Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “Pssst.” Devi Das was walking next to me, his eyes downcast. It had been almost ten days since we’d spoken; I was astonished at the way my heart leaped when I heard his voice. After all, this was just Devi Das. It wasn’t as if Matt had materialized next to me.

  He walked close, his shoulder brushing against mine, then slipped a small, hard square into my hand, like a drug dealer making a handoff. I glanced down: A Cadbury dark chocolate bar. Santosha disintegrated, and Amanda sprang to life. Chocolate! On the list of forbidden substances at the ashram, chocolate was right up there with crack cocaine. “Where did you get that?” I hissed.

  “We took the bus into town yesterday to buy a new hoe for the garden. We bought this at the fruit stand next to the pharmacy.”

  From across the path, Darshana shot us a reproving look and shook her head: No talking to men. I slipped the chocolate deep into my pocket and went into the meditation hall. I was Santosha again, contentment incarnate.

  After meditation, I walked slowly to my room, peeked out the window to make sure Darshana wasn’t anywhere around, and slipped the chocolate bar under my pillow. I would eat it that evening after dinner, while Darshana was slicing bananas and mangoes for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. I would eat it slowly, appreciating every bite. It would be a religious experience.

  All day, the chocolate bar shimmered in my mind, a dark, sweet promise of happiness to come. Technically, we were not supposed to eat chocolate at the ashram—or sweets of any kind, for that matter. But surely, now that I was Santosha, now that I was practically enlightened, I was beyond such strictures. Besides, I was pregnant. It was important to indulge my cravings, even the doctor had said so. Probably the chocolate had some nutrients in it that the baby really needed: antioxidants or something like that.

  After dinner, I walked down the path to my room as fast as I could while still appearing peaceful. I had about half an hour before Darshana came back. I could eat the candy bar and burn the wrapper in our meditation candle. No one would know.

  I slipped into my room, looked out the window to make sure the coast was clear, and picked up the pillow.

  The chocolate bar was gone.

  TWENTY-EIGHT, twenty-nine. Darshana’s boar-bristle brush whipped through her hair. I lay on my bed, seething with rage and suspicion.

  It must be Darshana who had taken it. Who else could it have been? No one else had been in our room. I opened my mouth to ask her, then closed it again. I couldn’t ask her about a chocolate bar I wasn’t even supposed to have in the first place. She’d deny all knowledge of it and then go straight to Sri Satyaji, and I’d be thrown out of the ashram.

  Fifty-two, fifty-three. That chocolate bar had been mine. She had no right to take it away, even if it was forbidden. I closed my eyes and imagined getting up in the night and cutting off her hair while she slept. Ha-ha-ha, I’d say when she awoke shorn. That’s what you get, chocolate thief. I started to roll onto my belly, my favorite sleeping position, then rolled back; it was supposed to be better for the baby if I slept on my side.

  Eighty-five. Eighty-six. Okay. Be calm. It’s just a candy bar. I took a deep breath and tried to summon Santosha. But I was stuck with Amanda, wallowing in self-pity. I was pregnant and without a partner in a foreign country. I couldn’t even sleep on my belly. Couldn’t I at least have a piece of chocolate?

  Darshana leaned over and blew out the candle. I lay in the dark and let the tears dribble down my cheeks, trying not to sniffle.

  I AM TRYING to put an enormous contact lens into my eye. It is as large as a school bus but I keep trying to make it fit. My eyes are watering, but I lean closer and closer to the mirror, pushing the lens into my eye, saying, “I want to see clearly.” But as I force the lens into my eye, my eyeball itself pops out of the socket and rolls across the floor. When I bend over to chase it, the other one falls out, too. I get down on my hands and knees, blinded and terrified, scrabbling around in the dark for my lost eyes.

  I JERKED OUT of the dream and sat bolt upright, hugging my blanket tight around my shoulders. My heart was thudding. Pale moonlight streamed into the room, illuminating the sleeping figure of Darshana, curled under her covers with the blankets pulled up over her head.

  I closed my eyes and put my fingers gently on the lids: both eyes still there. But the horror of the dream still hung around me. I listened for the reassuring whistle of Darshana’s snore, but it wasn’t there. In fact, I couldn’t hear her breathe at all. What if she’s dead. What if I’m lying here alone in the dark with a dead body. I leaned over and peered at the sleeping bundle of blankets: no movement at all. Oh God. I leaned over and put my hand on top of it. It was soft and squishy. I yanked back the blankets—nothing but a pillow and a heaped-up bundle of white clothes.

  Where was Darshana?

  I looked out the uncurtained window. A full moon hung over the fields. She’s gone somewhere to eat my chocolate. Not even bothering to change out of my sweatshirt, I pulled my white clothes on over it, wrapped my white shawl around my shoulders, and headed out into the night.

  Wind whipped at my hair; a storm must be coming in. Thick clouds scudded past the moon. Trees, buildings, and gardens leaped into moonlight, then vanished in shadows. I walked down the path to the cowshed and peered inside at the shadowy shapes of the sleeping cows. “Darshana?” The cows shifted slightly; one of them gave a grumbling snort.

  I walked on, shivering, past the vegetable gardens. I felt driven by an urgency I didn’t understand. It felt as if the key to all life’s mysteries—my missing chocolate, my lifelong sadness, enlightenment itself—would be handed to me when I found Darshana. I headed past the meditation hall, then up the winding path—forbidden to all devotees except his personal assistant—that led to the guru’s hut.

  The windows glowed with candlelight; Sri Satyaji must be meditating. Darshana had explained to me that he needed only about half an hour of sleep a night, and spent the rest of the time meditating on world peace. “Last night,” she’d told me at breakfast that morning, “he stayed up all night sending healing energy to the Middle East.”

  Women were not supposed to go within a hundred yards of the house. But I moved closer until I stood in the shadow of a bush, less than ten feet from the steps.

  The door opened. I shrank back into the shadows, preparing my excuses: I wasn’t feeling well. I needed some fresh air. I was sleepwalking. Please forgive me.

  But it wasn’t Sri Satyaji who came out of the door. It was Darshana. Her loose hair cascaded around her bare shoulders. Her white sari was half undone. She closed the door behind her, pulled her shawl tight around her, and began walking down the path. I stepped out of the shadows and cut her off.

  We stood still, looking at each other in the silver light. I’d never seen her look so beautiful. Her hair tumbled in a wild river; her eyes glowed; her lips were parted and swollen.

  We looked at each other in silence. Then she shrugged and began to walk past me.

  “Wait,” I said. She turned back.

  “It was you who ate my chocolate,” I said.

  She shrugged again. “And if I did? How would that change your practice, Santosha?”

  In Varanasi, whatever is sacrificed, chanted, given in charity, or suffered in penance, even in the smallest amount, yields endless fruit because of the power of that place. Whatever fruit is said to accrue from many thousands of lifetimes of asceticism, even more than that is obtainable from but three nights of fasting in this place.

  —Tristhalisetu, ca. AD 1618

  CHAPTER 14

  WELL, STRICTLY SPEAKING, maybe she wasn’t lying,” Devi Das told me, as our train rattled through the night. “Many devotees view a sexual relationship with a spiritual teacher as just another form of darshan, or transmission of wisdom. They don’t look at it as sex at all.”

  I was crammed into the dark, narrow top berth of a sleeper car—just a padded shelf about a foot and a half wide—with Devi Das on the berth opposite me, about an arm’s le
ngth away. An icy wind leaked around the edges of the windows. Even wearing every layer I had—long johns, two pairs of baggy pants, fleece jacket, wool shawl—I was shivering.

  “But then why didn’t she just come out and say that she was his lover? Why all the talk about celibacy and purity?” In the berths below us, an Indian family was sleeping—a mother and father with four young boys piled on top of each other like puppies. They didn’t speak any English, but they’d shared their dinner with us—foil-wrapped chapatis, eye-wateringly spicy vegetable curry, sticky sweets oozing ghee. I could still taste the food every time I burped, which was every few minutes: My swelling uterus was beginning to press my intestines up into my stomach, which was refusing to yield without a fight.

  “I’m sure she believed it while she was saying it.” Devi Das rolled over, his bony knees and elbows poking off the edge of his berth. “We have noticed, in our own life, that it’s possible to tell ourselves two contradictory stories and believe them both at the same time.”

  My hand slid down to cup the hard little lump that swelled between my pubic bone and my navel. Right. But somehow I’d expected more from a spiritual teacher. I’d wanted to escape from my own grubby life into a sweet-scented heaven of candles and incense and chanting. It was so disappointing to discover that that luminous world was as screwed up as my own. Probably Darshana was just the tip of the iceberg. Probably the gimlet-eyed British receptionist was running an S and M dungeon with the angel-faced Danish boy. Heck, even the cows were probably up to something naughty.

  “Here, take this.” Devi Das tossed his heavy woolen shawl across the aisle. “The last thing you need is to get sick.”

  “You can’t give me that. It’s the only warm thing you’ve got. You’ll freeze.” I pushed it back at him.

  “Oh, we have been colder than this before. It is a good opportunity for us to work on our yogic powers. There are yogis in Tibet who can dry wet clothes in subzero temperatures just through raising their body heat. We’ve always wanted to learn how to do that ourselves.”

  “Let’s share it, at least. Come on over here. It will be warmer if we’re squeezed together. And I’m so cold that I’d snuggle up to a goat if I had to.” I paused, embarrassed. “I mean—I don’t mean that you’re—”

  “Don’t worry. We like goats, too.” He scrambled across the gap between our berths and we wedged ourselves together, both of us turned on our sides facing the wall. He pulled his heavy shawl around us, its rough wool scratching my neck. He wrapped his top arm around my waist. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, the knobs of his hips prodding at my kidneys, his ribs colliding with mine. “Plenty of room, as long as we don’t both inhale at the same time.”

  My awkwardness dissolved as I relaxed into the warmth of his body. When Matt and I first became lovers, we used to sleep like this: twined together, holding on tight, as if we were each afraid the other would slip away in the night. It was one of the surprising pleasures of our connection—how well we literally slept together. We’d drop into sleep at the same moment and turn from side to side together all night, as if in some intricately synchronized dance. We’d share complementary dreams: He’d awaken from harvest celebrations after I’d been planting all night; he’d dream of flying with owls, and I’d spend the night picking feathers from my roof.

  But gradually, as things got more complicated between us, our sleep patterns had changed. Drifting off, we’d squabble wordlessly over pillows, over blankets, over whether the comforter should be pulled up tight around our necks (me) or down around our armpits (him). Our silent arguments would churn on long after we’d fallen asleep. Once, I’d awoken to find that he’d pulled all the covers to his side of the bed and was rolled up in a woolly cocoon, snoring. When I yanked at the edge of his blanket, he turned away in his sleep and murmured, “Give me a break, Trish.” Trish? I let the blanket drop and lay there in the dark, shivering, trying not to cry, gazing up at the fading constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars he’d arranged on his ceiling in the exact configuration of the sky on the night of his birth.

  Devi Das began making a low, chuffing noise, like a steam train starting up, and I felt his breath coming in short blasts against my neck.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I asked sleepily.

  “Kapalabhati. Breath of fire. It will raise our body temperature even higher. You’ll feel like you’re curled up to a hot-water bottle.”

  “Stop it. They’ll think we’re having some sort of kinky American sex.”

  “Fortunately, the train is so loud they can’t even hear us.”

  I’d been so disappointed in the way things had turned out with Matt—so hurt and let down. Maybe that was part of why I was so upset with Darshana and Sri Satyaji. I’d wanted there to be someone whose purity I could trust. I’d wanted to believe in something.

  I thought of the hasty email I’d fired off to Maxine before I bolted from the ashram, trying to sell her on my next destination: I’m off to Varanasi, the city of death! It’s the ancestral home of Shiva, the lord of the yogis, the god of destruction, who lives in the charnel grounds and feeds on the bodies of the dead. So I’m sure to get lots of good enlightenment tips there. With so many of my illusions dead, a crematory city seemed an appropriate destination.

  Devi Das’s huffing quieted into a long ujayii, a rhythmic, soothing hiss. My mind crumbled into disjointed images: Darshana’s hair crackling with electricity under her brush. Matt’s lopsided grin. The swinging plate of fire at the ashram’s evening pujas. Then Devi Das’s voice whispered in my ear, so soft I wasn’t sure it wasn’t part of a dream: “Amanda. Even if the teacher is a fraud, the teachings can still be real.”

  THE TRAIN PULLED into Varanasi early in the morning. I hobbled off the train, my knee aching again after the long, cramped trip. The platform was dingy and dim; the light of an occasional vending machine cast flickering shadows over families sleeping on the floor, wrapped in shawls and blankets. Some of them were cooking breakfast over small camp stoves. Peddlers carried baskets on their heads piled high with oranges and finger-sized bananas.

  Outside the station, the air smelled of rotting garbage, feces, and smoke. A mob of rickshaw drivers descended upon us like flies on roadkill. The driver we chose stopped before leaving the station to buy a packet of reddish powder that Devi Das told me was paan, a stimulant made from ground betel nut: “It will give him the courage he needs to drive on these roads.”

  The driver spewed a stream of crimson spit into the road, floored the accelerator, and began to sing—“Shiva Ram, Jaya Ram!” I wrapped my shawl around my face and eyes to keep out the choking fumes. We swerved around a bicycle rickshaw, dodged the craggy black behind of a water buffalo. My lungs were burning. Am I poisoning the baby? I grabbed onto Devi Das. “Make him turn around! I’ve changed my mind. I want to go home.”

  “Don’t worry.” He leaned forward and said something to the driver in Hindi. The driver shouted something back; spat again; then turned off the main road and began to jolt through rutted stone streets so narrow I could reach out my hands and touch the buildings on either side. Along the edges, families were getting up out of low-slung hammocks where they’d apparently spent the night: cooking breakfast over small fires, brushing their teeth and spitting into the street, washing their hair under hand pumps that drained into sludge-filled gutters.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Devi Das.

  “We’re going to a wonderful bed-and-breakfast where they serve an American-style brunch.” We swerved around a mother sitting on a set of crumbling stone steps, picking lice from the head of her little girl. “It’s pricier than we’ve been paying, but you look like you could use a vacation.”

  Pancakes. Maple syrup. Sausage. Maybe everything was going to be okay after all. But the rickshaw had stopped in the middle of an intersection to let three camels pass, huge bundles of wood swaying on their humped backs.

  “Wood for the funeral pyres,” Devi Das said. “People c
ome here from all over India to die, because if you die in Varanasi, your soul is guaranteed a favorable rebirth.”

  I nodded. I’d imagined Varanasi as a solemn place, a cross between a funeral home and a Gothic cathedral. But this city was seething with life, so raw and unfiltered that San Francisco seemed wrapped in plastic by comparison.

  As if on cue, the rickshaw lurched forward, then stopped again. Pushing through the crowd in front of us were five or six men carrying a bamboo platform on their shoulders with a long bundle on top of it, wrapped in gold silk. Two more men beat on small hand drums. They were all chanting: “Ram Nam Satya He, Ram Nam Satya He, Ram Nam Satya He…”

  “The name of God is truth,” Devi Das translated.

  The men were just a few feet away from me. It took me a moment to understand that what I was seeing was a shrouded dead body.

  “Ram Nam Satya He. Ram Nam Satya He.” The chanting was swallowed up in the noise of the crowd, and our rickshaw began moving forward again. I closed my eyes, stunned.

  “This happens hundreds of times a day in Varanasi,” Devi Das said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  From: Maxine@bigdaybooks.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Re: Progress!

  Amanda, Satyanam Ashram’s getting raves from editorial, especially the pics. Such a handsome guru, especially if we do something in Photoshop about those eyebrows. City of DEATH? Tell me I didn’t get that right.

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Subject: Don’t touch the water!

  I just read that the E. coli level in the Ganges at Varanasi is 150 times the legal limit. They dump EVERYTHING in the river there: dead bodies, raw sewage, nuclear waste, you name it. And you aren’t even supposed to be changing kitty litter! Will you please come to your senses?