The commentary continued. “The Indians eat too many sweets,” he told us. “It’s because they’re so bored. Look, there’s a sweetshop every three doors.” He was right, too. Small hole-in-the-wall sweetshops dotted every town we passed. Robert’s comments and insights had a flat realism that made me listen more deeply. I would often find myself asking, What did I just hear? On this day he was as much talking to himself as to us, and his eyes turned deep gray with study and recognition, as if he were someone’s uncle talking about the character flaw of a family member. It was like he was wearing big Paul Bunyan boots while wading all throughout India, collecting a stunning minutiae of detail.
We checked into a hotel as soon as we arrived in Vrindavan. Shortly after, Robert shuttled us off to the Yamuna River for a holy bath. The Yamuna River is one of the holiest rivers in India, and as we walked, Robert filled us in with stories of Krishna’s childhood. Vrindavan is where Krishna is said to have grown up four thousand years ago. You can tell by all the shrines in the village—as plentiful as ATMs in any American city—that Krishna is considered a god in a human form. Devout Hindus have two distinct views on history of the god incarnate. Some feel Krishna was his most perfected self when he was a baby, with all the innocence and pure love that implies. Others believe it was when he was a young man, newly in love with his divine female complement, Radha. That the question of whether a god’s perfection is to be found as a baby or a young lover is tossed around as a part of a cultural dialogue in India just floors me. This definitely engages my spiritual imagination.
We took a circuitous route to the river, trailing through sandy white backstreets that were more like tiny alleys. The Indian people walked very slowly, which made sense in that heat. Robert, however, had a Mad Hatter quality about him, and he walked quickly, with no time to waste, his ivory-colored clothing flowing. His arm encircled Greg, who was shorter, as he ushered us around on speeding legs, offering us advice: what to avoid, where to find proper clothing and the best sweets. I was only half tracking it because I don’t pay enough attention to this kind of detail and also because I was in so much culture shock. The two walked ahead most of the time, leaving me to take in the surroundings as I trailed behind them. I was amazed by the many free-roaming peacocks all over the town—on the ground at our feet, in the trees, and running to get out of the way of the rickshaws—and by the gracefulness of the women’s colorful floating saris. Indian women seemed to have elegant wear for the most mundane activities. I was too tired to talk, but Greg and Robert were chatting away and laughing nonstop. I had two contrary impulses: go back to the hotel room to hide, or keep up with them because I didn’t want to miss a thing.
When we neared the river, Robert told me I was going to have to bathe by myself because there was no way a woman and two men could be seen bathing together at the river, “especially Westerners.” I felt sort of left out and terrified to be by myself, but he gave me instructions about how to bathe in a sacred river, and they moved on. The boys walked around a dune, their voices trailing off, until the only sound I heard was the deafening roar of the river. By myself and not at all comfortable, I looked around and up at the huge, blue sky overhead. I took off way too many clothes—I would later realize this with great alarm—and walked into the river.
Following directions has never been my strong suit, and I couldn’t remember what Robert told me to do, so I made up my own ritual and then dunked myself in an act of self-baptism, feeling too self-conscious to fully give myself over to the experience. When I stood, the water was up to my ribs. I scanned inside myself for any differences, and then looked around. My surroundings were so stark I could have been on the moon.
The Yamuna is broad, maybe a hundred feet across, with a light gray sandy bank. I felt the pull of gravity down in the river’s trough and the force of the water sweeping around my body. It was all just sand, sky, and this wide, thick water. No clutter of voices. I breathed a big sigh, my whole body having finally slowed down to its natural rhythms after days of travel, heat, and terrible sleep patterns. At last I felt at one in my body with my environment.
Standing in this peace for a while I noticed something floating about ten feet away, in the fast moving center of the river. I strained to make it out. With a jolt of recognition, I understood that it was part of a human shoulder attached to a bit of torso. A disconnected hand bobbed after it. Horrified beyond words, I was suddenly terrified that I couldn’t see my feet in the opaque water. Straining to drag myself free of the river, I made it to the shore, naked and panicked and small, like Eve thrown out of the garden.
I dressed as fast as I could, tugging and pulling the clothing over my body, the whole process slowed down by the wetness. The realities of the sacred and the physical were oddly juxtaposed in this one bizarre moment. There was nothing to do but wait for Greg and Robert to return. My skin felt the kind of refreshed well-being that comes after cold water and dry clothes under a beautiful warm sky. Calming, I saw the river was smooth and unending and remembered not just Robert’s words, “the Indians have seen it all,” but the words of others who had told me that “Mother India allows for everything.” On that day, I dearly hoped that included me.
Later I learned that there must have been a funeral ghat upstream where they dumped the body before it had fully burned because the relatives didn’t have the money to buy enough wood to completely cremate their family member. At the time, though, only three days in the country, all I knew was that body parts were floating past. Get out now! was all I could think of.
After bathing, Robert showed us how to smoke bong, which is Indian marijuana that has been ground to a thick paste. Hemp grows in many parts of India, and it was stunning to see hillsides covered with these spiky green hands on undernourished plants. It’s not high quality stuff, and I wondered if the process of grinding it into a paste, which is done between two rocks, somehow extracts the narcotic properties to improve the smoke. It was sticky and wet and amazing that it even caught fire. After we got stoned I was in trouble because marijuana makes me vulnerable to fear, of which there was no end on my third day in India. I fell silent and that night became very sick with a temperature of 106 that lasted for a week. Greg became equally sick just as I got well. After that, we did have some kind of silvery immunity as we traveled through India. Steve had been right. We never got sick again.
* * *
When Steve had returned from India, he told me he had gone on retreat with a teacher who sang to his students early every morning. He described it in such beautiful detail that I was beside myself with longing to see this for myself. Completely coincidentally Greg and I ended up at one of this teacher’s retreats—then five or so more after that. But on the morning I first heard S. N. Goenka sing, my memory floated back to Steve’s story. The deep resonance of his voice sounded through the meditation hall and I knew it had to be the same guy. It was his songs that swept through us every morning, that cleared us up and strengthened our resolve for ten days of deep vipassana meditation.
Much later, after my return from India, Daniel Kottke, who had traveled with Steve, told me that it was only he, Daniel, who had meditated with this teacher. Steve hadn’t gone; he had only heard about it from Daniel. I was shocked. Why would Steve lie?
The taking of another’s story as your own is a type of thievery, charming or otherwise, that claims attention under a surface awareness. As an adult I’ve learned to give young people plenty of latitude to experiment with lying because imagination and what we call reality are just a continuum. And because the sixth sense is the most developed and inclusive of all the others, sometimes what we call a lie is actually a sixth sense that cannot be seen or proven—yet.
It may be that, for Steve, deception was a radical form of creating. He once told Howard, a mutual friend from high school, that Bob Dylan had sent his Lear jet to take him to a concert. Steve was seventeen years old at the time of this lie so he was just barely young enough to get by with it, but definitely old
enough to be playing beyond the edges of acceptable behavior. “What a liar!” I told Howie. I was incredulous and twenty-one. I’d had no idea Steve was telling people stuff like this back then. However, over the years, I began to think more along the lines of, what an extraordinary lie. At the very least, Steve had the courage to tell a massive one. And later, when he owned his own Lear jet, how could I not appreciate the nonlocal kinds of space and time in which the magician was playing. It was both a lie and a creation.
I believe Steve held multiple purposes in a single act of deception. Creativity, as I’ve said, was one. But it seems to me that he also lied to study people’s responses in order to gather intelligence. Sometimes I think he lied simply to make himself look more interesting because he thought he was too oafish and regular and didn’t think he was enough as he was. And I think he lied to tweak people’s insecurity, and in so doing, take charge of the environment. After he became well-known, Steve was able to manage perceptions to separate people and to discourage communication about things that he wanted to hide. It’s all so fascinating, of course, because the man who went on to be a part of creating technologies that connected people all around the world was himself so effective at keeping those nearby disconnected from each other. I mean this on both a business and a personal level. I’m pretty sure Steve was consciously strategic about the paradox. He was an acomplished trickster who operated outside other people’s awareness. In the end I found it disturbing not because he lied, but because he used a masterful awareness of other people’s blind spots to create and manage perception for personal advantage.
* * *
In May or June, Greg and I moved to Dalhousie in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, to get out of the heat. Dalhousie was an English hill station during the time of the English occupation and was used by the British to escape the scorching summer months. From our front yard there was a view of a seven-thousand-foot drop to the plains to where an indistinct arc of the horizon met the seemingly endless sky. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore had lived on the very top of the mountain we were perched on, where there was the most extraordinary view of the Himalayan peaks. Nothing I have ever known has come close to the magnificence of this view.
After helping me to get settled in Dalhousie, Greg bused through Pakistan and Afghanistan to Tehran, Iran, to teach English and make money so that we could stay in India longer. I was way too dyslexic to teach English; likely any Iranian would have had a better grasp of English grammar than I did, so I stayed on the hill.
About twenty Westerners from all over the United States and Europe had moved to the mountain to get out of the heat that season, and a month after most of us had arrived, Larry Brilliant came with his wife, Girija. From 1973 to 1976, Brilliant had worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox from India. While he was doing this, Girija was writing her Ph.D. dissertation on women’s studies. We were all excited to meet them, then one day word spread that everyone on the hill had been invited to their house for dinner.
The only thing I remember about that evening’s festivities was Girija’s talking about her research. She said that the highest suicide rate in India was among young Hindu wives in new marriages. Seriousness sets the memory like nothing else, and I remember studying her closely because the fact of this was so horrendous. Girija was very present and had a plucky graciousness that was impressive. Her colors were pretty and light: a gossamer shirt and a wide-patterned skirt that brushed the floor as she stood, walked, cooked, and talked. It swished in a way that reminded me of a waltz in a Disney cartoon. This was a happy woman and I wondered at her marriage—it seemed like a good one.
As Girija spoke, hers were the words of a careful reporter who had seen behind the scenes and into what I now consider to be a crime against humanity. She was careful and articulate as she spoke; the whites of her eyes widened to convey the full impact of what she knew beyond her words. She shared all this with us as a group but I wanted to know more. She told me that when young women are married in India, they move into their husband’s huge family homes. The young Indian wife has no status and no power. She is the least valued, least cared for, and least understood in the new family. If the family is cruel, which they often could be, she is in trouble; the mothers-in-law may take over raising her children and her sisters-in-law might put stones in her food so that she will break her teeth or worse. If the emotional environment is intolerable, the young wives will often see suicide as the only way out. But Girija went on to explain, “If she survives the ordeal, this woman might well grow old enough to take over the raising of her own daughters-in-laws’ children.” I remember thinking, What a terrible cycle. It may be that the goddesses are on equal footing with the gods in India and Hinduism, but the real women were suffering terribly. You can tell a lot about a culture’s values by how they treat particular segments of their populations. In this case, it was how they treated the young women who carried and gave birth to the babies and the future of the whole nation.
After Greg returned from Iran, there was a day when, unexpectedly, two friends we had met in New Delhi told us that the 16th Karmapa was in town at the ritzy Ashoka Hotel, and that we could have private darshan with him. The Karmapa lineage is Tibetan and predates the lineage of the Dalai Lama by two centuries. Catching the spirit like a cowgirl and a cowboy, Greg and I freshened up and took a rickshaw to the Ashoka where we met our friends in the lobby. We would be seen immediately. It was such a straight passage through, it felt like a free fall into the sky.
Before entering the inner sanctuary where the Karmapa sat, high-level monks worked with the four of us in an anterior room to show us how to conduct ourselves in the presence of a Karmapa. We were instructed to stand upright while holding our hands together in prayer over the tops of our heads. Next we were to bring our hands down to the level of our third eye, and then to our hearts. After that we were to stick our tongues out pointing downward toward our chins and force our eye-balls up into the top of our heads and bow. Each bow, and there were to be three of them, was a full body prostration on the floor before the station of this man. I was utterly embarrassed, but jumped in ready to do whatever it took to be in his presence.
We were led into the room and His Holiness sat watching us perform the dizzying routine until at last we lined up like Four Musketeers catching our breath for what would be next. From a Western perspective the following won’t necessarily make sense, but I will say it anyway. It is true that we were all four standing together, but it was also true that each of us was having a private audience with His Holiness. Brilliant and glittery-eyed cartwheels of light turned in his eyes, as he looked into our eyes, individually and simultaneously. From this I knew I was in the presence of a fully awakened, multidimensional human being. I felt vastly expanded and lit up under his gaze. I would later look at his picture hanging in a Palo Alto spiritual bookstore and feel the same thing.
The Karmapa asked questions through a translator and seemed to be laughing at us in the most marvelous way the whole time. Part of the deal of receiving a blessing from him was that he would give us each a Tibetan name. In the East, teachers and gurus often give you a god name. I had been given other names, Paravati and Sharda, by two different teachers, and this would be my third. I had not intended to collect sacred names for myself, it is just what happened. The Karmapa was about to receive his lunch so we were told to come back the next day for the naming. When we returned at the appointed hour we went through the round of bows and, once again, felt the exhilaration that we were all being seen individually, as if he had four heads and eight eyes. He had the monks reach into a hat and pull out slips of paper one at a time. Each name was typewritten in Tibetan script and read aloud, then handed to the translator, who explained the meanings in English and then handed it to each of us. I do not remember my Tibetan name but I do remember its translation: “The Guardian of the Gate.” The Karmapa encouraged us to ask questions, and after a short Q and A, we were sent on our wa
y out into the super-crowded, sun-blasted, noisy streets of downtown New Delhi.
I had gone to India because I wanted to be touched and changed by something as huge as the force that had touched and changed Steve. Seeing the Karmapa lit a fire in me that can hardly be overstated. The name that he gave me was a very powerful riddle that would take more than thirty years for me to understand.
Steve would later criticize me by saying that my trip to India was more of a vacation than a pilgrimage. But he missed it entirely. And only now after so much time has passed, and I have the depth of insight that a lot of work and a long life have afforded me, I am completely certain that India could never be a “vacation” for anyone who was there for over three weeks—it is too profound a place. That Steve couldn’t or wouldn’t see this, that he couldn’t allow me to have my own sacred experience without his distorting interpretations, is something that took me way too long to understand.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 14
