Maya (27 page)

“
Bahut khatarnaak
, Stanley-ji,” he responded, vigorously nodding in the affirmative. “These creatures are very poisonous.”

“But they're everywhere!” I exclaimed.

It was true. They were as common as the squirrels in Jackson Park, skittering over rocks and across the paths where we walked. I had even seen them, more than once, right here on the porch.

“They won't hurt you,” Ramnath said, waving a hand vaguely in my direction, as if to brush away my worry.

I continued watching the lizard, who did not seem to be at all concerned with us. Indeed, he was still moving up and down, just as before.

“So what are they doing?” I inquired.

Ramnath looked at me quizzically.

“The little pushups, I mean.” I put two fingers on the plank next to where I sat and bent them up and down a few times at the knuckles. After a second he seemed to get my meaning.

“Puja,” he responded. “It is worship, you know? These are prostrations.”

“
Prostrations?
”

“Yes, they are bowing to Lord Shiva, requesting permission to bite humans.”

“Wonderful,” I said drolly.

“But Lord Shiva will never allow it,” he responded quickly, apparently in all seriousness. Then he added, with a smile: “No vurry, mahn!”

Ever since the night in Old Manali, Ramnath had been after me to teach him to sing
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
. This proved to be something of a chore, largely because he absolutely refused to quit until he had it right. He made me repeat each word over and over, shaping my lips and tongue, holding the sounds in place while he watched and listened attentively. I was surprised by his perfectionism. He had particular trouble with the
swa
sound in “swing” and “sweet.” He pronounced the words with great
care, laboring to get it right. At first I was surprised at his diligence, then dismayed. We worked at it for several hours, until, at last, he was satisfied.

From that day on, it seemed as if he never stopped singing that song, and oddly, I never grew tired of hearing it.

At my urging, Ramnath patiently coached me through a folk song in Kullu dialect. I still remember the melody—a sequence of wavering quartertones that sounded, to me, like the music of gypsy caravans and campfires . . .

I never learned the meaning of the words. It never occurred to me to ask. Neither one of us knew what we were singing, and neither one of us cared. The sound was enough. And even now, after all these years, the sound of the words I learned from him is still enough to conjure up the hidden world of Ramnath's front porch, where I was held, for a brief time, secure and content in the arms of the mountains. It was a place where what needed to be done was simple, and good, like throwing a shuttle back and forth, from one hand to the other, the same movement repeated again and again.

Late one morning in the first week of June, I hiked down to the bazaar to buy provisions. On an impulse, I decided to stop by the post office. I had given my address to the Fulbright office with instructions to forward my mail.

There in the wooden box labeled
Poste Restant
, I found a blue inland letter with my name on it. The return address read Block C, no. 139, Baba Nagar, New Delhi.

I took it outside and sat down on the curb next to a group of Tibetan pilgrims from Spiti who had chosen that spot to rest. The peaks all around us glittered in the sun, cutting a stark line against the blue sky. I inserted a finger under the envelope's flap, carefully tore it open, and unfolded the page. In small, meticulously crafted script, was a short message:

Pinda
: Offerings for the dead.

Shri Anantacharya is dead.

He had been my first teacher in India—a living tie, through his father and his father's father and on and on, backward in time, to the world of classical Sanskrit literature and poetry. And now, so swiftly and so surely, he was gone. This is death, I thought. This is the meaning of the word. A man goes away and behind him a doorway closes, and that doorway will never be opened again.

I knew in that moment, sitting there with the letter in my hand, that I had to find a place of my own.

I began that very afternoon to search, inquiring here and there in the bazaar. Within a few days I found a secluded, one-room cabin about half an hour's climb up a steep trail on the eastern side of the valley.

The morning of my departure I packed up my clothes and books and papers, along with the blanket I had finished weaving only days before. I tied my two new cooking pots to the outside of my bag. When I left my room I found the entire family assembled on the porch outside. One by one I thanked them for their hospitality and said goodbye while Priya slept in her sister's arms. Ramnath was last in line. I told him how deeply grateful I was for all he had done, but he barely looked at me. It was time to leave.

I walked maybe a hundred feet, to where the path took a steep turn, and hesitated. Before losing sight of the house I looked back one last time. The family was still standing where I had left them, so close together their bodies touched. Only Ramnath held slightly to one side, watching me go, both fists planted deep in the pockets of his old coat. I joined my palms together, put my hands to my forehead, and bowed low, then straightened up and shouted “No vurry, mahn!” I saw him smile.

21

M
Y HUT WAS BUILT
of stone plastered over with a mixture of clay, straw, and cow-manure. The tiny square room was lit through a single window and a shuttered doorway that I kept open during daylight hours. An alcove carved into the back wall could be closed against foraging creatures. My only furnishings were a circular tin stove about ten inches high, like the one I'd had at Ramnath's, and a desk I made out of a split log laid lengthwise over two apple crates. I purchased a straw mat to sleep on, and I spread out a torn burlap sack in front of the stove where I prepared my nightly rice and vegetables.

Everything about my new home was ideal, except for the roof. The beams over my head supported several tons of slate shingles that did a good job keeping out the rain but were much less effective when it came to discouraging the occasional rat and the not-so-occasional lizard that would slip through the cracks. All too often, as I sat reading, one of them would lose its footing and plummet with a resounding smack, striking the floor as if someone had slapped the stones with a rolled-up newspaper. They never seemed to be injured, but it always scared the shit out of me. Once, while I was working out the translation of a tricky passage of Sanskrit, some kind of obese red-and-yellow-striped chameleon dropped through the roof and landed squarely on the back of my hand. I don't know who was more startled, but we both recoiled in horror and made a break in opposite directions.

Like it or not, I shared my space with a variety of living beings. On the whole we kept to ourselves and things went smoothly, though there were some unpleasant moments. One early morning, not long after I moved in, I made my way groggily across the porch and accidentally stepped on a huge black slug; its body blew apart under my bare foot like a water balloon.

It was the tarantulas, however, that really taxed my coping skills. What most disturbed me about these giant spiders was that I never, ever saw
them move. They simply
manifested
. I might be absorbed in reading and would chance to look up, and one of them would be clinging to the wall, absolutely still, its body the size of a golf ball, shaggy legs radiating up and out like tentacles. My landlord assured me they were harmless. I wanted to believe what he told me, and I suppressed the urge to flee in terror from my new cabin. But it was hard to ignore them. Especially in those first few weeks, I rarely let the spiders out of my peripheral vision, which was not easy. They would routinely stay in one spot half the afternoon without so much as twitching. Eventually I would get distracted and glance away. And then, when I remembered to look . . .
vanished.

Spiders notwithstanding, I knew I had found the perfect hermitage. All alone, perched on the rim of a flat, terraced area amid an apple orchard, it was only a fifteen-minute hike to the forest, where I went every few days to collect firewood. My nearest neighbor, a German woman who passed her time reading Hegel and practicing sitar, was a good twenty-minute walk away. I hardly ever saw her—or anyone else, for that matter. Water came from a nearby spring. I shat in the woods like a wild animal, squatting under a tree with the cool breeze tickling the hairs on my naked butt.

One night not long after my move to the new cabin, I woke up and stumbled out, half asleep, to pee off the edge of the porch—a drop of some ten feet to the steep slope below. Across the valley, the sky opened up between the jagged, snow-capped peaks like a hole torn out of the cosmos, black as death behind the great, curving arc of the Milky Way. It was like pissing off the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Standing there balanced at the edge of the void, it was easy to see how our conventional, everyday experience is itself suspended somewhere between the infinite reaches of space and the groundless, subatomic realm of quantum probabilities—extreme frontiers of the mathematical imagination.

I stocked up on provisions and cut my trips to the bazaar to a minimum. When the vegetables ran out, I ate onions, rice, and lentils so as to extend my solitude for a few more precious days. I was in retreat, hiding from the world.

22

T
OWARD THE END OF
J
UNE
Penny came for a visit. From here she would go on to Ladakh for a festival at Hemis Monastery in Leh. Manali was considerably off her course, and the only reason she came was to see me.

By the time she arrived, loaded down with expensive photography equipment, I had long since settled in at the new cabin and was thoroughly absorbed in my monastic routine. I had not talked to anyone in weeks. Penny was consumed by her academic work and could talk about little else. She had been selected to sit on a panel at a big conference in Paris, and she was thrilled. I could not share her excitement, and although I made a real effort to hide my feelings, my reservations were difficult to conceal. We did all right the first night, but things boiled over the next day.

It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, and we were drinking Nescafé on the porch. We sat facing each other, our backs resting against two posts that supported the stone roof. Penny was telling me the details of a book she was reading, something by the art historian chairing her panel. I had been listening for quite a while without saying a word, but at last I could no longer restrain myself.

“All of this struggle to climb the ladder of academic success seems pointless,” I finally blurted out.

“What do you mean, Stanley?”

“I guess I just don't see what it has to do with Buddhism. That's all.”

She looked at me like I had just stepped off a flying saucer. “You mean, you don't see what the book—or is it the panel?—has to do with
practicing
Buddhism? That's what you mean, right?”

I didn't respond.

“Studying Buddhism isn't the same as practicing Buddhism. Is that what you're saying? Because if that's all you're saying, then okay, fine. I think we know that already.”

“I just mean, well . . .” I considered, choosing my words carefully. “Why do you care so much about what these people think?”

“People?”

“Like this guy in Paris.”

“This
guy
in Paris happens to have been a student of Henri Focillon. Do you even know who Henri Focillon is? He . . .”

I shrugged my shoulders and took a sip of coffee.

She stopped talking in mid sentence and put down her cup. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I get it. Now I understand. It's the whole
evil ego
thing? Right? Isn't that it?” She didn't wait for my response. “Like the academic world has a monopoly on big egos.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't say it, but that's what you're thinking. I know exactly what you're thinking. Just because you hate your advisor . . .”

“I don't hate him. He's an arrogant jerk, that's all. People like Abe Sellars don't care about India or Buddhism or anything, really. The texts—or whatever it is they're studying—inscriptions, rituals—it's all just some kind of proving ground, a way of jockeying for position in the big race to the top. All they care about is their own reputation as some kind of murderous intellectual.”