When I was about 10 years old I learned about reincarnation from somewhere, probably something on TV that I discussed with my mother. Later that same week I was standing in the lunch line at school and holding court with my new-found knowledge. Because my classmates hadn't heard about this phenomenon, I soon had a rapt audience and began to embellish the tiny fragment of the philosophy that I understood. "You're a 3", I told another little girl whose big brown eyes stared intently into mine. "You've had 3 past lives. I'm a 6, that's as many times as you can go." I was making it up on the spot.
Another girl I barely knew approached and earnestly said, "Do ME" and shoved her face right up into mine. I scowled and gazed deeply into her ingenuous eyes, and it suddenly, and chillingly dawned on me that we weren't playing a game. The other little girls in my 4th grade class were genuinely seeking information from me, and they were anxious to believe my lies. "I can't do any more of you," I said, "It's too tiring."
This is the closest I've ever come to forming a cult. This brief brush with persuasion has stayed with me for 40 years because of the attention I wasn't used to, and the intensity of the desire of my young friends. I was also strangely frightened: I didn't WANT to keep up the lie. I didn't want to come clean, either, but I knew even at that young age the responsibility even of maintaining the facade for a few more days. The naivete, the enthusiasm and the gullibility of my young would-be followers dismayed me, and in a way I couldn't understand then, broke my heart.
If I hadn't had that long-ago experience I think it would be hard for me to believe in cults today. To a registered Freethinker in suburban America, it's difficult to comprehend the existence of religious groups held in sway by a leader whose crazy ideas come across as pure comedy on the surface, and often as nightmares on deeper scrutiny.
Sanjiv Bhattacharya has written the best, and most-engaging (no pun intended) book on Mormon fundamentalist polygamy that I've yet encountered. In recent years many memoirs of plural wives and a few novels about them have surfaced, and I've read several. I read Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven", a gruesome account of madness, mania and murder in polygamous sects. "Banner of Heaven" is a good book, but the style is straight-up reportage,just the facts ma'am, and to my mind made for a rather dull, textbook read.
"Secrets and Wives" is anything but dull. Rather than sitting on a journalistic high horse and lofting softballs of who, where, when and how at us, he instead invites the reader into the passenger seat of his none-too-showy sedan and cranks up the a/c as we ride across the western landscape and try to slip unnoticed into the heart of Fundy Mormonism.
Bhattacharya writes with lively style, and I get the impression he bores as easily as I do. This book about polygamy becomes a book about writing a book about polygamy. The author, a Bengali Hindu born and raised in London, is so exotic and alien to his whiter-than-white quarry that their guard may be down. He isn't quite like the myriad journalists they've chased off in the past, different skin, different accent. They all have doctrine regarding dark skin. One wonders, do they regard him as even human?
It's a fair question, because many of the people featured in the book have whole-heartedly embraced the idea that they are something BETTER than human, and that they -- whichever division or sect or offshoot Bhattacharya is examining at the moment -- are the ONLY true, chosen, blessed and exalted.
Sanjiv Bhattacharya tells their tales by telling his own, and his honest examination of his own life, his journey into and out of faith, make a unique, compelling parallel to the weird and discomfiting families of dedicated polygamists he encounters. He treats each person in his book with a measure of compassion and kindness that some of them may not deserve, but Bhattacharya has a gift for understanding the episodes that create a personality. His ability to define motives and interview the seemingly un-interviewable is truly amazing.
The book is well-notated and cites multiple news reports, court documents and personal testimony to tell some stomach-turning tales of multi-generational incest and abuse. Women and children do not fare well in these communities.Yet a great deal of humor is present in the book, and I laughed outloud often when reading it! Bhattacharya has a genteel, chummy approach to storytelling, and assumes that you and he are on the same philosophical page. He doesn't condemn the practice of polygamy outright, but he asks its participants to look at themselves and evaluate their decisions in the light of day. And that is something most are not willing, perhaps able, to do.
