Around India in 80 Trains (46 page)

Just before lunch on day five I felt a tingle in my forehead. It was so delicate it was like a filament flickering inside a light bulb. Intrigued, I sat as still as possible. There it was again. The flicker then appeared across the apples of my cheeks and moved into the tip of my nose. I had never felt this in my body before. I moved systematically down to my neck and felt the same flickering that soon grew to a thumping beat.

Woooohoooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Goenka’s voice crackled to life again, signalling the end of the sitting and I realised that I had passed almost two hours without any niggling thoughts. See ya later Robert Palmer! Of course, he was immediately back in the room singing with gusto.

‘Your heart sweats, your body shakes ...’

Silence is the most beautiful sound. Not once did it feel restrictive to stick to the rules. There was no need for small talk. It was liberating not to have to compete with, impress, feign interest in, or be answerable to anyone, but just to be present for the sake of being present. Despite the lack of communication we adjusted to one another quite naturally and, dare I say it, Inga and I became friends. She left me a towel when she saw I had misplaced mine. I left her bottles of water when I noticed she had run out. Through body language and intuition we became sensitive to each other’s needs. It was not a sixth sense but a heightening of the five I already had. Instead of allowing them to linger in the past or drift into the future, they had become focused on the present.

Leaping out of bed became the norm. After 11 hours of daily meditation I slept straight through the night and rarely had dreams. The flickering soon branched out across my skin and swept over my body. It was like being on an Easter egg hunt. Scouring patches closely would soon turn up new goodies that I could add to the basket. My favourite flicker was the vein in my forehead. Growing attached to it was against the rules, but it was hard not to be thrilled by the discovery of my body. One night the flicker became a stream that connected my nose, cheeks, chin and neck until my whole face throbbed gently in time with my arms and legs. My upturned hands felt as though 10 tiny heartbeats were living in the fingertips. Eventually they all connected, the inside of my wrists pounding so hard that I opened one eye to see if I could detect a movement on my skin.

But during the sittings there was one recurrent image: the night I fought with Passepartout in Chandigarh crept up on me making my shoulders stiffen, my chest tighten and my breath rasp. I kept it under lock and key and pushed it out of my mind, but just as I had settled it would resurface. Goenka’s voice smoothed over the creases with a constant reminder about impermanence:

‘Everything in life arises to disappear. Do not become attached.’

But the memory refused to leave. It climbed out of my head, made itself comfortable in front of me and stared at me. Just as I found a state of calm, a bony finger poked me:

Hey I’m still here, you still hate me, I still make the back of your neck hot and itchy every time you remember me.

The inside of my nostrils began to tingle and an ache grew behind my eyes as they filled. I started to cry, heaving with sobs on my cushion. Furious, I uncrossed my legs, left the hall and ran into the gardens where I sat on a rock weeping onto my knees. The resident pye-dog trotted up to me and cocked his head to one side as if to say, ‘another one of you weirdoes on my patch.’ He snorted then lay down at my feet and began to lick himself.

As I watched the sun descending on the hills I thought about how I normally dealt with upset: I phoned my best friend; watched
Anchorman
for the 50
^th
time; played with other people’s dogs on Hampstead Heath; or devoured Shanghai dumplings in Royal China. They were avoidance tactics. They briefly alleviated the symptoms but suppressed the root cause of my woes that would soon push shoots up from the ground again. It had to be found, dug up, pulled out and thrown away. By dealing with the thoughts head on, there was nowhere to hide. I looked around and caught sight of Inga sitting against a tree, her face stained with tears. Against the rules she flashed me a watery smile. After six days of no real human contact, it felt like the mental equivalent of a bear hug.

I settled back on my cushion and listened to Goenka’s voice:

‘When a thought originates from hatred, hurt or anger, an unpleasant sensation arises in the body. Just accept that anger is there and now heat, or tension or palpitations. Just accept that the mind is full of that negativity. You will come out of it. You have not suppressed it, you just observe and observe and one comes out of it.’

Michael Stipe had managed to oust the boys and was now sitting on my shoulder singing
Losing My Religion.

‘That’s me in the corner

That’s me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you’

I realised that the only person I was trying to keep up with was myself. In my first year as a journalist I decided I would only be happy when I got my film reviews quoted on posters on the Underground. Then I saw them on the Jubilee line and I was soon bored. I wanted a byline in a national paper. I had three back to back. But then I wanted a byline in
TIME
magazine, then another. I was overjoyed at the time but it was short-lived. What next? Where did it end? Why did I care that Passepartout did not think I measured up to his standards? Why did I feel guilty for not getting my grades at A-level? It meant nothing now.

The hum of a plane passing overhead grew louder and louder until it screamed by and then faded away.
Everything arises to disappear
.
Learn to face both pleasure and pain with equanimity
. The truth was that they both hurt: one when it disappeared and one when it arrived. But by remaining a passive observer to both, perhaps day-to-day events would become more manageable. With this in mind, on the seventh day after lunch, something strange happened.

I had traced the pulsations through my arms and legs and was sitting in what felt like a ball of warmth when the Chandigarh image sprang into my head—but nothing happened. No prickling along my skin. No tensing in my shoulders. I forced myself to play out the entire scene in slow motion in my head. Nothing happened. My breath was almost invisible. Meditation by its very nature is experiential. It is not open to description. It recoils from language, shrugs off explanation. Nor can it be a target of cynics or criticism, we cannot criticise what we have not known. But while still sitting cross-legged my body underwent the most intense physical sensation I have ever experienced. My stomach muscles tightened, my arms burned and I felt as though a plug was being pulled out of the base of my spine, draining me of all my bitterness towards Passepartout and myself. At one point I thought I had risen off the cushion and panicked, blinking open my eyes and expecting everyone else to be staring. Nobody paid any attention. I ran from the hall, found my rock and sat down, surprised to feel my T-shirt drenched in sweat, tears streaming down my face. My body was crying but my mind was still and had never felt so at peace. Those roots had finally been torn up.

Liberty the White Witch broke her silence the next morning. While on an amble through the orchard she spotted the gardeners spraying the plants with pesticide and turned to me with her mouth hanging open. She willed me with her eyes to join her in uproar. I flared my nostrils in sympathy and slunk off to the dining hall for a cup of tea and a banana while she argued with the teachers. With the final days approaching, people were becoming casual and smiling, nudging each other towards the bundle of puppies discovered in the bushes and standing in huddles to watch the sunset. On the 10
^th
day we learnt the final stage of the meditation process. For the last 10 minutes of every sitting, we were to imagine that our bodies were generating nothing but love and peace and happiness.

Where once I would have smirked, rolled my eyes and made jokes about tree-huggers and hippies, it made sense to me. Over the last 10 days I had done nothing but observe my breath and watch my own body. I had not been force-fed literature or doctrine, or been asked to engage in rites or rituals. I had not placed hope in an unknown entity. I had not asked for anything, from anyone. I had not paid money, or offered gifts as a bargain for my well-being. I had sat still, let my body do the talking and listened patiently. I no longer needed or wanted any kind of God or religion. Goenka’s last piece of advice was this:

‘Please don’t leave here calling yourself a Buddhist. If the technique works, then please practise it to reap the full benefits. If not, then throw it in the bin and put it down to experience.’

We were then permitted to break noble silence. It was as though someone was slowly increasing the volume on a muted scene. Murmurs of relief gave way to the exchange of names, nationalities and a general release of joy. It turned out that Liberty’s real name was Zooey and she was an ex-drug mule from Brooklyn who used to swallow condoms of heroin until her periods stopped and she almost died. Malini from Bangalore was here for the 12
^th
time. I could not help but assume that she had failed to learn anything on the previous 11 occasions. A contingent of Slovenians grabbed each other in excitement then decided to travel to Pondicherry together. Perfect Annie to my left had never meditated in her life, and it turned out that Inga had tired of the meditation after three days and had torn open a big paper shopping bag and spent the last six days making notes all over it—so much for my heightened awareness. After packing our bags, gossiping about the Canadian outburst and cleaning our rooms, we were invited to make anonymous donations to the course based on what we thought was appropriate for 10 nights’ food and accommodation, or at least enough for someone else to benefit from the course.

21 | Answered Prayers

At Hyderabad Kacheguda station I joined the queue to buy a ticket for the short hop to Deccan Nampally from where I was going to catch the Charminar Express to Chennai. As I stood sandwiched between fellow passengers, a finger poked me in the base of my spine. An elderly man in a dhoti and Nehru topi stood behind me applying steady pressure to my back with the tip of his index finger, as though this would make the queue move faster. Ten days ago I would have turned around and fumed. But now this man was only as annoying as I allowed him to be. In a few moments we would reach the front of the queue. Was it worth spending the next five or six minutes pulling my forehead into a scowl and tutting at a man who was completely indifferent to the effects of his poking? Not really. Instead I turned around, looked at him and started to laugh. He smiled back at me with a set of teeth like broken tombstones and muttered in Telugu about the wait. At the same time he removed the finger to pick his nose. Everything is, indeed, impermanent.