4
FOR THE NEXT several days the world shimmered with an ambiguous aura, a strange mixture of dread and unfulfilled promise. Absorbed with the exigencies of my life in India, my memory of the dream gradually faded, though its emotional overtones lingered. Near the end of October I received word from the Fulbright director, Mr. Akaljeet Singh, that I was permitted to return to Delhi. Shortly thereafter Mahmud arrived in the black Ambassador, and I said goodbye to Agra.
By the time I returned to New Delhi, it seemed to me that the capital had more or less reconciled itself to the demands of Indira’s Emergency, though there had apparently been some problems with the newspapers during the first few months. Certain highhanded editors, accustomed as they were to a democratic press, thought it necessary to publish articles critical of Mrs. Gandhi’s administration. Prior to publication such articles had fallen under the watchful eye of V. C. Shukla, head of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, forcing him to intervene. The censored material was then replaced in the following day’s papers by so many column inches of blank space—a clever trick not at all appreciated by Mr. Shukla. When this practice was forbidden as well, the Times of India took to substituting for the censored words famous quotations from the writings of Tagore, Gandhi, and other freedom fighters critical of the British Raj. This, too, triggered an equally vigorous response from people on Mr. Shukla’s staff, who were quick to see the thinly veiled allusions. After that such games were largely finished. A provisional calm now prevailed in the capital. For the moment, people appeared willing to accept the relative order that came with the Emergency, especially after the nearly constant turmoil of protest marches, strikes, and open battles with the police that had preceded it.
Meanwhile, the seasons were changing, banks of dark monsoon clouds giving way to the crisp, sunlit skies of winter. Overnight the temperature dropped and the air became clear and cool. Suddenly everyone who could afford to wrapped themselves up against the morning chill. Wealthy Hindu ladies from Defense Colony and Haus Khas dug into their winter wardrobes and came up with luxurious salwar kameez of raw silk and intricately embroidered Kashmiri shawls. Their husbands could be seen every morning standing like big, lost boys in the drive or on the veranda in garish synthetic bathrobes that hung heavily around their ankles. They hovered there in patches of bright sunlight, a bit edgy, toes tapping ever so slightly, smoking cigarettes and drinking chai, calculating the expense of a young daughter’s dowry. Drivers of the motor rickshaws flying along the crowded thoroughfares near Lodi Colony and South Extension were bundled in scotch-plaid blankets that flapped in the wind like woolen wings. Even the cows were draped in cleverly tailored burlap sacks that allowed space for their floppy humps to protrude.
Wrapped in my own gray woolen shawl—a luxury I had purchased just before leaving Agra—I settled down to the task of creating a life for myself in Delhi. I found a small room in Lajpat Nagar and soon fell into a routine. A few afternoons a week I was obliged to attend classes and seminars at the university. This meant a long bus ride, but there was no choice, since my involvement at the institution provided the official justification for my visa. The monotonous lectures were delivered in Hindi, which was useful for learning the language; still, these interminable hours at the university stamped my speech with a haughty, Sanskritic flavor it has borne ever since. It was only later on in Banaras, under Mickey’s patient tutelage, that I learned to wield a repertoire of Bhojpuri maledictions so foul I was scared to use them in public.
I have many poignant memories of those months in Delhi. There were long bike rides through the city at all times of the day and night, trips to the bookshops in Connaught Circle, and outings to Lodi Gardens for afternoon walks among the tombs of the last Delhi sultanate, Turkish Muslims who once ruled all of northern India. There were, as well, excursions into the crowded bazaar around Jamma Masjid, the neighborhood of the great red mosque, where bearded Muslim traders hawked everything from auto parts and used clothing to spices, perfumes, and meticulously worked silver jewelry. I fondly recall several performances of Beethoven and Bach at Max Mueller Bhavan, an organization promoting appreciation of German culture. On one occasion, by exploiting my Fulbright connections, I got myself invited to a piano concert at the Italian embassy. Arriving in the dusk of early evening, as always on my black Atlas bicycle, I peddled through the imposing wrought-iron gates and up the softly lit circular drive, where New Delhi’s elite patrons of the arts moved in a stately procession of polished Mercedes-Benzes.
My education in the eccentricities of contemporary Indian society continued. I remember one afternoon in particular, shortly after making the move from Agra, when I was riding my bicycle through the orderly streets of an affluent neighborhood south of India Gate, only minutes away from the grandeur of the houses of parliament. On either side, I passed the homes of some of India’s wealthiest, most respected citizens, the heads of major multinational corporations, retired admirals, MP’s, and other high officials in the federal government. These are the people who even now shape India’s future relations with the international community, the politicians who will decide whether or not to engage Pakistan militarily, the scientists and high-level bureaucrats who plan and operate India’s vast economy. Every house was surrounded by a steep wall and watched over by a chaukidar who stood guard just outside the gate.
I was coasting along taking all of this in when the distorted squelch of a loudspeaker caught my attention. I followed the sound, riding my bicycle down a few streets to a spacious public courtyard, where several hundred people had gathered under a gaily colored tent. I peddled closer, hopped off, and walked my bike up to where I could peer inside. This was definitely not a wedding. Only women were in attendance, the plump wives of India’s economic elite and their svelte, unmarried daughters, all of them thoroughly captivated, so far as I could make out, by two men who looked down on the audience from an elevated stage at the far end of the tent. One of the two was an old fellow with a marvelous, bushy beard. He was sitting quietly, legs folded, eyes down, as if meditating. The second man stood in front of him addressing the group through a microphone. Neither of them wore any clothing whatsoever. The one at the mike was handsome in a movie star sort of way. He was holding forth on the subtleties of Digambara Jainism, an ancient religious sect that dates from the time of the Buddha. The Jain path to liberation is a form of complete renunciation that culminates in death by starvation.
I was certainly no naked saint, but a heartfelt disgust with my own impurity was nevertheless driving me deeper into a self-styled asceticism. The Fulbright grant made me wealthy by Indian standards, yet amid such widespread poverty I refused to live anywhere near the level I could afford. I sought out the grimiest dhabas, public eating places distinguished by a row of massive aluminum cooking pots lined up out front on a masonry stove. While I sat over my dinner—a few peas and a chunk of potato submerged in mustard oil and chilies—cockroaches scurried around my rubber sandals. The spices had tears streaming from my eyes. My sinuses poured. All around me Sikh mechanics and taxi drivers dismembered plates of scarlet chicken, the grease in their moustaches and beards glistening under the glare of neon tubes. A gold embossed picture of Guru Nanak blazed down from where it hung on the wall over the wooden cash box, illuminating us with his blessing.
After one of these meals I was stricken with food poisoning and spent the night dry-heaving over a plastic bucket, my body straining to turn itself inside out. For the next two days I was repulsed by the thought of food, yet I felt strangely cleansed—spiritually pure—a sensation that almost compensated for the ordeal. Nevertheless, within a few days I was my old self again, foaming at the mouth to do something—anything—to purge myself of an indelible stain that seemed to taint my very being.
One evening I fell into a horrific brawl with my landlord, who was apparently trying to cheat me out of a month’s rent. The ferocity of my rage at this old man caught us both by surprise. All it took was a few lost rupees
to set me off. What other ugly emotions were there, just under the surface, waiting to erupt?
November arrived and I was besieged by sentimental memories of Thanksgivings past. Of course the holiday did not exist in India, but I resolved to mark its passing with a thirty-six-hour fast. On the morning after the fast, I awoke ravenous and went directly to a shop and purchased five pieces of pista barfi. But after one or two timid bites I was overcome with self-loathing and ended by dumping the sweets into the hands of a beggar child who had trailed me as far as the threshold of the store. Later that night I crouched over my desk, lonely and exhausted. I wrote in my journal, “I’m tired of being selfish, tired of being greedy and hateful. Hollow as a cracked shell yet soaked with desire.”
From time to time some tiny, pleasant episode would distract my attention—the sight of a small girl with jasmine flowers tied in her hair, a kind word from a shop owner—and for a moment or an hour the world would appear innocent and hopeful, as if to be sentient, to wake up in the morning embodied and self-aware, was not such a painful thing after all. But always, before long, I felt the earth crest under my feet and the path begin its descent. Being less than fully healthy most of the time—and indisputably mortal—I could not rid myself of the conviction that my self-absorption was more than psychological. I felt as if somewhere in the raw, wet darkness of my body the hard seed of a tumor had quietly sprouted.
I clung to my academic work, which meant that I was constantly reading. There was the library at Delhi University, of course, and the big American Library near Connaught Place, where I often went to browse. But there were also lots of cheap bookstores in the markets of New Delhi. The only thing I spent money on was books. My favorite place for this was Motilal Banarsidass, in Jawahar Nagar, not far from the university. I spent many afternoons, after class was dismissed, foraging through those dimly lit, chaotic aisles stacked with books on every aspect of Indian culture. I read voraciously, books on religion, books on mysticism, logic, mythology, psychology, and philosophy.
All the while I continued to research the early history of Vedanta—a Hindu philosophy that was to have been the foundation for my dissertation. I found Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, mesmerizing. Its phonetic structure, its ability to form compounds of truly extravagant length, its complex grammar—eight cases, six types of aorist, singular, dual, and plural forms in every declension and conjugation. The undisputed queen of Indo-European languages. And then there is the inconceivable wealth of vocabulary, developed over the more than three thousand years when this language was the primary vehicle for South Asia’s intellectual and artistic culture. Reading the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, or some other classical text in the original Sanskrit meant that I was engaging with the actual words of Indian philosophers, poets, mystics, and yogis who were otherwise lost in time. To study their writing like this was to gain privileged access to a way of understanding—to an entire world, really—inconceivably remote from my own.
I should acknowledge that this trip to India was made against the express wishes of my graduate advisor. He considered it unnecessary. In his own words, “Going to India is a waste of time.” And I suppose he should know. Abraham Bentley Sellars was an internationally renowned historian of religion who occupied an endowed chair at the University of Chicago. Sellars was the author of countless articles and three books on the history of religion in India that were widely acknowledged as both learned and original. Every bit of this dazzling work had been done in the library, or right in his office in Swift Hall. That is to say, Abe Sellars had never himself set foot in India, and he had no desire to do so. His interest in Indian culture was strictly professional. He delighted in exposing the delusion and outright hypocrisy that—in his view—lay behind ancient Hindu ritual practices and, one gathers, behind the entire ancient Indian religious world. He had built his substantial reputation brick by brick, demonstrating in considerable detail how—through a meticulous historical analysis—humanity’s deepest spiritual impulses could be adequately understood in terms of competition for power and wealth. Abe Sellars was a man of formidable intelligence, but he was cursed by a sort of reverse Midas touch: In the brilliant light of his intellect, everything could be explained and everything turned to dust. I had come to India, against his advice, to see if I could find here something important, something alive, something not even Abraham Sellars could kill.
Late one afternoon I took a break from my reading and made my daily ride over to the Fulbright office to check the mail for a letter from Judith. I removed a stack of envelopes from the “H” box and took them over to the couch, where I could sit down and sort through the pile—a task that didn’t take long. I was about to run them by one or two more times, just in case, when I felt someone’s eyes on me. I looked up and saw a woman standing across the room obviously waiting to get my attention. I had been peripherally aware of her conversation with the secretary. She had arrived in India a couple days before and was in the process of straightening out the formalities of securing a research visa. She wore tortoise shell glasses and a printed cotton dress, one of those Indian imports found in stores with names like “The Middle Kingdom,” that had about it a crumpled, detached air. Her short, frowzy hair appeared not to have been given much creative attention since sometime before the preliminary exams and dissertation, years ago. Then again the style may have been calculated to give an impression that this hair adorned a head with better things to think about than how it looked in a mirror.
Few places are more convivial than the Fulbright lounge, where one can be assured of coming across an intrepid academic type anxious to recount, with a vaguely jaded air, the latest adventure in Rajasthan or Kashmir, or to whine on interminably about the exorbitant cost of housing and domestic help in New Delhi. Even more likely is the possibility of spending an hour being assailed with every last detail of some obscure research project. All of this can be entertaining in its own way if you’re in the right frame of mind. It is a ritual act, one that every academic engages in, a sign of membership in the guild, curiously reassuring even when the conversation is excruciatingly pedantic.
I nodded in her direction and offered a faint smile.
She walked over to where I sat and extended a hand, which received a cursory shake. “Hi. Mind if I sit down?”
I motioned to the space on the couch next to where I had stacked the mail.
“Margaret Billings. Columbia. I’m working on medieval inscriptions.” She leaned back into the soft couch, eased one leg confidently over the other, rearranged her dress and began rummaging through a purse the size of a small suitcase. “I know they’re in here somewhere . . . ah, la voilà!” She took out a package of Dunhills, flipped back the lid, and offered me one.
“No thanks.”
“So you don’t smoke?”
“Nope.”
“Well good for you. I wish I didn’t.” She gazed wistfully at the box in her hand. “These are duty free. I picked up four cartons at Heathrow, but when they’re gone . . . oh, the hell with it. I’ve been through it before. I suppose I’ll survive. But those Indian cigarettes . . . my god. Believe me, you have no idea.” She lit up and took a long drag.
I began to rifle through the letters again.
“What a pain.”
I held a finger in the stack and looked up. “What?”
“Oh, you know.” She sighed. “All the shit they put us through: half a dozen pictures, forms, and stamps, one office after another. I’ve got to go over to foreigner’s registration at Hans Bhavan this afternoon, then who knows where else before I’m finished. I’ll tell you one thing, though . . .” She leaned forward conspiratorially and lowered her voice. “These Fulbright people don’t know their head from their ass when it comes to getting a research visa taken care of. The truth is they’re totally dependent on the American Institute. If the director over there hadn’t agreed to help me out, I’d still be waiting in some god-forsaken office at Hans Bhavan next month. He’s sending
a man here right now to escort me through.”
“Very nice,” I said. “I had a friend with an AIIS grant a few years back. I know what you’re saying. They know how to work the system.”
“If you ever need help you certainly know where to go.” She puffed on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “I guess I’m happy to be back again. A little less pressure would be okay by me, though. I’m under the gun. My research has to be finished in time to present at the AAR conference in San Francisco next fall. I’m chairing a panel on Gupta rock inscriptions. My paper will deal with the Girnir material. The archives here in Delhi are packed with photographs and rubbings that no one has even looked at. Frank Davis—at Chicago, you know?” She glanced at me just long enough to take in my nod.
Bonding, I thought to myself. But it felt all right to belong, to be accepted as a colleague of sorts, even in this trivial way.
“Well,” she continued, “he published his last paper in The Journal of Asian Studies without even a footnote acknowledging this stuff exists. Can you believe it?”
She broke here for another drag, evidently expecting that all of this should make a deep impression on me.
“He went into detailed speculation on the local city administration of the Gupta, all of it based on a single inscription. Nothing but formal panegyric.”
“His paper?” I realized my attention had lapsed. I must have missed something.
She looked at me as though she were beginning to suspect that I might not be able to hold up my end here after all. “No, not his paper. The inscription. The inscription at Girnir praises a man named Chakrapalita, apparently the son of a provincial governor Parnadatta.”
“Right,” I said. “The inscription is a formal panegyric. I see.”
Maya Page 4
