At the Bottom of Everything
Page 16
At some point a man walked in from the backyard, tying the sash on his long shirt and pajama pants outfit; he was short and about the same age as the grandmother. “Welcome, welcome, so much welcome,” he said, shaking my hand. “I am? Akki.” He had the kind of barrel chest and thick white hair I associate with kings and billionaires. “My wife, who you are meeting? Shima. Our son? Very dead, very sadly dead. He is sorry you will not meet him. Stabbed. Very much bad business.”
He called something toward another room, and a young woman shuffled in; she couldn’t have much been much older than me, and she moved with the cautiousness of someone trying not to break through the surface of a frozen pond. Akki pressed her against his side. “The wife of my son. Gita. Very much beautiful. Very, very welcome to meet you.” She didn’t look very welcome to meet me. She hardly looked at me at all. She had gold bangles on her wrists and a daub of the same red on her forehead as the grandmother’s. She nodded in my general direction, then hurried back to whatever room she’d come from.
“We are hearing not to be expecting you,” Akki said. “This, you understand—” He gestured apologetically (I think) at the room, at the lack of special arrangements. I made a pshaw sort of noise and, in desperation, took a worrisomely sour gulp of tea.
“You are coming to us from miles and miles away,” Akki said. “My English, I offer apologies. So many, many apologies.” He moved his chair so he could sit facing me directly. “Bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, very wonderful. Most wonderful. Telling me. You are a rich man? Important city man?”
No, no, a very unimportant man, I tried to explain. Unless you couldn’t be a bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta without being an important man, in which case, yes, very important, extremely important, from the biggest city of all. I sipped more tea.
The grandmother, Shima, had gone off into the backyard and now she came back in carrying a chicken, which she set to work hacking apart on the tabletop; it took me a surprising number of minutes to connect what she was doing with the sudden absence of rooster crows.
Two things happened then, which, along with its getting dark outside, seemed to mark the tilting of the evening from one phase into another. First, the little girl came back from her errand, which had apparently been to buy two giant bottles of something label-less and golden. And second, as Shima went around the room lighting the lanterns, I began to notice a set of dark shapes gathering by the door where I’d come in. At first I counted three people, then four, then five, all lingering on the porch like carolers. “Do they want to come inside?” I said.
“They are hoping you give them numbers!” Akki said. “Many, many people, not very much educated. Someone say savakabodhisatta, they start to think of lottery. Start to think of magic.” Then, to them, he said something that sounded like a grudging acknowledgment. One by one, bowing and cringing, they stepped inside and took their places against the wall. Were these the people who were supposed to lead me to the cave? They were mostly men, a few of them with mustaches; sometimes they whispered to each other, but mostly they just stood and watched as I served myself chicken bits and a purplish lentil stew. They looked as if they could have been waiting for a bus, or waiting to be called into a police lineup. By the time I’d finished my plate, which is to say picked at what meat I could discern in the half-dark, there were at least seven of them watching us.
“You are very much not feeling fear,” Akki said. “Very much calm, very much preparing, many, many accomplishments. The final night for many, many things.”
I made a noise of general agreement and wiped my hands against my shorts. The food was painfully, eye-reddeningly spicy, and the only way I could outrace the pain was by eating more and faster. Shima and Gita and the granddaughter had joined us, perched on chairs at a slight distance from the table; Gita looked down at her lap and ate only with the fingertips of her left hand, as birdlike as it was possible to be while eating stew without utensils; her daughter stood waiting to climb onto her lap. You’d think this might have been among the more awkward meals I’d ever eaten, but I was fairly well inured to awkwardness by that point, plus I’d resolved that a bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, at least as I interpreted the role, wasn’t really given to chattering.
Also, there was the alcohol. At some point it became impossible to keep track of how much I’d had, because Akki, like an overeager waiter, poured a refill (we drank from orange plastic mugs) every time I drank so much as an inch. “Tulleho! Tulleho!” If I had to guess I’d say it was whiskey, or maybe gin, but really what it tasted of most strongly was flammability. By the end of the meal I’d noticed that the doorways, formerly very stable, were wobbling whenever I moved my head. One of the wall-lingerers, a pipe-cleaner-thin man in a white undershirt, seemed, each time I looked at him, to be mouthing a message to me, but I couldn’t keep him still enough to decipher it. The possibility of vomiting appeared on the horizon, like a distant ship popping into view. I know I knocked over my mug at some point and I remember thinking, as the grandmother pressed a towel against the puddle and Akki apologized, That’s probably for the best.
It was after dinner, in Akki’s long whiskey-sipping giggling period, that I first noticed the singing coming from the backyard. It could have been going on all throughout dinner; I was having, by then, to keep a fairly vigilant watch on the table to keep the room from spinning. Akki had been in the middle of telling me a story about Gita’s family (she’d gone to put her daughter to bed as soon as the meal was finished); she was, from what I understood, very lonely, much too shy to find a new father for her little daughter. There were other threads in the story too, things I couldn’t quite follow, to do with corrupt judges, shady land deals. As I say, I wasn’t at my best.
And anyway, the singing: it was a single voice, probably female; going just by the melody I’d guess it was a song about waiting for a loved one to return from sea; it sounded like something you’d sing as you sat watching the plum blossoms wither. Either Akki noticed me noticing it or he noticed it himself. He stood up and lifted the lantern from the table; the men against the wall seemed to take this as their cue to huddle together by the door, as if they might need to run. “Come,” Akki said. “Now we will see. They are as family to me. Very, very sad, when my son is dying. Lots of crying, much too much crying. They make happiness again.”
The yard wasn’t really so much a yard as it was a pen of dirt, leading out into an endless field. Except that I couldn’t see details beyond Akki’s lantern light, and what I could see, including the stars and the moon, seemed to be turning in a kaleidoscope. There’s something about rural darkness, even or especially when you’re drunk; it feels bottomless; it makes you feel like you’re floating in the ocean. The lone voice had become a handful of voices now, a droning harmony, coming from somewhere that seemed to get farther away as we approached it. I tripped over a clod of broken-up ground and Akki put his arm around me, half affectionate, half stabilizing. He led me to the edge of the field, where there was a brick shed so basic it could have been drawn by a preschooler. The singing was coming directly from inside; if I’d lain my hands on the walls I would have felt a humming. Practically tiptoeing, Akki led me around to the shed’s cutout door: Look.
And there they were, the disciples who’d brought Akki happiness after his son died, the people who were, I realized as soon as I saw them, my only hope of getting to the cave. Raymond had been telling the truth. They were all boys, and they couldn’t, I didn’t think, have been much older than thirteen or fourteen. They wore simple robes, something like orange togas, and had identically shaved heads. The singing seemed to come not so much from them as through them. One of them, the one I’d thought was a woman, would sing something that must have meant: Must I, oh must I, wait forever? And the other three would answer: Yes, yes, you must wait forever.
They sat, the four of them, perfectly still, kneeling on the bare ground in what had been complete dark, singing with their heads tilted slightly toward the ground. It felt like coming upon
a cluster of unicorns at a watering hole. In college, in a music appreciation class, the professor had once played us a recording of what she said was the last Italian castrato, this now ancient man, shriveled and broken, singing with the voice of an angelic little girl. That was, I’d always thought, the eeriest, most unworldly music I’d ever hear. Wrong.
Akki and I stood there until the song was done (I’m guessing it was at least a few minutes, because I had time to notice the rolled-up straw mats in the corner of the shed and the wood-framed photo, against the wall, of what must have been a much-younger Sri Prabhakara). Then, as soon as they were finished, all four boys, who I wouldn’t have thought were aware of us, opened their eyes, turned to face us, to face me, and bowed until their foreheads were against the ground. I don’t think the feeling of being wrongly prostrated to is something that most people get to, or have to, experience in their lives; I was lucky to be unsteady enough not to feel the full bizarreness of it.
They sat back upright and closed their eyes, and Akki, looking as if he’d just pulled off the world’s most remarkable magic trick, led me staggering back toward the house. Was it possible that I smelled as strongly of alcohol as he did? Were those tears on his cheeks or was it sweat?
“Are they going to take me to the cave?” I said.
“Tomorrow, yes, yes, yes, tomorrow you will make puja. Now to resting. Now to sleep.”
Someone had made up a bed for me, complete with a folded set of pajamas, while we were out in the backyard, and it looked, in that moment, as welcoming as a bath. It was right by the wall where we’d just eaten dinner, with a lantern tucked into the window nook above. The pajamas would have fit two of me, even with the drawstring pulled tight. I blew out the lantern and lay there listening to what sounded like a large animal just outside the back door, breathing and chewing. The room was warm but I wanted the protection of the blankets on me; either they or I or both of us smelled sweet and gamy. I tried, because exhaustion and the ability to fall asleep had parted company, to count the places I’d slept in India, but I kept losing track, having to double back. Under my mountain of blankets I turned onto one side and then the other, my back and then my front. I felt as if a plate-sized Alka-Seltzer were dissolving in my stomach.
There’s no point, really, in ranking my nights according to their unpleasantness, but that one in Akki’s dining room deserves some sort of special mention. Without getting too much into it, I’ll just say that among the chicken’s many other qualities, it cured me of my constipation. I spent a couple of pitch-black hours racing between my bed and the fields, squatting and praying in the dark, thinking that this time, finally, I had to have emptied myself of everything that could possibly have been inside me. Degradation, like awkwardness, can be gotten used to.
Also there was the half-dream I kept falling into, like a second bed, that I was still at the Batras’, looking not for Thomas but for a doorway out, creeping around behind the furniture, trying not to be noticed.
And one other thing happened that night, which I’d say was another dream except that I was, by that point, past any hope of sleeping. It had to have been at least four in the morning, because the darkness outside had started to turn gray. I was lying there feeling empty and steamrollered, my eyes blurrily cracked open, when I noticed Gita standing next to me; my first thought was that she’d been sent to wake me up. No. She removed her sari like someone stepping out of a bathrobe and slid silently into bed beside me. I was so bewildered that I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. Her skin was as smooth and cold as marble. She didn’t acknowledge me. She lay there as still as a mummy. And then, some number of airless minutes later, she was crying, a high, breathy sort of crying, as if she were suppressing a series of sneezes. “Gita?” I whispered. But as quickly and quietly as she’d gotten into the bed, she was out of it, clutching her clothes to her stomach and hurrying back out through the doorway.
The sun, when it came up, didn’t so much rise as appear, like a blazing grapefruit, directly in the window. Shima was up, moving gingerly around the kitchen, rubbing what looked like ashes onto our dishes from the night before. She nodded good morning to me as I climbed out of bed. Akki was already in the field; the hacking sound I’d been hearing since dawn was him, working his way along between two rows, hunched and swinging a tool like the grim reaper’s. The brick shed really wasn’t so far from the house at all. Gita was in the corner of the field, looking conspicuously away from me, attaching something to a rhino-sized cow.
I’d just eaten breakfast, which is to say nibbled at a piece of round dry bread, when the monk came into the house from the backyard. He was, I was fairly sure, the lead singer from the night before. He was dark, with small eyes that made him look as if he were always just about to smile, and he had the thinnest of pubescent mustaches on his upper lip. He bowed at me again, staying on his feet this time. He was wearing his same robe and a pair of sandals that seemed to be made of tires and twine. He came up to about my chin. Akki, who’d followed the monk into the house, stood beaming in the doorway, sweating, dirt streaked across his forehead. He looked at the monk, looked at me, and apparently unable to contain himself any longer, he rushed over and pressed a pointer finger between my eyebrows, as if he were affixing a stamp to an envelope. He took me by the shoulders, beholding me, seeming seriously to consider kissing me. “We will be remembering you always.”
[Excerpted from Meeting the Timelessness: The Teachings of Sri Prabhakara, as Transmitted to His Disciples. For Free Distribution Only.]
A questioner from Germany asks: Is the proper teaching that we are to be mindful of every action always? Because it is often my experience that when I am trying to be most mindful, that is when my mind wanders the farthest.
Sri Prabhakara: Who is telling you, must be mindful? You are trying to control how is the state of your mind, of course you will find much suffering, much confusion. Do you see flowers? [gestures toward altar] Is flower thinking, being mindful, being mindful?
Q: Then the proper understanding pertains to effort? In making too much effort, I have been hindering myself?
P: In saying too much “I,” have been hindering yourself. In coming to me, thinking there is “I” who will make you understand this and that. That is where hindering begins …
I should make clear that even under ideal circumstances, I’m no hiker. It makes my knees hurt, it makes my back sweat; I associate it with bad food, bad sleep, bad company. I’ve had terrible fights with girlfriends over my refusal to spend weekends camping. I’ve sulked my way through two-mile gravel-paved meanders.
So, as the monk and I set out through Akki’s fields, between rows of something that looked like tobacco, then into a thicket of hilly woods, I kept repeating to myself: hiking is walking, hiking is walking. It was every bit as hot in the woods as it had been in the fields, and there were birds and bugs and frogs making trilly noises at every depth. There were more trees and tall grasses and bushes and vines than you could possibly count; the path looked days, or possibly hours, from being overgrown completely. You could see fallen trees turning back into mush almost in real time; there were mushrooms like orange tuning knobs along every trunk.
But I wasn’t, at least for a while, doing too badly, and it took me a while to realize that this was because of how little I was carrying. On my summer camp Appalachian Trail hikes I’d carried, in addition to my idiotically bulky frame backpack, a sleeping bag, a Therm-a-Rest, a raincoat, a camping chair, clothes, water, some share of the group’s food, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting. You’d put down your backpack at the end of one of those days and feel, for a few minutes, that same weird weightless propulsion as when you step onto a moving walkway at the airport.
But now, thanks to my lack of foresight and to the relative emptiness of the village general store, I had:
(1) blue JanSport backpack, containing:
(4) miniature bags of Ritz-esque crackers
(2) liters of water
(1) dirty sweatshirt
(1) box of not-very-adhesive Band-Aids
(1) composition notebook, and
(2) ballpoint pens courtesy of the Noida Radisson.
One reason the inadequacy of my provisions may not have been shriekingly obvious to me from the beginning was because, compared with my monk/guide, I was traveling with my own personal storage caravan. There may have been things I wasn’t aware of tucked into the folds of his robe, but I’m fairly certain that all he had, as he scampered off ahead of me, were his sandals and, attached to a knotted string over his shoulder, a little enclosed bowl (which contained, I saw later, about half a meal’s worth of lentils).
I hadn’t learned his name; to myself I called him Ranjiv, because he looked vaguely like a Ranjiv I’d gone to elementary school with. It seemed as unlikely that I’d learn his actual name, or that we’d have any sort of conversation, as that one of the birds cooing above me would fly down and ask how I was doing. He seemed to see me as an unusually large and helpless pink baby. He stopped to help me over a creek; he held back a thorny branch; he gestured for me to sit at a point when I happened to be feeling especially dire. I kept thinking I detected, behind the solicitousness, a kind of suppressed amusement in him. Did a fourteen-year-old Indian monk have friends? Go to school? Where was his family? Why had they let him get involved with Sri Prabhakara? He was, to me, an opaque little container of hypercompetence; his presence was the only thing that gave me any confidence that this hike wouldn’t end with me eaten by a tiger or dead of heatstroke.