Maya (3 page)

I was caught off guard by the intensity of my reaction to the sudden collapse of our marriage, dismayed at the realization of how deeply my identity was bound up in our relationship. I had imagined myself to be
much stronger than I obviously was, much more independent. But now the voices in my head showed me otherwise. They bled into a compulsive undertone that lacked any center of gravity, revealing only this one great discovery: without Judith I was lost.

Every morning I had to command myself to sit up under the net, cross my legs, and attend to the cycle of respiration that carried me through the next hour and into another day. I talked myself down, felt my lungs expand and compress. The minutes dragged on until, eventually, I found some degree of stillness suspended on an anxious tightrope of breath.

As morning crept into afternoon, afternoon to evening, all over again the pain crystallized into images of our final days together. I rehearsed every detail of those last few weeks, the arguments and accusations, angry words driven into each other's hearts like the shards of glass embedded on the wall outside my room. I wanted to believe she would come. I fought to convince myself that I did not need her to come. I willed myself to forget. I waited, every day, for letters that did not arrive. I had no idea that mail often took two weeks or more to make the trip from Agra to the States, and at least two more to return. As far as I knew there was no international phone service of any kind in Agra, a city where it was hard enough to find a refrigerator.

Passing through the tunnel of my loss, I emerged in a world far removed from anything I had encountered in my previous life. One after another, habitual patterns of thinking—of believing—gave way under a barrage of sensations, a reality so starkly foreign, so saturated with extremes of beauty and horror, that it simply could not be reconciled with memory or expectation. The effort to escape my anguish pushed me ever deeper into the texture of unfamiliar sounds and colors and smells. Driven by my need to forget the past, I threw myself into experiences that were only slightly less disturbing than the images I longed to repress. My white skin, my wealth, the very fact of my existence in this place was reflected back to me in a mirror of incomprehensible poverty and disease. Sensing my weakness, the beggars engulfed me, shoving battered tin bowls up toward my face. I flung coins into their outstretched hands until my pockets were empty, then retreated to the safety of my room and hid behind the bars that covered my window.

There were two men who passed by my house every evening just at dusk. One of them, a leper whose hands and feet had rotted away, rode on a crude wooden cart—really nothing more than a few boards strung
together over four pitted iron wheels. He lurched past my window swaddled in grimy rags, propped upright and pushed along on his miserable journey by another emaciated man only slightly less disfigured. The fellow on the cart sang the same enchanting bhajan every evening, so predictable that I waited for his voice as a signal to close my books and prepare for meditation. The melody could be heard from some distance off, weaving through the streets above the laughter of children playing, the cries of vendors peddling samosas and chutney and chai, the voices of goats and cows and water buffalo, the shrill whistle of a steam locomotive. It was a love song to God, a song so sublimely beautiful that, sitting at my desk, listening, for those few moments every day I could almost imagine a way out of my pain.

3

T
HERE IS A PASSAGE
in the Pali suttas, among the earliest of Buddhist scriptures, where the Buddha observes that in direct, first-person experience—which is all we ever really have—“mind” and “matter” are inseparable:

This may seem like an abstruse philosophical claim, but it's quite obviously true. Looking back, for example, I can see that in Agra a corner was irrevocably turned. Like the young prince Siddhartha, I found myself outside the palace, in a new body and a new world, where nothing was quite the same as it had been and everything was unsettling.

It was during those first weeks after my arrival in India that I began the task of acclimating myself to an unceasing parade of discomforts and petty inconveniences. I learned to appreciate electricity when it was available and to stay calm when the ceiling fan died, leaving me drenched in sweat that ran down my face and fell in salty drops onto my books and papers. I conditioned myself to approach the tap with no fixed expectation, to store buckets of water for bathing, to lay in a supply of candles, to apply extra glue on my aerogrammes and postage stamps, to ask directions from several different people and to believe nothing they said. I practiced striking the spindly Indian matches at a particular angle so they wouldn't snap in my fingers. I struggled to cultivate equanimity while jockeying for a place in the unruly crowd at the post office, at the train and bus stations, at the bank.

Any counter, every public office or shop, was always crowded, no matter what time of day I arrived. I recall one occasion when, after patiently allowing myself to be elbowed, squeezed, stepped on, pressed, and shoved
for an hour while waiting to buy a train ticket, my “turn” finally arrived. As I approached the window the clerk informed me, in the most offhand manner, that I needed to go to window number 5, immediately adjacent to his own, where I would have to pick up a form that he himself was not authorized to issue and, bearing that form, return to him, at which time he could sell me the ticket. This meant at least another hour in the train station. When he finished speaking I struggled to find a Hindi vocabulary sufficient to express the profundity of my disbelief.

“
Aap ne kyaa kahaa?
What did you say?”

But he was no longer looking at me. He appeared to have forgotten me entirely. He turned to receive a glass of chai handed to him by the friend operating window number 5. From where I was standing I could easily see what looked like a stack of blank forms just out of his reach, to the left of the agent who handed him the glass. I forged another sentence in Hindi, carefully crafting the delicate syntax and a tricky use of the causative form of the verb, rehearsing it once in my mind before attempting to speak.

“Can't you have
him
give you a form?”

He sipped at his glass of chai, then set it down in a space painstakingly cleared at the side of a stack of battered ledgers. He examined the book in front of him. He rearranged the narrow vertical columns of tickets that lined a wooden dispenser. Eventually he glanced up and seemed to be surprised to discover me still out there, clutching with both hands at the bars that separated us.

“My dear sir . . .” The English words were brimming with wearied condescension, as if they were heavy objects that had to be carefully hoisted up from somewhere far below. “What is the problem? I am not making the rules. You will please collect necessary form and return to this window. If you are having some problem, please . . . you go and fill out complaint form at window number 8.”

“Why isn't it posted?” I gave up and spoke English, no longer willing to struggle with Hindi. My voice shook. I was straining to be polite. “I waited over an hour to get here. Please, just this once, have your friend there give you the form.” I was pleading, shameless, and prepared to do anything to get that form. “
Please
. . .”

He was immersed once again in the same enormous record book. I did not exist.

The man is a total asshole. I hate him.

I told myself to be patient. I reined in my anger and extracted myself from the rabble that had all the while been smashing me against the stone counter. Resigned to the worst, I shuffled over and inserted my body into the morass of other bodies pressing around window 5. After what seemed like forever I returned with the required form and endured the same process of fighting and shoving. At last I found myself once again at window 4, just in time to see the ticket seller slam a
Closed
sign in my face, turn his back, and walk away. The window was shut down—for an hour, for the rest of the day, perhaps for all eternity. One could not know. In India, as I was discovering, some things simply cannot be known.

I slammed my palms against the bars in a display of impotent rage, aware now that I was drawing undue attention to myself, aware that I, the foreigner, appeared to have lost my mind while everyone else around me remained strangely unaffected.

There was much to learn in this India, a place altogether unlike the intensely philosophical India so familiar to me from reading Sanskrit texts in seminars at Chicago, or the India captured in the serene black-and-white photos of temples in Heinrich Zimmer's
Art of Indian Asia
, a book I owned and loved.

Among the people I met during those first few weeks in Agra, I remember one of my teachers in particular. Ashok Mishra, an instructor in modern Hindi literature, befriended me early on. In his midthirties, he was frail and meticulously groomed, with a closely trimmed black beard. As a graduate student, Ashok had studied for a year at Oxford, and it had completely destroyed him; he was obsessed with only one thing—his longing to return to England.

He had a goddess for a wife and a little boy who looked like a miniature prince from the pages of the
Arabian Nights
. Evidently neither his wife nor the child brought him any happiness. On the occasions of my evening visits, the two of them, mother and child, sat side by side in silence, observing us from across the narrow room with liquid brown eyes while Ashok and I conversed in English and listened to the old jazz albums that he had carried back with him from England. His bitterness seemed to have infected the whole family. No one spoke but Ashok, and the topic to which he invariably returned was his abject hatred of Agra. “This city is a shithole, Mr. Stanley. A place fit only for pigs and cows.” Every other
word that left his lips was an expletive hurled at the injustice of a destiny that had condemned him to live in this filthy backwater town from which he would never, ever escape.

I later came to see that there were, at that time, many such people in India—people whose lives had been stunted through contact with the West. For some it was enough simply to hear about the affluence of Europe or America to be forever enchanted by its lure, or perhaps to enter this fantastic realm through the occasional Hollywood film that played at the Bhagavan Talkies, a cinema in the neighborhood of Dayalbagh, not far from where I lived. As a foreigner I could not easily avoid these wounded spirits, for they were fatally attracted to Westerners and seemed to love nothing more than to pass time in our company lamenting India's backwardness.

While my host ranted, I sat mired in my own private hell of loneliness, marveling at the perfection of his wife's skin, the very color of our chai. I longed to reach out and touch the soft contours of her sari where it fell over her breasts, across the gentle curve of her naked stomach, and down around her hips to the delicate silver ankle bracelets that jingled, faintly, as she nervously shifted her bare feet. What joy such a body could give and receive! Truly this man had been cursed. He could find no place of rest in the life he had been given. We talked about a lot of things: music, literature, film. But more than anything else it was this terrible defect that rent Ashok's soul, this brokenness he carried within, that we shared.

And then there was Penny. Miss Penelope Ainsworth. I met her through Mickey. Penny was doing research for her dissertation at Oxford, working on a project dealing with the ancient sandstone sculptures of Mathura. She had a slim, boyish figure, ivory skin, and pale green eyes. She kept her chestnut brown hair tied back in a single thick braid, in the style of Indian women. I only saw her a few times in Agra, but she was always dressed in either salwar kameez or sari—never in Western clothing. Like Mick, Penny spoke fluent Hindi and appeared to be entirely at ease in India, despite the fact that she was, very obviously, both a woman and a foreigner and therefore subject to a certain amount of routine harassment from men. Still, it was as if she were surrounded by a protective force-field that held them at bay. She was beautiful and, in her profound self-confidence, unapproachable. The three of us—Penny, Mick, and I—went out to
dinner once or twice at the Kwality Restaurant, not far from the Taj Mahal. That was about it. Except for the bus trip to Mathura.

Sometime in late September Penny invited Mick and me to travel with her to the government museum in Mathura, a few hours from Agra. She had an appointment with the director, a Mr. Bhattacharya.