Every family keeps papers that nobody reads. Ours kept a summons.
It was addressed to my grandfather, V Ramanathan, calling him to a meeting of Lodge in Madurai. I must have read it three or four times. It was formal, short and completely opaque. It gave a date, a place and an expectation that he would attend. It explained nothing else. Whoever wrote it clearly assumed the reader already knew what he was being called to.
Around the same time I began paying attention to the stories about my great-grandfather, Rao Saheb N R Venkatarama Ayyar, who belonged to Lodge Salem. By every account in the family he attended without fail until the day he died. In our house the word “lodge” was used the way you might say “the office”. It was simply somewhere these men went. Nobody explained it because nobody thought it needed explaining.
I do not have the years for either of them. The title in my great-grandfather’s name places him more precisely than any document I hold. The lodges in Salem and Madurai will have records that I do not, but the dates were never part of the story as it reached me. What reached me was the habit. He went. Then his son went.
So I had two generations of Freemasons behind me and no idea what that meant. My father was not a Mason. Whatever had been passed from my great-grandfather to my grandfather stopped there, one generation short of me. That gap is what made me curious. If it had come down to me automatically I suspect I would have taken it for granted and left it alone.
I eventually took the question to an uncle of mine, my grandfather’s younger brother’s son. I expected an explanation. What I got was better and more frustrating. He told me a little. He confirmed that both men had been Masons, spoke about what the lodge had meant in their lives and answered some of my questions. Others he simply did not answer and he made no apology for it. Then he said the thing that actually moved me: if I wanted to understand what this was, I would have to go and find a lodge and ask to join. Nobody could hand it to me secondhand.
That is not the answer a curious person wants. It turned out to be the correct one.
I was living in Melbourne at the time and that is where I made my first approach, to Lodge Liberation. I was initiated there and took my first degree with almost no idea what I was walking into. I remember being nervous in a way I had not been nervous in years, which is a strange thing to say about an evening spent among welcoming strangers. Before I could go any further, circumstances brought me back to India. I left Australia as an Entered Apprentice with the work unfinished, which sat uneasily with me for some time.
In Bengaluru I found Lodge Al Ameen No. 1412, working under the Scottish Constitution. I asked to continue. I went through initiation, passing and raising there. Doing it properly, at my own pace, in a lodge that became familiar, gave me something the rushed version never would have.
What I found was not the thing I had gone looking for. I had been chasing whatever my grandfather knew that I did not. What I actually found was a room full of people I would otherwise never have met: men who were serious about their own conduct without being pious about it, men who knew a great deal and wore it lightly and men who asked me questions about myself that I had been comfortably avoiding. Some of them have changed how I make decisions. That is not a small claim and I do not make it loosely.
Today I am the Secretary of Lodge Al Ameen No. 1412 SC. Among the duties of that office is issuing the summons to the brethren before each meeting: the date, the place, the expectation of attendance. Nothing else explained.
I think about that whenever I send one out. Somewhere there may be a young man who finds it years from now, folded in with the electricity bills, wondering what on earth a lodge is. I hope he asks. I hope somebody tells him just enough.