Some Assembly Required (13 page)

I went home and called Rachel. She completely knew this rare mini-computer because her husband had one, and she had worked on his. Of course. She fixed it that afternoon.
Now I am the Steve Jobs of the Asus mini—I could take it apart in the dark and put it back together, like a Marine.

My favorite part of this whole experience was the way the phone call with Sam ended. He said, “I know we’re talking computers, but… As long as we’re at it, there’s something I’ve meant to tell you for a while. I think it might hurt your feelings.” My stomach buckled.

“Okay,” I said. “You can tell me.”

“You need to talk to your friends about the style of jeans you wear.”

“What?”

“Mom,” he said calmly, gently. “I think you can do better.”

I really don’t need Jax anymore, since I have this fabulous mini-PC, but he and Amy came over this afternoon anyway. He has grown so long. And he’s become both a danger to himself and a menace to society. He now focuses like a meth head on my necklaces and earrings, watching my ears with infinite wired patience. He flexes his fingers, warms them up like a safecracker, then grabs at my jewelry and holds on, while making farting noises.

Plus, Amy forgot to tell me, you can’t leave paper around anymore. He’s a paper eater. On their way back from North Carolina, Jax pooped out a zebra code.

“That fucking TSA,” I said. “What next?”

No, Amy explained. While they were boarding in North Carolina, he sneakily ate the tag the airline had put on his stroller, which she and Sam were about to leave on the ramp to check. The bar code came out twenty-four hours later, perfectly formed, if worse for wear.

Jax is going to be six months old in nine days. I will be in India.

“Why are you going, again?” my friend Karen asked, as we walked in the hills early this the morning with my dogs. She said that when she thinks of India, she thinks poverty, poverty, poverty. And how absurd it is for Westerners to go there for an authentic spiritual experience, since you can have the same experience at the library. All you have to do is stop what you are doing, sit down, be solitary and present and breathe. And then you’re there, in the eternal now.

I’ve dreamt of this my whole life; the desire to go to India has never lifted, and I can finally afford a ticket. I want the mosques, the temples, the lepers—in other words, the in-your-face experience. I guess I’m more of a Ganges-and-ghats type of gal.

“I couldn’t handle the poverty, or the sensory overload, and especially the jet lag,” Karen said. “The way people look
at each other at the thirteenth hour—it’s the way you look at someone else who is in labor at the same time as you.”

I have always been seeking God, direct experiences of truth or reality; so sue me. Because of the Beats and the Beatles and Ram Dass, I thought Truth was in India, or from that direction, instead of wherever my butt was.

“It’s Nana’s Excellent Adventure,” said Karen.

I got cold feet at the airport. It was only days after the earthquake in Haiti. I was reeling with the global unimaginable tragedy of that one, and knew I was about to fly into the heart of another. So I called Bonnie. “Where is God in Haiti? Where will God be in the slums of Delhi?”

She said that in Haiti, as a result of the devastation, we’ve seen the care with which people treat people in trouble, with which we attend to our families and others, in chaos or sorrow. And I would get to see that in India.

She said, “Dearest, remember? You are going to India to see the holy sites, the holy tree, the holy marigolds, the whole holy enchilada, as someone once put it: the light that is divine.

“It will be beyond anything you’ve gotten to see before, and yet deeply recognizable. You are going to see whatever you expect to see. The only control you have is to plan your intention. You can go there to see God from another perspective,
like seeing Mount Tam from San Quentin instead of Mill Valley. The experience of being in this form, human life, is always that we are born, live however long, die—this is true in deep poverty and great wealth. You can see God in the extreme disease and deformation, because the disease and the deformation of each person is not who that person is. Think Mother Teresa: in every person and each ravaged body, she saw the face of Jesus, both Christ crucified and the radiant face of God. Go see grace everywhere, passion, tenderness, art, families, surprise, mystery.”

“But what if my plane crashes, or a snake bites me, or I catch a deadly disease, and I never get to see Sam and Jax again?”

“Well, good news,” Bonnie said. “Life is eternal. Go see eternity.”

I arrived in a socked-in Delhi at two a.m. I was met by a cabbie sent by my hotel, who drove me through the fog like Mr. Toad, hell-bent and blind. I was in bed at four, and up before nine, when I was to meet Bill Hanson, who had been in India for two weeks already, at a Buddhist retreat with his teacher. I felt strangely okay, having been on a widely discredited anti–jet lag diet for four days. The hotel was small, tucked away from the main street, with marble floors, and no shower in my small bathroom, just faucets extending
over the tile floor, so that you sat on a plastic stool like some washed-up old tribal chief, sploshed room-temperature water all over yourself, sudsed up, and rinsed off. There was a pair of men’s worn flip-flops, which at first I recoiled from, and then ended up using frequently.

I went to Bill’s room to begin our day, and knocked on the door.

He peered at me from around the door. “I’m naked,” he announced, and pointed me to the hotel dining room.

Bill Hanson is Bill and Emmy Smith’s oldest friend from the East Coast. He’s close to seventy, a former Peace Corps teacher and manager, and he speaks a dozen languages. He is handsome, fussy, Buddhist, with blue eyes and a monk’s tonsure. He has a piercing knowledge about most places on earth. The first time I met him, twenty years ago, I thought to myself, Paul Lynde, someone who managed to be both masculine and feminine, and who makes a joke out of everything, and is swishy in a nonspecific way.

When we stepped out of the hotel, Bill told me that if I gave a single rupee to a single beggar, he would leave me there in the dirt and dust of Old Delhi to fend for myself.

India looks like every movie I’ve ever seen of India, the way Georgia O’Keeffe always looked exactly like herself. People were going about their day: Brahmans, vendors, beggars, rickshaw drivers, schoolchildren in eentsy-beentsy buses. Some people were waking up under blankets: families who lived on the streets in this soft fever dream, with temporary
homes built against low walls and fences. A kitchen materializes when the mother produces two bricks and some dung and someone has found pieces of coal or wood from packing crates; they have a rice pot and a minimal amount of grains to cook. In the market stalls were great vats of milk boiling, and clay pots in which yogurt would be made, from warm milk and yesterday’s curds. Everywhere, people were doing their daily
puja
, their offering of flowers, fruit, devotions: in their stalls, on their blankets, in their rickshaws, in their fleeting homes on the street.

Bill waved away every beggar by saying, “Nay! Nay!” and it was painful for me, as I seriously wanted to start saving everyone, with a few rupees and some of the nice granola I had in my purse. But Bill gave me the stink-eye. “I will leave you here,” he reiterated, and I remembered that when I first got sober, someone told me to take the action, and the insight would follow, and that when all else failed, follow instructions. So I committed to saying no to everyone: Nay, nay! It’s all corruption, Bill explained, it’s
Oliver Twist
: you don’t give the beggars money, because it doesn’t go to them—it goes to each beggar’s
goonda
, the Fagin character, the thug who runs the beggar syndicate.

There are monkeys on the roofs and in the crazy canopy of the absolutely unfathomable spaghetti tangle of electrical wires, bizarrely shoved and hanging and twisted, which is your basic Indian electricity delivery system.

There are a million betel-leaf sellers on the streets, with
their rolls of bright packets like condoms. There are teeny stalls packed together like timber, barely wider than a person’s body, from which are sold all manner of things. Ultra-poor Muslims huddle in front of restaurants where they are fed real food, not leftovers, for free. All of life is being lived right here, every generation and social standing in a crowded parade. It is not a place where people get on the subway and go home. Life is lived lower to the ground: mothers and grandmothers holding babies go into squat to rest, or reconnoiter, or pee, and rise with grace, their babies still attached. The babies and children have mastered the cling here. I saw a few mothers holding out infants to pee and even on one occasion poop—diapers are not so common here. They are used for backup, if at all: mothers learn to read their babies’ gestures, to predict every sound, fidget, reflexive move that might indicate impending elimination. Maybe I will not mention this to Amy.

I would imagine there is less fixation here on the baby’s life of the mind than there is back in Marin. I bet not many of these Indian babies have the black-and-white mobiles provided to newborns at baby showers all over the United States to boost their spatial reasoning.

There are goats in ski parkas and sweaters milling around, tended by boys who want ten rupees from tourists to take a photograph of them and their goats. Bill says no, that this will count against me, but he stops to chat with them in his most animated Paul Lynde way. There are sadhus everywhere, wandering
holy men wrapped in ragged warm blankets, sitting before tiny fires, smiling from deep within. The smells of spices, incense, humanity, cooking, marijuana hang in the air.

We got into an auto-rickshaw. Bill bargained Driver-ji down, while I wanted to pay him way more than he asked, plus give him my socks and shawl. Bill talked to the driver in Hindi, and then indicated me with a wave and a flourish:

“This is my former wife,” he said in English, “and we are on our friendship tour.” This turned out to be his major coping strategy in India. Everywhere we went, he bantered with drivers, waiters, beggars, almost always sharing some miserable aspect of our imaginary marriage: that I was cheap, or wouldn’t put out, or had taken him to the cleaners when we broke up. And I laughed every time, so I guess it was my coping strategy, too.

There is no way to prepare for the mystical
zap
that is India. It’s stunning, tragic, hallucinatory, bejeweled, smoky, overpowering. I’ve noticed that many people here have tiny hygiene issues. My automatic response to overwhelming situations is to try to organize everyone into small functioning groups. This usually requires a clipboard and Post-its. But these were hard to find in India. And the people did not seem to want me to organize them and improve their lot. They, and India, are the song that never ends, no matter what has been thrown at them over the millennia, or earlier this morning. You see packs of children begging, whose parents often put them up to this (another reason Bill won’t let me give them
money, as it encourages them not to pursue a real trade); minuscule open-air buses full of Muslim children in uniforms heading to school; packs of young glue-sniffing teen agers, zoned out. The smell of pot is everywhere.

Bill tells me that in Nepal, there is a phrase,
rungi-chungi jilli-milli
, which means total bombardment on every level, too much of everything all at once. Every color, smell, taste, sound, and echo fills the air, hot and spicy curries, every kind of sweet, harmony and silence and horns honking.

The air here is as soft as cashmere. Saris are for sale every where, and most women, no matter how poor, are works of art. There are way more men on the street than women—Bill says all the Muslim women are home, behind walls.

Most of the women I do see are petite, with long black hair and round brown eyes. My eyes played tricks on me, and I saw Amy everywhere in a sari.

I almost backed into a bull on the street while I gaped at a crowd of
hijra
s, whom you see all over: they are men in body only, who adopt female gender identity; they’re not quite transvestites, and not transgendered. Some have castration surgery, some do not. There is no equivalent word or adequate definition in English. You cannot believe that some of them were born men. They are low-status, marginalized, and are often sex workers. Others look like male movie stars in saris. People are afraid of them, as they are always crashing ceremonies to which they have not been invited. You pay them to go away when they hit on you for money, or you risk
their putting dark spells on you and yours.
Hijra
s frequently stand outside the homes of families with newborns until they are paid not to put curses on the children.

The horns of the bull that almost gored me were painted with the colors of the Indian flag, green, orange, white. The bull pulled a cart with sacks of rice. I stepped aside at the last minute, like a matador. Ubiquitous urchins laughed at me, and I smiled.

India is a round place: round noses and round, soulful eyes; sacks of grain; beach balls for sale everywhere; kids with hacky sacks; fried balls of anything edible for sale, savory or sweet.

It is layers upon layers of ancient and living civilization, a profound and tangible sacredness that has been alive for 7,000 years, always and still evolving, so maybe not exactly the song that never ends, but more like a song that has no beginning and no end, a Möbius-strip song, the same ancient note that ever was. Delhi is built upon and built upon and built upon the most ancient foundation, the Stone Age; the Indus Valley civilization from more than 5,000 years ago, the birth of most great religions; the Mughal empire; the sadhus, the yogis, and the British. The obscene Raj takeover left gorgeous buildings and squares and gardens everywhere. Everything is right there on the streets—everything that ever was, everything beautiful and destitute that ever was and will be, with Stone Age fires along the streets burning outside high-tech corporate offices, the Divine being transmitted and worshipped, and the reality
and the continuity of that; and the dirt and pee and people shitting in the streets, and a million beggars right around you, and two million dogs, and as many cows and bulls, and every God everywhere, so that this sense of worship envelops every thing, permeates and emanates. Other places I’ve seen in Asia, Thailand and Vietnam, for instance, seem as though they are behind glass, whereas here, you’re a part of it. In Thailand, it’s a great ballet or a play—a representation. But here I was part of it, part of the dance.