Ganesh

by Malcolm Bosse

The rest of the week Jeffrey looked forward to Friday. Back in his village he had never been lonely — at least not until Father died — but with boys his age had played cricket, gone swimming, climbed trees, and with Rama had killed vipers. It seemed that after Father’s death, the world had cut him off, isolated him with the powerful memory of a raging fire, a dawn river, and birds rising from the shore. Of course, Aunt Betty had done everything possible to make him comfortable; more than that, she had made him feel that he belonged to the old house. But not until Tom Carrington invited him to his house had Jeffrey felt there was a chance to return to the world as he had known it before Father’s death.

  On Friday afternoon Jeffrey approached the Carrington house with excitement — and apprehension. When he rang the bell, no one answered for such a long time that he wondered if he had come on the wrong day. Suddenly a woman opened the door and frowned at him. “Go on, they’re in the basement —” From her curtness, Jeffrey understood that he should have just gone right in. On the stairway down, he heard the heavy rhythms of rock music blasting from beneath his feet. The light in the basement was dim, except over a billiard table where four boys were playing pool. In a little space beyond the table two couples were dancing. Tom Carrington sat on a couch, drinking a Coke. Next to him was Lucy Smith, a pretty girl with long, braided black hair. Jeffrey had often noticed her in class; Lucy was always ready with an answer when no one else could handle a tough question. Jeffrey walked up to Tom and stood there, not knowing what was expected of him. Both Tom and Lucy eyed him until he just sat down.

  “Coke in the fridge,” Tom said, waving his hand backward at a bar lined with liquor bottles on glass shelves. Then without another word Tom got up and walked over to study the game of pool.

  Maybe, Jeffrey thought, he feels as awkward with me as I do with him — as I do with all of them.

  “I heard about you,” Lucy Smith remarked abruptly. She had braces on her teeth, but was still pretty. “I heard you stayed under water a lot longer than anyone ever did in this school.”

  Jeffrey was surprised. Aside from one boy in the locker room, nobody had mentioned it.

  “They couldn’t believe you stayed under so long,” continued Lucy, adding, once she looked him up and down, “you sure don’t look like someone who could hold his breath two minutes twenty-three seconds. Know what some of the guys did? They asked Hank Foley — he’s a big senior tackle on the football team — to hold his breath, and he couldn’t get near two minutes.”

  Jeffrey didn’t know what a tackle was, but clearly this fellow Hank was strong and far bigger than he was. “Nobody told me about that,” he admitted.

  The girl laughed. “That’s because they can’t understand how you did it. How did you do it?”

  Encouraged by her winsome smile, Jeffrey began to explain the Indian breathing exercises. At her urging he then demonstrated various methods — Bhastrika, Ujjai, Sitali — while music blasted away and new arrivals danced in the corner and some boys racked up the billiard balls for another game of pool. Phil Booker, having lost the last game, ambled over to the couch just as Jeffrey was sticking his tongue out, shaped like a curled leaf, to inhale deeply and demonstrate yet another technique.

  Hands on hips, Phil asked Lucy, “What in hell is he doing?”

  She waved him off impatiently and continued to watch Jeffrey suck in air through the tube formed by his protruding tongue.

  Phil muttered something under his breath and went away.

  Lucy asked what was the reason for doing all these complicated breathing exercises.

  “To calm the mind,” Jeffrey said.

  “Why calm it?”

  How could he answer such a question in a basement reverberating with loud music, billiard balls clicking, and people talking and laughing? Even in silence, how could he explain an idea that had been part of his life ever since he could remember? Calming the mind was — well, calming the mind. It was an ideal that everyone in the village acknowledged was essential to happiness, the mark of well-being. So instead of answering such a question, he simply added that there was another dimension to the practice of calming the mind: mantras also helped.

  Hands clasped, Lucy leaned forward. “What’s a mantra?”

  “A chant.”

  “Magic?”

  “No, a prayer.”

  “You mean, like one of our prayers?”

  Jeffrey did not want to show his ignorance of Christian prayers, so he replied cautiously, “I would be thinking so.”

  “Tell me a mantra!” Lucy urged, clapping her hands. “Please! Tell me a mantra!”

  Jeffrey hesitated. Why did she want to know? In his experience a mantra was sacred, therefore spoken of solemnly. This girl’s carefree eagerness surprised him.

  “Please,” she wheedled.

  A few kids swirled around the couch, one boy asking Lucy to dance, but she waved him away. A girl asked her what was going on. Lucy shook her head impatiently, her eyes fixed on Jeffrey. “Tell me a very, very special mantra,” she pleaded.

  There was so much noise in the basement that Jeffrey had to lean forward to be heard. “This is the Gayatri —”

  Lucy beckoned him. “Sit next to me! Here!”

  “No,” he said in alarm, “this is okay.”

  “Please! Otherwise I can’t hear you!” She patted the cushion beside her on the couch.

  The fact was her invitation stunned Jeffrey. No Indian girl would ask a boy to sit close to her. Yet so compelling was Lucy’s smile that he got up and did as she asked. He edged away slightly when her thigh touched his.

  “Now tell me!”

  “This is a very sacred mantra, the Gayatri Mantra,” he began.

  “Wonderful!”

  Again her enthusiasm rattled him; yet when she tapped his wrist and repeated, “Tell me!” Jeffrey explained, with mounting enthusiasm of his own, that for Brahmin Hindus nothing is more spiritually purifying than the recitation of the Gayatri. He did not add that years ago women were forbidden to hear it.

  “Tell me! Say it!”

  In a singsong chant — Lucy put her ear close to his mouth to catch the words — Jeffrey began the mantra: “Om tut suh-viter vah ree yen yim —”

  “What language is that?” Her face was inches from his.

  “Sanskrit.”

  “That’s an Indian language, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, an old one.”

  “Like Greek and Latin?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me more!”

  Her ear was disconcertingly close to his mouth, yet Jeffrey chanted through the basement uproar: “Boor-go day-vahs-yah dee moo hee/Dee yo yo nuh pra choo duh yat!”

  Lucy gripped his shoulder to pull him even closer. “Say it again!”

  So Jeffrey chanted, again and again, while Lucy listened with concentration, until she began repeating the syllables under her breath. It occurred to Jeffrey that the girl was memorizing the mantra! He felt proud, as though he had brought something of his own into this basement — a new ability aside from playing billiards or dancing. He had brought something of his past, of his India into this room, and someone had accepted it. He was grateful to Lucy Smith, yet disturbed by her physical closeness and by her eagerness — you didn’t learn a mantra the way you put to memory the words of a popular song. For the moment, however, he chanted the mantra into her cupped ear, while the basement vibrated from so much noise.

  As he chanted, he could see from the wall clock that it was time to go. Aunt Betty had asked him to be home at seven. That morning she had insisted, for some reason, that he be home on time, maybe because until now he had always gone straight home from school. If only she knew that often for weeks at a stretch he had lived alone in the village, while Father tramped the roads of India!

  Lucy was now asking him what the mantra meant in English.

  He explained it was a holy prayer to the sun. It meant God beyond God. “Let us all think,” he translated, “of the burning light of the Shinin
g Ones so that the divine unmanifest Source may illuminate our minds.”

  “Say that again?” she asked, grimacing.

  “I am sorry, but I must go to home.” Jeffrey rose, and, not knowing what else to do, bowed from the waist.

  Lucy giggled.

  He turned and looked around for Tom Carrington. The tall boy was bent over the billiard table, sighting along a cue stick. Waiting until Tom had taken a shot, Jeffrey went up to him and stood there. Tom looked down at him.

  “Thank you,” Jeffrey said.

  Tom nodded casually and returned to the billiard table.

  That was all. Jeffrey plodded slowly up the basement stairs, having a last glance at Lucy Smith huddled on the couch, laughing with two other girls.

  Once outside in the still air of early evening, he realized how lonely he would have been in Tom Carrington’s basement if Lucy Smith hadn’t talked to him. Was she really interested in the Gayatri Mantra? Or was she just being nice? At any rate, she had learned after a fashion to chant it. Lucy was quick. After a week’s practice, say for a half-hour a day, she would be able to chant the mantra like a Brahmin. But why had Tom Carrington even invited him? They had said nothing to each other, and it seemed as if Tom had deliberately ignored him.

  The air was crisp, but not cold, not the way it had been for many days. He left his jacket unzipped on the walk home. All the way he kept thinking of those kids in the basement, so filled with energy, so loud, so healthy, so casual and relaxed. It was difficult to know what Americans meant by what they did. In the village they would have been considered impolite, even insolent. In the village, if you were invited to a house, you took care not to disturb the adults. You were quiet and excessively courteous. Upon leaving, you profusely thanked the boy’s family — grandmother on down — for rice cakes and tea, bowing your way out of the house. But Tom’s mother stayed clear; and he couldn’t believe any of those kids would seek her out to pay their respects.

  Opening the front door of the old house, Jeffrey was still considering these differences. From the living room came the high, anxious voice of his aunt. “Jeffrey? Is that you? I have been waiting so long! You’re late!”

  Was he? He couldn’t be. Aunt Betty emerged from the living room and carefully closed the double doors behind her. “Seems like I have been waiting for hours!” she exclaimed with a broad smile. “Did you enjoy yourself?” Without waiting for a reply, she added, “Well, don’t waste time — go in, go in there!” She thrust him toward the double doors and reopened them herself. “Go on, go in!”

  When Jeffrey passed the threshold, he noticed, standing in the middle of the room, a bicycle: it had a headlight, hand gear, and chain guard, its shiny chrome flashing in the lamplight.

  “That’s why I have been waiting so impatiently!” cried Aunt Betty in triumph. “Well? Do you like it? Do you?”

  Jeffrey ran his fingers along the metal curve of the front fender. It was a beautiful bicycle.

  “I just thought,” Aunt Betty went on, standing behind him, “you’d need a bike in the spring, so you can ride out of town. Spring is lovely around here.”

  A beautiful bike. Aunt Betty had no idea how much a bike meant to an Indian: it was a passport to the world. Without one in a village, you were prey to erratic bus schedules and long, tiring walks in the hot sun. A bike was like an arm, a leg, an eye. Jeffrey had never owned one, although Father kept promising that when they “got a little ahead financially,” a bike for him would be their first purchase. Of course, they never got a little ahead, they only got farther behind. The scooter that Father used was the property of the Welfare Association; before leaving the village Jeffrey had wheeled the scooter — not risking an accident — to a local official who would store it until the association came for it.

  A beautiful bike. He worked the gear and knelt to inspect the thin, hard tires. A beautiful bike. And yet something was wrong. Not with the bike, but with his having it. Jeffrey glanced up at his beaming aunt. “This is costing very much money.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Nah. Not much.”

  “But you sold your car, aunt, to save money.”

  “Because I really didn’t need it. Don’t worry. Money is no object when a boy needs a bike.”

  It was like his own father talking. The voice was higher and thinner, but the words were similar: optimistic, carefree — and suspicious. Jeffrey had lived long enough with someone careless of money to recognize the symptoms. His aunt was projecting unfounded assurance, and Jeffrey guessed that she could ill afford to spend so much money. Yet he could not resist the bike, this beautiful bike.

  Rising, he went to his aunt, flung his arms around her (he had not done such a thing since his mother was alive), and murmured, “Thank you, thank you, thank you…”

  *

  Aunt Betty was right: spring was in the air. Riding to school on his new bicycle, he noticed tiny buds on tree limbs, like a string of green beads on a necklace. Where there had been patches of snow a few weeks past, shoots of grass were thrusting out of the brown lawns. He had been in this American town more than a month now. He had a bike, and if not friends, at least kids at school were taking some notice of him. Moreover, he belonged to an old house where his father and aunt had been born in a second-floor bedroom and where old people, his ancestors, regarded him from picture frames across a vast passage of time. Riding his new bike, Jeffrey felt that he might yet call this American town his home and the people in it his friends.

  Then something happened that puzzled him and disturbed his new-found equanimity.

  In the school hallway, after lunch, he saw two girls halt in the flow of traffic and waggle their heads loosely, like a pendulum — in a south Indian manner. One girl loudly chanted, “Om tut suh-viter vah ree yen yim.” The other girl supplied the next line, and both chanted the third in unison. Although kids stopped and gawked at them, they pretended not to notice and went their separate ways.

  Twice more that afternoon Jeffrey saw girls stop to chant the Gayatri Mantra, waggling their heads like south Indians. It occurred to him that he must have been waggling his own head every time he said “yes”; the habit of a lifetime is not conscious. They were therefore imitating him. Or more to the point, making fun of him.

  Lucy Smith had learned the mantra simply to amuse herself and her friends.

  The next day the Gayatri was chanted throughout the halls by both girls and boys. Sometimes they gave him a quick glance of amusement, but more often they ignored him. Maybe, thought Jeffrey, they didn’t even know where Lucy had got the words. Whenever he entered a classroom and his eyes met hers, Lucy glanced quickly away. Why had she done this? But then, why not? He and his ways were strange; had Lucy Smith come to live in his village, her nasal American accent, blue jeans, and bangs — and teeth braces — would have seemed odd, perhaps ridiculous to him. Father would have told him to shrug the incident off, and so he would try. After all, what did the mantra mean to him now? Perhaps he no longer believed in mantras or in the gods who had failed to help him when he needed help most. Something wonderful had occurred at the Cauvery River — something too powerful for him to examine yet, something lurking in the far reaches of his mind, like a light hidden behind a door with only a slit of brilliance appearing beneath it — but perhaps that strange experience had nothing to do with mantras, rituals, and prayers to the gods. And yet perhaps in his own village, he would have felt that making fun of a mantra was a terrible sin. Here, on the other hand, he wasn’t sure. There were no cows in the street, no scorching noontime heat, no tea stalls, no Irula tribesmen strolling along with reed baskets full of cobras. And there were no temples of Shiva, Hanuman, Krishna. There were Christian temples, but he had not yet been inside one. His aunt had timidly asked one Sunday if he would like to attend church, but on that occasion — new to America and to Christianity — Jeffrey had begged off.

  So here he was, walking through the halls of an alien school, while all around him people were mispronouncing
the sacred Gayatri Mantra. At least he took comfort in that: not one kid was chanting it properly. According to Hindu practice, the incorrect pronunciation of a mantra simply nullified it. So these kids were reciting a lot of meaningless words. If they expected him to get angry or hurt, he was going to disappoint them. After all, they were mouthing terrible Sanskrit and not even waggling their heads with the fluid motion of a true south Indian!

  Only once during the day was he ever directly approached about the mantra. A boy from a grade below him came along and said, “Hey, you’re the guy from India, right? What are they doing? I heard they are reciting some voodoo magic from India.”

  “They are chanting a mantra. Like that.”

  The boy screwed up his face. “No kidding. What does it mean?”

  “It means,” Jeffrey said with a grave look, “let us all think of the burning light of the Shining Ones so that the divine unmanifest Source may illuminate our minds.”

  “Huh?”

  “That is the meaning, only you would never be knowing it, would you, from the bad Sanskrit.”

  The boy’s mouth opened slackly. “Yeah? Well, okay. But why are they doing it?”

  “To be getting the attention of people like you,” Jeffrey said.

  For a moment the boy stared thoughtfully, then grinned at Jeffrey. “You’re right. That’s it.”

  Through the afternoon the mangled Gayatri Mantra drifted above the heads of students passing in the halls. A few glanced curiously at Jeffrey, who smiled back; they looked away.

  And then, after school, when Jeffrey was bound for the bike racks, Lucy Smith was just wheeling her own bike out. She couldn’t avoid him, although her eyes darted around quickly, seeking an avenue of escape.

  Jeffrey stopped in her path.

  Her dark, brilliant eyes met his, then Lucy sighed. “Look, I didn’t mean any harm. Some of the girls wanted to learn it, just for fun, so I told them.”

  “You learned it quickly, but you were not teaching the correct pronunciation. The chanting is being done wrong. Shall I show you again?”

  Lucy’s eyes, level with his, studied him closely. “We were just having some fun. It’s hardly the Lord’s Prayer.”