by Anne Cushman
He wagged his head in a gesture that seemed half yes, half no. “Yes, yes. Haridwar train leaving soon.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Five minutes.”
I turned to another man. “Haridwar train? Where?”
“Haridwar train. Platform 12.”
I was on Platform 1. The straps of my backpack digging into my shoulders, I sprinted up the stairs and along the overpass, pushing my way around porters carrying suitcases on their heads, past whole families camped out on blankets. There was no train at Platform 12. But I did spot an open Assistance counter. A uniformed man sat at a desk behind it, his eyes closed.
“Excuse me.” I rapped at the glass window. “When is the Haridwar train going to get here?”
He looked up sleepily. “Haridwar train. Platform 1.”
I sprinted back up the stairs and fought my way back through the crowds to Platform 1. Sweat was streaming down my neck. My backpack was the weight of a small elephant. I stepped in the open door of the waiting train and looked in vain for a conductor; instead, I turned to a man seated just inside the door and repeated my mantra: “Haridwar? Is this the Haridwar train?”
He smiled, revealing a mouth with exactly one snaggled tooth hanging down from the top gum. “Yes, madame. This Madras train. Madras is very good city. You are going to Madras?”
“IS YOUR MARRIAGE arranged marriage?” asked the Indian woman sitting next to me on the train to Haridwar. The words came out in a rush, as if she had been rehearsing them for the last ten minutes. “Or…” Her face flushed and she looked down, as if she were about to ask something risqué, like whether I liked to be handcuffed naked to a bedpost. “Or is it love marriage?”
We were rattling north through mile after mile of crumbling cement slums, tent cities, and garbage dumps—an unrelenting sea of inhabited rubble in which I couldn’t tell houses from ruins. The train seats were upholstered in mustard-yellow plastic; the walls were dotted with ads for broadband Internet. My seatmate was a slender young woman in a dark blue sari, hair pulled back in a tight knot at the back of her neck, a golden bindi between her eyebrows. Her name was Anjali, she had told me shyly; she was traveling home to Dehra Dun to visit her mother. I guessed that she was about my age. Squeezed between us, leaning up against her side, was her three-year-old daughter, clutching a dark-haired Barbie in a sari.
“Actually, I’m not married at all,” I told her.
Her face registered shock, which she struggled to cover up. “You are how old?”
“Twenty-nine.”
She looked down at her daughter, now sleeping, and reflexively pulled her close, as if her mere proximity to me might cause such a fate to swallow her up. “Oh. I am sorry.”
A conductor stopped at our seats and offered us breakfast: thermoses of hot English tea, sugar biscuits, a crisp copy of The Hindu newspaper. The landscape outside was shifting to fields of sugarcane and smoke-belching sugar refineries. Buffalo carts hauled piles of sugarcane down dirt roads. Cows clustered under groves of eucalyptus. Women in brilliant saris picked through the garbage by the tracks.
“What about you?” I asked Anjali, dipping my biscuit into my tea. “How long have you been married?”
“Seven years. Now I am twenty-eight years old.” She continued to stroke her daughter’s hair. “This is my second child. Her older brother is at home; I didn’t want him to miss the school.”
She was stunningly beautiful, as so many of the Indian women seemed to be—radiating a kind of effortless calm, eyes dark pools, olive skin flawless. Despite the dust of the train station, her sari was clean and draped in elegant folds. She looked as if she had never perspired a drop in her life. In comparison, I felt scruffy and disheveled, dressed in the salwar kameez I had bought at the market in Delhi yesterday—a pajama-like outfit with baggy pants and a shapeless tunic that hung down to my knees. An Australian woman I met in a chai shop had told me that dressing in Indian clothes would make me less likely to be harassed by men. But my salwar kameez was already smudged with dust and sweat, crumpled from the weight of my backpack, which hitched it up awkwardly in the back. I had stored my money and passport in my security belt around my waist, which meant that when I wanted to buy my ticket, I had to hitch up my tunic to my belly button to get out my wad of rupees—thereby attracting stares from every man within eyesight, as if I had paused at the ticket counter in Grand Central station, pulled down my jeans, and begun pulling out hundred-dollar bills from my panties. In the window, I could see the shadowy reflection of my face, strained and splotchy, my hair escaping in frizzy tendrils from my ponytail.
“So your husband is watching your son?”
She laughed again. “Oh no. My husband has very good job with cell phone company. He is working all day. But I live in same house with his mother and father, his brother, and all rest of joint family. My sister-in-law is watching my boy. She has two children also and our children are all like brothers and sisters.”
“And how did you meet your husband? Was it…”—I tried to remember her phrase—“a love marriage?”
She blushed and looked down again. “Oh no. It was arranged marriage. My mother’s cousin was good friend of his mother. She made the introduction.”
“So you had never met him before you were married?”
“Oh yes, I had met him. These are modern times! I met him with my mother, and gave the approval. Then we met five, maybe six times before our wedding. Once he invited me out for chai, just the two of us, so we would have time to get to know each other and all like that. But my mother said no. She said, ‘You have the rest of your lives to go out together. Why you are wanting to go out now?’”
Across the aisle from me, an Indian man was watching a DVD on a portable player of a giant white-bearded swami standing knee-deep in a rushing river, his arms outstretched in blessing. Anjali and I eyed each other across a gulf of culture. I liked her. In another reality, I imagined, we might have been friends. I tried to envision her in cutoff jeans and a tank top, a tattoo snaking down her spine, lying next to me on the grass at a concert at Golden Gate Park. Or me in a sari, the two of us side by side in a kitchen making chapatis for our husbands’ dinner.
“In America,” I told her, “we like to get to know each other for a long time before we get married, to find out how well we like each other. Sometimes we even live together first.”
She shook her head. “In India, we feel so sorry for Western women. You have to find your own husbands…going to bars, even searching on the Internet by yourself.” Her inflection made the term Internet sound vaguely scandalous. “And then, how can you make a proper choice? Even if someone is getting quite old, like you, you are still inexperienced. Without the help of your mother, how will you know what will make you happy through a whole lifetime?”
I looked out the window. We were flashing through a village of squat mud huts. About twenty feet from the train tracks, an outdoor school was set up under a grove of eucalyptus: rows of desks with children bent over composition books, looking up to wave as the train rushed by.
“Maybe I don’t. But I don’t think my mother does, either.”
Over and over, as I was growing up, I’d sat at our kitchen table with my mother, eating microwaved macaroni and cheese and listening to her talk about her relationships. It was a litany of hope followed by disappointment: how this man had let her down, how that one had betrayed her. “Beauty is a curse,” she’d said, studying me across the table—my thick glasses, my tangled hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “You should count your lucky stars that you’re not saddled with it. Being smart will get you further, in the long run, than being popular. I was homecoming queen, you know. And just look where it got me!” She’d looked around our kitchen, and I saw it through her eyes: the ditch she’d lurched into when the train of her life had run off its tracks.
“I was engaged once,” I told Anjali. “Just a couple of years ago.”
“Oh, I am so sorry,” she said again. �
��What happened? Did he die?”
“No, he didn’t die.” I closed my eyes, thinking of Tom, trying to find words that would make sense to her. “I just changed my mind.”
I gave her a retouched version of the story, with all the sex airbrushed out—just a contest between two different men, one of whom I wanted, one of whom wanted me. “I haven’t seen Tom since I gave the ring back. He must have been terribly hurt.” I was on a train in the foothills of the Himalayas with my mind still coursing down the same familiar California tracks, as if suffering from some peculiar form of jet lag: You should have married him. No, you never should have dated him in the first place.
Anjali was looking sympathetic but confused, as if I had been speaking a language she had read but never heard spoken. “But how could you make such a choice? To reject a man who would marry you, for one who would not?”
“It didn’t even feel like I had a choice. My body rejected him on its own, like an organ transplant.”
She shook her head. “In India, your body does not have that choice, to reject. You accept.”
“And does it work out? Are you happy?”
Anjali looked out the window. We were rattling through another village: clusters of concrete houses, none of which seemed quite finished, although they were already decaying. Beams of rusty rebar protruded in bristles from the tops of them, like badly trimmed hair.
“You say you are yoga student. So you are knowing the Bhagavad Gita, yes?”
“Yes, of course.” We had studied it in my yoga teacher-training program: an ancient hymn to the god Krishna, the transcendent power of love that illuminates the whole universe. I’d read it sitting on Ocean Beach, eating gingersnaps, my book balanced on thighs slick with sunscreen.
Anjali nodded out the window, where houses were being swallowed up again by a plain of yellow mustard flowers. “Just here, on these very fields, is where the Lord Krishna appeared to the warrior Arjuna in his chariot.” She spoke casually, intimately, as if speaking of events that had happened only a few days ago. “In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that it is his dharma—his role in life—to be a warrior. His spiritual task is to live that dharma as best he can. Just so, my dharma is to be wife to this person. Now I must find the joy within that assignment.”
“But does it work?” I persisted. “Are you really happy?”
“When I was first married, I was very sad. I missed my mother and my family so much. Oh, so much! It was too hard. In my home, where I grew up, it was more like small village. And although my parents were not very educated, I went to very good school. I studied English literature. I was even editor of the school literary magazine.”
In the seat next to her, her little girl shifted in her sleep and murmured something in Hindi. Anjali’s hand moved to stroke her head.
“My husband’s home is in the city. It is much smaller, more crowded. My husband is from family of businessmen. They are very kind people. But all they know is business. They do not know art, they do not know music, they do not know poetry.”
“And what do you do all day?”
“I clean the house, I do the shopping, I cook. It is not just for me and my children, you understand. It is for whole household—grandmother, mother, cousins. Whole extended family.”
“And do you still read poetry?”
She shook her head. “Only in my heart.”
The landscape outside had shifted to a city; we must be getting near to Haridwar. We rattled along the banks of a mud-brown river lined with gaudily painted temples. I leaned my head against the window, suddenly weary.
Anjali and Arjuna seemed so clear about their assignments in life. Arjuna was a warrior. Anjali was a wife and mother. Case closed. But what was my dharma? Dog walker? Yoga teacher? Travel guide writer? Spiritual seeker?
If only I knew.
Devotedly with the pure heart who so ever comes to Rishikesh, the Bramtheerth (Supreme Pilgrimage), and stays one night becomes godly. Rishikesh is now round the year destination. Get the best of Rishikesh as per your interest.
—www.rishikesh.org
CHAPTER 7
ONE WEEK AFTER I had arrived in Rishikesh, I stood on a footbridge over the Ganges River, tossing pebbles of fish food over the railing into the bottle-green, foam-flecked water fifty feet below, and trying not to cry.
From the bridge, I looked out over riverbanks frothing with ashrams and temples—peach and pale yellow and pink, turreted and domed, trimmed with crimson, emblazoned with excerpts from Hindu religious texts in scrolling script. Behind them rose the gray-green arc of Himalayan foothills, where for centuries yogis and saints had come to meditate in caves and bathe in the sacred waters of the goddess Ganga. Rishikesh was a pilgrim’s paradise, the ultimate yoga fantasy; even the Beatles had found God here. But what good was it to be in a mind-blowing place if you didn’t have a friend to turn to and say, “Isn’t this amazing?”
A moped rattled across the bridge behind me, with an orange-robed sadhu hitching a ride on the back. A gang of tall, blond yoga students in immaculate white kurta pajamas—the collarless, knee-length shirt and drawstring pants that were the traditional outfit of Indian men—tromped after it, arguing heatedly in German. I tossed another handful of fish pellets into the water, thinking of the grubby little girl who had sold them to me: the back of her ragged dress flapping open, a trail of snot smeared across her face. A school of carp surfaced, jostling and fighting each other, mouths gobbling.
I was surrounded by thousands of spiritual seekers. And I’d never felt so alone in my entire life.
MY FIRST FEW DAYS in Rishikesh, I’d been ecstatic. The sunny cobbled alleys that lined the Ganges were blazoned with hand-lettered banners advertising yoga classes, meditation courses, ayurvedic massages. I even spotted a hotel called Enlightenment House. Incense wafted from storefronts; bhajans crooned from temple loudspeakers and CD shops. The Incredible India Yoga Festival was about to start at a riverside ashram. Sadhus sat on the ghats, the polished granite steps that led to the sparkling river, and wandered through the streets along with the free-roaming cows and ponies. At sunset, I sat by the ghats and watched a spectacular puja, or devotional ritual, in front of a thirty-foot metal Shiva statue; a chorus of ashram boys in orange robes sang bhajans in sweet, high-pitched voices while a priest swung a flaming bowl of fire over the rushing waters. Jaya Jaya Om Jaya Jaya…I was giddy with delight. At this rate, I’d find an enlightened master in a couple of days. My book was practically going to write itself.
But the Incredible India Yoga Festival turned out to be staffed almost entirely by teachers from California; I even recognized a couple of names from The Blissful Body. Enlightenment House was run by a former investment banker from Massachusetts. And the yoga ashram I checked into was a giant tourist hotel crammed with travelers from all over Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and America. The resident swami was nowhere to be found, although there was a hatha yoga class every morning, taught by a brisk young Australian woman with sunburned cheeks who barked out the asana instructions with hearty enthusiasm. My next-door neighbors were a group of Rastafarians from Germany, who stayed up late every night smoking pot, playing guitar, and singing reggae with thick German accents. I had dropped in on another ashram, but it was populated almost entirely by Japanese men in business suits.
My third morning in Rishikesh, a monkey with a raw red bottom had swung down from the bridge cables and snatched my expensive REI sunglasses off my face. And that evening, sitting by the river at the evening puja, I had watched an armed guard chase away a begging sadhu so he wouldn’t disrupt the ritual for the foreign tourists.
It’s okay. No one expects you to find enlightenment the very first week. Remember how it was with the wine book, all the overpriced wine you had to swill before you found the great local vineyards that no one knew about. At least with all this distraction, I hadn’t had any time to think about Matt. Oh, damn, now I was thinking about him again.
I turned away from the railing and
began walking back into town. A man in a brown lungi, bare to the waist, was turning an iron wheel to operate a sugarcane press; he ladled the spurting juice into metal cups. Through the open door of a gem store, I saw two blonde women in saris sitting across the counter from an Indian salesman in a suit and tie. All three of them cupped immense amethyst crystals in their palms. Their eyes were all closed. They were all chanting Om.
I cut across an alley and into the Ganesha Health Food Internet Café. Inside, Bob Marley was playing, the pitch warbling slightly as the CD player speeded up and slowed down with the fluctuations in power. Travelers crowded elbow to elbow at tiny tables and sprawled on foam mattresses covered with tattered fabric. A few people hunched over computers, lost to the world. I sat down in front of one of the computers and studied the menu lying next to it, although I already knew it by heart.
“I’ll have a Yogi Chai,” I told Ashok, the Indian man behind the counter, who was frying potatoes on a griddle over an open flame.
“And a plate of macaroni and cheese.”
“No problem. And you, madame? You are well today?’
I’m lonely and scared. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. For all I know about India and enlightenment, I might as well be writing about nuclear physics. I’d give the advance back and call the whole thing quits, but the thing is, I’ve already spent most of it. “Yes. I’m great, thanks.”
As Ashok shook a package of macaroni into a pot of boiling water, I turned to the computer and clicked on the familiar Yahoo! logo. Perched on the top of the computer was a statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who removes obstacles, next to a stick of smoldering incense. As I typed in my password, the power went out in the restaurant, and the lights went dim. But the computer had a battery backup. It kept on glowing and humming—as if the virtual world were the stable place, and India the fragile reality that could crash at any moment.
