The Yoga of Max's Discontent (15 page)

Shakti smiled at Max when Ramakrishna left, then burst out in dry sobs. Max wanted to cry too, because he knew she wasn't crying for the hunger or the thirst. They would pull through another week. She was crying for the loss of a guru who had given them a glimpse of truth and could light the entire path for them. But leaving, they both knew, was now inevitable. Max put his hands in hers and held her close, feeling her burning skin under him. They had never touched before. Ramakrishna had never explicitly forbidden them, but touch meant desire, a narrow craving that tethered one to this limited life. But today, to touch another burning, throbbing body was to feel alive again. For everything around them—the land, their crops, the spare insects, even the resident frogs and geckos—had all shriveled and burned to death.

T
he tractor came early in the morning on the third day. The driver had aged considerably from the last time they'd seen him a month ago. His dry, papery skin was covered with thick grooves, his lips were cracked, and he seemed to have shrunk to half his size. Max shook his burning hand, relieved they were carrying food for the village. He felt ashamed for throwing a tantrum. But Shakti and he were starving too. Just loading the food sacks and backpacks in the tractor made his head spin. They bent down and touched Ramakrishna's feet, then folded their hands, thanking him for his teaching and hospitality. Max felt a pang of concern about leaving him alone without emergency rations. But he knew Ramakrishna would manage as he had for all these years. They drove away in the sputtering tractor.

The tractor ran out of fuel a few miles before they reached the village. The farmer apologized. There was no gas in the village. They would have to walk. He himself was too tired to walk. Could they ask the villagers to make something from the food sacks they were carrying and send it back? He lay down under the tractor to protect himself from the blazing sun. Max promised he would come back himself with food. They hoisted their backpacks and loaded the food sacks on their heads, beginning a slow, stumbling walk to the village.

They stopped for a break midway and sat down on their backpacks, sweat pouring down their temples. Max licked his lips. Salt. He licked some more. Any food would do. Soon he would eat more. Chocolate biscuits and orange juice. Apples, bananas, rice, bread. Blood coursed through his veins. Max took off his shirt and wiped the sweat off his face.

Shakti looked around. Seeing just miles of desolate land, she removed her T-shirt and sat in her bra.

“Where you will go next?” said Shakti, opening her ponytail so that her hair fell over her naked, tanned shoulders.

Max cupped his hand over his eyes to shield them from the blinding sun. “Not back home,” he said. “Maybe Varanasi. I read that it's India's holiest place. Anywhere I can find a teacher half as good as Ramakrishna. You?”

“Back to Milan,” she said. “My sabbatical is almost over. First, I thought I would not join the university, but now I want to.”

“Come with me,” said Max.

She shook her head. “I feel like this for some time now. I do not want this. I want life. I want family. Imperfect. Comfortable. Beautiful.”

Max's eyes watered from the hot wind. He would probably never see Shakti again. An aching loneliness filled him. Yet another friendship left halfway. “Even I don't know if I want liberation,” he said.

“You do,” she said.

Max had the sudden urge to pull her sure face closer. “Will you have a family with your boyfriend?” he said.

“Maybe yes. Maybe no. Finding a man is not difficult for me.” She smiled.

She tossed her hair back, a stream of sweat dripping from the side of her neck to her naked torso. Max stared at the tops of her soft white breasts against her tanned skin.

“Not difficult at all,” he said. “You are beautiful.”

“Yogis do not look at woman like that.” She laughed.

“I'm not a yogi then,” he said.

He came closer. His lips found hers. He tasted water, salt, and blood in her chapped skin. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her closer to his naked chest. Her burning skin pressed against him.

“I am messy. I am dirty. I smell. I do not feel attractive,” she said.

“I love your smell,” he said.

He spread his shirt below them, put her on it, and tugged her cargo pants off. He buried his face between her legs, smelling sweat mixed with dry earth. She moaned. He moved up and down her lean, hard body, licking, kissing, touching, nibbling, biting, his desire fueled by starvation.

He stopped and lay down still on her, feeling her writhe below him. She circled his cracked sore nipples with her tongue,
caressed his raw skin, rubbed her fingers over his dry, torn hips, and drew blood from his cuts. He gasped with pain and pleasure and entered her.

They fucked hard as the sun beat upon them.

Again and again they went up, down, his face in her buttocks, her mouth working his penis, fucking, sucking, living, the months of abstinence and denial seeping away from their hard, weary bodies until their skins peeled from the unforgiving wrath of the sun and they cried out in pain.

He shifted position and took her from behind, aroused once again by the red-brown hair falling over her shoulders, the fullness of her breasts and her hard waist.

They screamed together when he came.

They collapsed into each other's arms, a sweaty mix of dust and blood, and lay there still and silent, unconcerned with the beating sun.

“I want this every day. I like this. I do not like yoga,” she said after a while.

“Come with me. We can have this every day,” said Max.

She got up, pushed her hair back, and started clasping her bra.

Max forced himself up as well. A thousand prickly, throbbing, alive sensations coursed through his body. “Come with me,” he said again.

She snorted. “I give us one week, maybe two. You will disappear after that. You want yoga, not sex.”

He put his shirt back on and tousled her hair. “How do you know everything?”

“I do not know everything, but I know you, Max. I see you work. I see you do yoga
.
You are a
parivrajaka,
an eternal traveler,
a yogi with no home who will not rest until he sees God face-to-face,” she said. “I am not like that.”

She looked at her watch. “Almost eleven. If we do not start now, we will burn up, walking six miles to town.”

They put on their backpacks and lifted the sacks above their heads and walked back to the village. Max was heady and light. The images from his past that had been tormenting him for months had receded. He felt Shakti's touch on his skin, a loose strand of her auburn hair below his eyes, the smell of her sweat. He stole a glance at her determined, sure face. His eyes stung. She was beautiful.

S
omething felt different. Max hadn't been to the village in three months, choosing to stay in the ashram even on days silence broke, so he couldn't put his finger on it. What was it? He looked around. Everything was just as he remembered. The thirty-odd huts in a neat semicircle, the giant well in the center of the huts, the shop selling cigarettes and sundry items on the far right, the weaver's shop on the left, the fields with their hardened earth ahead. Why did it look so different, then? It struck him then. He couldn't hear a sound. The village was completely silent. There was no one around. No women huddling at the wells, no children playing with marbles, not a single farmer plowing the fields, no weaver working in the shop. No words, no whispers, no sign of life.

“Where is everybody?” asked Shakti, her words a shout in the eerie silence.

They approached the hut where the man who usually took their food sacks lived. The wooden door was open. A man lay on the mud floor. His skin looked like the earth—patchy, dry, and black. The man raised a bony hand in greeting. It took Max a moment to recognize him as the erect, proud man who had greeted him the last time they had come with the crops.

Max and Shakti put the sacks in front of him.

His withered, dry face broke into a smile. He said something. Max bent closer. He wanted Max to call the others in the village. They knocked on all the doors. Fifteen or twenty women and a couple of old men shuffled out. Heat and hunger seemed to have driven their modesty away. Their rags showed most of their burned, blackened bodies, their hair was unkempt, and their movements were slow and unsure. They had entered the land of the living dead.

The women stared at the food sacks with bright eyes. They smiled through their cracked lips and stained teeth. Three of them lifted one of the sacks and carried it inside to the tall man's hut. The others came closer to Max and Shakti and touched their feet, mumbling their gratitude.

Max stood there staring at the food sacks he hadn't wanted to part with.

“Where are all the men?” said Shakti.

They learned that the men had gone to Madurai, the nearest city twelve hours by bus from Pavur, to find work after farming became impossible in the village.

A middle-aged woman pointed fiercely to a hut on the far
left, gesturing that they should go there. The tall man tried to dissuade her, but she persisted.

They walked through the scorching land and entered the hut. The rancid smell of human waste. Two thin boys, five or six years old, whom Max had often bought snacks for and joked with, were huddled together naked on a bed strung together by ropes. They breathed heavily, making loud, scratchy sounds. Max looked away from their scared eyes.

The woman folded her hands. Her eyes begged them to do something. Again and again she raised her arms, praying and begging.

They had been fucking less than a mile away.

Max indicated she should give them the food they'd brought immediately. But he knew the futility of his suggestion. The three sacks of food would be three meals for one day for a village in the throes of a drought. There wasn't enough food to go around. Today two kids would die, tomorrow some more and then a few more. Hunger, starvation, death were right at his doorstep. How could he have been so selfish, so oblivious? Ramakrishna had been right. They'd had more than enough to eat. Max gripped Shakti's hand.

“Let's go,” he said.

“Where?” she said.

“Pavur. Somewhere. There must be an ATM or a bank nearby. I have money,” he said.

She started to say something, but her words were drowned by the anguished cries of the woman. They walked out of the hut, past the two-hundred-foot well, which didn't seem to contain a drop of water, away from the charred bodies collecting near the hut they had kept the food in. Limp, weary hands waved at them.

A middle-aged man ran toward them with obvious effort.

He lifted his shirt and pointed to his waist.

Max didn't understand.

“Help. Kidney. Buy kidney,” said the man.

The man wanted to sell his kidney for money. Max had read about impoverished donors selling kidneys to needy, rich people. It hadn't struck him with any urgency then. Just as droughts hadn't.

Instead of pity, anger surged within him. Didn't this happen every year? How could these people be so unprepared, so oblivious? Why did they choose to live here?

The man fell on Max's feet, pleading.

Max brushed him off. “No need. I will get money,” he said.

They turned around and walked out of the village.

“How many villages will you give money?” said Shakti on the dirt track to Pavur.

He stared at her.

“There are small villages all around,” she said pointing to the huts along the road. “It is the same everywhere. How much money can you give?”

His initial irritation disappeared. Shakti was right, logical as usual. What he gave wouldn't be a drop in the ocean for this village, let alone the millions of people dying of starvation in the hundreds of villages all over the world. Half of this world lived on less than a dollar a day. Just because he had seen a few kids die didn't mean it began or ended here. Why did it happen? The questions hadn't changed since he had begun his journey.

“I also think they put on little show for us,” said Shakti.

Max understood. The villagers knew they were coming that day, so they hadn't made any effort to hide their needs.

“I read before I came here. Drought and famine are very bad in India but no mass deaths anymore. We were worse off than the villagers. The government sends water tankers to the village every few days. At Ramakrishna's ashram, we had nothing,” she said. “Farmers' problems are inflation and debt, not food grain itself.”

Max figured the villagers were likely taking on debt to tide themselves through the drought and the men were working menial jobs in Madurai city to pay them off. So the villagers probably had a little more to eat and drink than they had shown. Maybe the boys on the rope bed would breathe less heavily if Max and Shakti weren't around. Sure, he was being manipulated, but it changed nothing. Misery was written large on their faces. The cycle of hunger and debt and more hunger and more debt would go on.

“The planet can't support so many people. There has to be an end to this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” said Max.

Even as he articulated this half-formed thought, he realized he was running away from the one man who could show him the end of suffering. Why? To have more drumsticks and eggplant? While he was busy angling for an extra bowl of millet and fucking in the fields, the world had continued to spin in its uncaring way. He had come so close to seeing a glimmer of the truth but been distracted once again.

“I'm going to go back to Ramakrishna,” he said after a minute. “I'll withdraw whatever money I can from the ATM, buy supplies for the village, and walk right back.”

Shakti tied her bandanna around her hair. “I think that is wise,” she said.

“Will you come?”

She shook her head. “Nothing changes for me.”

“Yet you say it's smart for me to go back?” he said.

“The path of liberation is like poison in beginning, nectar in the end. The path of the world is nectar in beginning, always poison in end,” she said. “Quoting as it is from Bhagavad Gita.
”

“So come with me,” he said.

“I do not want to think about the future. I want nectar now,” she said.

A boy waved at them from a hut on the side of the dirt track. Max waved back distractedly. “And I should have poison?” he said.

“I think you cannot help it,” she said.

A light, empty feeling arose in his gut. He was afraid of going back without Shakti. “Is it safe to live with so little food?” he said.

“If Ramakrishna is okay all these years, you will be okay too. You are strong like him. I try to keep up with you all these months,” she said.

“I was keeping up with you,” he said.

They arrived at the bus stand. Shakti bought a ticket for the bus to Madurai. They kept their backpacks down and hugged. Tears fell from both their eyes. She touched his face.

“You'll be fine,” she said. “All these ups and downs are just small waves in the yoga of your discontent.”

“The yoga of my discontent?”

“In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna's sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness. That's why Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna Vishada Yoga
,
the yoga of Arjuna's despondency,” she said. “Your discontent with the world as it is will lead you to your union.”

She waved at him and went inside the bus. Max waved back, a lump forming in his throat. He willed himself to feel nothing. It had to start from here. The narrow need for comfort and companionship had to be burned in the fire of a broader, universal love. The bus left. Max walked over to the shop with the phone, feeling an aching sadness in his heart.

•   •   •

MAX CALLED HIS BANK,
concentrating on remembering long-forgotten security questions, and maxed out his ATM's international withdrawal limit. He left the shop and withdrew $2,000 in rupees from the ATM next to the bus stand, enough for the village to survive the season if they bought the essentials of grains and lentils. On his way back to the village, Max stopped in front of the hardware store with the Internet connection. He hesitated. He had to break free from the pull of the world, go deeper within. But he couldn't stop himself from entering the store.

Biscuits and chips strung on the façade, shelves full of machine parts, and the proprietor sitting on a chair in the relative coolness of the dark shop interior—everything seemed glaringly opulent in contrast to the sparseness of the ashram and the village. He connected to the Internet, barely noticing how slow it was. To touch the cold metal of the laptop, to know how to operate it, and have an email account itself made him aware of the vastness of his privilege.

Petty, irrelevant noise entered his silent life as soon as he opened his email. Jobs being changed, houses being bought, babies being welcomed. He skimmed through everything quickly, stopping only at an email from Sophia.

Maxi, I got admitted to Stern . . . I know you'll be surprised I'm going to B-School but I gotta make some money! Else I'll end up back in the projects . . . I've realized now I was just trying to be different from you. Send me news. Oh and I've met someone! He's great . . . he's helping me think through a lot of things.

Max was surprised. Sophia had always been so driven by purpose and meaning. He couldn't see her working in a corporation. Was she okay? She didn't seem as self-contained and thoughtful as she usually was. He didn't quite like the sound of the guy she had met.

Max walked back to the shop with the phone. He dialed Sophia's number from memory. It went to voicemail. Max disconnected the phone. He wouldn't call her again. If he wanted to become the universal, he had to transcend this narrow love, these binding attachments that fed one's sense of self. Not that she needed him. She was twenty-six and going to graduate school, not a mother of two trying to feed her children in the middle of a drought.

Outside the shop, Max began throwing his clothes out of the backpack with a vengeance. He returned to the village with a bag full of powdered glucose, water bottles, biscuits, fruits, lentils, and rice—and just enough diesel for the tractor ride to Ramakrishna's ashram and back.

•   •   •

IN THE VILLAGE CHIEF'S HUT,
he succumbed to the villagers' insistence of sharing a portion of their meager rations. They
treated him like a messiah.
I'm nobody
, he wanted to scream at their dried, torn faces. Just someone born in easier circumstances he didn't work for in this life. A bony, charred young woman served him potatoes and biscuits. She looked roughly the same age as Sophia, but this woman's future would be as black as her past. Could he help her? Could anyone? Who knew if her pain was the effect of actions from lives past or just a random act of nature? All he knew was that the world was imperfect and an ancient path promised perfection. Now he would walk the path afresh to get answers back for all. Max looked at the woman's sallow face and couldn't taste the potatoes anymore. He had lost his taste for food forever and was glad for it. So fleeting and capricious was the joy of the senses, these external pleasures. Nothing would distract him in his search for the permanent truth within.

Max made his way back later that evening once the driver had his fill of the cooked food Max brought for him. Ramakrishna greeted him at the gates with his silent smile. Despite Max's protestations, he insisted on sweeping the floors of his hut and making his bed just as he had done the first time. It was as if he was welcoming a guest other than the one who had left.