I later came to see that there were, at that time, many such people in India—people whose lives had been stunted through contact with the West. For some it was enough simply to hear about the affluence of Europe or America to be forever enchanted by its lure, or perhaps to enter this fantastic realm through the occasional Hollywood film that played at the Bhagavan Talkies, a cinema in the neighborhood of Dayalbagh, not far from where I lived. As a foreigner I could not easily avoid these wounded spirits, for they were fatally attracted to Westerners and seemed to love nothing more than to pass time in our company lamenting India’s backwardness.
While my host ranted, I sat mired in my own private hell of loneliness, marveling at the perfection of his wife’s skin, the very color of our chai. I longed to reach out and touch the soft contours of her sari where it fell over her breasts, across the gentle curve of her naked stomach, and down around her hips to the delicate silver ankle bracelets that jingled, faintly, as she nervously shifted her bare feet. What joy such a body could give and receive! Truly this man had been cursed. He could find no place of rest in the life he had been given. We talked about a lot of things: music, literature, film. But more than anything else it was this terrible defect that rent Ashok’s soul, this brokenness he carried within, that we shared.
And then there was Penny. Miss Penelope Ainsworth. I met her through Mickey. Penny was doing research for her dissertation at Oxford, working on a project dealing with the ancient sandstone sculptures of Mathura. She had a slim, boyish figure, ivory skin, and pale green eyes. She kept her chestnut brown hair tied back in a single thick braid, in the style of Indian women. I only saw her a few times in Agra, but she was always dressed in either salwar kameez or sari—never in Western clothing. Like Mick, Penny spoke fluent Hindi and appeared to be entirely at ease in India, despite the fact that she was, very obviously, both a woman and a foreigner and therefore subject to a certain amount of routine harassment from men. Still, it was as if she were surrounded by a protective force-field that held them at bay. She was beautiful and, in her profound self-confidence, unapproachable. The three of us—Penny, Mick, and I—went out to dinner once or twice at the Kwality Restaurant, not far from the Taj Mahal. That was about it. Except for the bus trip to Mathura.
Sometime in late September Penny invited Mick and me to travel with her to the government museum in Mathura, a few hours from Agra. She had an appointment with the director, a Mr. Bhattacharya.
After browsing the collection for a while, Mick and I left her in the director’s office and went outside for chai at a little kiosk nearby. It was a gorgeous, late summer afternoon. The sky was clear, and I was feeling uncharacteristically at ease, relaxing with my tea under a vast pipal tree. Mick had just lit up a bidi when Penny came striding purposefully out the museum door and across the yard to where we sat. Her eyes were blazing. She refused to speak other than to rouse us and demand that we all leave immediately.
On the bus back to Agra, we got the short version of what had happened. Apparently, the whole time she was explaining her research to Mr. Bhattacharya, he had been sitting behind his big desk surreptitiously jerking off. She hadn’t noticed at first, until he sort of got carried away and started jiggling up and down in his chair. Eventually it became a joke between the three of us, but at the time she was understandably furious.
On top of everything else I was dealing with in Agra, health problems made it even more difficult to focus on my academic work. My body was under constant siege. Not long after the trip to Mathura, my stomach began to rumble, then to boil and churn. I quickly learned how to balance myself while squatting over the Indian toilet, how to wash myself with the fingers of my left hand. Cup by cup I emptied the buckets of water that had been set aside for bathing as I hovered over the porcelain hole, five or six times a day, massaging my sore anus. I became a connoisseur of shit, bending down and scrutinizing each gelatinous mess for signs of possible intestinal disorder.
A few weeks of this sort of thing and my appetite faded, then virtually disappeared. I realized one afternoon that I had been surviving for days on a diet of nothing but Milk Bikis and chai. My throat was raw, my head ached, and some obscure valve in my nose broke, discharging a flow of mucus that would not stop. I purchased several handkerchiefs at the bazaar but eventually gave in and attempted to master the local custom in such matters:
Step 1: Tip the head forward, making certain that the nostrils are extended well out beyond the legs and feet. This is the tricky part, the part that requires repeated practice.
Step 2: Use the fingers of the right hand to plug first one nostril, then the other, all the while forcefully ejecting wads of snot onto the ground.
Step 3: Once the nose is emptied in this fashion, the fingers may then be wiped clean on any convenient vertical surface.
I forced myself to eat bananas and yogurt, then rice and lentils. My intestines gradually settled down, and after what seemed an eternity, the cold faded away. I adapted to living with a sort of chronic fatigue punctuated by sporadic episodes of severe diarrhea. These improvements left me time and energy to worry about other sorts of health issues.
The monsoon in India is a hothouse for every imaginable fungus. Sometime in August, a few months after my arrival in Agra, I began to constantly scratch my armpits. I scraped at the skin behind each knee and discreetly clawed at my inflamed scrotum. Under constant siege by armies of microscopic warriors, I retaliated with every available weapon, smearing myself with Ayurvedic creams and homeopathic ointments, downing pills and capsules for giardia and a host of other infestations. I still remember the first time I had to choke down those immense pink wheels of Flagyl. I studied the warning on the foil package carefully: “Metronidazole has been shown to be carcinogenic in mice and rats. Unnecessary use of the drug should be avoided.”
Unnecessary use?
What did it mean that I should be forced to decide between having my guts overrun with worms and poisoning myself with a known carcinogen?
The circumstances of my new life in India were so novel that it often seemed as if every sensation had become a source of anxiety or, occasionally, of sheer wonder. Perhaps it was simply that I had never before been so conscious of my body, of the curious throbbing of my heart or the rush of blood pulsating through arteries and veins. One afternoon I was quietly studying Hindi grammar, absorbed for a few blissful minutes in the words on the page, when I become aware of the singular pressure of the chair under my thighs, lifting me up, holding me there, ever so gently. The smooth, tubular surface of the pencil thrust itself against my fingers, pushing back, asserting its own will. The virtually inaudible scratch of an ant’s tiny feet moving across my papers inserted itself into my awareness with a compelling urgency. I sat absolutely still, listening intently. In all of this, it was as if there were something essential I did not understand, something I perhaps did not want to understand, calling out for my attention.
Focusing on sensations came naturally, in any case, since my daily sessions of meditation provided a laboratory setting for the meticulous, detached observation of my inner life and its workings. Back in Chicago—years before coming to India—I had taught myself to meditate following the instructions in Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen. I got Judith interested, and for a time the two of us attended early-morning sittings at a local zendo. The sparse, samurai world of Zen didn’t suit her style though, and before long she lost interest. After she left, I too quit sitting at the zendo, but I kept up my practice. No way was I going to stop. After years of searching, it felt like I was finally pointed in the right direction. I found I preferred sitting alone.
What captivated me about meditation from the very start was something both entirely simple and utterly profound. Until I began sitting, it had never occurred to me that one could learn, with practice, to distinguish between attention, or awareness, and its objects. But just this is the central and most basic technique of meditation in all the yogic traditions of India, first described
some 2,500 years ago in the Upanishads. In those ancient texts, the meditator is instructed to observe literally every element of experience from afar, to simply bear witness to anything and everything that arises and passes away before the mind’s eye. That’s it. Just sit there, without moving, and watch, allowing the focal point of identity to shift from the contents of awareness—thoughts, feelings, and sensations—to awareness itself, where all trace of agency dissolves and the burden of personality can be set aside.
Although I worked to cultivate equanimity around my various infirmities and trials of these first few months, the effort to step back from the tumult of thoughts and emotions was like trying to paddle a canoe upriver against a swift current. My loss was too deep, the images of Judith too powerful to repress. And India itself was overwhelming.
In the Pali scriptures the Buddha is reported to have asked his disciples,
What, monks, do you think is more—the water in the four great oceans or the tears that you have shed while roving, wandering, lamenting, and weeping on this long way because you received what you feared and were denied what you wanted so badly?
There were plenty of reasons to shed tears in Agra. Every day as I bicycled to and from the institute, I encountered myriad forms of human and animal suffering. The sick and dying wandered aimlessly through the streets, or lay where they had fallen—wasted, half-naked human bodies twisted into an astonishing variety of deformities, noses rotted away, faces bubbling with raw pustules. But it wasn’t just the omnipresent disease and poverty that was so disturbing. There was a kind of violence here that was unlike anything I had ever encountered. Indian society incorporated forms of casual brutality that I found unimaginable.
I remember one morning I passed a group of boys entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at a puppy. They had formed a wide circle around the little dog to prevent it from escaping. Every time one of the missiles found its target, the animal would let out a pitiful, anguished yelp, and the children would cheer and laugh. This was taking place in the middle of a crowded street, and no one—not the shop owners, the pedestrians, the cop on the corner, the men sitting in the nearby chai stall, or even the wandering holy men—seemed to care or, for that matter, to even notice. On another occasion I came across a similar scene, only this time it was a single boy dressed in his school uniform—navy blue shorts, white cotton shirt, and a clip-on tie, a little knapsack full of books. He was standing in a street not far from where I lived, flinging chunks of broken concrete at a sow who lay in a nearby ditch nursing her brood of tiny piglets. I came up behind him, indignant, yelling in Hindi, angrily commanding him to stop. I was only a few feet away when he turned around, confronting me with a distorted reflection of my own blanched, implacable face. I had never before seen an Indian albino, and the torrent of my pious wrath instantly collapsed into silence. His orange hair had obviously been dyed with henna, but his eyebrows were pure white. He squinted at me, a jagged wedge of concrete still clutched in one hand, his eyes glowing with pride and arrogance. After a few seconds he turned back to his game as if I didn’t exist.
One afternoon at the institute, during our lunch break, I read an article in the Times of India about a bus that had struck and killed a child. The accident happened in a rural area just east of Agra. Villagers broke into the bus and hauled the driver out, chopped off both his hands, and left him to bleed to death in a ditch. No arrests were made. The story was buried somewhere in the back pages of the paper, along with accounts of bride burnings and small-time political scandals.
Before coming to India, as an adult I had rarely cried; but here in Agra, cloistered in my room among the dictionaries and grammars, where no one could see, I wept. And yet despite the obvious suffering everywhere around me, I cannot say that my tears fell for these others. Like the disciples of the Buddha, I was only truly sorry for myself. Hemmed in on every side by a multitude of living beings, I was entirely alone. No doubt losing Judith had made things worse, but I now saw that I had been living this way since long before coming to India. My life was built around an endless, exhausting battle to get and keep what I wanted and to avoid or destroy everything that threatened my perceived self-interest. Only in my most distant childhood memories was there a suggestion that things might once have been different.
In an old copy of one of Edward Conze’s books, dating from my early years as a graduate student in Chicago, the following sentence is underscored: “Fear of loneliness is the icy core of much that passes as human warmth.” The margin bears a single line, scrawled in my own nearly illegible hand: “I am incapable of love.” Granted, there was more than a touch of melodrama here, but it is nevertheless true that I had tormented myself—and Judith—with such thoughts throughout the years we were together. The voices in my head were right: our marriage had been deeply wounded by my constant probing into the selfish motivations behind what, in my view, only passed for love. In Chicago this may have been little more than an adolescent failure—itself just another self-centered game. But in Agra my loneliness was no longer an existentialist affectation; the game lost any charm it may once have possessed.
Judith had abruptly disappeared from my life along with every other familiar landmark by which I might have navigated such a loss. And in my cultural and social isolation I could not avoid facing the truth: just as Judith had existed primarily as a reflection of my hunger for company, so it was clear to me now that all these human and animal others served merely as so many reference points for my own anxiety and fear. It was all about me. I cared for them only to the extent that their anguish was a source of pain for me. In this peculiar sense their suffering was not really theirs at all; it was mine, and in my present situation I could no longer pretend otherwise. In Agra it became obvious, for the first time, that some essential cog in the great, hidden machinery of the soul had long ago jammed, leaving me imprisoned in a fortress of solitude.
I recently discovered, in a box of old papers and notebooks from graduate school, a journal I kept during these first few months in India. The box had been stowed up in the attic behind a rack of old clothes. I had no idea the journal still existed; I quit using it a year or so after arriving in India and hadn’t given it a thought since then. Leafing through those pages, reading words I’d written so long ago, I came across something that stopped me cold. It’s the account of a dream—a dream I would never have remembered had I not found it recorded in this old journal. But I remember it now. Vividly. And now I see how everything that came after—the whole story I’m about to tell, in all its detail—must somehow have been leading inexorably to this dream, to this moment of remembering, where the beginning and the end come together.
Here is the entry dated October 20, 1975:
It’s Navratri and the entire city has gone mad with worship of Durga. Mick and I were out late last night wandering around, and when I got back it took forever to get to sleep. And then, early this morning, I had a bizarre, disturbing dream. Only it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like a memory—the memory of something that had happened long ago, something I had forgotten or repressed. Something I didn’t want to remember.
I was underground in a shadowy chamber—a cave, I think—and there were packing crates and stacks of old books everywhere. Just in front of me a small, luminous globe seemed to float in space, radiating white light. Below it the floor fell away steeply into pitch darkness, and from somewhere down in the darkness a faint sound drifted up. At first I thought it was the grunting and squealing of pigs, or women crying, but then I realized it was laughter—a man laughing crazily.
In my arms I held a dead child. It was the albino boy I saw in the street a few days ago. Only it was me: The dead child in my arms was both him and me. One side of the boy’s face was crushed, the bones shattered. His eyes were transparent, like two windows opening onto infinite, empty space. I desperately wanted to get rid of the corpse—to drop it over the edge and let it tumble down through the darkness, all the way down to the laughing man—
but the dream was like one of those dreams where you’re stuck on the railroad tracks and you hear the train coming and you can’t make your feet move, no matter how hard you try. I could not make myself let go of the boy. I just stood there, vainly commanding my fingers to loosen their grip . . . until, at some point, I realized that I was awake—or so it seemed—lying in bed with my eyes wide open.
I have no idea when I woke up. I only know that when I realized I was awake, it was dawn, and a hint of light was visible through the bars on my window. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking. I found myself in a world of exquisite stillness. A world that seemed to glow with the simple wonder of being. It was as if I had stumbled upon some hidden, magical quality of things. I wanted to lie there quietly forever, to lose myself in love of this world, but the perfection was heartbreaking, the stillness too much like loss. I couldn’t bear it. I needed to get away.
I tried to sit up and discovered—to my horror—that my body was paralyzed. The intricate mesh of the mosquito net closed in around me like a tomb. It was as if the dream wouldn’t end, as if I were trapped between waking and sleep, or between two selves: one of them alive but impotent, the other dead and suffused with power. I was truly scared. My heart thudded against my ribs as if it would explode. At last—was it only a few seconds?—the alarm clock rang and my body convulsed and jolted upright in terror at the sound of the bell. I nearly tore the mosquito net apart flailing out to turn it off. The sheets were soaked in sweat.
After that I was afraid to lie down again, so I just sat in bed waiting for the light, enveloped in the spell of the dream, my fingers opening and closing, the muscles in my hands flexing and relaxing, learning to let go.
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