by Anne Cushman
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Amanda, we’re wondering how you’re doing on this enlightenment gig. Any chance you could get it to us quicker? The Yoga World Magazine conference is in New York at the same time as the ABA and we’d like to have books at both. Also, we need pictures for our fall promo package. Please send us some jpegs right away of someone looking as enlightened as possible, preferably someone with nice teeth, exotic outfit, dark skin but not too ethnic looking.
A few spam emails from Target and Amazon; a new schedule from The Blissful Body. And nothing from anyone else. Nothing, in particular, from Matt.
I knew that this is what we had agreed on—no calls, no letters, no email—but still it made my stomach hurt. I had hoped that the silence would mean that I would stop thinking about him. Instead, I seemed to be thinking about him more and more.
I opened up a blank message and typed in his address: [email protected]. A few keystrokes, and I could connect with someone who—for all his flaws—knew me inside and out. I could even suggest that he meet me here, a side trip on one of his many travels.
If I could be sure that he would be alone when he got the email, I would do it.
I sat on my hands. I took a few long, deep breaths. Then I logged out.
I sat down at a table to wait for my food and looked wistfully over at a mattress in the corner, where three or four travelers lounged laughing and drinking lassi. If Lori were here, she’d have marched right over and joined them for a chai and a masala dosa. She’d probably already be friends with that Swedish girl with the raucous laugh and the calves of a mountain climber. She’d already have been asked out by that German guy with the blond ponytail and the rudrashaka mala around his neck. But I had always been shy about meeting new people. Everyone here was on the move—it was like trying to sustain a conversation with someone on a train platform.
I felt tears sting at the back of my eyes. Who was it I missed? Matt? Lori? Tom? My mother? My father? Here in India, everything that was hidden in America was out in the open: garbage tossed in the street for cows to eat, people praying and bathing in the river while tourists strolled by, no toilet paper so you couldn’t even avoid your own rear end. Now India was ripping the lid off my heart as well, and everything I’d packed away was boiling to the surface.
“Your macaroni, madame.” Ashok placed the steaming plate in front of me. The macaroni was piled high on a metal thali tray. The cheese sauce was a fluorescent orange.
Two gray-haired British women chatted at a table next to me. “So how are you enjoying India?” one of them asked. “Oh, I love it!” the other said. “I feel so at one with the people here. Perhaps it’s because they used to be a colony.”
I took a bite of my macaroni and studied the titles on the bookshelf next to me, a collection donated by previous travelers: Le Divorce. Say It in Tibetan. Working Miracles of Love. Trekking in Bhutan. The Da Vinci Code. “Let’s get together and feel all right,” sang Bob Marley. A cow wandered past the open door, a half-eaten milk carton sticking out of the corner of its mouth. I could just go home.
“Hi, mind if we join you?”
I looked up. Standing by my table was a skinny guy with dirty, carrot-colored hair matted into shoulder-length dreadlocks. His skin was pale, with a spray of freckles over the nose; his eyes were a watery blue; he was wearing a brown wool shawl wrapped over his cotton dhoti, the long piece of cloth knotted around his waist like a skirt. He was holding a steaming cup of chai in one hand, a giant plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce in the other.
“Sure,” I said gratefully. “Want to pull up a few more chairs?”
“No, we will only need one.” He sat down and bowed, his hands in prayer position at his heart. “Namaste. Our name is Devi Das. ‘Servant of the Goddess,’ it means, in case you were wondering.”
“Amanda. As far as I know, it doesn’t mean anything. In case you were wondering.”
“Pleased to meet you.” He began scooping the spaghetti into his mouth. “Man, this is fantastic. We’ve been staying in an ashram for the last six months where all we ate was rice and dal. Very sattvic. Very good for our spiritual practice. But we lost so much weight that when we sat down to meditate, we got bruises on our butt bones.”
“Where was the ashram? Here in Rishikesh?”
“No. It was in Gujarat. We would have stayed there, but the guru got brought up on tax evasion charges and had to go to his center in Sweden instead.”
“Sounds like he wasn’t much of a guru.”
“He was awesome! He taught us the most amazing practices. He changed our life.” He sucked a dangling strand of spaghetti into his mouth. “Before we came to India, we had a lot of mental problems. We had to take medication every day. Now we don’t take any drugs at all. We just meditate. And we are truly happy for the first time in our life. It is so wonderful to finally be living like a normal person.”
I decided to let that one slide. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Devi Das beamed. A large smear of tomato sauce decorated his cheek, like the badge of some oddball Hindu sect. “For us, nothing is personal any more.”
“Why do you call yourself ‘we’?”
He swallowed the last bite of his spaghetti and began wiping the sauce off the plate with a bony finger. “It is a spiritual practice our first guru assigned us. It’s supposed to break down our ego attachment to the idea of a separate self.” He took a sip of his chai. “To the rational mind, it appears that there is an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ sitting at this table. But in reality, there is no separation. Our ‘we’ includes ‘you,’ too.” He gestured to Ashok. “Could we get some more chai, please? And a piece of apple pie?”
“Shouldn’t you make it two pieces? One for each of you?”
“We tried that for a while. But we started to get love handles.”
He first came to India five years ago, he told me as he ate his pie. He had been a religion major at the University of Kansas, researching his senior thesis on Hindu spiritual practices. He had lived in an ashram in Kerala, then another in Bangalore. Then he decided to become a sadhu. He changed his name and let go of his past identity and his plans for the future—but not the interest on the trust fund his grandfather left him, which was only about two hundred dollars a month, but it let him live like a raja here. Now he just wandered from ashram to ashram, teacher to teacher. “Someday we might go back to college,” he said. “We made so many notes for our dissertation. But they fell off the roof of a bus in Sikkim.”
“What about your family?” I asked. “Don’t you miss them?”
“Our father dropped his body. Our mother dropped out of touch.” He licked the sugar off his fingers. “This is why we must find spiritual parents instead.”
“I’m trying to find all the best spiritual teachers in India. I’m writing a guidebook about how to find enlightenment.”
He settled back in his chair and patted his belly. “A guidebook for enlightenment! What a beautiful idea. One of our teachers used to tell us, ‘When you are ready to awaken, the teacher will appear.’ But if you are successful, he will be able to say, ‘When you are ready to awaken, the guidebook will appear!’”
“But what do you think? Are there any particular teachers you’d recommend that I visit?” I fumbled around in my daypack and pulled out my notebook.
“Have you ever heard of Swami Ramdas? He is no longer in his body. But he had a wonderful method for traveling around India. He would go to a train station and simply see what train was waiting at the platform. He would get on it and ride until a ticket collector threw him off the train. At whatever station Ramdas found himself, he would set about finding a spiritual teacher. We think that is the best method for you!”
I put my pen down. “I have a book contract. I can’t leave my research up to the whim of a ticket collector.”
“But you see, Ramdas believed that every person he met was Ram—God—in disguise. His wh
ole trip was therefore in divine hands.” Devi Das stood up. “We were thinking of taking a little walk along the river. Would you like to go with us and see some real yogis?”
I hesitated, gazing down at my list from that morning: Buy laundry soap—where? Find enlightened master—where? Buy deodorant—where? Arati by Ganges, 6 o’clock—p.m.? a.m.? bring candle and camera. Where? Email Maxine—about what? Write sample chapter—about what?”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “We practice celibacy. Soon we will be so advanced in our tantric practices that we won’t even have nocturnal emissions.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that I was supposed to email my editor this afternoon.”
“Wonderful! This will give you something to tell her.”
We left the restaurant and made our way back across the bridge. Then Devi Das veered off onto a path that wove through a tangle of trees and bushes along the river banks. The trail was lined with crumbling whitewashed buildings and shacks made of logs and trash bags.
“Yogi huts,” explained Devi Das. He pointed down at the sandy beach below us. A sadhu sat on a river-smoothed stone, his legs folded in full lotus. He was holding one of his arms straight up in the air. Next to him, another sadhu was standing on one leg, his upper body supported from a sling that hung from a tree branch.
“These yogis are performing austerities. The one hanging from a tree has taken vows not to lie down for twelve years, even if his legs turn gangrenous and rot. The other one has been holding his arm up in the air for so long that it has atrophied into a stick.”
“But why?” Dear Maxine, I’ve got a great theme for the fall promo package: Self-mutilation!
“Yogis believe that suffering turns our mind to God.”
I looked down at the yogis again. They were less than twenty feet away, but their world still felt as impenetrable as if I were flipping through a coffee-table book back in California. “But isn’t there enough suffering in life already?” Idiot’s Tip: If you want to get enlightened, you can hold one arm up in the air until it withers. Or to save time, just get a boyfriend!
“Yes. Life is so full of pain that is a wonder we are not all God-intoxicated all the time.” Devi Das turned to me and beamed. “We have just had a beautiful idea! In the hills around here are many caves where yogis live and meditate in solitude. They live on tree leaves and Ganges water. We were planning to go up there for a few months. Why don’t you come with us?”
“Wow, I…I totally love tree leaves and Ganges water. But unfortunately, I’m scheduled to be in Maharashtra in just a few days. I’m visiting a famous yoga teacher who has a center there. I arranged it weeks ago.”
Devi Das shook his head. “In our experience, you can’t chase down awakening in India. You have to sit still and wait for awakening to come to you.”
I picked up a rock and tossed it into the river. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that. I’m on a deadline.”
“Yes. We can see that you still believe in your plans more than you believe in Ram’s plan. But that is okay! That, too, is part of Ram’s plan!” He smiled. “Clearly, Ram has drawn us together for a reason. So if you will not come with us, then we must come with you. Shall we take the train tomorrow morning?”
“But I thought you were going up to a cave to meditate!”
“Our plans are like the Ganges. They keep flowing.”
I could hear Lori’s voice: Amanda! This is a bipolar sadhu from Kansas, currently off his medication, who refers to himself in the first person plural! What are you doing? Read my letter!
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the rickshaw stand at seven o’clock.”
“We don’t wear a watch,” he said. “But you can find us meditating by the water.”
Cobra Pose
(Bhujangasana)
Lie face down, your elbows bent and your palms pressed lightly into the ground by your chest. Anchor your tailbone into the earth as you roll your spine up and open. Spread the wings of your rib cage. Slip your shoulder blades down your back to cradle your heart. Feel the electric wave of pleasure ripple from your pelvis to your skull.
Is the quiver you feel excitement, or terror? Coiled at the base of your spine is a sleeping serpent—the passionate goddess who seeds all life. As you arch into Cobra, feel the serpent shudder. Feel her hot pleasure, her potent joy, as she shakes off her slumber and begins to writhe.
If you cannot see your little toe, how can you see the Self?
—B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–)
CHAPTER 8
THE NEXT MORNING, Devi Das and I left on an overnight train to the vast industrial city in India’s southeastern plains that was the unlikely home of the up-and-coming yoga master Mr. Vikas Kapoor.
The vendors sang out their wares as they walked up and down the aisles: “Chai, chai, chai! Chikki, chikki, chikki! Chocolate! Samosas! Idli!” “Shoeshine, shoeshine!” called a man paralyzed from the waist down, as he slid himself along the corridors with his arms. A blind musician in a white lungi played a one-stringed sitar and sang ballads. A little boy swept under our feet with a bundle of twigs, and held out his palm for change.
All my doubts about the wisdom of traveling with Devi Das melted away within an hour, as he guided me straight to the right car, bought some samosas on the platform, and firmly turned away the dozen or so men who waved tickets at us and insisted that we were in their seats. By day, he regaled me with stories about enlightened masters all over India, with some colorful tales about ex-girlfriends thrown in. At night, we slept in narrow, swaying bunks stacked one above the other, with Devi Das handing me his shawl to sleep under.
We arrived in the midafternoon and stepped off the train into a suffocating blast of heat and petrol fumes. On the platform, a skeletal man with a stump for a leg lay on a pile of jute rags. He gestured feebly toward his mouth, too weak to lift his head. I set a tangerine by his head. But when I looked back, I saw a dog carrying it away.
Our rickshaw swam through choking smog and crumbling cement buildings. Through the mob of honking trucks, I caught a glimpse of a grim, dingy bullock dragging a cart. “Hotels near yoga center all full,” said the rickshaw driver. “So many yoga students! Yoga man is richest man in city. Oh, so very rich! But I find you good place, very cheap, very short walk.”
“Could you get us something with an Internet connection?” I asked.
“Phone fax Internet chai, all services, very short walk, no problem.”
“Remember,” said Devi Das beatifically, “the rickshaw driver is God in disguise.”
The hotel God was talking about turned out to be a collection of bamboo huts on stilts, mosquitoes the size of bumblebees drifting in and out of holes in the tattered walls. I hung a tent of mosquito netting from the rusty overhead light fixture, then cowered inside it. When I lifted my mattress, three large cockroaches scuttled out from under it. The floor pitched like a ship at sea whenever Devi Das turned over in his bed on the other side of a paper-thin wall. At dawn, wood smoke began seeping up through the cracks in my floor; someone was boiling chai over a fire beneath my hut. When I pulled on my yoga clothes, they smelled like smoke and were covered with a pale layer of dust.
“NO! GO AWAY!” I turned and stamped my foot at the scrawny dog that was following me down the alley through the gray dawn light. “Go!”
The dog sat down and whimpered. Seated, it barely came to my knees; its fur, coming off in patches, was the same dull tan as the dust in the road. Its left eye was swollen almost closed, with a trickle of yellow pus coming out of the corner.
“I’m sorry.” I squatted and patted its head gingerly, and it went into a paroxysm of ecstasy, its whole rear end wagging with joy, its mouth stretched in a slobbery grin: love! love! love! As it leaped up to lap at my face, I stood up. “But you have to go home.” I bent over, picked up a rock, and pretended to make a threatening gesture. The dog cringed and shrank away, but its eyes still shone, in a weird combination of hope and terror.
I’d been wandering through the streets for over half an hour, squinting at the map I’d picked up at the train station—a map that seemed to bear only the most tangential reality to the city itself, as if drawn by mapmakers who had only visited it in dreams. As I picked my way down a potholed alley, I remembered what I’d heard about Vikas Kapoor: a yoga master in his late fifties who had been teaching yoga for twenty years in relative obscurity in the reform school he ran for teenage boys. Three years ago he’d been discovered by a Peace Corps volunteer who’d gone to the school to lecture the boys on safe sex. Now the studio he ran in the converted basement of his home was the latest mecca for Western yoga students. In a habit apparently carried over from his juvenile hall boys, his devotees all referred to him either as “Mr. Kapoor” (pronouncing the word mister with reverence, as if it were a title like pope or king) or, more simply, as “Sir.” It’s awesome. It’s the best of Ashtanga AND Iyengar, one of his devotees had told me, when I grilled her about him after class back in San Francisco. Sir will sweat you into a puddle in the morning. Then in the afternoon, he’ll crucify you over a metal folding chair. She said it with a tone of hushed excitement, as if being crucified over a metal chair by Mr. Kapoor were not just a privilege, but a thrill.
I’d made my way into what seemed to be a residential neighborhood: rows of houses jammed close together, most of them painted a streaky cream, with black mold growing up the sides. The occasional cow was lying in the shadows, still asleep. The streets were littered with scraps of plastic garbage, the only things the cows wouldn’t eat: a bag, a water bottle, the rings from a soft drink six-pack. I peered at the map again, and turned down a random side street; although some of the streets on the map had names, there were no street signs visible anywhere. I paused to collect my bearings. Then, from a nearby window, I heard a familiar sound: the deep, throaty hiss of ujayii breathing. I’d found it.
