Maya (6 page)

Few places are more convivial than the Fulbright lounge, where one can be assured of coming across an intrepid academic type anxious to recount, with a vaguely jaded air, the latest adventure in Rajasthan or Kashmir, or to whine on interminably about the exorbitant cost of housing and domestic help in New Delhi. Even more likely is the possibility of spending an hour being assailed with every last detail of some obscure
research project. All of this can be entertaining in its own way if you're in the right frame of mind. It is a ritual act, one that every academic engages in, a sign of membership in the guild, curiously reassuring even when the conversation is excruciatingly pedantic.

I nodded in her direction and offered a faint smile.

She walked over to where I sat and extended a hand, which received a cursory shake. “Hi. Mind if I sit down?”

I motioned to the space on the couch next to where I had stacked the mail.

“Margaret Billings. Columbia. I'm working on medieval inscriptions.” She leaned back into the soft couch, eased one leg confidently over the other, rearranged her dress and began rummaging through a purse the size of a small suitcase. “I know they're in here somewhere . . . ah,
la voilà
!” She took out a package of Dunhills, flipped back the lid, and offered me one.

“No thanks.”

“So you don't smoke?”

“Nope.”

“Well good for you. I wish I didn't.” She gazed wistfully at the box in her hand. “These are duty free. I picked up four cartons at Heathrow, but when they're gone . . . oh, the hell with it. I've been through it before. I suppose I'll survive. But those Indian cigarettes . . . my god. Believe me, you have no idea.” She lit up and took a long drag.

I began to rifle through the letters again.

“What a pain.”

I held a finger in the stack and looked up. “What?”

“Oh, you know.” She sighed. “All the shit they put us through: half a dozen pictures, forms, and stamps, one office after another. I've got to go over to foreigner's registration at Hans Bhavan this afternoon, then who knows where else before I'm finished. I'll tell you one thing, though . . .” She leaned forward conspiratorially and lowered her voice. “These Fulbright people don't know their head from their ass when it comes to getting a research visa taken care of. The truth is they're totally dependent on the American Institute. If the director over there hadn't agreed to help me out, I'd still be waiting in some god-forsaken office at Hans Bhavan next month. He's sending a man here right now to escort me through.”

“Very nice,” I said. “I had a friend with an AIIS grant a few years back. I know what you're saying. They know how to work the system.”

“If you ever need help you certainly know where to go.” She puffed on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “I guess I'm happy to be back again. A little less pressure would be okay by me, though. I'm under the gun. My research has to be finished in time to present at the AAR conference in San Francisco next fall. I'm chairing a panel on Gupta rock inscriptions. My paper will deal with the Girnir material. The archives here in Delhi are packed with photographs and rubbings that no one has even looked at. Frank Davis—at Chicago, you know?” She glanced at me just long enough to take in my nod.

Bonding
, I thought to myself. But it felt all right to belong, to be accepted as a colleague of sorts, even in this trivial way.

“Well,” she continued, “he published his last paper in
The Journal of Asian Studies
without even a footnote acknowledging this stuff exists. Can you believe it?”

She broke here for another drag, evidently expecting that all of this should make a deep impression on me.

“He went into detailed speculation on the local city administration of the Gupta, all of it based on a single inscription. Nothing but formal panegyric.”

“His paper?” I realized my attention had lapsed. I must have missed something.

She looked at me as though she were beginning to suspect that I might not be able to hold up my end here after all. “No, not his paper. The inscription. The inscription at Girnir praises a man named Chakrapalita, apparently the son of a provincial governor Parnadatta.”

“Right,” I said. “The inscription is a formal panegyric. I see.”

“The point is,” she continued, hesitating slightly to catch my eye, “Davis has built his entire case on a single inscription that he misunderstood, for God's sake. Typical, isn't it? Like everybody else there he's only interested in weaving together a good story. No concern with putting some solid research under his speculation. Things have got to change, that's for sure. These Chicago people have had their way long enough. Don't you agree?” She stopped talking and waited for confirmation. Her tone had become slightly indignant, but I couldn't be sure whether it was directed toward Frank Davis or me.

“I, uh . . .”

“Oh shit,” she said. “You're from Chicago, aren't you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. But I don't work much with Frank Davis. I took
a few classes with him, that's all. He's around the department.” I paused. “And he's on my dissertation committee.”

“Look, I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry about it.” I tried to seem reassuring. “The truth is, if you want to know, I sort of wish he weren't on my committee.” This seemed to make her feel better.

We sat there on the couch for a minute or two without saying anything more, then it occurred to her to ask me what I was doing in India. I explained that I was here to pull together research for my dissertation on an aspect of Shankara's work, though I had to admit that the project was not as well defined as I would have liked. She chain-smoked Dunhills while I talked a little about my struggle to find the right text, one that I felt comfortable working on. After listening to me babble for five or ten minutes she finally interrupted.

“Stanley,” she said, “do you mind if I ask you something?” I shrugged. “Why are you putting so much energy into finding ‘the right text'?”

I considered this for a moment and got nowhere. “Maybe I don't understand your question. I mean, shouldn't I look around and find a project that seems significant somehow . . . to me, at least?”

“Not necessarily.” She put on a no-nonsense, let's-talk-business sort of expression. “Wouldn't it be wiser just to pick something you know you can finish? I'll give you a clue.” She bent ever so slightly in my direction as though she were going to let me in on a well-kept secret. “Nobody's going to read that thesis. What you want to do is to come up with a topic that you can squeeze a few articles out of. Get them written and published. Then show up at the conferences and do some glad-handing. Get yourself known.” Her voice had gradually taken on a tone poised somewhere between matriarchal concern and condescension. “The last thing you want to do is spend too much time over here. Sure it's fun. And important. You want to visit and get a sense for where the material comes from. But unless you're doing art history or some kind of modern culture studies, you're basically wasting your time in India.”

“Excuse me,” I said. She stopped talking and looked in my direction, smoke curling up from her fingertips. “You asked me your question, right? So do you mind if I ask you something?”

“No. Go ahead.”

“If what you say is true, then why are
you
here?”

She smiled. “
Touché
! But I told you already. There are things at the
archives I need. Let's face it, though. No one's fooled. Very little real work gets done in India. If you can manage to collect a few documents, use the grant money to buy some books . . . take a break. Do some shopping. But listen, I'm telling you the truth. It's not smart to stay too long when you don't have a tenured position back home. Jobs in South Asian studies don't exactly grow on trees. You want to get what you need and get back to the States, where you're in touch. Were you at last year's AAR conference?”

I stared at her blankly.

“There was a panel on Vedanta. You should have been there. You should have presented.”

“I didn't make it.”

“So you weren't there.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why not?”

For a moment I considered being completely honest, trying to explain to her that I had trouble with the institutional,
professional
side of academics. That I wasn't exactly looking for a career. But I knew damn well she would not be interested in my personal history. Why should I even try to explain myself to her? Fortunately, I didn't have to. Not immediately, at least, since she excused herself to go the bathroom, leaving me alone for a few minutes with my thoughts.

It pissed me off that this woman was lecturing me so sanctimoniously. She was nothing but a clone of my fucking advisor. Everything she said amounted to no more than a single piece of advice: Give up even thinking about anything but money and job and status. Academic success was all that counted.

I thought back to the beginning, to Hesse and Watts, Kerouac, Gary Snyder . . . then Suzuki, Conze . . . to how I first taught myself to meditate by following
The Three Pillars of Zen
. I actually considered telling her about how I had never been the same since dropping acid, how, deep into a hallucinatory journey, it hit me with the force of a powerful realization that what we call “reality” is simply a matter of perception. She would never understand how little her world mattered to me. That I was looking for something far more important, I was looking for . . . for what? For myself . . .

Myself?

The word stuck in my throat. In that instant everything I had gone through during the past few months came crashing down around me like a mud hut in the monsoon rain of rural Bihar. Talk about bullshit. What did all my pretentious so-called spirituality really amount to? The more
I thought about it, the more juvenile and self-serving it sounded. Me, me, me. All those years wrapped up so proudly in
my
spiritual search,
my
studies,
my
meditation practice,
my
need to be left alone. And now I had left my wife and come halfway around the world to be . . . what? Alone?

Sitting here reflecting on the same advice I had always rejected so scornfully, it suddenly appeared entirely possible that this righteous contempt I nurtured for graduate students and faculty who fretted over publications and career was simply a romantic, adolescent pose. The whole grand, mystical story I'd been telling myself for years about who I was and what I was doing—a story brimming with ambition, resentment, and pride—was nothing more than a kind of elaborate, self-absorbed fantasy. Now what the
fuck
was I supposed to say to this woman? If only I could have laughed. Instead I pulled my lips together tightly in a forced grin and did my best to look nonchalant as she walked back across the room and sat down again on the couch. The way she looked at me, she obviously expected a reply to her question, which had been left hanging in the air.

“Dr. Billings, I don't know why I didn't go to the AAR meeting. I never go to conferences. And my advisor is constantly telling me the same things you just said.” I wanted to vomit. I must have gone pale or something. I could see that she was studying my face now, as though I had suddenly begun to morph into a werewolf.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine. My stomach has been rebelling lately. I'm okay.”

“You want a drink of water or something?”

“No, really. I'm fine.” I coughed self-consciously.

I could see her struggling to pick up the thread. “Well, anyway, the main thing is to get published, go to the conferences, and meet the right people. That's the way it works. That's how you get a job.”

“Is that what you did?”

“If I hadn't I wouldn't be here now, that's for sure. I was presenting sections of my dissertation at conferences as fast as they were written,” she said. “Kept my eyes open for positions I could apply for. I must have sent out at least fifty letters while I was writing. God, I was all over the place, that's for sure.”

“What did you write on?” I asked.

“Gupta administrative policy.”

“And how did you come up with that topic?”

“Just like I told you. I sat down and did some serious thinking. Weighed my interests against what I knew I could finish. And what I could extract some good articles from, of course.”

“And you got what you wanted? It paid off?”

“Yes, it did.” She dusted a few stray ashes off her lap. “It paid off. If things work out, I've got a good shot at tenure. Well,” she looked up, “I've got a driver waiting outside. I better get going.” She stood, straightened her dress, and casually slung the long strap of her purse over one shoulder. “It was nice talking.”

I waited until I was sure she was gone, then slunk out the door and pedaled back to my room, with no letter from Judith and lost in a dark cloud of unknowing. I no longer had any idea what I had hoped for out of grad school, or from marriage—or from anything, for that matter.

Maybe you've seen someone do that stunt with a tablecloth, the one where the cloth is yanked out from under a vase so quickly that the vase stays right where it is without falling. If you think about it, there must be a moment—not more than a fraction of a second—when the vase hovers just over the table, poised for the fall that will determine whether or not the trick is a success. I felt just like that fragile piece of china suspended in midair, waiting to see where—or how—I would land.

5

I
CONTINUED TO PLUG AWAY
at my research and to attend lectures at Delhi University. But what I best remember about this time were the regular meetings, three evenings each week, with Shri Anantacharya Swami, my first Sanskrit teacher in India. I had been looking for a more traditional arrangement—something outside the context of the university—and the Fulbright staff helped me find this lovely man.