Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “So this is it. This is where it happened.” Devi Das put his palms together and bowed. “Right under this very tree, the Buddha liberated himself from all desires.”

  “It can’t be this very same tree.”

  “Well, no. But pipal trees do live for hundreds of years. New ones spring up in the same place from their roots.”

  We peered through the stone fence at the tree trunk, swathed in yards of bright orange silk, its branches strung with white plastic flowers. Next to us, a Thai monk was pressing pieces of gold leaf on the stone fence as a Japanese monk took his picture with a digital camera.

  Devi Das sat down on a stone ledge and folded his legs. I sat down next to him, closing my eyes. The chanting surged around me. This tree had died and been reborn over and over. The temple had been buried for centuries. Strangely, it gave me hope. If a temple could be resurrected from a pigsty, maybe I wasn’t crazy to be getting together with Matt again. Maybe our relationship could sprout again from its dead stump. Freedom from suffering was possible for everyone, the Buddha had said. But his life hadn’t been a wreck like mine. Surely no one as screwed up as me had ever sat under this tree.

  Hummm…sahhh. Was it okay to use a Hindu mantra to meditate at a Buddhist temple? Or was it sacrilegious, maybe even dangerous, like mixing Clorox with Ajax when you cleaned the toilet? I sneaked a peek at my watch. Only fifty-five minutes until Matt was supposed to meet me right under this tree. There was still time to get out of here. I could walk back to our hostel, pick up my backpack, and head to the train station. Not see Matt until the baby was, say, in college. Or married with kids of her own. Great to see you again after all these years, Matt! You look good. Oh, and by the way…you’re a grandpa.

  Hum…sah. Maybe things would be different this time. Maybe I’d changed. Maybe he’d changed. He might even be excited to hear that I was pregnant. That we were pregnant. Maybe we’d find a lama to marry us right here under the Bodhi Tree. I’d wear a crimson silk wedding sari. We’d honeymoon in Varanasi, watching corpses float down the Ganges and making love for hours under our snowman-print flannel comforter.

  Hum…sah. Unless…What if he was seeing someone else already? Maybe he’d hooked up with that red-haired girl Lori had seen him with. Maybe he was even traveling with her. “I’ll be right back,” he was telling her tenderly, right at this very moment, as he zipped up his jeans. “Just a quick lunch with my ex.”

  A flock of magpies began to squabble in the branches. I opened my eyes. Opposite us, on the other side of the tree, a dozen Tibetan nuns were assembling. Nunhood! That was the way to go. No more shaving your legs, no more agonizing about whether some guy had left a message on your voice mail. Although maroon wasn’t really my color. I should go with the Thai tradition, that nice rich ocher.

  But maybe each of these monks and nuns had their own inner torment, their own tangled dramas? Maybe that was why they were chanting with such fervor?

  I closed my eyes again. The chanting throbbed into my belly, vibrated my spine. I felt the baby quiver. Maybe the door to joy was open. Maybe all I had to do was walk through it.

  “Amanda.”

  My eyes flew open, and Matt was standing in front of me.

  He looked thinner and browner than I remembered him. His hair had grown back and fell in shaggy locks across his forehead, flecked with gray. Were those gray hairs new? Or had I just airbrushed them out in my mind? Maybe this wasn’t really Matt. Maybe he was just a demon sent by Mara. “You’re not supposed to be here yet!”

  “I thought I’d get here a bit early and try to get enlightened before I saw you. But it looks like you had that idea first.” He sat down facing me and looked at Devi Das. “Hi. I’m Matt.”

  “Oh—I’m sorry. Matt, this is my friend Devi Das. We’ve been traveling together.” The monks were still chanting, undisturbed by any of the human dramas unfolding around them.

  Devi Das unfurled his legs. “We are delighted to meet you. But unfortunately, we were just leaving to catch lunch at the Thai temple. We have been dreaming about their tofu curry for the last twenty minutes.”

  Matt looked at me as Devi Das walked away. “We? How many invisible friends does he have with him?”

  “It’s a long story.” Somewhere along the long journey of our relationship, Matt and I had dispensed with hellos and good-byes. We prided ourselves on picking up conversations right where we had left off, as if we’d seen each other just the other day instead of five or six months ago. It was a way of pretending to each other—and ourselves—that we didn’t spend most of our time apart.

  “You look great, Amanda.” He studied my face. “I’d say radiant, if it weren’t such a cliché. Is it the force of your spiritual practice? Or just some new kind of makeup?”

  I’m pregnant. “Oh, just a little eau de Ganges. It does wonders for the complexion.” I wanted to throw myself in his arms. But I knew if I did, he’d immediately feel the new little bulge of my belly, hidden under my baggy tunic and shawl. Instead, I picked up my notebook and began to flip through the pages, as if I’d already written a script for how to handle this meeting, and I just had to find it.

  He nodded at my notebook. “So how’s the book going?”

  “Really fantastic!” I’d never been good at faking it with Matt. “Well—okay. Honestly, Matt, it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. This is nothing like visiting vineyards in the wine country. I’m in way over my head. I might as well be trying to write a guide to designing interstellar space stations.”

  “That’s how it always feels when you’re working on anything worthwhile. It’s the same with my photos. The ones where I feel like I know what I’m doing—they’re boring. Predictable. It’s when I take risks that things come alive.”

  “Well, then, this manuscript is so alive that Maxine will have to chop its head off so it doesn’t crawl off her desk.” I wanted to bite his neck. I wanted to reach out and run my hands down the muscled curve of his arm. “How about you? What are you doing here?”

  “The Dalai Lama was here last week. A friend of mine did a story on it for Slate, so I came along to shoot some pictures.” He looked at my face, which was freezing into a grimace of a smile. “My friend Peter. He’s a very fat, hairy male.”

  “Right.” For a moment, everything that we weren’t saying heaved up between us. “Well, I’m glad I happened to be in the area!” I said brightly.

  “Oh, I knew you were headed this way. Otherwise I’d have gone straight to Thailand.”

  “How’d you know that? Lori?”

  “Are you kidding? I think she’s set her spam filter to delete me. Not just my emails—me, personally. No, I called your editor. She was practically hysterical, saying you were filing dispatches from a crematorium, and would I please talk some sense into you.”

  He stood up. “It’s too crowded to talk here. Are you up for taking a hike?”

  “A hike? Where?” I’d been envisioning a cup of chai at the Om Restaurant. Or sitting on a bench under a tree. It was something I always forgot about Matt when I wasn’t with him—the way some part of him was perpetually in motion, always leaning toward the next adventure. I used to find it exciting. But now—my feet sore, my body bloated—it was exhausting. He was the galloping horse, and I was the bucked-off rider with my foot stuck in the stirrup, being dragged along behind him. “Weren’t we going to have lunch?”

  “I picked up some fruit and some samosas. We can have a picnic.” He reached out a hand to pull me to my feet, but I scrambled up without taking it. I was afraid that if I started touching him, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, we were on the outskirts of town, wading ankle deep across an icy river. Soft sand sucked at my bare feet. “This is where the Buddha himself used to cross the river. You can tell by the electrical lines.” Matt gestured at the cables slung overhead.

  “So that’s where his power came from.” The current tugged hard at my legs. I scrambled up the bank. “At some point,
are you going to tell me where we’re going?” My uterus was pressing down hard on my bladder. I was trying not to pee in my pants. My knee hurt. Less than half an hour with Matt, and I was already chasing after him, destination unknown. And I still hadn’t told him about the baby. I had a feeling that this was not what my therapist would call healthy boundaries.

  “Just over there is the cave where the Buddha spent years doing ascetic practices.” Matt pointed toward an arc of dusty hills. “Well, I guess he wasn’t the Buddha yet. He was just a young yogi still trying to get enlightened.”

  “Wow—I’ve heard about that place. You mean the actual cave is still there?” We began to make our way across a patchwork of fields—lentils, mustard, wheat, chickpeas—walking on the raised dirt ledges that separated them. The air was filled with the coos and trills of wood doves, the twitters of sparrows, the caws of crows. Haystacks dotted the landscape like golden stupas.

  Matt snapped a picture. “Mmm-hmmm. There’s a little Tibetan temple up there. Peter took me up there last week. But my camera battery died after just two shots.”

  “Oh. So this is actually a photo shoot?” I felt a familiar feeling wash over me: that I was circling around Matt as if he were a locked refrigerator, looking for an emotional meal that I knew was in there, if I could just get the door open.

  “It’s for both of us. You can even have one for your book.”

  “Well, thanks. Just think, this whole day can be a tax write-off.”

  “Come on. Don’t pick a fight. Tell me about some of the other places you’ve been visiting.”

  “Oh, Matt. It’s been insane. If I’d had any idea what these places were like, I’d never have agreed to take this book on.” As we tramped along the edges of the fields, I told him about my adventures: Hari Baba, Mr. Kapoor, Sri Satyaji. I hadn’t realize how eager I’d been to talk to someone—how eager I’d been, specifically, to talk to him. I’d missed that feeling I’d always had that his mind locked into mine like intersecting LEGO pieces; that thoughts that had existed half formed within me sprang to life under the light of his attention.

  “And then I had this roommate, Darshana, this fashion model, who was so into purity and celibacy—”

  “And let me guess. She was screwing the guru.”

  “How did you know?” We had entered a village and were winding through a dirt alley between mud huts. Chickens clucked and pecked. A woman in a sari walked in front of us carrying a heaped basket of grain on her head.

  “The ones who seem the purest have the biggest shadows. Be wary if someone says they don’t have a toilet. Because what are they doing with all their shit?”

  “And what about the ones who don’t seem pure?”

  He grinned at me. “They’re slightly less dangerous. That’s why I don’t even try to pretend.”

  We dodged sideways to avoid a rooting pig. In front of a mud hut, two women squatted shelling peas into a clay bowl. Having this conversation with Matt in this place reminded me of sleepwalking when I was a child. I would walk through the familiar landscape of my house, but superimposed on it would be the dream landscape: trees sprouting up between the armchairs, dragons perched on the lamps. Although in this case, was Matt the dream? Or was it India?

  “And then there are people like you,” Matt said. “That’s what I like about you. You’re not pretending anything. You are exactly as neurotic as you appear to be.”

  “I’m going to try to take that as a compliment.”

  “It is a compliment.” He reached over and tapped my nose.

  “Like, for instance, most women would have put makeup on that zit.”

  “What zit?” My hand flew to my face.

  “Amanda. I’m kidding. Do you think I’d point out a zit if you actually had one? I only point out your imaginary flaws.”

  Now. Tell him now. “Matt? I’m—”

  He looked at me inquiringly. My nerve failed me. “I’m thirsty.”

  He pulled a water bottle out of his daypack and handed it to me. I took a long swig. “And hungry.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re almost there. We just have to hike up that hill.” He gestured at a rugged slope with a whitewashed temple clinging to the jagged red cliffs at the top. Grinding up a winding road toward it was a tour bus.

  I stopped. “Wait a minute. You mean we could have taken a bus here?”

  “Well, sure. But that would have spoiled the adventure.”

  By the time we reached the top, the busload of Sri Lankan tourists was already leaving. “Another sacred site checked off their list,” said Matt. Strings of red and yellow and green prayer flags were looped from tree to tree, fluttering in the wind. A Tibetan monk came out to greet us with a bow. His face was grooved with wrinkles; his smile was toothless and radiant. He wordlessly offered us clay cups of chai, and we sat on a low white wall to sip them, overlooking the valley below, a patchwork of green and brown fields.

  Matt snapped a shot of the monk, then turned the camera on me. “Hey, gorgeous. Give us one for the collection.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him, and he clicked. “There’s your photo for your book jacket.”

  “For God’s sake, Matt. Put that thing away and get out the food. I’m ravenous.”

  Matt pulled out the food from his daypack: samosas and chapatis wrapped in aluminum foil, tins of rice and dal. I began eating greedily, too hungry to be polite. Since I got pregnant, meals had felt like feeding time at the lion cage.

  “Peter said that while he was living here, Siddhartha starved himself until his backbone was poking out through the skin on his belly,” Matt said with his mouth full. “Of course, Peter may have been exaggerating. Peter’s idea of asceticism is not eating a second dessert.”

  “I heard that toward the end, the yogis ate just one grain of rice a day.” I reached for another samosa, stuffed with spicy potatoes and onions.

  “Frankly, I don’t really get it.” Matt dipped his chapati into the dal.

  “Why deliberately torture yourself? Isn’t life hard enough already?”

  “Maybe that’s why they did it. Because it was so hard.” My sudden vehemence surprised me. “They just didn’t want to be at the mercy of it any more. They didn’t want all their important decisions to be made by their stomachs and their dicks. They wanted to know that they could let go of anything, even their own bodies, and survive.”

  “See, I have the opposite philosophy. Since it’s all going to be taken away from us eventually, anyway, why not enjoy it to the max while it’s here?” He scooped up the last of the dal. “Speaking of which, I was thinking…After you’re done in India, maybe you should come to Thailand and visit me for a while. Relax on the beach after all this work.”

  “You know I can’t do that.” He’s finally come to his senses! I’ll have the baby in Thailand on the beach. It will be a water birth, with dolphins swimming all around. “I have to write my book.”

  “So write it in Thailand. You could get a little hut right up the beach from me. Send in everything by email. When you’re done, we’ll celebrate with a scuba-diving trip.”

  Me and Matt and the baby sprawled in a bed together, napping under a palm frond roof. Me and Matt walking on the white sand, the baby in a sling on Matt’s chest.

  “Matt. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What? You’re staying in India and becoming a guru yourself? You’re on the right career path for it.”

  I couldn’t summon the words. Instead, I stood up. I turned sideways. I flattened my billowing tunic down over the slight but distinct bulge of my potbelly.

  There was a long, long silence.

  Somewhere in a parallel universe, Matt is throwing his arms around me. “Amanda, that’s wonderful! What great news!” he is saying.

  “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Matt said.

  Apparently, our spaceship was not going to be traveling anywhere near that universe. I sat down again. “Actually, it is.”

  “An
d—are you telling me that it’s mine?”

  “It’s definitely yours.”

  “I’m so happy! When is it due?” asks the parallel-universe Matt.

  “When is it due?” asked Matt. I knew that look on his face—opaque and preternaturally calm, as if a veil had been drawn across the back of his eyes so I couldn’t look in. It was the look he got when he was so angry he could barely speak.

  “The middle of June.”

  “So you’re almost four months along. What if I hadn’t come to India? When, exactly, were you planning on telling me?”

  “Well, you did come to India. I’m telling you now.”

  “Now that it’s too late to do anything about it. This affects my life, too, Amanda. Didn’t I deserve to be part of this decision?”

  “You and I aren’t together any more. You were screwing some other girl.” My voice was shaking. “I was supposed to ask your permission to have a baby?”

  “So is this your way of punishing me?”

  “A punishment? Is that what our baby is to you?” I felt like I was about to throw up. What had I been thinking, getting together with him? I’d been doing fine. Now my heart had bitten down on the bait on his fishing hook, and he was reeling it out of my body.

  “You know how I feel about having kids. The planet is falling apart. Bringing a child into this fucked-up world is one of the most irresponsible and selfish things you can do.”

  “You’re calling me irresponsible and selfish? All you do is hide behind a camera! Take pictures so you don’t have to deal with anything!”

  Matt stood up. “Look, Amanda. I came here to see you because I’ve missed you like crazy. But I’ve seen what happens when people have kids. They disappear. Their life gets narrowed down to this tiny little world of diapers and spit-up and LEGOs and conversations about who’s driving carpool on the fucking field trip to the fucking sticker factory. I can’t do it. It’s the end of creativity. It feels like death.”