Mickey’s Theravadin monkishness set a high bar, but it was nothing compared to the gentle fanaticism of my Marxist housemate, Alain. He shunned cold drinks of all kinds, including the fresh lime sodas that I craved. Not only this, he shrugged off, as an unnecessary luxury, the ubiquitous boiled mixture of tea leaves, milk, and sugar consumed by everyone from Indira Gandhi to the leprous beggar who sipped his chai from a dented bowl clamped between two stumps.
I could not see the point in denying myself these cheap and delicious treats that seemed an essential element of life in India. Nor, in the context of Agra and its poverty, could I take such things for granted. I learned how to savor a two-rupee soda, to give myself over to the luxury of the refrigerated bottle as it rested against my lips, the icy bubbles foaming over my tongue, chilling my teeth and throat, sending up lime-flavored balloons of carbonated air from a thoroughly bourgeois stomach with no greater concern than its own sensual pleasure.
This troubled me. I had come to India not only to do research for my dissertation but also on a sort of ill-defined spiritual quest, which I equated, in part, with the ancient path of renunciation traversed by the Buddha and other great Indian saints and yogis. I wanted to strip off everything inessential until I reached the core, to discover my true self by peeling away, like the layers of an onion, everything I did not really need: Not me, not mine.
As it turned out, the discomforts and difficulties involved in just getting through each stifling day in Agra were my salvation. They absorbed my attention, diverting it from another, more fundamental problem. A loss I had not anticipated. A loss I could not affirm. Originally this journey to India was to have been an adventure shared with my wife, Judith. In the weeks preceding my departure things had not gone as planned. Things had not gone well at all. What had happened? How could two people fail so miserably to nourish their hearts’ desire? How could we have hurt each other so badly? I asked myself these questions frequently during those first days and weeks in Agra, when the borderline between reality and dream began to erode.
Reality: Judith had never really wanted to come on this trip.
She was an artist, a sculptor whose stylish metal contraptions were built from the detritus of American industry, most of it scavenged from junkyards around Chicago. She worked out of a warehouse filled with tanks of oxyacetylene and propane, hoses and torches and grinders and impact wrenches, an arsenal of demolition equipment and a one-ton chain-fall hoist she used to move stuff around. What was she supposed to do in India without the tools of her trade? To make matters worse, she’d have to pay rent on the studio the whole time we were gone.
Once I received the Fulbright she had grudgingly acquiesced, step by step, as the signs of our imminent departure accumulated. In the beginning I might have returned the fellowship had she asked me to, though in all likelihood I would have been incapable of doing this without becoming so bitter it would have destroyed the marriage. One always wonders how much of oneself can be given over to a relationship before there is no self left to relate. No doubt Judith was wrestling with some variation of this same conundrum.
Reality: I fucked up.
Or I should perhaps say that I established an unfortunate precedent when, a month before we were scheduled to leave for India, I allowed our friend, with whom we shared a large apartment on East 53rd Street, to slide into bed beside me. This friend of ours was the quintessential earth mother who loved gardening and baking bread. She was a woman who identified strongly, as I discovered, with her sensual appetites. While Judith socialized over brunch, I lay back and let her work me with her hands like a lump of warm dough, rising at her touch.
Reality: I confessed to Judith, naively assuming that our marriage would survive a single indiscretion. Hadn’t we talked endlessly about free love? Wasn’t everyone talking endlessly about free love?
Judith freaked out. Our friend’s husband—a graduate student writing his dissertation in economics—moved out. That left just the three of us. The weeks that followed were what you might call tense. Judith and I argued constantly.
The whole thing climaxed at a party I threw for graduate school friends and faculty. I knew I was in for trouble when Judith started drinking early. Jack Daniels on ice. No water. By the time the guests arrived, she was plastered. One of her friends brought along a joint of Thai stick, which didn’t help.
I was in the kitchen talking with Abe Sellars, my academic advisor, when someone came in and told me I might want to go outside and see if Judith was okay. Outside?? I bolted downstairs, through the small lobby, and out the front door. When I caught up with her, she was standing in the middle of the street in her party dress, consumed with rage, her eyes blazing in the head lights of passing cars. “Fuck her again!” she shrieked, loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. “She wants you! She needs you! She’s waiting for you up there, right now, in our bed!”
Among the guests who viewed this spectacle from the box seat of our balcony, I noted Sellars up there sipping his scotch, gazing down like some Olympian deity on me and my sorry life.
Reality: Despite all of this I was nevertheless caught by surprise when, only a few days before our scheduled departure, Judith went off to her studio to work late and didn’t return until the next morning, at which time she announced that she hadn’t really been working at all. She had spent the night with Bruce Wilkins. Wilkins was a friend of hers who played drums in a proto-metal band called the Roto-Rockers. A guy I barely knew, apart from the few times Judith and I had gone to hear him play at a bar. She had, furthermore, decided she was not going to India with me. She would come along later. On her own. When will you come? I asked. Later, was all she would say, when I’ve had time to think.
Dream: That she would write telling me to meet her at the airport in Delhi.
Reality and dream: The interminable nights when I would drift in and out of consciousness, waking in a soggy pool of sweat overwhelmed with the sheer strangeness of being in bed alone, of having lost this woman without whom, I now saw, I could not survive.
Yes, I wanted to learn to do without, to escape the confines of my life in Chicago, and god knows I had imagined often enough what it would be like to be on my own again, free to pursue my spiritual aspirations. But no matter how much I tortured both of us with such fantasies, losing Judith wasn’t part of the master plan. I reached out in my sleep for the familiar curves of her body. Or was I actually awake in the alien heat, listening to the demented braying of some wretched, brutalized donkey? The threshold between sleep and waking was easily dissolved by a thousand unfamiliar sounds, or by the absence of sound, as when the electricity failed and the ceiling fan coasted to a stop, the reassuring chop of the blades giving way to a dreadful silence that would pry its way into my dreams, rousing me with a start.
If the loneliness in my room was unbearable, the black expanse of the South Asian night was worse. Just outside the iron bars of my open window lay the tangled alleyways of Agra, a world that belonged, after dark, to the same disease-ridden dogs that cowered during the daylight hours, avoiding all human contact. Out in the shadows they fought each other and copulated and filled the air with their hungry, mournful cries.
Following hours of semiconscious torment, I would fall into a heavy, narcotic sleep that inevitably gave way to the first dim light of day and the rhythmic crunching of termites. The frame and legs of my charpoy were perforated with their holes. My initial sensation every morning was of an invisible weight of damp air and misery pressing my body down into the ropes that crisscrossed the bed. The small space inside the mosquito net smelled of hemp, cotton, and wood. In those first moments of consciousness, I succumbed all over again to the pull of debilitating sadness, a manic exchange of voices, an argument I could not win . . .
Judith is gone.
Be still.
You did it.
Be
still.
You pushed her away.
I loved her.
You feared her.
You wanted out.
I wanted only . . .
What?
I wanted . . .
What did you want?
. . . to find
myself.
So find yourself,
you
stupid
son of a bitch.
I was caught off guard by the intensity of my reaction to the sudden collapse of our marriage, dismayed at the realization of how deeply my identity was bound up in our relationship. I had imagined myself to be much stronger than I obviously was, much more independent. But now the voices in my head showed me otherwise. They bled into a compulsive undertone that lacked any center of gravity, revealing only this one great discovery: without Judith I was lost.
Every morning I had to command myself to sit up under the net, cross my legs, and attend to the cycle of respiration that carried me through the next hour and into another day. I talked myself down, felt my lungs expand and compress. The minutes dragged on until, eventually, I found some degree of stillness suspended on an anxious tightrope of breath.
As morning crept into afternoon, afternoon to evening, all over again the pain crystallized into images of our final days together. I rehearsed every detail of those last few weeks, the arguments and accusations, angry words driven into each other’s hearts like the shards of glass embedded on the wall outside my room. I wanted to believe she would come. I fought to convince myself that I did not need her to come. I willed myself to forget. I waited, every day, for letters that did not arrive. I had no idea that mail often took two weeks or more to make the trip from Agra to the States, and at least two more to return. As far as I knew there was no international phone service of any kind in Agra, a city where it was hard enough to find a refrigerator.
Passing through the tunnel of my loss, I emerged in a world far removed from anything I had encountered in my previous life. One after another, habitual patterns of thinking—of believing—gave way under a barrage of sensations, a reality so starkly foreign, so saturated with extremes of beauty and horror, that it simply could not be reconciled with memory or expectation. The effort to escape my anguish pushed me ever deeper into the texture of unfamiliar sounds and colors and smells. Driven by my need to forget the past, I threw myself into experiences that were only slightly less disturbing than the images I longed to repress. My white skin, my wealth, the very fact of my existence in this place was reflected back to me in a mirror of incomprehensible poverty and disease. Sensing my weakness, the beggars engulfed me, shoving battered tin bowls up toward my face. I flung coins into their outstretched hands until my pockets were empty, then retreated to the safety of my room and hid behind the bars that covered my window.
There were two men who passed by my house every evening just at dusk. One of them, a leper whose hands and feet had rotted away, rode on a crude wooden cart—really nothing more than a few boards strung together over four pitted iron wheels. He lurched past my window swaddled in grimy rags, propped upright and pushed along on his miserable journey by another emaciated man only slightly less disfigured. The fellow on the cart sang the same enchanting bhajan every evening, so predictable that I waited for his voice as a signal to close my books and prepare for meditation. The melody could be heard from some distance off, weaving through the streets above the laughter of children playing, the cries of vendors peddling samosas and chutney and chai, the voices of goats and cows and water buffalo, the shrill whistle of a steam locomotive. It was a love song to God, a song so sublimely beautiful that, sitting at my desk, listening, for those few moments every day I could almost imagine a way out of my pain.
3
THERE IS A PASSAGE in the Pali suttas, among the earliest of Buddhist scriptures, where the Buddha observes that in direct, first-person experience—which is all we ever really have—“mind” and “matter” are inseparable:
Within this fathom-long body, O monks, equipped with thought and the other senses and sense objects, I declare to you is the world, the origin of the world, and also the cessation of the world.
This may seem like an abstruse philosophical claim, but it’s quite obviously true. Looking back, for example, I can see that in Agra a corner was irrevocably turned. Like the young prince Siddhartha, I found myself outside the palace, in a new body and a new world, where nothing was quite the same as it had been and everything was unsettling.
It was during those first weeks after my arrival in India that I began the task of acclimating myself to an unceasing parade of discomforts and petty inconveniences. I learned to appreciate electricity when it was available and to stay calm when the ceiling fan died, leaving me drenched in sweat that ran down my face and fell in salty drops onto my books and papers. I conditioned myself to approach the tap with no fixed expectation, to store buckets of water for bathing, to lay in a supply of candles, to apply extra glue on my aerogrammes and postage stamps, to ask directions from several different people and to believe nothing they said. I practiced striking the spindly Indian matches at a particular angle so they wouldn’t snap in my fingers. I struggled to cultivate equanimity while jockeying for a place in the unruly crowd at the post office, at the train and bus stations, at the bank.
Any counter, every public office or shop, was always crowded, no matter what time of day I arrived. I recall one occasion when, after patiently allowing myself to be elbowed, squeezed, stepped on, pressed, and shoved for an hour while waiting to buy a train ticket, my “turn” finally arrived. As I approached the window the clerk informed me, in the most offhand manner, that I needed to go to window number 5, immediately adjacent to his own, where I would have to pick up a form that he himself was not authorized to issue and, bearing that form, return to him, at which time he could sell me the ticket. This meant at least another hour in the train station. When he finished speaking I struggled to find a Hindi vocabulary sufficient to express the profundity of my disbelief.
“Aap ne kyaa kahaa? What did you say?”
But he was no longer looking at me. He appeared to have forgotten me entirely. He turned to receive a glass of chai handed to him by the friend operating window number 5. From where I was standing I could easily see what looked like a stack of blank forms just out of his reach, to the left of the agent who handed him the glass. I forged another sentence in Hindi, carefully crafting the delicate syntax and a tricky use of the causative form of the verb, rehearsing it once in my mind before attempting to speak.
“Can’t you have him give you a form?”
He sipped at his glass of chai, then set it down in a space painstakingly cleared at the side of a stack of battered ledgers. He examined the book in front of him. He rearranged the narrow vertical columns of tickets that lined a wooden dispenser. Eventually he glanced up and seemed to be surprised to discover me still out there, clutching with both hands at the bars that separated us.
“My dear sir . . .” The English words were brimming with wearied condescension, as if they were heavy objects that had to be carefully hoisted up from somewhere far below. “What is the problem? I am not making the rules. You will please collect necessary form and return to this window. If you are having some problem, please . . . you go and fill out complaint form at window number 8.”
“Why isn’t it posted?” I gave up and spoke English, no longer willing to struggle with Hindi. My voice shook. I was straining to be polite. “I waited over an hour to get here. Please, just this once, have your friend there give you the form.” I was pleading, shameless, and prepared to do anything to get that form. “Please . . .”
He was immersed once again in the same enormous record book. I did not exist.
The man is a total asshole. I hate him.
I told myself to be patient. I reined in my anger and extracted myself from the rabble that had all the while been smashing me against the stone counter. Resigned to the worst, I shuffled over and inserted my body into the morass of other bodies pressing around window 5. After what seemed like forever I returned with the
required form and endured the same process of fighting and shoving. At last I found myself once again at window 4, just in time to see the ticket seller slam a Closed sign in my face, turn his back, and walk away. The window was shut down—for an hour, for the rest of the day, perhaps for all eternity. One could not know. In India, as I was discovering, some things simply cannot be known.
I slammed my palms against the bars in a display of impotent rage, aware now that I was drawing undue attention to myself, aware that I, the foreigner, appeared to have lost my mind while everyone else around me remained strangely unaffected.
There was much to learn in this India, a place altogether unlike the intensely philosophical India so familiar to me from reading Sanskrit texts in seminars at Chicago, or the India captured in the serene black-and-white photos of temples in Heinrich Zimmer’s Art of Indian Asia, a book I owned and loved.
Among the people I met during those first few weeks in Agra, I remember one of my teachers in particular. Ashok Mishra, an instructor in modern Hindi literature, befriended me early on. In his midthirties, he was frail and meticulously groomed, with a closely trimmed black beard. As a graduate student, Ashok had studied for a year at Oxford, and it had completely destroyed him; he was obsessed with only one thing—his longing to return to England.
He had a goddess for a wife and a little boy who looked like a miniature prince from the pages of the Arabian Nights. Evidently neither his wife nor the child brought him any happiness. On the occasions of my evening visits, the two of them, mother and child, sat side by side in silence, observing us from across the narrow room with liquid brown eyes while Ashok and I conversed in English and listened to the old jazz albums that he had carried back with him from England. His bitterness seemed to have infected the whole family. No one spoke but Ashok, and the topic to which he invariably returned was his abject hatred of Agra. “This city is a shithole, Mr. Stanley. A place fit only for pigs and cows.” Every other word that left his lips was an expletive hurled at the injustice of a destiny that had condemned him to live in this filthy backwater town from which he would never, ever escape.
Maya Page 2
