by Janet Sola
Suddenly, loss, like a buried root, digs at my chest. Familiar. Don’t you know, a chirpy voice in my head mocks, what you love is what you lose. That’s the way it goes. Ha ha ha ha. Better not to love anything at all. When I think of it, all my life, I’ve lost not just objects, but people, even whole communities. I’d lost the other children I loved, my childhood friends, time after time, when we followed my father to yet another town where he would design yet another dam or bridge. Loss followed me into my adult life. Every love I’ve had has slipped through my fingers.
I remember that day—what was it, just a few months ago—that Peter said goodbye, after years of coupledom. I was shocked. I was outraged. But even more at myself than at him. There was part of me that wanted that secure, conventional life. Peter was smart. He was a professor. He wrote books. In the beginning he thought I was wonderful. You’re such a good listener, he’d say. Or, you’ve got great eyes. Or, it’s wonderful that you love books like I do. I even thought of having children with him as my biological clock’s ticking got louder. But I put it off. He was changing. He was becoming rigid. He wanted me to play a role, but I couldn’t learn the lines. I felt more and more uncomfortable, more and more like I was trying to pour myself into a costume that didn’t fit.
Even so, I kept clinging and clinging, even after he began to criticize everything about me. I tried so hard to fit his idea of what he wanted me to be that I hardly knew who I was. Let’s see. Dress: classic and tailored, please. Beige or black. Personality: social and pleasant, but circumspect. Opinions: exactly what his were. Job: professional, the more money the better. My job as a writer and editor for a local arts and entertainment magazine didn’t quite fill the bill for his upscale future as far as he was concerned. Not that I loved my job, which was mostly writing puff pieces on galleries and restaurants. When I told him what I really wanted to do was take time off to work on my own writing, the novel I felt I had in me, it pushed him over the edge. “You’re irresponsible,” he said, slowly shaking his head at me, as if in disbelief.
“I didn’t say I was actually going to do it,” I backtracked. “I just said I fantasize about it.”
And then, two months later, he met me as I was pulling up my car into the driveway. He signaled for me to roll down my window. When I did, he leaned over and rested his arms on the frame. I can still see his pitying smile, his reddish moustache twitching as he told me: “I’ve met another woman. She’s a lawyer.” That was explanation enough, as far as he was concerned. I should not have been, but I was devastated.
My friend Jason had always told me that I take things too hard. “People come, people go. Things come, things go. You have to learn not to cling.” I had known Jason for over a decade, ever since we had worked together for a short time. He was the one friend who was there for me. That day, I drove around in a kind of mild shock, not knowing where to go or what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the flat I had shared with Peter.
It was hot that day, and for some reason my car’s air conditioning didn’t work. I drove by Jason’s apartment building. There he was, leaning out of his third story window, head bent and his long hair falling forward from his bald spot. He was working on the plants on his fire escape. Jason was a nurturer. He said it was his lover dying of AIDS that had made him that way, but in truth it was just the way he was. “Come on up,” he shouted down when I waved to him.
He poured me a glass of white wine. While he made a vegetarian dinner for us, he listened to my tale of woe. I worked myself up into a rage, then a philosophical calm, then into a fit of sighing, back and forth, always finishing with “What should I do?”
The third time I asked this, Jason nodding as if he really did understand, the room started to shake. “Earthquake,” we both whispered. We watched as a ceramic statue fell from a shelf to the floor. The shaking stopped almost as soon as it started. “Thank God it wasn’t another Big One,” I said, trying to make light of it. “That would be way too much for one day.”
The statue was laying in several pieces on the floor. He picked them up and began studying them as if they held the clue to some mystery. “It could be a warning. But I think,” he paused in that I’m-going-to-tell-you-something-important way of his, “it’s the universe trying to send you a message. You personally.”
“Come on. Don’t go new age on me, Jason.”
“Well, I am new age, my dear. But seriously. Look at this.” He put the two broken pieces next to each other on the kitchen counter. The statue was of a long-haired woman with a sweet expression holding a lute. “Saraswati,” Jason said, bending down and trying to fit the pieces together. “The Indian goddess of creativity, learning, a whole bunch of stuff.”
“OK.”
“It’s a sign.”
“What of?” I asked. “That I’m broken and have to be glued back together?”
“That maybe now you’re finally free from the obstacles to doing what you want to do. That maybe you should take some time off. Dive into that creative side you’ve been repressing for so long to be with this . . . .”
“Jerk. No. Asshole.”
“There you go. Attitude. It’s a good thing.”
Two weeks later, I was still walking around in a septic fog when Jason called me. “India,” he said.
“What?”
“Healing. For you and for me.” He wanted, he explained, to go visit his guru in the south of India. I should go along with him.
India was too vast, too unknown, too frightening. “My idea of travel is sitting at a sidewalk café in Paris, or sunning on a beach in Hawaii,” I told him. “Someplace pretty, but safe. Maybe if I really get my courage up, I could take a singles cruise. Not that I ever want another relationship in my entire life.”
“Look, I’m going,” he said. “You’re not the only one who’s hurting.” I was embarrassed. His boyfriend had died just a little over a year earlier and I was acting like it was all about me. “Anyway, you won’t be alone,” he added. “And the ashram is very peaceful.”
The more he talked, the more I began to see the journey through his eyes: meditating in a flower-filled ashram, being nourished with an aura of spiritual love. In the space of several weeks, I found myself quitting my job, putting my possessions into storage, and accompanying Jason to the travel agency where we bought tickets to India. After the ashram, refreshed and whole, we would travel together, go sightseeing in fabulous but still vague places—the Taj Mahal, the Buddhist caves, Varanasi—and finish up in Kathmandu, Nepal. Buying our return ticket from Kathmandu, Jason pointed out, was insurance that we wouldn’t get cold feet in the middle of our trip and go home.
We arrived in India at midnight. It was a long way from the Madras airport to the hotel, and the driver didn’t speak to us for the entire ride. Jason slept next to me as I stared out the window. The night air smelled of rotting fruit and diesel fumes and a hint of urine. In the darkness I could see only flickering shapes: people cooking, squatting, mothering, selling, begging. Thousands of shapes that seemed to go on forever, an epic shadow play. I couldn’t see their faces, and they couldn’t see mine. I felt invisible, moving in a world made up of the stuff called maya—illusion. If I turned away, it would all be gone.
But the next day, Jason, forever upbeat, led me on a quick tour of the very real city, swarming with more people than I ever thought could be on the planet. We were on our way to look for a restaurant, sidestepping the weaving bicycle wallahs with their calf muscles moving up and down like mice under their skin, the men stoking the smoking braziers, the women tending to their children. I almost stepped on a black bundle lying in the middle of the street. Just at that moment, it moved. A second later, a woman snatched it up. I caught a glimpse of a tiny brown face—the face of a newborn baby.
The street, I could see then, was their living room, kitchen and nursery, and I was clomping through it. I tried to find a place for this in my understanding of the world and how it works, what it means, but I could not. It was too big
, too incomprehensible. It simply was. Jason and I went to a bank, filled our pockets with change, and gave it here and there, to a child propelling itself with its arms on a skateboard, to a thin young woman holding what looked like her baby brother but was likely her child. Soon, we were surrounded by an agitated, hungry crowd, holding out their hands. Any amount we gave was only a drop in a bottomless bucket of need.
The next day, we took a train to the town closest to the ashram. I again imagined a serene light-filled room where I would join a circle of linked hands. A place where, as Jason kept saying, the chakra of my heart would open and the wounds of my psyche would heal. At the end of a path through thick vegetation, a bright pink temple awaited us. Hundreds of gods and goddesses cavorted over every inch of its surface. India was chaotic, confusing, crazy, and crowded. This seemed to me more of the same. I was soon presented with an outfit of white pants and tunic wrapped in cellophane. This was the required clothing for women; stiff, long-sleeved, and made of polyester. From the moment I put it on, I started to itch and drip.
The ashram was presided over by an efficient and dedicated group of Westerners with a very long set of rules. One of them was that women had to be completely covered up while men could go around in sarongs. The devotees spent most of their time seated on a hard marble floor, waiting for an appearance of the elusive guru. Jason was happy doing exactly this. But the more I sat, the more I chanted, the more I breathed deeply, the more I felt like a failure.
I started escaping to the garden where I could breathe in the scent of tropical flowers. An Indian man wearing a suit with a loosened tie was sitting near a bush bursting with red blooms. Next to him was a tiny woman with a sad, luminous face. The man held out his hand to me and introduced himself and his wife as Mr. and Mrs. Randive. “I am from Bangalore,” he said. “I am coming with my wife this long distance to see the compassionate Arushi. My wife is sick. She needs a medical operation. But I have lost my job.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I came here because I want to ask her to help me get my job back. Do you think she can help me?”
“Yes, yes, of course I do,” I lied.
“And you, what do you ask for?”
I paused. “I don’t know,” I said. He looked so disappointed, I added, “I’ll think of something.”
“We go to ask,” he said. His wife picked a red bloom from the bush and handed it to me with a sweet smile. “For you to give,” Mr. Randive said. His wife leaned on him as we walked.
The temple was humming with frenzied chanting. The curtain had been drawn and the woman they called Arushi had appeared. Behind her were several Western men playing sitars. She was resplendent, sitting swathed in pink under an arch of flowers, all roundness, a plump brown face. But it was her expression that was striking, a half smile floating under black moon eyes. She radiated a combination of the selfless, nonjudgmental kindness of a buddha and the shining self-awareness of a movie star.
Hundreds of people waited in two lines that hugged each wall. One by one, the devotees climbed the steps then went down on their knees before they reached her. Each laid something at her feet, a gift of some kind. She took each face in her hands and looked deeply into the eyes of each person in turn. This was the fabled darshan, or blessing.
“We part here,” said Mr. Randive. “You go in this line, for tourists. We go in this line, for the rest of us.”
I scanned the room. He was right. There were two lines, and the line for Westerners was much shorter. “This doesn’t seem right,” I whispered.
“Because you are guests in our country,” he said. He smiled at me. “And because we know how to wait.”
I nodded apologetically. Maybe he’s right, I thought, as I waited my turn to go on stage. We all just get in line for the things we think we need. For some the line is shorter. For some it’s longer. Each line is like a little rainbow with a promise at the end of it. For Westerners it’s often a rock concert or a latte or a feel good transformation. For Indians like Mr. Randive, it’s a cure for his wife, or a job.
As the line advanced, I kept looking for Mr. Randive on the other side of the room, through the crowd. Once I caught sight of him, his hair perfectly combed, his hands folded, his wife in a chair. Each time the line advanced a little, Mr. Randive would lift the chair and move her forward. They would be waiting, I figured, for hours and hours.
Then it was my turn. I did what I had seen everyone else do. I walked on to the stage, knelt, and put the flower Mrs. Randive had given me at Arushi’s feet. She reached out her big koala-bear arms. Her head was surrounded by lights from the stage, and her blond backup guys were softly strumming on their sitars. She smiled with her eyes.
“Arushi,” I heard myself say, “what I would like to ask is for Mr. Randive to get his job back.” She spoke no English and so did not know what I was saying, but that was not the point. When she held my face between her plump hands and looked into my eyes, I felt all my defenses crumble. I felt not like a sophisticated woman, or a world traveler, but just a being who was like every other being. I started to back up on my knees to make way for the next supplicant. But then I knew what it was that I wanted. I inched forward again and bowed to her. “Give me a chance to love somebody,” I said. “Give me what Mr. and Mrs. Randive have.” She nodded and answered me with the same benign smile, as if it were easy for her to grant my wish.
But the next day I didn’t believe any of it. Not really. I didn’t believe Mr. Randive would get his job back or that I would find devoted love. A potbellied man from the Netherlands asked me if I would like to share his room, and when I said no, he told me he had asked Arushi for a better physique so women would want to sleep with him.
The whole thing started to seem quite senseless to me. I was hopelessly restless as I sat for hours in my stifling outfit, decidedly claustrophobic in the insular atmosphere, and deeply depressed as I tried unsuccessfully to mend the still tender wounds of my heart with rituals.
“Why don’t you travel on your own for a while?” Jason said, when he saw my distress. I shook my head. I had never traveled alone, and certainly never in India, a place as strange as the moon. “There are good, safe trains. Nearly everybody speaks English. You’ll be fine. We’ll stay in touch by email. And I’ll meet you in Kathmandu, if not before.”
I thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the ashram seemed to me a sort of spiritual corporation. Cut off from the world, life there was predictable and circumscribed, without the danger or romance I found myself yearning for, in spite of my cautious nature. And then the woman with the blue kohl-rimmed eyes offered me the train ticket. I didn’t believe in signs, but it did seem auspicious. It was time for me to make the break. I tried to talk Jason into going with me. But by this time he had found his bliss, and not only the spiritual kind. He had met a man, a kind and handsome New Zealander who he hoped might become more than a friend and help him forget his own grief. He wanted to stay at the ashram indefinitely.
“Remember the goddess who gave her life for you. I think she had a message,” Jason reminded me when I was leaving.
“Gave her life for me? Oh, you mean the cracked statue.”
“Saraswati. Exactly. Whatever you encounter, remember it’s just part of the flow of life,” he said. “Let each moment carry you into the next. Don’t cling.”
And now here I am, sitting on a rooftop in Udaipur, Rajasthan, falling back into my old pattern, clinging again. Clinging to a lost picture, for god’s sake, or maybe for goddess’s sake, when all around me is all this exotic gorgeousness. The pulse of real life.
A faint sound scratches its way into my consciousness. And something else, the tang of sulphur. I turn my back on the remains of the sunset and see the blonde, looking cool, leaning forward in her chair, striking a match. The blue flame flickers, then burns steadily. She picks up a shiny garment of some kind and holds the match under it. Not surprisingly, it starts to smolder.
“See, I damn well kne
w it,” she says. “They told me this was silk, and it’s goddam polyester or something.”
I’m halfway annoyed that my thoughts have been interrupted by this silly woman. “Hmm,” I say and turn back to the sunset. Undeterred, she pulls her chair closer to me and thrusts the fabric under my nose. “Take a whiff,” she says. Obediently, I do. It does smell slightly acrid.
“The burn test tells. If it were silk, it would smell organic when you burn it. They cheated me.”
“Did you pay a lot for it?” I ask to be polite.
She names a figure that’s the equivalent of about three dollars. “But that’s not the point. The point is they try to cheat me because they think they can get away with it. They see this tall blonde and they see a mark. If they’re not trying to cheat me, they’re trying to come on to me. I’m always getting hassled. Sometimes I wish I weren’t blond and gorgeous.”
I look at her more carefully. Aside from being blond, part of her problem, I think, could be the way she’s dressed. In a country where women cover up, at least from the waist to the ankles, her long tan legs are showing themselves off between short khaki shorts on one end and scruffy boots on the other. She looks as if she’s come back from an African safari.
“You always have to have your guard up.” She grimaces, snatches the garment back from me, stuffs it in a bag and lights a cigarette.
I give up on ruminating and let myself be drawn into the conversation. “It’s been a bad shopping day all around,” I say. Once I start talking, I realize how lonely I’ve been for female companionship. It all comes spilling out, the story of my encounter in the shop, the crowd, my lost painting. “The weird thing is, I fall in love with this painting that embodies, I don’t know, letting life be, letting life flow, just letting go. And now here I am attached to this painting.”
“Yeah, well all that non-attachment crap isn’t what they care about here. Any more than we care about loving your neighbor as yourself.” Then she grins wryly, showing off her huge, extravagantly white teeth. “My name’s Cathy, by the way. From Chicago.”
