by Karan Bajaj
KARAN BAJAJ
The Seeker
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
The Traveler
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
The Yogi
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
The Sage
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SEEKER
Karan Bajaj is the bestselling author of Keep off the Grass (2008) and Johnny Gone Down (2010). He was among India Today’s 35 Under 35 Indians and nominated for the Crossword Book of the Year, Indiaplaza Golden Quill and Teacher’s Indian Achievers (Arts) Awards. His interests in travel and Eastern mysticism are key writing inspirations.
The Seeker was inspired by Karan’s one-year sabbatical backpacking from Europe to India by road and learning yoga and meditation in the Himalayas.
He can be reached at [email protected].
Praise for Karan Bajaj’s Books
“An amazing journey. Wonderful characters who keep you hooked until the very end”—Raju Hirani
“A racy and entertaining account of a romp through an ever-changing yet timeless India . . . Wild, witty and wicked!”—Ruskin Bond
“Simply unputdownable. Dark, mysterious, sexy”—Mid Day
“Not for the faint hearted! A captivating, fascinating read that evokes a dramatic sense of awe”—Deccan Herald
“Restores one’s faith in the pace of a thriller”—Asian Age
“A taut, gripping saga”—Hindustan Times
“Pacy, unpretentious and great fun to read”—Outlook
For Leela, so one day you set out to find your own truth.
The Traveler
Arise! Awake! Approach the feet of the Master and know THAT. Like the sharp edge of the razor, the Sages say, is the path. Narrow it is and difficult to tread.
The Katha Upanishad, 400 B.C.
1
“I give her a week at most.”
“Don’t say that, Max,” said Sophia.
Max and his sister stepped out of the hospital lobby onto deserted, icy West 59th Street. Sophia looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the snowfall with a gloved hand.
“She’s only forty-nine for heaven’s sake,” said Sophia. “Everyone else’s parents are alive.”
The wind gusted. Max wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck. They shuffled along in the thick blackness of the night, past the bare trees covered with snow and the closed Starbucks, toward Ninth Avenue. Max tried to find a cab that would take Sophia back to Brooklyn but none passed. His eyes burnt. He’d been up for more than twenty-four hours, since midnight the previous day when his mother had to be rushed to the hospital once again. The cancer had spread to her lungs making it difficult for her to breathe.
“Do you want to crash at my place tonight?” said Max, who lived only a few blocks away on 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue.
They turned on Ninth Avenue. Sophia looked up at him, blue eyes brimming with tears, tight brown curls wet at the ends, face creased with years of worry. She looked older than twenty-five. Max put his hand on her shoulder.
“You’ll . . .”
He stumbled over something. A man lay slumped against the stairs of the Church of St Paul on Ninth Avenue.
“Watch it, giant,” said the man.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Max.
The man gripped Max’s leg. “Give me change,” he said, his red eyes staring out of his pale, unwashed face.
Despite the weathered but thick blanket that covered the man, his unkempt beard was speckled with ice. Max didn’t want to see yet another cold, dying body that day. He dug into his coat pockets and gave the man a ten-dollar bill. The man let go of his leg. They had barely walked a few yards when they heard the man shouting.
“Hey, big guy, give me more.”
“God bless, God bless,” said Max.
Max held Sophia’s hand and moved faster. He’d been around junkies all his life and knew how unpredictable they could be.
“Wait, you selfish giant.”
Quick footsteps. Max turned around. A shock of white hair rushed toward Max.
“You hit me,” said the man facing him.
The man stood a head shorter than Max’s six feet six inches yet Max’s heart clutched. The sidewalk was empty except for a man wearing an orange cloth frying something in a food cart a block ahead.
The man grasped Sophia’s coat.
“The city demands compensation, restitution and retribution, Madam. The city demands compensation, restitution and retribution,” he said.
“Don’t touch her,” said Max.
The man pulled Sophia closer. “The city demands compensation.”
“Get away,” said Sophia, pulling free from the man’s grip.
Max pushed the man back. The man rushed forward and threw a gloved fist packed with ice at him. Max felt the thud against his nose. A warm, hollow sensation pulsed through it. Blood dripped from his face down to the ice below. It looked crimson, unreal.
“Get away from him. I’m calling the cops,” said Sophia.
The man blew a mouthful of foul air at Max. “The city demands compensation . . . ”
A dam burst inside Max. He grabbed the man’s neck. The man raised his thin arms weakly. Max let go of his neck and shoved him back with force. The man fell on the ice. Max swooped down next to him and raised his fist to break the man’s quivering jaw.
Someone grabbed his hand.
Max swung his other arm back, trying to break free. Again, someone caught it. Max pushed his shoulders back. The grip tightened. Max whipped his head around.
A naked man.
Max broke out of his trance. A tall, thin Indian man with a naked torso held his arms. The bright orange cloth around his waist flapped in the wind. The food cart guy.
“Yes, okay, sorry,” said Max.
The Indian man let go of Max’s arms. Max got up from the ice. The homeless man curled up into a tight ball, whimpering.
“Max. Your face,” said Sophia, her hair dripping with sweat despite the cold.
Max touched his nose. He was bleeding.
“Should I call 911?” asked Sophia.
He shook his head.
The homeless man picked himself up and limped up the stairs of the church.
“The city, the city . . .” he mumbled.
The Indian man had returned to standing behind his food cart, a pan in one hand, a mug of water in another.
Max went up to him. “Thank you. I could’ve hurt him badly,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Think nothing. Indeed, you are like my child,” said the man. He began to cut onions, seemingly unaffected by the cold.
Max stared at him. The biting wind screamed. No one could possibly live through this freeze without a shirt on his back. Would it be insulting to offer him money? Max took out his wallet. A cab stopped in front of them finally.
“Your face is bleeding, Max,” said Sophia. “Should we go back to the hospital?”
Max hesitated, then put his wallet away. He opened the bac
k door of the cab for Sophia.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just get home safely.”
Sophia got inside the cab. “We never catch a break,” she said.
“But we always have each other,” he said.
Max shut the cab door and rapped twice with his knuckles on the window. She looked up at him and smiled. The cab left.
A cold draft blew through Max’s nose, hitting the space between his eyes. Jesus, what had come over him? Would he have really smashed the homeless guy’s face? How quickly he’d regressed to the violence of his teenage years. Max wiped his nose with his scarf and walked toward his apartment.
2
Max stopped outside the revolving glass doors of his apartment building. Inside, the uniformed doorman was putting flowers in an antique vase on a gold-plated ledge next to the lobby mirror. Behind him, the wall-length painting of a Japanese rice farm glinted in the light from the chandelier. A wave of revulsion swept through Max. Just who had he become? A few steps away, his mother lay dying in a hospital bed, a man slept on the steps of a church and another flipped pitas half naked in the snow. Max turned around before the doorman could see him. He walked along 63rd Street toward Central Park. The freezing wind dried the drops of blood falling from his nose as soon as they hit the air. The homeless man’s blow had shaken him awake. He’d finally complete the errand he hadn’t gotten to since his mother had been confined to a bed in his apartment three weeks ago.
Max walked across bright, empty 59th Street and stopped at the Capital One ATM on Park Avenue. He withdrew $2000 and distributed the bills on his body—in his back pockets, inside his underwear, in his socks, in the sleeve of his shirt, inside his coat pockets—leaving only $40 in his wallet. At 4 a.m. he caught the 6 Train on Lexington Avenue to Pelham Bay Park. The preppy drunks in his car got off at the 77th and 86th Street stations and the fedora-wearing hipsters in Harlem. By the time the train reached the Bronx, the compartment looked much like it had in Max’s childhood: a woman high on crack scratching her deathly pale face leaving thin red lines on it, a homeless man slumped on his seat muttering to himself, and three boys wearing baseball caps and imitation Air Jordans drinking from brown bags and slobbering over pizza slices. The boys stared at him. Max gave them a cool, blank look and glanced away. Lingering longer was intimidation, not meeting eyes was fear, either could leave him bruised and bloody on the subway station and without his $2000. He’d deserve it too. A white guy in a Boss overcoat in the South Bronx late at night was begging to be messed with. The boys whispered among themselves and laughed. Max got off at the Brook Avenue station. The boys followed him outside the train and up the stairs.
“Where you going, whitey?” they said behind him.
Max didn’t turn around. He walked along dark, unlit Brook Avenue with an exaggerated swagger, pumping his chest forward, swinging his arms loosely, chewing the non-existent gum in his mouth, the pimp roll he had perfected in his childhood.
“You need a hit?” they said.
He turned on East 139th Street. A drunk was rummaging through a trash can in front of a closed pawn shop. Another man in a tattered coat leaned against the glass door of a check cashing store. The boys picked up speed behind him.
“Whoa, wait, GQ.”
Max took a quick left on St Ann’s Avenue. The boys’ footsteps died out immediately. Just as Max expected: they wouldn’t follow him into gang territory. Two men, one bent over a shining white cane, the other sporting an Afro, stood talking under the streetlight in front of a park next to the St Ann’s Episcopal Church. Max’s heartbeat returned to normal.
“J,” he said.
The Afro turned around, his hands reaching inside his overcoat, likely for his pistol.
“It’s Max. Jerome knows me.”
The man with the white cane turned. He was twenty-nine-years old like Max but looked twenty years older. Since middle school when Max and he had studied together at PS 65 Mother Hale Academy on Cypress Avenue, Jerome had been shot by rival drug dealers in both his knees and his right hip and arm. His face was a tangle of knife scars, his hair prematurely gray, and his skin cracked from a lifetime of drug use.
“Da Max,” said Jerome, giving Max a high-five. His hands were shaking and his voice was hoarser than a year ago when Max had last run into him. “What you in the ghetto for? I thought you’d gone all uppity.”
“Not uppity man, just busy with shit,” said Max. “I have to see Andre.”
“Bitch’s going to finish school, I hear,” he said.
Max nodded. “You should go too.”
Jerome laughed. “And your uncle will raise them little ’uns?” he said.
A car blasting Latin music came down the street. Jerome pressed the cane firmly against the ground and pulled a ziplock bag with rose gray powder from his coat. “You want some H, da Max? On the house.”
Max shook his head. “Gonna head to Andre’s. Some punks were following me so I turned around.”
“Want me to come with?”
“I’m good now,” said Max, shaking Jerome’s rough, jittery hands.
The car pulled over. The Afro bent over the car window.
“Be safe,” said Jerome and hobbled over to the car.
Max turned around and walked beside the fenced park toward 139th Street. Much had changed since his childhood. Then the park had been a barren sandy lot filled with hypodermic needles and blue crack caps. A lone tree had stood in the center of the gravel, its dry branches covered with dolls—some intact, some with missing limbs—eerie, makeshift memorials made by parents who couldn’t afford any better for children who died of gang shootings and drug overdoses.
I . . . I don’t wanna g . . . get up there.
Sophia’s stutter would worsen every time they passed the park on their way from the train station to home. Max would hold her hand and promise her they wouldn’t end up as dolls on the tree if she stuck close to him. Now, the tree had been replaced with seesaws and slides. The ground was clear of debris, the gravel raked smooth, all signs of progress except for the addicts themselves. Years ago, Jerome’s father had dealt crack in front of the park. Now his son, with the same fading ghost-like face and hacking cough, was dealing heroin. Jerome’s kids would break the cycle perhaps, thought Max without much hope.
A prostitute in a tight yellow skirt with haunted eyes and chattering teeth paced outside the brown brick building on 139th Street where Andre, Max’s childhood friend, lived. Max punched the security code on the console and entered the building’s cold tunnel-like lobby. A bottle crashed on the floor. Max stepped around the broken glass, urine, and other beer bottles next to the doorway and knocked on Andre’s door.
No response.
He knocked again and called Andre on his cellphone. The phone buzzed inside the apartment. Andre picked up after four rings.
“Max.” His voice was thick with sleep. “Is Ma okay?”
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“It’s just cold outside,” said Max.
“What?”
“I’m freezing outside your apartment,” said Max and knocked again.
“Shit.”
A thump. Wheels rolling on the floor. The door opened. Andre sat in his wheelchair in a white sleeveless shirt and underwear, dreadlocks disheveled, drool slipping down the corners of his mouth. Max stepped in. The house was heated like a furnace. Ammonia and bleach fumes seeped into Max’s skin, making his throat itch. A bottle of E&J, naked light-bulbs, a cardboard box with greasy pizza crusts, broken lighters, razor blades and residue of white powder lay on the kitchen counter—the aftermath of a crack binge.
“Jesus fuck did you call those Bloods motherfuckers over again?” asked Max. “You’re gonna get killed, man, you fucking wait and see.”
Andre rubbed his eyes. “Quit being a bitch, Ace,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep. “Ain’t nothin’ to it. You work in a bank. I work here. The kids gotta know me to trust me.”
M
ax walked across the floor littered with beer cans and empty glass vials. He poured the E&J into a dirty glass on the kitchen counter and gulped it down. Andre’s eyes followed him.
“What happened? Is Sophia okay?” he said.
Max took out the cash from his wallet, socks, shoes, and underwear, tightened it in a roll, and put it on the kitchen counter. “I just came to give you this,” he said. “So you can keep digging your grave studying useless ass criminal behavior at college.”
Andre stared at the cash. “At 5 a.m.? Motherfucker be crazy?”
“Doesn’t your semester start next week?” asked Max. “I won’t have time for a bit. Mom is about to go down.”
“Naw, hell, Ace,” he said, his eyes dropping. “I figured it’d be soon.”
Andre rolled his wheelchair up to the counter and poured the last of the E&J into a clean glass for Max. They went from the box-like living room to the even smaller bedroom, Andre’s wheelchair knocking down more empty beer cans with its wheels. Max sat down on the spring bed and downed the yellow-brown liquid in one swig. The window behind the bed was barricaded with thick steel railings to block stray bullets from gang shootings outside the apartment. They looked like prison bars.
“Shit, man, go counsel kids in Manhattan gangs. Enough trouble to stick your nose into there,” said Max. “Here, you’re just gonna get banged one day.”
“How ’bout we don’t talk about me?” said Andre. “You want a smoke?”
Max shook his head.
“I ain’t using no more but fuck it today,” said Andre. He wheeled out of the bedroom. Max’s head felt heavy from the drink. He leaned against the headboard. His eyes began to shut.
“ . . . I tell . . .”
Max opened his eyes. Andre sat opposite him sucking from a plastic Coca Cola bottle bong with a suction hole at its center. His eyes were glassy, his face vacant.
“Sorry, I dozed,” said Max. “What?”
Andre burnt more weed in the makeshift bowl attached to the hollowed pen-tube wedged in the suction hole. He took a giant suck from the bottle’s mouth and inhaled deeply. “Do you know what I tell them young gangbangers about you?” said Andre, enunciating each word slowly. “I don’t say shit about you going to Harvard or working in Wall Street. Everyone in the projects knows that. I just tell them about St Patty’s Day years ago when a bunch of us went to the city. You remember?”
