At the Bottom of Everything (15 page)

A problem with trying to accomplish anything when you’re visiting a place like Delhi is that just living, getting up in the morning and staying on your feet until it’s time to go to bed at night, feels like such an accomplishment already. I felt like the world’s most incompetent private detective. Only instead of my incompetence turning out to be a tricky sort of asset, where I’d stumble onto the bad guys in their lair like the Pink Panther, I was going to end up stabbed and tubercular in a gutter, picked over by wild dogs, no closer to finding Thomas than if I’d never left D.C.

Never mind finding Thomas; just finding the hotel where I was supposed to meet Guruji’s assistant (this was the major chore of my first week) somehow turned into a three-hour adventure. First the auto-rickshaw driver (auto-rickshaws were what people called the Flintstones cars, it turned out) misheard the address I gave him and took me, through unspeakable traffic, to Chandni Chowk when I wanted to be taken to Barahkhamba Road. Then, once I’d found another auto-rickshaw to take me back, and once I’d finally found the right street, the hotel turned out to be three-quarters closed
due to construction. Then, trying to find somewhere to email Raymond to say I’d be late, I got lost in the electronics/Styrofoam district, and by the time I made it back to the hotel, another entrance had been marked off with caution tape. I was never unsweaty. I was never rested. I was never entirely uninterested in finding a bathroom.

In a roundabout way, all this difficulty was reassuring. If I, sane and healthy and armed with
Lonely Planet: India
, was finding Delhi hard to navigate, then Thomas must have found it impossible. He could no more have found the Batras, assuming they were really there, than he could have found a particular pebble on the beach.

But of course I couldn’t mention reassurance to the Pells. My dispatches, which I usually sent from an Internet café on the second floor of a coffee shop around the corner from the
barsati
, must have read like the journal entries Scott wrote as he was dying in the South Pole.

I never knew how much to say to them; they’d known bits about Thomas and his guru beforehand, from their own calls to people who’d lived in the apartment, but they hadn’t known the details of his being homeless, or anything about the retreats. Out of Lost Boys solidarity, or maybe just out of cowardice, no one in the apartment had wanted to tell his
parents much about what he’d been doing, and it turned out that I didn’t either.

But for myself, for the purposes of my own search, I’d been spending most of my time trying to meet Guruji. If I was going to say that I’d made a real effort to find Thomas—if I was going to go back to D.C. feeling any less ashamed of myself than when I’d left—then I needed to at least talk to him. But apparently meeting Guruji wasn’t going to be any easier than anything else; he’d been sick now for a month. Something with his heart, apparently, that people kept explaining by using a word that sounded like
bicuspid
. (At the
barsati
they’d been burning joss sticks and taking turns reading his old talks out loud.)

But Guruji was definitely still in Delhi, Cecilia said; he’d never left the city in his life, and he’d never been to a hospital. He also didn’t use a phone or computer, so if you wanted to reach him, you had to write to Raymond, the man who handled all his worldly affairs.

This went on for days, like a meander through the circles of customer service hell, until finally, just an hour after he’d written to me for a third time to say that no meeting would be possible, Raymond sent an email with the subject line “URGENT”:

So, just before two p.m. on my seventh day in India, after hours of auto-rickshaws and traffic cones, I stood alone outside what I was fairly sure was the southwest entrance of the Continental Hotel, wearing Rory’s basically clean size-nine penny loafers. In a plastic bag I had a worrisomely softening Valrhona chocolate bar, the procuring of which had been a morning’s work. I kept mistaking the tickle of sweat on my nose for a bug. Just when I was getting ready to go back into the lobby to see if I could convince the woman at the front desk to let me use the business center, an auto-rickshaw pulled to a stop and a disheveled, white-haired stork of a man unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat.

“Adam? Raymond Broughton. In we go; you sit in back, please. Just shove my stick off the side. Drive, drive, drive.”

Raymond was British; he looked to be about eighty, and he seemed to have dressed for a safari weeks or months ago
and then not bothered to change. Stray feathers of white hair flapped from the sides of his head; his glasses made his eyes look like things preserved in jars. We were going straight to Guruji’s home, apparently. Raymond couldn’t have given me the address over email, of course. There were people who would very much like to know where Sri Prabhakara laid his head, as I must have known. The government was terribly frightened of him, terribly frightened, ever since the campaign in ‘84. Whether I ended up speaking to Guruji would of course depend on how he happened to be feeling just then, and there was quite a good chance, unfortunately, that he might not be feeling well at all. Sometimes these notions did overtake him; his ambitions were greater than his health. Was I staying at the Continental? That was the only place Raymond ever allowed guests to stay, because at all the rest of the hotels in central Delhi you were assured of being robbed, either by bandits or by the room rates. Was I familiar with Guruji’s forty-four precepts and twelve injunctions?

While he talked he rummaged through my plastic bag and pulled out the chocolate bar, which he unwrapped and began to eat. “Dreadful for my teeth, really, but vital for the rest of me.” Whenever our auto-rickshaw stopped or even slowed down, he slapped the back of the driver’s seat and barked,
“Chalo! Chalo! Chalo!”
pointing in the direction of an alleged gap in the traffic. “They benefit from a bit of force, you know. Wonderful people but absolutely complacent.”

We drove along a wide, dusty road through a part of town that looked something like Embassy Row in D.C., past trees with seedpods like brown leather baseballs. Guruji’s building turned out to be half an hour from the hotel, in a neighborhood that looked like an American suburb, if that suburb had been fending off an invasion. All the lawns were
Wizard of Oz
green and newly mowed, and at the base of every driveway, in front of a wall topped with chicken wire or broken glass, stood a bored-looking security guard in a blue uniform.

At the end of a cul-de-sac, in front of a beige three-story building, Raymond leaped out and rushed past the guard without so much as a nod. Outside the door he directed me to speak very quietly (“Guruji may well have reconsidered, you understand”) and then led me up into an apartment no bigger, but much cleaner, than the
barsati
. All the curtains were drawn, so it was dark inside; the floorboards were buckled and loose, the doorframes seemed to tilt. There was a low dresser covered in incense holders (hence the sweet, slightly sickening smell in the air) and, above it, a wall covered in mismatched framed photos of men who looked very much as if they might have been called Sri. There was a beatific dark-skinned man with wavy Jesus hair gazing upward; a wizened homunculus of a man seated cross-legged in an orange robe; a white-bearded man laughing and tilting his head.

Raymond was the kind of person whose whisper is just as loud, and maybe more piercing, than his ordinary speaking voice. “I’m just going to step in and see how he’s doing, if you’ll excuse me.”

As a little kid I’d gone with my mom on a few visits to a dying great-aunt in Connecticut, and the feeling in Guruji’s apartment—the hush and stillness—brought those awkward afternoons back. That and maybe the closed bedroom door, behind which I could hear murmuring voices now, not just Raymond’s, and some sort of low staticky chatter.

After long enough that I wondered if I’d been forgotten, and whether I’d remember how to get back to the main road to catch an auto-rickshaw, Raymond cracked open the door and hissed, “Come now, please. Shoes off.”

I’m not exactly sure how I would have pictured a spiritual guru’s bedroom (maybe a buckwheat mat, a hanging gong), but it wasn’t like this. An enormous bed with four dark carved posts as tall as the ceiling; overlapping Oriental rugs; gauzy curtains; a dozen burning candles scattered over brass tables and dark wooden dressers. A founding father could have died
in this room. The air was like miso soup; the chatter turned out to be coming from a black-and-white TV with a broken antenna, tuned to a soap opera set in a hospital.

Sitting in a tall, carved chair right next to the bed was a man who must have been the doctor; he had John Lennon glasses and a dark mustache and an actual white doctor’s jacket. He looked down at his feet like someone who wished he could be elsewhere or, barring that, invisible. Standing behind him, slowly flapping a woven fan in the direction of the bed, was a woman I took to be a nurse; she wore something multilayered and a white face mask, and seemed determined not to look at me.

And there in the bed, tucked carefully under the covers like an E.T. doll, lay Sri Prabhakara. He was as dark skinned a person as I’d seen in India, and at least as old as Raymond. He had a silver shine where he’d once had hair, and a calm, vaguely amused expression. His head was much too big for his body, and his ears and nose were much too big for his face. What I could see of his chest was covered in white cotton; next to him on the bed sat a rusting silver bell. He’d been looking at the TV, but now he turned his eyes to me in a way that made me think of a long-suffering sea turtle.

“Alone, please,” he said. Or mouthed; his voice was just at the edge of what I could hear. “TV, off.” The nurse and doctor began to go and Raymond held the door for them.

“Shall I go too,” Raymond said, “or would you like me to stay, in case …”

“Go.”

“Of course.”

As soon as the door was closed, leaving just the two of us, I was filled with the same fluttery, empty-headed feeling I’ve had the few times I’ve been around celebrities. Waiting for popcorn behind Cal Ripken in a Cleveland Park movie theater, standing next to Diane Keaton at baggage claim in the Denver airport; it was that kind of feeling. Guruji gestured
with a shaky hand for me to sit in the doctor’s chair. From up close I could smell a peppery balm and something like sage. “You are … nervous. Why?”

“Well, I don’t think I’m really nervous, just sort of, you know, sorry, it’s a little weird, I only came, I don’t know if Raymond told you, my friend Thomas? I think you might have known him—”

“Breathing … please.”

“Sorry. I’m just … Do you think I could maybe ask you a little bit about Thomas, because his parents actually—”

“First … the calm body. Beginning … to consider … hearing … sounds … the moving air … the birds outside …” (I didn’t hear any birds, but for the first time since coming to India, I could hear the ticking of my watch.) “One hundred … breaths. Feeling … feeling.” He let his eyes fall shut, and I worried he might have died. But then he said, “One? … One. Two? … Two.” With every breath a single crimped nose hair shook.

“Thirty-one? … Thirty-one. Thirty-two? … Thirty-two.” He counted as slowly and steadily as a roof leak. By the time we got to a hundred I’d passed through disbelief and outrage and arrived at something like acceptance, as if I were listening to one of my tutees mangling an interminable joke.
I’m sitting at the bedside of an Indian guru who’s counting to a hundred with his eyes closed. This is in fact what’s happening
.