by Don DeLillo
Coomeraswamy said, “But what will you do after you’ve seen this Sanskrit ghat of yours? I think you’ll want to rest awhile, won’t you? Come back to Sarnath. You’ll be ready for a long rest by then.”
“I’m not sure what I’ll do. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Why don’t you want to think about it? Do you feel this is not an auspicious time to go to Rajsamand?”
He had graying hair, an immense kindness in his eyes, a stab of light. As if he knew. Smoke hung over the plain. The soaring birds, the kites, turned slowly above the white horizon. Why didn’t he want to think about it? What was beyond Rajsamand, after the pure white embankment, the peaceful lake? He studied inscriptions not only in stone but in iron, gold, silver and bronze, on palm leaves and birch bark, on ivory sheets. Bhajan Lal told him that people had been gathering for weeks, living in tents or in the open, to prepare for the solar eclipse. He blew the horn at a tonga, at men on bicycles, at a small girl with a switch walking a dozen bullocks across the road. Beggars were assembling, holy men, those who will bathe in pools to seek their release. A million people were waiting at Kurukshetra, he said, to enter the tanks of water. Owen looked out the window, saw men reclined on charpoys outside spice stalls, white vultures hunched in trees. Bhajan Lal took a long-peaked cap from a pouch on his door, showed it to Owen.
“You are having a hat with you?”
“l left it somewhere.”
“It was what kind of hat precisely?”
“A round hat with a loose brim. A sun hat.”
“This is for eclipse!” the young man said.
A man in a dhoti walked toward him in furious contemplation, hands behind his back. Owen smiled. Among the brown hills were fields of sugarcane, the thick stems ending in wispy flower heads. There were no cars or trucks on the road. He walked into a barren valley. Men with yellow turbans here, cows with tricolor horns. He saw the hilltop fortress that stood above Rajsamand. The kites turned in the burning sky. How quiet here, the day of eclipse, no trucks, no buses. Past the wheat fields, the clumps of pencil cactus. Bells rang lightly, a boy on an ox-drawn cart. Owen smiled again, thinking how in the midst of this wandering among Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, the Buddhist students in Sarnath, stunned time and again by the fairytale dynamics of Hindu cosmology, he had begun to think of himself once more as a Christian, simply by way of fundamental identification, by way of linking himself to the everyday medley he found around him. When people asked, this is what he said. Christian. How strange it sounded. And how curiously strong a word it seemed, after all these years, to be applied to himself, full of doleful comfort.
He came to the town that was set below the fortress and walked down the main street, where water buffalo lay in shallow ditches. Stalls and shops were closed, day of eclipse, and pregnant women stayed indoors, or so the driver had advised him. A disabled truck blocked the end of the street, front tires and rims gone, body pitched forward, down like a Mausered rhino. A woman sheeted in white stood by a door, a gauzy pink cloth fixed over her mouth. Owen edged past the truck and approached a gate in a yellow wall some yards from the edge of town. On the other side of the wall was the Sanskrit pavilion, as he’d come to call it, a marble-stepped embankment stretching about four city blocks along Rajsamand Lake. He judged there were fifty steps down to the water, a descent that was suspended at intervals by platforms, jutting pavilions, several decorative arches. A miraculous space in the dullish brown distemper of the countryside, cool, white and open, an offering to the royal lake. And miraculous as well for what it was not—a ghat swarming with bathers, pundits under sunshades, those who sit erect and see nothing, the mendicant, the diseased, the soon-to-be-turned-to-ashes. There were two women at the lowermost step, beating clothes, far to Owen’s left, and a boy with a melodious face, approaching. That was all. Owen walked down to the nearest pavilion, entering to stand in the shade awhile, noting the elaborately sculptured columns, the dense surfaces. Set into a platform nearby was a slate panel on which he could faintly make out a block of text about forty lines long. The boy followed him along the embankment, up and down steps, across platforms, under the arches, in and out of the three pavilions. In time Owen counted twenty-five panels en cased in ornamental marble, the epic poem he’d come to see and to read, one thousand and seventeen lines in classical Sanskrit, the pure, the well-formed, the refined.
The panels were accompanied, as almost everything seemed to be, almost everywhere, by carved images of elephants, horses, dancers, warriors, lovers. Everything in India was a list. Nothing was alone, itself, unattended by images from the pantheon. The boy did not speak to him until Owen by a simple shift of the head indicated he was ready to step outside his studious bearing, the contained exaltation of this first short hour on the embankment. The women pounded clothes on the bottom step, the sound fading toward mid-lake, mid-sky, renewed before a silence could obtain.
“This is a poem of the Mewar kingdom,” the boy said. “It is the early history of Mewar. It is the longest Sanskrit writing in India today. This lake is circumference twelve miles. This marble is from Kankroli. The full cost is more than thirty lakhs of rupees. You are from?”
“America.”
“Where is your suitcase?”
“It’s just a canvas pack and I left it under a tree up there.”
“It must already be stolen.”
He wore short pants, sandals, high socks, a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the top. His eyes were serious and bright, showing an interest in the wanderer that would not be satisfied without an earnest dialogue. He inspected the man openly. Sunburnt, dusty, wide-eyed, bald on top. A shirt with a dangling button.
“Is there a place I can spend the night?”
A watch with a cracked band.
“You must go back out to the road. I will show you.”
“Good.”
“How long will you stay?”
“Three days, I think. What do you think?”
“Do you read Sanskrit?”
“I will try to,” Owen said. “I’ve been teaching myself for almost a year. And this is a place I’ve wanted to see all that time and longer. Mainly I will study the letters. It’s a handsome script.”
“I think three days is very long.”
“But it’s beautiful here, and peaceful. You’re lucky, living near a place like this.”
“Where will you go next?”
The women were in red and parrot green, beating in a single motion. Where would he go next? The repeated stroke re minded him of something, the Greek fisherman he’d seen a dozen times walloping an octopus on a rock to make the flesh tender. A stroke that denoted endless toil, the upthrust arm, the regulated violence of the blow. What else did it remind him of? Not something he’d seen. Something else, something he’d kept at the predawn edge. The boy was watching him, smooth face tilted in an air of inquiry, a manner that seemed laden with mature concern. As if he knew. The women started up the steps, the washwork in baskets on their heads. The boy’s hair gleamed nearly blue. He climbed to the top of the embankment, pointed with a smile toward the tree where Owen had left his rucksack. Still there.
Owen used the pack as a cushion, sitting cross-legged before a panel set into the nearest platform. The boy stood behind him and to the right, able to see the text over Owen’s shoulder.
The letters, attached to top—strokes, were solid, firmly stanced. It was as though the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered. He studied the shapes. What was it about the letter-shapes that struck his soul with the force of a tribal mystery? The looped bands, scything curves, the sense of a sacred architecture. What did he almost understand? The mystery of alphabets, the contact with death and oneself, one’s other self, all made stonebound with a mallet and chisel. A geography, a gesture of the prayerful hand. He saw the madness, even, the scriptural rage that was present in the lettering, the madness of priests who ruled that members of the menial caste were to have their ears
filled with molten lead if they listened to a recitation of the Vedas. It was in those shapes, the secret aspect, the priestly, the aloof, the cruel.
The boy spoke several lines aloud in a beautiful musical pitch but said he wasn’t sure he had it right.
The letters were not proportioned and spaced with the care the Romans put into monumental capitals, which were frameworked in squares, half squares, fitted circles, then sketched and painted and carved in graded widths. This was a thousand lines. This was the childlike history of Mewar, terrible and fierce, and the text fairly sang of sages, maidens, caliph invaders. It seemed childlike at any rate to Owen, the child again, made to learn a language, to think in lists.
He wondered at which end of the embankment the poem began, how he could tell, whether it mattered. He could not help imagining that all this marble had been quarried, cut, laid in place, the pavilions built, arches raised, the lake made, to provide a setting for the words.
Together they read aloud, slowly, the man deferring to the music of the boy, pitching his voice below the other’s. It was in the sound, how old this was, strange, distant, other, but also almost known, almost striking through to him from some uncycled memory where the nightmares lay, the ones in which he could not speak as others did, could not understand what they were saying.
Then the boy was gone. Owen felt the light become dim, felt it, sensed it. A wind swept down the embankment. Birds veered across the lake, crying hoarsely, crows, hurrying. An arch cast multiple shadows. Midafternoon. Empty, pale and hushed. A cock began to crow.
In Kurukshetra they would be swarming toward the tanks. Bhajan Lal had said a million people. Futile to imagine. The ash-painted men, the men fixed in one position, those with sect marks, those anointed with sandalwood paste. Owen climbed toward the trees, then turned and sat on the top step. The women gathering their skirts above their knees as they enter the water. The genealogists recording the names of pilgrims, the dates of ritual baths. The holy men in rings of glowing coals. There would be mud fireplaces, the heavy smoke of burning dung. Children with begging bowls, blind men and lepers, people dying under black umbrellas. Saved by the water, released to the water. Miracles share the landscape with death.
It was one more list, wasn’t it? All he could do, all he could make. His own primitive control. The sadhus sit naked, heads raised, eyes opened wide to the sun. The contortionists bend themselves into topological knots. The chanting begins, the blowing of conch shells. They go dragging through the shallow water, arms raised, multitudes, a solid body, too many to see.
Trampled, drowned. In his fear of things that took place on such a rampant scale, was there an element of desperate envy? Was it enviable? Did they possess a grace, a beauty, as his friend Kathryn believed? Was it a grace to be there, to lose oneself in the mortal crowd, surrendering, giving oneself over to mass awe, to disappearance in others?
He crossed his arms to clutch himself against the chill. In three days he would walk into the desert.
“There’s some water in that jug.”
“Here,” I said.
“Take some.”
“Is it safe?”
Owen was gravitationally bound to the cult, as an object to a neutron star, pulled toward its collapsed mass, its density. The image is both trivial and necessary. What could he say about the attraction? Nothing that did not take the form of an example from the physical world, preferably a remote and not easily observed part of it, to suggest the edge of perception.
The dead sun was not an image. It hung over the cactus and scrub, the sand hills of this desolate western reach of the Thar, the Great Indian Desert, not far from the Pakistan border. He followed camel trails and ate a thick bread made with coarse barley. The well water was brackish, the camels wore bells, people made frequent reference to snakebite. He came across two villages in four days on foot and in buses. The villagers lived in beehive huts with thatched roofs, walls of mud and dry grass.
His mother used to tell him, “Try to be more impressive.”
He stood on a broken asphalt road in a white silence, waiting for a bus. The people he’d seen some miles back had worn a type of cotton robe and the women had gathered branches from small thorny trees to use in making fires. He would have to learn the names of things.
He watched a man come hobbling toward him out of the hills. He led a goat on a rope and wore a ragged turban and the cleft white beard of the old Rajput warriors. He began talking on the other side of the road and in what appeared to be the middle of a sentence, as though continuing a conversation the two men had started some years earlier, and he told Owen about the nomadic tribes in the area, about snake charmers and wandering minstrels. The English he spoke sounded like a minor dialect of Rajasthani. He said he was a teacher and guide and he called Owen sir.
“Guide to what? There’s nothing here.”
He said a number of things Owen could not understand. Then he showed him a filthy length of cloth embossed with some kind of symbol. This seemed to give him official government status as a guide.
“But what is there to see that requires a guide?”
“For an feesir.”
“How much?”
“As you wish.”
“All I want to do is get a bus going that way, to Hawa Mandir.”
No buses on this road. “You will be going to Hawa Mandir, you will need to see a lorry.”
“When?”
“After certain days.”
“How many days are certain days?”
The man thought about this.
“I am interested in knowing what you will guide me to if I pay your guide fee.”
“Pay as you wishsir.”
“But what will you show me? We’re somewhere between Jaisalmer and the Pakistan border.”
“Jaisalmer, Jaisalmer.” He made a happy chant of it.
“And the Pakistan border,” Owen said.
The man looked at him. The word for yesterday was the same as the word for tomorrow. The hawks turned in the empty sky. “If there is no bus and if I have to wait indefinitely for another vehicle, I’ll walk to Hawa Mandir.”
“You will be walking into the Thar but you will never walk outsir.”
“You said you were a teacher. What do you teach?”
The man tried to remember. He began a monologue that seemed to be about his early days as an acrobat and juggler, wandering between the fortress cities. The two men hunkered in the dust, the Indian talking endlessly, his right hand floating in a mesmeric gesture, his left hand clutching the rope that was fastened around the goat’s neck. Owen was barely aware of his departure. He remained squatting close to the ground, leaning slightly forward, body weight supported by his calves. When the sun was white and rippling he took a dried vegetable preparation out of his pack and ate it. He wanted water but allowed himself only a token amount, trying to preserve most of what was left until the next day, midmorning, when he would look for rest and shade after five hours on foot. It was suddenly dark. He reclined on his side like the gypsy in the Rousseau painting, safe in a mystical sleep.
He was barely awake, thinking of the morning’s long haul, when a small caravan of brass-studded iron carts approached, bullock-drawn, heading the same way he was. Blacksmiths and their families, the women wearing bright veils and silver trinkets. They took him to Hawa Mandir.
It was a fifteenth-century town slowly being assimilated by the desert, so much the color of the desert that Owen did not see it until they were nearly at the gates. It was being received and combined, sinking into the land, crumbling, worn away in stages. Even the dogs that sulked along the outskirts were yellowish brown and passive and barely visible. He walked through the streets and alleys. The houses were sandstone, with carved facades and flat roofs, auspicious signs on many walls. There was one long building embellished with domes and kiosks and lacy stonework balconies. There was little activity, most of it involving water. A man washed down a camel, another fastened water containers to a two-whe
eled wooden cart. In minutes Owen had made his way to the edge of town. Sand began to blow.
The stone houses gave way to huts of mud and brick. Many of these were ruined, lapped in sand. Children watched him drink from his canteen. Goats moved in and out of inhabited huts. He stood on a ruined wall and scanned the horizon. There were earthen bins out there, sand-colored, conical, one or two with thatched roofs. He’d seen these elsewhere, receptacles for food and grain, the taller ones seven or eight feet high, usually set on the immediate edge of a village, men with tools, livestock tethered nearby. These bins were stark, a half dozen of them, about three hundred yards from the last of the huts. He set out in that direction.
Sand was blowing across the tawny ruins. A rough path led through gorse and thorn to the cluster of small buildings. Sand stone hills rose in regulated layers in the distance. He passed a woman and child with a gaunt cow. The child followed close to the animal, gathering dung as it fell to the ground, folding it, patting it briskly. The woman screamed something at her, lashing the air with a stick. This sound carried briefly on wind. History. The man who stands outside it.
