Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “It’s gorgeous.” Our entrées had arrived; I took a bite of “mushroom stroganoff,” canned mushrooms swimming in a creamy sauce that tasted, unexpectedly, of chilies. “Huge, too. You must be planning some big parties.”

  “It is big.” He twirled his fork in his fettuccine. “Way too big for just me. I didn’t understand why I wanted it until I talked to Lori.”

  “What, are you going to hire Joe and Lori as groundskeepers?” I honestly didn’t grasp what he was hinting at. Then I looked up and saw his face. He had put down his fork.

  “Amanda. I know we haven’t seen each other in a long time. And I know your life has gotten…complicated. It always has been, I suppose. But I’ve never stopped thinking about you.”

  I studied my mashed potatoes. Part of me wanted him to stop talking so I could devour them in peace. “Tom. In case you haven’t noticed: I’m six months pregnant. With someone else’s baby.”

  “There’s a little baby room right off the master suite. We could put an au pair in the in-law unit. There’s even a room for a yoga studio downstairs.” He leaned on the table. His eyes were wide and blue, his cheeks pink. He was as light as Matt was dark. “I’m not trying to put any kind of pressure on you. You could have your own bedroom. We wouldn’t have to decide anything about us, right away. This is about you, and what’s best for you and the baby.”

  I stared at the butter melting on my green beans. “Why would you even consider doing something like this?”

  “Because—you bring me to life. You wake up parts of me that have been sleeping for years.” He reached across the table and picked up my hands. “I like who I am, when I’m with you.”

  That’s how I feel when I’m with Matt. His hands were dry and cool on mine. I didn’t say anything.

  “And I’m worried about you. You shouldn’t be here in your condition. You should be back in your own home, with someone who loves you taking care of you.”

  “Have you been talking to my mother? I’m taking care of myself just fine.” But my words sounded unconvincing even to me. He shook his head.

  “You have no idea how crazy your life has gotten. You’re like one of those frogs in a pot of water that’s getting hotter and hotter, and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to come to a boil and cook you. Maybe at two or three months pregnant, sure, you could travel in India. But at six months—you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re taking a terrible risk for yourself and your baby.”

  I started to defend myself, but I just didn’t have the energy. What he was saying was too much like what I’d been feeling myself for the past couple of weeks. “I know it’s crazy. But I just feel like…I’m so close. It’s not that I think I’m going to get enlightened. But I just want to have at least a taste of what all these teachers are talking about. I want to get at least a glimpse of something beyond—all this.” I gestured around at all this, not sure myself what I meant: Me? The baby? Tom? The restaurant, with its brass candleholders in the shape of Hindu gods?

  He shook his head. “So what’s wrong with ‘all this’?”

  I’m with the wrong person. I am the wrong person. My life felt like my mushroom stroganoff—an improvised imitation of the real thing. I didn’t say anything.

  “Amanda. You’re sitting across the table from someone who loves you more than anyone else in the world, and who’s willing to love your baby as if it were his own. Can’t you let that be enough?”

  LATER THAT NIGHT, I lay awake in the room he’d booked for me. The air conditioner wheezed, drowning out the traffic. My skin still carried the scent of the spicy oil from my massage. I still tasted the creamy sweetness of the crème brûlée we had shared for dessert, still felt the aftershock of Tom’s lips on mine as he kissed me good night: a chaste but affectionate kiss on the lips, hovering somewhere between the sensual kiss of lovers and the cheek peck of friends. I was lying on my side, my belly heavy, acutely aware, as I had been for several weeks now, that there were two people sharing this bed.

  It was soothing knowing that Tom was asleep just on the other side of the wall; it gave me the primal sense that I could go to sleep and know that I wouldn’t be eaten by lions. It was so delicious being taken care of like this. Why not let it continue? As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined myself dissolving into a new identity. Or rather, picking up an old one, right up off the floor where I had dropped it like a discarded pair of yoga pants. Tom’s fiancée.

  I AM AT Tom’s old apartment, doing laundry in the efficient little laundry room off the kitchen. I am stuffing my India clothes into the gleaming German-made washing machine: my salwar kameez, my white ashram clothes, even my sandals are going in. The clothes are filthy with dust and sweat and grass stains and blood and spilled food; I dump in bleach and stain removers. But as I start the machine, dark gray soapsuds begin boiling up, spilling out onto the floor. I look for a mop, but I can’t find one. I begin frantically mopping up the spill with some of Tom’s monogrammed towels, turning them gray as well. As I bend over to the floor easily—too easily—it hits me: Where is my baby? I look down at my flat belly. Did I give birth and forget about it? I look in the washer and dryer. I run around the apartment looking under couches, in closets—looking for a baby, a crib, a changing table, any sign that a child has ever been here. I must have left the baby at Mount Arunachala; that’s the last time I remember being pregnant. I race out of the house and down to the garage; I’ll drive Tom’s car to the airport. But when I unlock the car, someone else is already sitting in the driver’s seat. I look over and it is Saraswati. She says, “Ask yourself. Who is it who is having a baby?”

  I JERKED AWAKE. The air conditioner rumbled; it was cold in the room, but I was burning up under my comforter. My hands flew to my belly and, as if in answer to an unspoken question, the baby rolled inside me. Relief flooded me.

  I pushed the comforter down and rolled to my other side. But I didn’t go back to sleep for a long time. I just lay there, staring into the darkness, thinking about Tom dreaming on the other side of the wall.

  THREE DAYS AFTER my birthday, Devi Das and I set out from the ashram after breakfast to walk around the base of Mount Arunachala.

  We started at dawn to avoid the heat—and also to avoid the thousands of other pilgrims who would also be walking around the mountain on this auspicious full-moon day. But hundreds of people were already surging down the road. The crowd was so thick I couldn’t even see the pavement—a shouting, laughing, chanting mass of young women in brilliant saris, their faces painted yellow with turmeric powder; men in jeans, suits, lungis, or dhotis, their foreheads streaked with stripes of ash from the temples they’d visited; teenage boys shouting and pushing each other off the road; bent old women with withered breasts swinging loose, holding little children by the hand. The road was not barricaded against traffic; the crowd itself was the barricade. Trucks and buses periodically rumbled through, horns blaring, sending pedestrians scampering.

  “This is a madhouse,” I said. “Are you sure this is the best day to do this?”

  “Better today than on a day when it’s not a full moon. I’ve heard that out on the main highway, the trucks hit a couple of pilgrims a day. One sadhu was crippled last month. At least where there are this many people, we can slow down the buses and trucks just through our sheer numbers.”

  As we stepped into the river of people, Devi Das frowned at my Birkenstocks. “You realize, of course, that you’re supposed to do this barefoot? Some of the local people have complained that the monsoons have been late the last few years because of Westerners going around the mountain with their shoes on.”

  I looked down at the rutted pavement, thick with rotting garbage, oil spills, gobs of spit stained red with betel leaf. “Can’t we just tell Shiva I’m pregnant and that I’ll get varicose veins if I don’t wear shoes with proper arch support?”

  “Oh sure,” said Devi Das darkly. “I’m sure Shiva’s never heard that excuse before. But go ahead. Ruin the crops. Cause a fam
ine. Don’t let us stop you.”

  We made our way down the street, which was lined with makeshift stalls selling snack foods: pakoras, samosas, fried bananas, paper cones of roasted nuts. Devi Das stopped to buy a paper cone full of chole, chopped chickpeas fried with chilies and ginger. He offered me a handful, but they were so spicy that just the smell made my eyes burn. A rickshaw pushed past us, horn blaring; we jumped aside and toppled into a line of people waiting to get a blessing at a roadside temple.

  I grabbed Devi Das’s elbow. “I thought pilgrims were supposed to go around the mountain in silence, with our eyes and heart fixed on its sacred peak. Isn’t that what I read in the ashram guidebook?”

  “As long as our hearts are quiet, the gods will smile upon us. But if you’d prefer, we can take the inner path.” Devi Das steered me off the main road and through a wrought-iron ashram gate. We cut across a weedy courtyard and up the hill behind the temple to a dirt footpath, marked with occasional splashes of white paint on the red rocks.

  “This will be quieter. And be sure not to walk too fast. The gurus say that circumambulation of the sacred mountain should be done slowly, as if you were a woman in the ninth month of pregnancy.”

  “That, I think I can manage.”

  We hiked along in silence for almost an hour, the roar of the crowd fading. The crown of the mountain was shrouded in silvery mist, turning peach-colored as the sun rose higher. The red earth path was lined with scrubby bushes with long, sharp thorns, which caught at my clothes when I walked too close to the edge. Within ten minutes, my legs were aching; the weight of my belly tugged at my sacrum, making my lower back throb. I tried to focus my mind on the mountain. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years people had been paying homage to this hill. I wanted to tap into the force field of their faith. But doubt hammered away at me with a sledgehammer. What was I doing, setting out on a seven-mile hike around a mountain when I was over six months pregnant? Plodding around this particular mountain on this particular day was supposed to be auspicious. But what if Tom was right, and with every step I was walking closer not to enlightenment, but to disaster?

  We stopped in front of a burned and gutted temple, with a tank full of scummy rainwater in front of it. A giant lizard perched on a rock. Wood doves cooed. The sun was barely up, but it was already hot. I sat down on a rock in the shade of a scrubby tree, wondering if it was too late to turn back.

  “So. He’s gone?” Devi Das reached into his bag and pulled out a water bottle.

  I didn’t need to ask who he’s talking about. “He left last night.”

  “Did he take it hard?” He handed the water to me, and I took a long drink.

  “Not as hard as I expected. He told me that if I changed my mind, the offer still stood.” I handed the water back to Devi Das. “I think on some level he was actually relieved. His intentions were sincere. But the reality of seeing me pregnant with another guy’s baby must have been a lot to deal with.”

  Devi Das pulled a lemon PowerBar from his sadhu bag and ripped off the wrapper. He tore it in half and handed part to me. “And you? Are you relieved?”

  I bit into the bar, sweet and chemical tasting. “I don’t know. Half the time I’m beating myself up for making a terrible mistake. The other half of the time I think it was the only honest thing I could do.” I could see Tom’s face as he hugged me good-bye at the hotel. My belly had pressed against him, a pulsating globe, as big as everything we weren’t talking about: my clothes on hangers in his closet. A gold ring with a diamond sparkling on it, sitting on a kitchen counter. My arms wrapped around another man’s neck, my breath hot in another man’s ears. I had told him to go home. So why did I feel, as I watched him get into the rickshaw with his duffel bag, as if I were the one being tossed off the life raft to the sharks? “What do you think? Did I make a mistake?”

  He shrugged. “In our opinion, we generally have less choice in these matters than we imagine we do.”

  He picked up the daypack, and we plodded up another ridge. In the distance, we could see other mountains jutting up out of the plains.

  “What makes this mountain sacred, and not those?” I asked.

  Devi Das shrugged again. “Why is one person born a saint, and another a pickpocket? This one is Shiva’s lingam; those are not.” We headed down the slope. “And speaking of saints…We didn’t want to say anything before, because we didn’t want to influence your decision. But the other day at satsang with Saraswati, while you were with Tom, everyone was talking about a woman saint named Maitri Ma who’s been living alone in a cave in the Himalayas for the past ten years. A couple of backpackers stumbled upon her last summer when they got lost in a rainstorm north of Gangotri and she let them stay in her cave. Apparently, it was a mind-blowing experience. They were just a couple of guys from Sprint visiting Delhi for a cell-phone conference, who took a week afterward to do a little trekking. Now they’re both Maitri Ma devotees.”

  “Hmm. So what are her teachings?” The question was automatic; I didn’t really want to hear the answer. My back was aching. My feet were aching. Tom was on the train to Madras to catch a plane home tomorrow. If I got the last train out this afternoon, I could still catch up with him.

  “Well, she doesn’t talk at all—just writes on a chalkboard. But her English is excellent. Apparently, she spent forty years teaching English lit in a private girls’ school in Delhi. She’s in her sixties or seventies—raised three children and a pack of grandchildren. But after her husband died, she began seeing visions of Shiva and ran away to the mountains.”

  “It’s amazing she even survived.” Reluctantly, I was intrigued. “I wonder if she’s packing a gun.”

  “Well, she must be packing something pretty powerful, because apparently all you have to do is sit in her presence and your mind just stops and your heart gets blasted open. So far only a few Westerners have been to see her, because the roads to Gangotri are closed all winter. But there were a couple of people at satsang who had made the trek in. They looked totally high. Just hearing them talk about it was enough to put us into an altered state for the rest of the day.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. We made our way around the side of the mountain, heading back into town again. Open sewers crisscrossed the path, assaulting us with the stench of raw sewage. A sadhu overtook us, walking briskly: a young, bespectacled man with a keen businesslike face, like a computer engineer who had inadvertently become covered with ashes on his way to work. He was walking fast, swinging his arms, and gabbling a mantra with extreme efficiency.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I’ve gotten my hopes up so many times, thinking I was about to find the ultimate teacher. How do I know this one will be worth the trip?”

  “We’re telling you, we saw the look in those people’s eyes. It looked like they’d stared into the sun for an hour.” We could hear the din of the main road drawing nearer. Beggars were starting to line the path—eyes missing, faces paralyzed by strokes, deformed limbs reaching out to us. A man with a white, pigmentless face and raccoon-black eyes reached out his hands, crying “Ma? Ma?”

  “This could be the real thing,” said Devi Das. “It could be what you’ve been looking for all this time.”

  Horns blared as we step onto the main road again. The crowd was surging. How could I meditate on the mountain in the middle of this din? I looked at the chaos around me. It seemed like the harder I chased enlightenment, the more of a mess my life became.

  But what if this woman really was the real thing? It sounded like the best lead I’d had so far. Maybe I could go to the mountains and get my personality blasted away. I’d get a taste of who I truly was when my thoughts stopped and my heart opened. And then I could go home and have my baby in peace.

  A truck roared by, and Devi Das and I stumbled to the side of the road. I narrowly missed stepping in a pile of cow manure.

  “Sure,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

  Mountain Pose

  (Tadasana) />
  Stand with your feet hip width apart, your arms relaxed by your side. Let thunder clouds gather around your head. Ground into the bedrock of lava that pushed up through the crust of the earth to form you.

  Let cheetahs hunt your slopes. Let winds blow through your grasses. Let saints meditate in your caves, and let villagers burn your trees for fuel and use your fields for toilets. Let trucks blare around the highway at your base and pilgrims circumambulate the path around you, praying for sons, and miraculous cures, and to know who they truly are.

  In the midst of them all, stand silent and unshakeable, watching them from the vast perspective of geologic time.

  “Not seeing things as they are” is the field where the other causes of suffering germinate.

  —The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, ca. 200 BC

  CHAPTER 22

  JUST OVER A week later, Devi Das and I and my bulging belly were crammed into the back seat of a rented Jeep Cherokee, winding too fast up a narrow mountain road, listening to Siddhartha and Maya argue about enlightenment.

  The squabble had been going on since our plane landed in Dehra Dun that morning, when Siddhartha told Maya as the wheels jolted down onto the tarmac that if he got enlightened while meditating with Maitri Ma, he probably wouldn’t love her anymore. Five hours later, she was still furious.

  “It’s not a personal thing,” he told her for the thousandth time. “It’s just that there won’t be any ‘I’ left to love ‘you.’” I could hear the quotation marks hovering around the pronouns, as if I and you were words so absurd he could hardly say them with a straight face. “My sense of a separate self will have totally disappeared.”

  “I thought that enlightenment was supposed to make you more loving, not less,” snapped Maya.

  “Well, of course I’ll still ‘love’ you, in the universal sense.” More quotation marks. “But it won’t be possessive. My heart will be equally open to, say, Amanda. Or even Mr. Desai.” He gestured at our driver, who was chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, filling the car with smoke, although I’d asked him several times to put them out.