The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  Max blinked away his sleep, trying to focus. Andre never spoke of their childhood. “I guess.”

  “You don’t remember nothin’, bitch. It was before all the shit went down,” said Andre. He took another drag. “We were twelve then. Or thirteen. You sagged your pants low and rapped and drank on the 6 like all of us. Muscle or Pitbull or someone dared you to ride hangin’ outside the train when we got off at Canal. You did it for ten seconds, then fell off and bloodied your nose on the platform. Later that night, we smoked up and you stole a record from Bleecker Bob’s. Then we came back home and crashed. We crashed, that is. You came back and studied all night for some stupid math quiz. You recall?”

  Max didn’t. There had been too many such days growing up. “I think, yes,” he said.

  “That’s what I tell these kids. Do what you gotta do to survive in this hell but go back each night and get your shit together. Piece by piece, build your motherfuckin’ empire,” he said. He leaned forward on his wheelchair. “You gonna be okay, Ace. On the real. You’re always hustlin’, always okay. And Ma’s suffered enough. She’d want to be at peace.”

  Max throttled the question that came to his lips. Is that what his mother was feeling? Andre would know, though he never talked about the day fifteen years ago when Max and he were caught in the crossfire between the Black Spades gang and some local toughs outside a bodega on Cypress Avenue. One moment, they were sucking ice pops. The next, three punks wearing gold chains with pistols in their hands stood in front of them. There’d been a blaze of yellow light and popping sounds. Max had dropped to the road, knocking out two front teeth. He was staring at bits of his bloody gum tissue splayed on the ground when Andre fell beside him, his cream shirt colored in red. “Pop, it hurts, pop,” he had shouted. The bullet had pierced his liver, tearing through his spleen, and lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.

  A deep sadness rose up within Max.

  “Some world this is where you’re better off dead than alive,” said Max.

  Andre looked at him with soft, mellowed eyes. “Don’t hate, Ace. You always took my shit harder than me,” he said. He put the bong down and tossed Max a cushion. “Sleep for a bit?” His arms were thin as spindles and his body twisted from avoiding pressure sores from sitting in the wheelchair all day. Max’s stomach knotted in despair. He forced himself to get up.

  “No, man, I gotta be with Mom,” he said. “I just wanted to drop off the Cs.”

  “Can I see her today? I’ll get a ride into the city.”

  Max nodded. “She’ll like that.”

  Max walked out of the apartment. Instead of going to the subway station, he turned on Alexander Avenue. In the dim light of dawn, 141st street looked like it had been bombed by a fighter jet. Overflowing trash cans, a vacant parking lot with heaps of tires, puddles of vomit outside a bar, thugs slumped against closed pawn shops with flashing neon lights. He stopped ahead of Willis Avenue and looked up at a blackened window in the corner-most building of the Mott Haven housing projects cluster. His mother, Sophia and he had spent most of their lives in an airless, one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of the building. The brown bricks hadn’t seen a single coat of paint in the ten years Max had been gone. With its furrows, cracks and chipped corners, the building looked like a body ravaged by cancer. Screams ripped intermittently through the quiet morning.

  “You best walk away, bitch.”

  “Maria, open the fuckin’ door.”

  “Whatchu think of yourself?”

  Sophia had hated these screams; the gunshots; the kids that called her names—“white bitch”, “snow bunny”, “nerd”, tore her overcoat, and messed up her hair when Max wasn’t around; and just about everything else about the projects. Max had swaggered and strutted, rapping, shooting hoops, shoplifting, getting into petty fights, anything it took to fit in. His mother had been different from both of them. She had developed a steely toughness, indifferent to the world crumbling around them. When the gangs started shooting at each other in the alley behind the building, she would clean their apartment vigorously. While Max and Sophia covered their ears and flattened themselves against the wall, she’d scrub the chipped legs of the ragged, brown sofa, wipe the cinder-block walls, mop the floors and move and rearrange the lone table and three chairs in the living room again and again. She’d stop when the shooting stopped and continue with her cooking or sewing as though nothing had happened.

  The only time her face livened up was when she spoke of Max and Sophia’s future. “These two will become something,” she’d tell her friends in the courtyard every evening before the dealers took over the place for the night. Back home, she’d slowly repeat the names of private schools—Horace Mann, Trinity, Dalton—she had heard of from people whose houses she cleaned in the city. She’d construct tantalizing images of them. Instead of the broken windows and smoky stairwells of PS 65 (where they went), these schools had swimming pools and ceramics studios. You didn’t have to smear a thick coat of Vaseline on your face each morning to prevent scratches in fights, nor hold your stomach for hours in fear that some kid you had a beef with would slash your face with a razor blade if you went into the dark bathroom. She’d been pulled out of school in fifth grade in Greece, but she’d dreamt her kids would go to the best schools in America. And they had. She just wouldn’t be around to see them make use of it.

  The building stirred to life as the sun arose. Tupac and Nas songs blared from the apartments. A teenager in an ill-fitting jacket and white underwear staggered out of the front, an asthma inhaler wedged tightly between his fingers, a dazed look on his face. Was he a crack fiend? Would he also end up dead on the streets like many of Max’s friends from childhood had? So what if he did? Max’s mother had worked two jobs—cleaning houses in the city in the morning, bagging groceries at the bodega down the street late in the evening—and had been so tired every night that she sometimes fell asleep in her bowl of Avgolemeno soup. All so they could go to good schools and get out of the projects. Hadn’t she realized that illness and death didn’t go away just because you crossed over to Manhattan on the 6 train? Everything was so fucking pointless. Max went to the front of the building and touched the scratched, bullet-dented metal front door, then turned around and walked back toward the subway station, glad he’d gotten a chance to say some kind of a goodbye to his mother.

  3

  Max’s mother died the next day, finally free from the kidney cancer that had spread to her uterus, bladder, liver, bones, and lungs over the past three years. A week later, Max and Sophia held her memorial service at St Ann’s Episcopal Church. They briefly considered holding the service at St George-St Demetrios Greek Church in Spanish Harlem but his mother hadn’t identified with the Orthodox faith just as she hadn’t fasted at Lent or sought any Greek family in the US. “Talking of past is like two birds sitting and knitting sweater. Fools’ daydreams. You think only of future,” she had said in her halting English, whenever Max and Sophia asked her too many questions about her childhood. Not that it mattered. Orthodox or Episcopal, everyone ended up in some spot under the ground. At least she had died a natural death. A life not cut short by a shooting or an overdose was a minor blessing in the projects.

  On his way back from the Columbus Circle subway station after her memorial service that evening, Max saw the Indian food-cart guy from a week before standing on a small stool in front of the open-air cart, still naked from the waist up. He was scraping snow from the cart’s tin roof with a look of complete absorption on his face. Max hesitated, then removed his overcoat and walked up to the cart, shivering in his sweater. The man saw Max and smiled.

  “From the other night, yes?” he said, getting off the stool.

  Max nodded.

  “I came to give you this.” Max handed him the overcoat. “It’s very cold here.”

  The man laughed and his eyes lit up. “Thank you for caring, sir, but I am not in need of a coat.”

  “Please. Just a small gift fr
om my sister and me. It’s not safe to be like that in the winters in New York.”

  “Indeed, sir, that is very considerate, but I am very fine indeed,” he said. “Please believe me when I say I can buy a coat for myself. I have been in America for one whole month but I have not felt cold here. It is much colder where I come from.”

  Max put his coat back on and huddled closer to the warm cart. “I didn’t know it was that cold in India,” he said. “I mean, you are from India, aren’t you?”

  The man nodded. He pulled a mug of water from the metal tank under the grill surface and washed the grill.

  “India is a big country, sir. I am from the mountains, up, very far up in the Himalayas, beyond Kashmir, where people rarely visit,” he said. He splattered oil on the grill. “Will you have something to eat, sir?”

  It was 8 p.m. Max was restarting work the next day after a week off and he hadn’t slept well for several nights. But he felt like talking to someone who didn’t know of his mother’s death and wouldn’t offer unwanted condolences and homilies.

  “A falafel gyro,” said Max, stooping and moving closer to the cramped, warm interior of the cart.

  “Sit, sit, sir,” said the man. He wiped the stool outside the cart with a dry, white cloth. “You are tall for my small cart, sir.”

  Max sat on the stool. “I’m tall for every cart,” he said. “And please don’t call me sir, I’m Max. Max Pzoras”

  He smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “My name is Viveka.”

  Viveka took out some falafel from one of the stainless steel containers on the shelf and put them on the grill. The falafel sizzled. Just inhaling the hot metal smell made Max shiver less. Viveka broke the falafel gently with his tongs, snowflakes falling on his naked back.

  Max shook his frozen fingers. “You must feel at least a little cold,” he said.

  Viveka looked up from the grill. “Oh me, no, not at all, sir,” he said. “If you live in cold weather for long, your body changes. I am nothing. The Himalayan yogis sit in their caves wearing nothing for months even when the temperature drops thirty or forty degrees below zero, much, much lower than here.”

  “But that’s just a myth,” said Max. “No one has actually seen them.”

  Viveka put the tongs down. He raised his eyebrows. “Why, I have, sir. Indeed I have. Every day for years and years.”

  “Up in the Himalayas?” said Max.

  Viveka nodded.

  “Can anyone see them?” said Max. “Just like that? You hike up the mountains and there they are, sitting in the caves?”

  “Oh no, no, sir, very much the opposite. Indeed, the yogis do not want contact with people,” he said. He began chopping the onions again. “I grew up in the Himalayas but I did not even see them until the army posted me up in Siachen glacier, the highest military base in the world, more than 20,000 feet above sea level. You can only get there by helicopter. There were just some of us in the Indian army station, a few Pakistani soldiers across the border, and the yogis sitting meditating in the caves nearby. It was a miracle how they got there on foot.” He shook his head. “Very unusual people, sir. Indeed, I did not even understand the things I saw in those years until much later.”

  Max didn’t fancy hearing about more religious nutters after listening to hymns praising God’s infinite mercy and justice at the memorial service that day. But he was vaguely interested in meditation as were some in the private equity firm he worked at on Wall Street.

  “What are they meditating on?” said Max.

  “These are things I do not know very well, sir,” said Viveka.

  “Why are they at the top of the Himalayas? Why don’t they live in a more comfortable place?”

  “The silence, the solitude, is necessary for concentration,” said Viveka.

  “Concentration on what?”

  Viveka picked up a bottle of tahini. “They believe—and it is not my belief, sir, so please do not misunderstand me— that the whole world exists in opposites: up and down, cold and hot, darkness and light, night and day, summer and winter, growth and decay. So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless, immortal as it were. They want to find it. Not just believe in it on faith or scripture but see it face to face.”

  Max leaned forward on the stool, curiously moved by the words.

  “And do they find this thing?”

  “I do not know, sir, but I’ve seen things with these very eyes that would make one believe almost anything.”

  “What things?”

  Viveka added the tahini into the falafel. The mixture sizzled. A drop of hot oil splashed on Max’s neck. He welcomed the burning sensation, a brief respite from the wind. Viveka mixed red and white sauce into the falafel with a large spoon, scooped it into a pita and handed it to Max.

  Max took a bite. “Very good,” he said. “You were talking about the yogis?”

  Viveka hesitated. “My daughter’s husband grew up in Queens. He tells me not to speak of such things in this country, sir,” he said.

  Max put his paper plate down on the top of the beverage cooler. “Please tell me. I want to know.”

  Viveka splattered more oil on the grill. He fried falafel again though no new customers were in sight. “I don’t know, these yogis were superhuman, like God more than men, sir,” he said. “All Indian soldiers selected to go up to the high camps of Siachen had grown up their entire life in the mountains. On top of that, we were put through a year of survival training and a team of psychologists monitored us when we came back. And yet, none of us had even a fraction of the yogis’ powers. We walked up and down the ice in our five layers of clothes all day to keep warm. But the yogis just sat in the caves, their eyes closed, meditating, and they would come out once in ten, maybe fifteen days, wearing nothing but a loin cloth. They walked barefoot in sixty or seventy inches of snow and there we were, using heavy snow shoes with crampons imported from Russia. Yet their feet were quicker, surer than ours. Like machines their bodies were, not human at all.”

  Viveka turned off the gas. The cart was cold again. Max shifted on the stool and tried not to fidget in the cold.

  “Perhaps that’s why the animals also never bothered them, sir,” said Viveka. “Sometimes a huge Himalayan bear would sit in front of a yogi’s cave and we would think of firing above it to scare it away. But then, the yogi would come out and the bear, this massive, unpredictable creature, would just slink away from the mouth of the cave and sit quietly on the side. It would return only when the yogi went back inside. I saw this again and again, first with the bears, then with the mountain leopards. It was as if the yogis told them how to behave, strange as it may sound.”

  Strange indeed. Not so much the stories but how palatable the idea of living alone at the top of the world, figuring out the meaning of life, actually sounded.

  “What do they . . . ?”

  A crowd of young men and women in thick coats and bright scarves came to the cart. Max got up from the stool. The group placed their orders and collected around the cart.

  “This cart is the best. I just started coming here,” said a young man in a leather jacket with a black fur collar.

  “Have you been to Kathi Roll in the Village?” asked a bald man.

  “Haven’t tried it. Nizam’s is good though. But I like carts better,” replied the man in the leather jacket.

  A brunette piped up. “Moshe’s Food Truck on 46th and 6th is the best.”

  “Not a chance,” said her identical-looking friend. “There is a place where all the cabbies eat in the East Village. Pakistani place. Heaven.”

  “No way, how did you find it?”

  “Just ran into it after Milk and Honey one night.”

  “Are you a member? Oh my God, their cocktails are so good.”

  More discussion followed. Authentic Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants, this club and that, what was so good, what was awesome, who was in the kn
ow, who wasn’t, drinking, eating and more drinking. Max recalled similar conversations—with a date or colleagues after work—and felt disgusted. Wistfully, he thought of the desolate moon-like surface of Kilimanjaro, his only climbing trip outside the country. He had always been drawn to the outdoors ever since the track coach at Trinity—the Upper West Side private school to which Max had won a scholarship—had taken him for a long distance run in Central Park. Something physical had exploded inside Max that day, as though his lungs were thrusting out all the worry, stress, and chemical waste that caused asthma in almost every kid in the projects. He had run every day since then, slowly ridding himself of his childhood bronchitis and asthma. Later, he’d run marathons and climbed mountains in the Adirondacks, enjoying the feeling of complete suspension in the present, without memory or past. Now, once again, he felt a strange yearning for those solitary, ice-capped peaks, away from civilization with its wants and pains.

  The snow began falling again. Max pressed his gloved hands on his wet head and moved closer to the cart. The group found the gyros really awesome so they ordered more, laughing uproariously at their own appetites.

  Max shifted in the snow, waiting for them to leave. More people joined them. Their faces blurred with the others. Only the sound of laughter emerged from the snowy mist.

  I want to see the unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless face-to-face.

  Max took a deep breath. More than half of the kids from his elementary school had ended up on the streets. A couple of different turns and he too might have been sitting on a newspaper . . . A couple of different turns and he too might have been sitting on a newspaper on the ice like the homeless man from the other night. He couldn’t throw everything away.