the place. And then, a zebra comes in. And one of them will wake up and see it without making a sound. And all of the other ones will quickly wake up, see the target and understand, and immediately know and all go attack the zebra. We call ourselves, as humans, the most advanced species. But, can we do anything like this? If we were all sleeping and we see a zebra, what would we do? We would have to schedule a meeting, a meeting number two, and then form a committee. Ahhh…” he trailed off, sounding genuinely exasperated.
“It’s because outside the jungle, there is no ether. Unless you burn a lamp. So I suggest you to burn a lamp, with ghee, same time every day. In India, this is common. I’ll give you an example. It is close to Deepavali, and you’re going to be buying a lot of firecrackers, spending a lot of money. And your neighbour comes over, and he says, ah, my child, he’s very sick. I need some money to pay for his medical care. And a child, a Western child, would blurt his mouth and say, ah, but Daddy says we don’t have any money because we need to spend money on firecrackers for Deepavali. Yes? The child does not have understanding. The child needs you to tell them not to say such things because he doesn’t have understanding. But in India, we burn the lamp, and we have ether, and the child knows. The child knows to keep his mouth shut.
“I’ve been in Singapore 30 years, married to a Chinese woman for 25 years, and I tell you, there is no understanding. She always say me, ah, why you never tell me, or I tell you but you forgot. Because we are not collecting ether in Singapore.” He then took a breath for the first time in about eight minutes. I nodded, and he continued.
“Let me ask you this. Do you know where your soul came from?” I shook my head. “Okay, I will tell you. When your mother and father have sex, they produce… a cell. A tiny cell. But what is the shape? It’s the shape of a lotus flower with three petals. But until a soul enters, this is just dead flesh. Now, many thousands of souls will enter into the mother’s vagina.” He pointed confidently at my loins and gestured upward into my abdomen just slightly more slowly than I was comfortable with.
“And one of these souls will make itself comfortable on the base of this lotus, and then the lotus petals will close. You know when this happens because that is the first vomit. After 30 to 45 days, when the woman vomits, that’s when you know you have a normal soul. But the soul of a very enlightened person like Jesus Christ or the Buddha, when they sit on the lotus, they will make sure that the petal doesn’t close. And they will allow the leaves of this lotus to get much bigger, and then they will allow it to close. We have lost this with Western technology, yes? We have all these scans and these items, but we do not simply use the senses. We ignore. We already know, based on how long it takes the first mother to vomit, what kind of soul the child will be, yes? And what happens when you have too much freedom?”
“Chaos,” I replied. He agreed. “Exactly. In the Western way of thinking, we tell children, oh, you can be whatever you want to be, and we do not give them any guidance, even though we already know what kind of soul that they’re going to be. We make the child figure that out, and it’s unfair. This is why we have children screaming on the airplane, even Indian children. Yes, their skin is maybe dark brown and Indian, but their mind? It lives in New York City.” I nodded in earnest agreement.
“I can see in your eyes, in your facial expressions, that you’re looking for something. You’re a vagabond. You’re yearning. Yes, I can see it.” He was right. He continued:
“Here’s what I will tell you. I was born in 1973. I lived in a village up on the mountain, and to get down to the school, we had to walk down through the mountain, through fields, into the village to get to the school. We have no shoes. We have no flashlight, no electricity. It takes us five hours to go down and six hours to get up, so we start at two in the morning. The older boys start coming down, and the mothers send the younger boys out to go follow-follow when they come through.
“And what is in the jungle?" At this point, a ceremony started abruptly, with it coming live traditional Indian music played quite loudly. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Thorns. Rocks. Poisonous snakes. Insects. Leopards. And? Wild. Indian. Bison.” The combination of the way he enunciated “wild Indian bison” and the loud music made me conjure an image of a buff man in the Indian jungle fearlessly wrangling a bison. I turned around, pretending to have a coughing fit as I stifled laughter at this sudden visualisation.
“When I was in Primary 1, 5 years old, I got this on a sharp rock.” He shows me his foot with a scar on the bottom. “It was very deep. I am now 52 and you can still see it. Imagine how deep it was. Today, we would take a child to the hospital and pump him full of antibiotics and stitches, and still the child couldn’t take it. But for us, we just took a leaf which had some sticky substance inside, and we rub it on the cut, and they say, walk, walk, and I walk to school and it dries, and the cut was all better.”
At this point, he’d now kept me past the temple’s tourist hours. It’s supposed to be actual Hindus only, and his colleagues at the temple gently reminded him to please kick the white boy out.
He says “okay, okay, this is all you need to know, yes? Whatever will happen will happen. We cannot change that. Just allow things to happen. Don’t look at people with a car and say, oh, what a beautiful car. Or you have no girlfriend and you say, oh, what a beautiful girlfriend. It always comes or it doesn’t come. We will not change our fate. If we could change our fate, it would be chaos. That’s all you need to remember. Add me on WhatsApp and I’ll send you many photographs.” I agreed I would and we parted ways. What a gem of a man.
I have many stories like this. I’ll tell you why. Take a look at Joe Budden here:
Everyone else (I have to wonder why they are even in the room) is visibly shocked at this woman’s taste. Not Joe. He’s gonna let her talk. Why shouldn’t he? If you hear someone start talking about “the little things,” namely a thousand bucks on some panties and groceries, you’re about to have a top-tier NPC encounter. Two dialogue options appear before you: “bitch what are you talking about” and “that’s what I be doin’.” The top one ends the encounter, the bottom one continues it. Why would you skip this dialogue? At worst, it’s a funny story. At best, you’ll find something out about the nature of fate and the fauna of the Indian jungle.
People will drop hints that they’re wacky. We reflexively cut them off without realising it every day. You gotta resist that urge. Go deadpan Nathan Fielder style. Smile. Ask them to elaborate. There’s a trick journalists and detectives use to make people incriminate themselves: say nothing. Your interlocutor, wanting to fill the silence, will just keep talking. Use that. Look interested. Look respectful. Let people do their thing and you’ll get content like this. That’s why Joes Budden and Rogan are good podcast hosts. Watch this clip until you get it. That’s what I be doin’.