by Angela Long
I tried not to read my guidebook. But I was drawn towards the Ajanta Caves, Mount Everest. “You could go and climb a Himalayan peak,” the meditation leader from my retreat said when I asked about transportation options to the Nepal border. “Or you could stay here and climb your inner Himalayas.”
She said this with such a matter-of-fact Dutch accent that I hid the Lonely Planet under the bed that evening, determined to overcome my desires. And then I received the letter.
It was passed to me in a red silk bag emblazoned with dragons and vines, the kind of bag Tibetans used to protect religious texts. It was passed to me like a relay-race baton, from behind, just when I was trying to focus on my footsteps while walking to my hut. The retreatants were already in the gompa. Not a word was spoken. Not a finger brushed. I took the baton without looking back, and ran.
It was a love letter. Even though we’d only spent two nights together in a mosquito-infested hotel room that smelled of Dettol, the Italian claimed to love me. I was Angelina now. I was not just bellissima; I was the most bellissima. The letter continued, growing more and more sentimental. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by all this business. I’d heard these words before, in various accents, and I’d lost faith in their power to create happiness.
Finally, at this retreat centre, I was beginning to discover why. Life is suffering. The evidence was everywhere: the emaciated gardener and his patched trousers; the rickshaw cyclist driver waiting by the front gate with his too-big sandals that kept missing the pedals; the mange-covered dogs whimpering in their sleep. But I was learning there were other less obvious forms of suffering. The constant little ache in my right shoulder I wished would go away. The feeling of annoyance towards the South American professor when he complained about paying fifty cents for a five-kilometre rickshaw ride. The longing for an ice-cold drink in a place where an ice cube was as luxurious as a white truffle. That kind of suffering. The suffering of wanting, of expecting. The trick, I was beginning to learn, was to stop. Stop wanting. Expecting. To train my mind to be content.
I didn’t expect the flowers. A marigold blossom deposited silently by the side of my plate as I ate papaya. A full-blown rose resting in the arch of my flip-flop outside the hut. And then came the touches. The brief touch on my lower back that set off shivers as I stirred honey into my tea. The slow fan of fingers across my shoulders as I stacked dinner plates. Soon he began to look at me. When the spiritual director wasn’t about and the other retreatants were busy contemplating the ground, he looked at me with eyes blazing like he knew all about this suffering business. But despite it all, he’d chosen to love.
Finally, after three weeks of silence, I let go. I let go of not wanting to fall in love and fell in love. I fell in love with the way he walked. The way he held his fork. The way he bowed to pet the goats. The way he always let others go ahead of him in the food line. I fell in love with loving. What else was there to do?
It was only natural then that we bumped into one another on the gompa rooftop after everyone had gone to bed. The sky at that time of night was too filled with stars to be wasted. The surrounding rice paddies too filled with the song of chirping insects. It was cool enough to ward off mosquitoes, cool enough that we had to hold one another to keep warm. It was on the rooftop that he whispered, “Ti amo,” and talked of us living together in Naples.
I let go. I let myself dream of geraniums on the sill and a lanky, tri-coloured cat. Maybe we were just two people trying to alleviate just a little bit of suffering in this world. One person at a time. Maybe it was enough to be silent.
The Gardener
They stood with their eyes focused on the place in front of them. A speck on the flagstones. A blade of grass. A right foot rose. Descended. Heel, then arch, then toe. A left foot rose. After ten steps, they stopped and stood still, as though trying to remember something important. Then they turned, raised a foot, and began again. The retreatants walked like this several times a day for intervals of forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour. It depended on when Venerable Antonio, a Buddhist monk from Sardinia who oversaw the retreatants from the balcony of his room, decided to ring the bell.
Some walked even more slowly than others. One woman’s movements were barely perceptible. It was almost feline, this awareness of movement, this concentration of energy and grace. The gardener watched the same woman from his place in the flower beds. He watched her golden hair shimmer past her hips.
The gardener looked confused by all of this. Confused in a country where it was common to pour pints of milk on the heads of bull deities, to chew a nut that caused teeth to turn red, to smear one’s naked body in ash and dung. He cocked his head to one side, tucking grey hairs into a faded pink cloth he’d fashioned into a turban to block the sun. Perhaps he found it difficult to understand why anyone would choose to spend hours walking back and forth and not going anywhere. Especially someone rich enough to pay five times his daily wage to stay for one night at this centre.
I wish I could have explained they were trying to learn how to live in the present moment. At least that’s what I’d heard Venerable Antonio preach from his balcony: “Feel the contact with the Earth. Feel each moment.”
But I suspected the gardener knew more about the moment than anyone. I’d watched him cradling dahlia blossoms in his hands, smiling at their petals. I’d watched him staring up at the clear blue sky, seeming to read patterns in the scattering of molecules. “Boom!” he’d exclaimed across the garden that morning, paying no heed to the “Silence Please” signs posted on the tree trunks. “Boom!” he’d clapped his hands and looked at me with a huge one-toothed grin as I sat at my place beneath the pipal trees. A thunderstorm was on its way.
We watched the retreatants, the gardener and I, until the bell rang and they returned to the meditation hall. I returned to perusing my guidebook, to analyzing train schedules and budget hotels. The gardener walked barefoot through the flowerbeds, deadheading calendulas, pruning stray branches. He examined the branches of the tree beside my guest hut through too-large eyeglasses that hung crookedly on his face. He held the lenses straight to examine the bark. He caught me watching and smiled widely. “Kerda tree!” he yelled across the garden. “My wife makes good pickle!”
A package wrapped neatly in newspaper sat on the windowsill of my hut the next morning. A daub of bright orange kerda pickle rested inside. A fiery, bitter sensation filled my mouth the moment I tasted it. But the fire mellowed and the bitterness sweetened as I pulled back my curtains to watch the retreatants settle at tables in the garden. It was time for their breakfast. They sipped tea. Slowly. Some looked up at the clouds lingering after last night’s storm. Some watched the fountain splash at the foot of a stone Buddha. A bald-headed man chewed slices of papaya. Slowly.
Even after everyone disappeared into the meditation hall and I settled at a table in the garden, the sweet aftertaste of the pickle lingered. I chewed my Tibetan bread as the gardener fished dead leaves out of the lotus pond. “Thank you!” I called and he looked up, holding his glasses straight until he recognized me.
“You like?” he yelled.
“I love!”
The bell rang. I closed my guidebook. The retreatants exited the hall to begin their slow march to the present moment. The gardener nodded, focusing his lenses where I was looking. The bald-headed man straightened his shoulders, the serene expression on his face illuminated by the sun. Even from here, I could see his long lashes and soft curve of lips. A right foot rose. Descended. Slowly, he moved toward my place beneath the pipal trees. I sensed the gardener luring him closer and closer. I waited for the bald-headed man to lift his gaze, to look at me, to walk through the grass until he reached my side. But he stopped, stood still for a moment, and turned.
The Woman in White
Blankets off. Bare feet on cold cement. It was too early for the chatter of the Indian women sharing the corner room. Even the two perky Japanese voluntee
rs in charge of the female dorms were still sleeping.
Before India I never would have woken at such an early hour on purpose. Though it was tempting to stay in bed and gaze at the unadorned lavender-coloured walls and listen to the bells of the Hindu temple in the distance. But I’d been told the gods roamed the ether and fell to the earth with the morning dew between four and six o’clock in the morning. And I needed to brush my teeth and wash my face before the line-up began at the lone sink in the communal bathroom. Besides, the Japanese girls would come and find me if I stayed in bed. They hadn’t taken a vow of silence and had no qualms about banging on doors, yelling “Wake up! Wake up!” and personally escorting anyone who slept in to their cushion in the meditation hall.
The deal was that if you were going to stay at Dhamma Bodhi for free – payment was made on a voluntary basis at the end of the retreat – you had better follow the schedule. S.N. Goenka, founder of this meditation centre and dozens of others throughout the world, didn’t want lack of finances to prevent anyone from participating. Once a successful businessman who suffered from migraines and depression, Goenka claims he was saved by Vipassana, a mediation technique taught by the Buddha 2,500 years ago. The technique is science, he says. Pure science. I had learned all this every evening from seven o’clock to quarter past eight when we were expected to watch Goenka’s videotaped lectures, featuring the merry and rather chubby guru sitting cross-legged and talking into the camera. Sometimes his wife, who was also on the portly side, made a special appearance, joining in for mantra chanting, or just sitting there, meditating, while her husband laughed about our out-of-control “monkey minds.”
Today was Day Three. The days of the week didn’t exist at Dhamma Bodhi. It was a countdown. When I signed up for Goenka’s ten days of meditation in the countryside of Bihar to pass time while Giuseppe was meditating a few kilometres away at Root Institute, it had all sounded so pleasant. Indian food. Private room overlooking a courtyard. The centre was surrounded by “long stretches of fertile agricultural fields” where lentils, wheat, and potatoes flourished. Beyond the fields snaked the Phalgu River, where none other than the Buddha himself had walked alongside its banks on his path to enlightenment.
I had arranged for a rickshaw to the centre’s gates and entered the whitewashed compound on foot. Even though the bustling town of Bodh Gaya was so close by, the centre felt isolated. Behind the front gates, the golden spires of a pagoda rose from a barren-looking acreage. “Passport,” the man at the check-in office commanded. He looked soldier-like with his crew cut and starched white shirt. I’d been wary about relinquishing my passport, but he assured me it would be kept in a safe along with all my other valuables. He asked for books, notepads, writing implements, confiscating anything that might distract me from observing “the changing nature of body and mind.” The dusty road leading back to Bodh Gaya had looked tempting then. But my rickshaw driver had already left.
I looked up at the square of starry sky in the courtyard and headed to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth in the sparkling white sink, cleaned several times a day by the Japanese volunteers. No mirrors. Cold water only, except for one hour of hot in the evening, when we signed up to take showers. Signs warned that washing clothes was prohibited. But the Indian women ignored this rule. Every day they scrubbed their saris in basins of the forbidden hot water on their hands and knees. They wrung them out on the bathroom floor and hung them in the courtyard to dry. “Please read sign. Read sign!” the Japanese girls pleaded.
The Indian women shrugged. “No English,” they said, standing in puddles of water.
I splashed cold water on my face and massaged Himalaya Herbals facewash (one of the few items not confiscated from my backpack) around in circles.
Day Three. For the first two days we’d sat on our cushions and watched our breath. To be more specific, we’d tried to feel the air coming in and out of our nostrils. We weren’t supposed to fidget or fall asleep while doing this for more than ten hours a day. A volunteer was always watching and didn’t hesitate to give you a poke, or even a shove, and tell you to leave if you couldn’t cut it. On Day One I’d secretly hoped to be ordered back to my dorm where the chatter of the Japanese girls would have been a welcome distraction from my nostrils.
The final gong sounded, telling us it was time to make our way to the meditation hall for Day Three’s morning mantra chanting. But I was already there, sitting on the marble steps waiting for the doors to open. Dark forms emerged from the shadows, draped in the ubiquitous shawls of India. I pulled my imitation pashmina shawl from Varanasi closer. “Real, yes, very real,” the shopkeeper had assured me. Woodsmoke from the village beyond the perimeter of the centre’s fence laced the air. As the other western women arrived – the men entered by a different door – I felt their camaraderie even though it was forbidden to say good morning or exchange other pleasantries. All of us had chosen to be here, in this country, at this hour, with a day of breathing on a cushion ahead of us. The strength of our silence grew as we stared into our own squares of sky or withered garden. And then the Indian ladies arrived. One by one, they tried to break us, engaging us in conversation. “Where are you from?” “Is your husband here?” I tried to look away from their kohl-lined eyes and nose rings, to look down. But they were so filled with good cheer and enthusiasm. So happy to be alive at such an early hour.
The Japanese girls had been impotent in their attempts to silence them. Instead, they had taken to talking to the Indian ladies in low, furtive whispers. In the pale-blue glow of the meditation hall, their chatter turned into bangle jangling, farting, belching, sari rustling. Every morning they waved at their husbands across the gender divide in the centre of the room, sometimes even calling out their names. The men ignored them.
Our ranks had become divided. The Indians and the westerners. Nowhere had this become more evident than at breakfast. The Indian women were always first in line. The cooks watched helplessly as they piled their stainless-steel plates with so much food the partitions disappeared. The westerners watched helplessly from the back of the line. Did they think what I was thinking? Will there be anything left for me? Are the Indian women using this retreat to gorge themselves? But who would sit through so many hours of observing their nostrils just for a free bowl of dal and rice?
I drew my shawl closer, wishing they’d open the meditation hall doors. The Indian women asked: “Is your country this cold?” “Do you really live in igloos?” Then the woman in white emerged from one of the private cottages, her hair covered, her head bent low. I couldn’t tell if she was a westerner or Indian. But it didn’t matter. The moment she appeared, the Indian women went silent. The woman in white glided along like a ghost, hands clasped behind her back. The door of the meditation hall opened as her bare foot touched its threshold, as if on cue. “They say this is her sixtieth retreat,” one of the Indian women whispered. “I am only at five. We are so fortunate to be in the presence of such wisdom.”
The Rickshaw Cyclist
It was two o’clock in the afternoon. “How far is it to Lumbini?” I asked a rickshaw cyclist in front of the newsstand.
“Twenty-eight kilometres,” he answered.
Everyone within hearing distance bobbed their heads up and down.
“Yes, yes, twenty-eight,” the shoe repair man confirmed.
“Will you take me there?”
For a moment, the rickshaw cyclist looked surprised. He looked towards the Indian border guard who had just stamped an exit visa in my passport. His eyes narrowed. “One thousand rupees. Indian rupees.”
He knew I had no other option. There was a nation-wide strike today and he was my only chance to escape this border town with too many bored-looking men loitering about.
I didn’t haggle. I nodded and climbed onto the vinyl-covered double-seat on wheels, welded by iron bars to his bicycle. I propped my feet onto my backpack. He made a move to pull the parasol over my head.<
br />
“That’s okay,” I said. “I want to feel the breeze,” I said. But really I wanted to be able to turn and say good-bye to India. My six-month tourist visa was due to expire the next day, just when I was getting to know “Mother India.” The next time I’d see her would be when I flew from Kathmandu to Delhi a month later. And then I would only see her from inside Indira Gandhi International Airport as I transited back to the west.
The rickshaw cyclist mounted the bicycle and waved to his friends. They started yelling in Hindi – asking him where he was going, I imagined, and for how much. But he didn’t answer.
He pushed hard on the pedals and we accelerated, cruising through the streets, past the last bored man in front of the butcher shop, the last cinder block shack.
The rickshaw cyclist stood up, pedalling away at maximum force. We rode in the middle of the road, the breeze full in our faces. He turned around and smiled. I noticed the sun still high in the sky, the sweat soaking his armpits. “Would you like to stop for some water?” I asked, pointing to a drink stand up ahead. He shook his head, and pedalled even harder.
The roads were empty. A few lone cyclists passed, laden with canned goods, containers of water, car parts propped onto their carriers. For once, the countryside unfurled quietly, slowly. Barren fields transformed into carpets of green rice plants and yellow mustard. We pedalled beneath the branches of bodhi trees, past conical mounds of harvested grain. Past soft curves of adobe huts with thatched roofs.
