Maya (24 page)

What I loved about this verse is the suggestion that there is something in our present experience that we fail to notice—something profoundly worthwhile. Whatever it is, this “deeper import” is always available, and in this sense it's completely ordinary. But we don't trust what is common and easy; we want the exotic, the complicated, the extra-ordinary. Of course the irony of traveling halfway around the world in search of what is most common was not lost on me; but then, what's more common than irony? The verse called to mind the Vedantic idea of the Satguru—the True Teacher who is always present and available but unnoticed. We recognize the Satguru only when we're particularly vulnerable, in a rare, unguarded moment of trust and self-surrender. And the lesson he teaches is always the same: Here I am, your own real self in the guise of the other.

Back in Delhi, it was not the Satguru that I found when I looked within or without. There was only the white clown, anxious of losing his balance
and tumbling off the high wire into the abyss. Amid the crowds and the traffic, immersed in classes at the university and conversation at the Fulbright office, the abyss was always and everywhere present, for it was none other than this world. This conditioned world, as the Buddhist texts say—this world of endless desire and fear.
Samsara
. I found myself retreating into solitude. I became more guarded than ever. When Penny once again went on the road I missed her, but I was relieved to have her gone.

A few weeks before I left Delhi, Ed Rivers passed through on his way out of the country. He had written to me from Banaras, requesting permission to stay a night or two at my place while he tied up the final arrangements with people at the Foreigners' Registration Office and the airlines. During the few days we shared, what struck me most was his apprehension in the face of his impending departure. He did his best to hide it, but his distress was obvious. He was jumpy, on edge. I couldn't help but recall how on our first meeting back in Chicago, Ed had appeared so comfortably self-contained, as though drawing energy from an inexhaustible source. Even in Banaras, during my Christmas visit, he had been calm and grounded. What had happened now to account for this disturbing transformation?

Pondering all of this it became clear. This wouldn't be a short visit home with family and friends. This time it would be for good. Very soon—in a matter of hours—India would be, for Ed, nothing but a memory. It's hard to imagine any context in American society where the preceding eight years of his life would make sense. He had been floating free in a strangely privileged, hermetic environment, a vast, eternal present. But the clock would start ticking with a vengeance the moment his plane touched down in New York. What skills did he have that might help him pull through what was just over the horizon? What had he learned during his long sojourn in the holy city?

As far as I could tell he had mastered two valuable lessons: how to survive on almost nothing and how to work hard with no thought of reward. Perhaps this would be enough. I watched him arrange his few possessions before leaving for the airport. Did this small bag contain all he had in the world?

He spoke vaguely of a plan to go into business with a friend, importing village handicrafts from India into the States. He folded his lungi and packed it.

“You're taking that?” I suppressed a smile, imagining him walking the streets of an American city in a brightly patterned, cotton wraparound skirt.

“I'll wear it at home.” His tone was mildly defiant. “It gets hot in New Jersey in the summer. How can I live without a lungi?”

“Sure.” I replied, abruptly contrite. I asked why, after eight years, he was leaving.

“You can't stay in India forever,” he answered, as if this were obvious.

But I didn't see why not. There must be a way.

At about ten o'clock a taxi arrived. It was dark, but the night air was still hot. Ed fastened the catch on his bag, picked up the sitar case plastered with
fragile
stickers, and thanked me for the hospitality. He was wearing the same polyester shirt and pants he had worn that night in Chicago.

19

I
N MID
A
PRIL
I had my last Sanskrit lesson with Anantacharya. These quiet evenings had been a routine part of my life in Delhi, and even before our final meeting I was mourning their loss. I loved everything about this weekly event, beginning with the long bike ride to Anantacharya's home through streets filled with children and peddlers. He lived with his family in a bleak, middle-class housing development, row after row of concrete stucco stained from years of heat and rain. I turned into a section marked Block C and peddled up to number 139, where I dismounted and pulled my bicycle under the covered porch. Krishna greeted me and showed me to my customary place on the couch, then disappeared into the kitchen.

There was one chair in the front room. Like the couch, it was a lacquered wooden frame with wide, flat arms, the back and seat a web of white plastic strings. In front of the couch was a coffee table, and a waist-high metal bookcase stood against the wall opposite my seat. High above the bookcase, only a few inches below the ceiling, a black-and-white photograph of Anantacharya's father hung from two wires: a stern, dignified man with a magnificent moustache that completely obscured his upper lip. He was shown from the waist up, shirtless, the sacred thread looped over one shoulder. The photo had been partially colored by hand and mounted in an ornate gilded frame. On either side were similarly framed pictures of Hindu gods. Windows above and behind the couch had no glass, only vertical bars painted green. The shutters were open, and a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead.

Before long Krishna returned with a glass of water on a saucer, which he placed on the coffee table. Having seen to my immediate needs, he excused himself to summon his father. Meanwhile, I looked fondly around this room where I had passed so many enjoyable hours.

There is something indescribably precious about the deliberate, meticulous work involved in mastering a classical language—memorizing conjugations and declensions, splitting long compounds, unraveling
grammar and syntax in order to decipher a message that has miraculously survived its journey through the centuries. Such intricate, all-consuming labor demands great patience, and it had carried me through much of this first difficult year in India. I owed a debt to Shri Anantacharya much greater than he would ever comprehend.

To commemorate our final evening together, my teacher's wife served me masala dosa and sambar, topped off with a cup of strong, South Indian coffee prepared with sugar and water-buffalo milk. Anantacharya sat to my right, in the chair beside the couch, watching me eat. He was dressed as usual in a dhoti and long kurta. At the bank he must have worn Western-style clothing, but he changed as soon as he got home; I never saw him in anything but a dhoti. Usually he was perfectly groomed, but tonight his long, silver hair had been carelessly pushed back over his ears, and his cheeks were covered with gray stubble. He looked tired. It occurred to me that he was an old man. When I finished the last of the coffee, he rose stiffly and shuffled over the smooth concrete floor to the bookshelf where his beloved library rested. He carefully withdrew a slender volume and examined it, wiping off some dust with the hem of his dhoti.

“You will please take this,” he said, gently depositing the book in my hands. “It is a Sanskrit edition of
Raghuvamsha
, one of Kalidasa's finest poems. I worked for many years, collecting and collating every manuscript I could find. So many quiet hours in my father's study in Madurai. I have also attempted to capture the meaning in English, but I am afraid this was a difficult task. I requested fifty copies printed and bound at my own expense.”

I tried to insist that with my poor knowledge of Sanskrit I was not in a position to appreciate such a gift, but he would hear nothing of it.

“You have traveled all the way from America only to learn our language. I want you to have this.”

I held it carefully. The cover bore an English inscription, in gold lettering, to his father. While Anantacharya continued to speak, I slowly turned the pages.

“I know that you are most interested in Vedanta, and also in the poor grammar of your Buddhist dialecticians—a serious error of aesthetic judgment which I nevertheless forgive.” Here he tilted his head to one side and shrugged his shoulders in mock surrender, as if to imply that he had tried his best to help me refine my taste. “Mr. Stanley,” he said, “we have an ancient saying in Tamil. May I tell it to you?”

“Please do.”

“Let me see . . .” He was clearly attempting to come up with a suitable translation. “Ah, yes. Here it is. We say, if two people are talking, and the speaker understands of what he is speaking, while the listener also understands of what he is hearing, then it is
business
!” He smiled cagily. “Do you follow?”

I nodded. “Is that all?”

“Oh no, no.” He waggled his head back and forth. “Very amusing, Mr. Stanley. That is only first part. It goes on in this way: If two people are talking, and the speaker understands of what he is speaking, but the listener does not understand of what he is listening, then it is
grammar
!” He got quite a kick out of this, Sanskrit grammar running a very close second to poetry and drama on the list of his favorite subjects.

“Very good,” I said. “I see that I'm not the only one who has trouble with Panini's
Asthadhyayi
.” Panini was the most famous of all Sanskrit grammarians.

“Yes, indeed. But this last part is especially for you. Listen: If two people are talking, and the speaker does not understand of what he is speaking, nor does the listener understand of what he is listening, what is it then, Mr. Stanley? What is the subject?” His eyes sparkled.

“I should know, right?”

He grinned so broadly that I spied two gold teeth I had never before noticed, set way around in back among the molars. “It is philosophy, Mr. Stanley.
Philosophy
!”

He looked at me and continued to gloat for several seconds, then spoke up again without waiting for my response. “All in fun, you understand.” The grin gave way to something with a bit more gravitas. “But allow me to tell you something serious now, and I hope you will not let what I have to say slip away without giving it some thought.”

I assured him that I would give his words a great deal of thought. Throughout this exchange he had remained standing in front of me, leaning heavily forward onto his cane. At this point he commenced to wobble slightly, as if he were about to topple over. At the last instant he redirected the vector of his fall, deftly spinning his body around so that he landed, with a little springing motion, dead center on the plastic webbing of his armchair. He let the cane fall to one side, where it clattered to the floor, then settled in like a Zen master, taking his time, meticulously rearranging the folds of his dhoti.

“Mr. Stanley, this is our final time for meeting together. We have labored to complete the foundation on which you might, if you choose, build a temple. You are young. You have time. A lifetime to use as you wish. I hope you will continue with your study. You may discover that, for Kalidasa, philosophy and poetry are not really so different.”

This last remark brought my eyes up out of the pages. Since Corbett, the name “Slave of Kali” had taken on new associations. The greatest of India's classical poets was also a devotee of the goddess. I had never really thought about it before. What had she taught him, I now wondered, and what price had he paid for her instruction?

“If you have no objection,” Anantacharya continued, “let us read the first shloka together. Some day you will open this book, far away in America. You will read this same shloka again, and you will fondly recall our time together. You may perhaps remember this very evening, this little room in Delhi where you sat with your old Sanskrit guru.” He spoke with such ingenuous warmth that I became suddenly self-conscious.

I opened the book in my lap, and Shri Anantacharya began to recite the first verse while I followed along with the Sanskrit text.

At the end of the verse he paused, allowing the sound of the words to re-enter the silence out of which it had arisen. Then, as was our custom, he proposed an English translation of the text for me to consider. This evening, he lifted the words from his own book:

“Parvati's ‘Lord' here is the Mighty Shiva, her husband, whose home is in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganga. Like a mother and father, Lord
Shiva and Parvati love all creatures and guide us. Marriage, you understand, means two people are joined together forever. Man and woman become one.”

I nodded vaguely.

“Here Kalidasa makes a comparison to words and their meaning. The Mimamsaka . . .” He broke off and raised one bushy white eyebrow. “You are familiar with Mimamsaka, Mr. Stanley?”

Again I nodded. I knew it was an early Hindu school of philosophy concerned with interpretation of the Veda. That's about it, actually. But I wasn't going to stop him for a disquisition on the Mimamsakas.