Maya

by C. W. Huntington

  Ghora vay tsan

  aah low,

  bhanga ray-lee

  yaah.

  Late one morning in the first week of June, I hiked down to the bazaar to buy provisions. On an impulse, I decided to stop by the post office. I had given my address to the Fulbright office with instructions to forward my mail.

  There in the wooden box labeled Poste Restant, I found a blue inland letter with my name on it. The return address read Block C, no. 139, Baba Nagar, New Delhi.

  I took it outside and sat down on the curb next to a group of Tibetan pilgrims from Spiti who had chosen that spot to rest. The peaks all around us glittered in the sun, cutting a stark line against the blue sky. I inserted a finger under the envelope’s flap, carefully tore it open, and unfolded the page. In small, meticulously crafted script, was a short message:

  Dear Mr. Stanley,

  On the morning of 25 May my father passed from this life to the next. I felt that you would want to have this information, as you were his chela, and I know that he enjoyed so much reading Sanskrit with you. Please come to visit us when you are next in Delhi.

  Aap kaa,

  Krishna

  P.S. The wedding is postponed to later date. As eldest son, it is my duty to give pinda.

  Pinda: Offerings for the dead.

  Shri Anantacharya is dead.

  He had been my first teacher in India—a living tie, through his father and his father’s father and on and on, backward in time, to the world of classical Sanskrit literature and poetry. And now, so swiftly and so surely, he was gone. This is death, I thought. This is the meaning of the word. A man goes away and behind him a doorway closes, and that doorway will never be opened again.

  I knew in that moment, sitting there with the letter in my hand, that I had to find a place of my own.

  I began that very afternoon to search, inquiring here and there in the bazaar. Within a few days I found a secluded, one-room cabin about half an hour’s climb up a steep trail on the eastern side of the valley.

  The morning of my departure I packed up my clothes and books and papers, along with the blanket I had finished weaving only days before. I tied my two new cooking pots to the outside of my bag. When I left my room I found the entire family assembled on the porch outside. One by one I thanked them for their hospitality and said goodbye while Priya slept in her sister’s arms. Ramnath was last in line. I told him how deeply grateful I was for all he had done, but he barely looked at me. It was time to leave.

  I walked maybe a hundred feet, to where the path took a steep turn, and hesitated. Before losing sight of the house I looked back one last time. The family was still standing where I had left them, so close together their bodies touched. Only Ramnath held slightly to one side, watching me go, both fists planted deep in the pockets of his old coat. I joined my palms together, put my hands to my forehead, and bowed low, then straightened up and shouted “No vurry, mahn!” I saw him smile.

  21

  MY HUT WAS BUILT of stone plastered over with a mixture of clay, straw, and cow-manure. The tiny square room was lit through a single window and a shuttered doorway that I kept open during daylight hours. An alcove carved into the back wall could be closed against foraging creatures. My only furnishings were a circular tin stove about ten inches high, like the one I’d had at Ramnath’s, and a desk I made out of a split log laid lengthwise over two apple crates. I purchased a straw mat to sleep on, and I spread out a torn burlap sack in front of the stove where I prepared my nightly rice and vegetables.

  Everything about my new home was ideal, except for the roof. The beams over my head supported several tons of slate shingles that did a good job keeping out the rain but were much less effective when it came to discouraging the occasional rat and the not-so-occasional lizard that would slip through the cracks. All too often, as I sat reading, one of them would lose its footing and plummet with a resounding smack, striking the floor as if someone had slapped the stones with a rolled-up newspaper. They never seemed to be injured, but it always scared the shit out of me. Once, while I was working out the translation of a tricky passage of Sanskrit, some kind of obese red-and-yellow-striped chameleon dropped through the roof and landed squarely on the back of my hand. I don’t know who was more startled, but we both recoiled in horror and made a break in opposite directions.

  Like it or not, I shared my space with a variety of living beings. On the whole we kept to ourselves and things went smoothly, though there were some unpleasant moments. One early morning, not long after I moved in, I made my way groggily across the porch and accidentally stepped on a huge black slug; its body blew apart under my bare foot like a water balloon.

  It was the tarantulas, however, that really taxed my coping skills. What most disturbed me about these giant spiders was that I never, ever saw them move. They simply manifested. I might be absorbed in reading and would chance to look up, and one of them would be clinging to the wall, absolutely still, its body the size of a golf ball, shaggy legs radiating up and out like tentacles. My landlord assured me they were harmless. I wanted to believe what he told me, and I suppressed the urge to flee in terror from my new cabin. But it was hard to ignore them. Especially in those first few weeks, I rarely let the spiders out of my peripheral vision, which was not easy. They would routinely stay in one spot half the afternoon without so much as twitching. Eventually I would get distracted and glance away. And then, when I remembered to look . . . vanished.

  Spiders notwithstanding, I knew I had found the perfect hermitage. All alone, perched on the rim of a flat, terraced area amid an apple orchard, it was only a fifteen-minute hike to the forest, where I went every few days to collect firewood. My nearest neighbor, a German woman who passed her time reading Hegel and practicing sitar, was a good twenty-minute walk away. I hardly ever saw her—or anyone else, for that matter. Water came from a nearby spring. I shat in the woods like a wild animal, squatting under a tree with the cool breeze tickling the hairs on my naked butt.

  One night not long after my move to the new cabin, I woke up and stumbled out, half asleep, to pee off the edge of the porch—a drop of some ten feet to the steep slope below. Across the valley, the sky opened up between the jagged, snow-capped peaks like a hole torn out of the cosmos, black as death behind the great, curving arc of the Milky Way. It was like pissing off the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Standing there balanced at the edge of the void, it was easy to see how our conventional, everyday experience is itself suspended somewhere between the infinite reaches of space and the groundless, subatomic realm of quantum probabilities—extreme frontiers of the mathematical imagination.

  I stocked up on provisions and cut my trips to the bazaar to a minimum. When the vegetables ran out, I ate onions, rice, and lentils so as to extend my solitude for a few more precious days. I was in retreat, hiding from the world.

  22

  TOWARD THE END OF JUNE Penny came for a visit. From here she would go on to Ladakh for a festival at Hemis Monastery in Leh. Manali was considerably off her course, and the only reason she came was to see me.

  By the time she arrived, loaded down with expensive photography equipment, I had long since settled in at the new cabin and was thoroughly absorbed in my monastic routine. I had not talked to anyone in weeks. Penny was consumed by her academic work and could talk about little else. She had been selected to sit on a panel at a big conference in Paris, and she was thrilled. I could not share her excitement, and although I made a real effort to hide my feelings, my reservations were difficult to conceal. We did all right the first night, but things boiled over the next day.

  It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, and we were drinking Nescafé on the porch. We sat facing each other, our backs resting against two posts that supported the stone roof. Penny was telling me the details of a book she was reading, something by the art historian chairing her panel. I had been listening for quite a while without saying a word, but at last I could no longer restrain myself.

  �
��All of this struggle to climb the ladder of academic success seems pointless,” I finally blurted out.

  “What do you mean, Stanley?”

  “I guess I just don’t see what it has to do with Buddhism. That’s all.”

  She looked at me like I had just stepped off a flying saucer. “You mean, you don’t see what the book—or is it the panel?—has to do with practicing Buddhism? That’s what you mean, right?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Studying Buddhism isn’t the same as practicing Buddhism. Is that what you’re saying? Because if that’s all you’re saying, then okay, fine. I think we know that already.”

  “I just mean, well . . .” I considered, choosing my words carefully. “Why do you care so much about what these people think?”

  “People?”

  “Like this guy in Paris.”

  “This guy in Paris happens to have been a student of Henri Focillon. Do you even know who Henri Focillon is? He . . .”

  I shrugged my shoulders and took a sip of coffee.

  She stopped talking in mid sentence and put down her cup. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I get it. Now I understand. It’s the whole evil ego thing? Right? Isn’t that it?” She didn’t wait for my response. “Like the academic world has a monopoly on big egos.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say it, but that’s what you’re thinking. I know exactly what you’re thinking. Just because you hate your advisor . . .”

  “I don’t hate him. He’s an arrogant jerk, that’s all. People like Abe Sellars don’t care about India or Buddhism or anything, really. The texts—or whatever it is they’re studying—inscriptions, rituals—it’s all just some kind of proving ground, a way of jockeying for position in the big race to the top. All they care about is their own reputation as some kind of murderous intellectual.”

  “Okay, so maybe he is a jerk, but that doesn’t make everyone in the entire academic world a jerk. And it sure doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole lot of insanely egotistical people outside the university. That’s for sure. Because there are.”

  “It just seems sort of, you know, all about ambition, this need to be recognized as somebody important, somebody with power. It’s like this huge competition for status.”

  “And of course you don’t care about status.” There was an unfamiliar, and distinctly unpleasant, edge to her voice. She stared across at me. Her legs were stretched out straight between us, the tin cup of coffee resting on one knee, wrapped in the web of her fingers. “I suppose you intend to live here in this little cabin, all alone, for the rest of your life? Reading your Sanskrit books and meditating. Like your hero—that old man what’s-his-name.”

  “Kalidas,” I mumbled.

  “Kalidas. Right. Giving up on the whole project of being somebody. Is that it? Is that your plan?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Stanley the hermit. Stanley who doesn’t need anybody or anything—least of all status. Gazing down from his mountaintop retreat on the rest of us with our sorry lives, like some Olympian deity.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. What do I know? I’m the arrogant jerk.”

  “What you are is hurtful. You hurt people.” Her eyes were clear and wide and glistening with tears. She set the cup to one side and looked away. “You don’t think about what you’re saying. And you don’t even care about anybody’s feelings.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  No response. She sat quietly, looking out over the valley.

  “It just bothers me, that’s all,” I said, aware now that I was pushing it, but I couldn’t make myself stop. “I don’t know why. People have this terrible need for recognition.”

  At this she brought her eyes quickly around and cut me off. “Well it bothers me that you seem so judgmental. Like you don’t have a huge ego that tramples over everything.”

  “I just said I’m an arrogant jerk, didn’t I?”

  “Mmhmm.” Her lips were pressed tightly together.

  “But that’s not . . .” I reconsidered.

  “What? What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say, that’s not the point.”

  “That’s not the point.” She folded her arms. “If that’s not the point, then what exactly is the point, Stanley?”

  In the few days she stayed with me I found it impossible to make any but the smallest concessions in my rigid schedule of meditation and study. These practices were my refuge. And we did not have sex, which pretty much says it all. Not exactly because I didn’t want to have sex, because I did. Sort of. But mostly I did not want to, because it was my very desire for her that was most disturbing to me. It was as if I had been thrust back into my own past, back to the early days when Judith and I were first together. Only now I felt like I could see the whole thing all too clearly, every move in the game, and the game was going nowhere. She had a boyfriend in London; I was staying on in India. As for her feelings, I can only guess. She may actually have been in love with me. The sad truth is that I would not have noticed, and I did not ask.

  The day she left we made the long hike down to the bazaar in virtual silence. She bought some bananas and an apple for the journey, and I went with her to the bus station and waited while she got her ticket. From Manali she was headed to Dharamsala—a long trip through mountainous roads. We stood outside drinking chai, talking around the fact that we had made no plans to see each other again. People started to climb aboard the bus.

  “I better go,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you better go.”

  I wanted to put my arms around her—and I would have, but that was not possible in India in a public place. So we just stood there awkwardly looking into each others’ eyes. There was nothing left to say. And then, without a word, she slung her bag over one shoulder, turned, and stepped up into the bus.

  She must have sat on the aisle, because I circled the bus several times and could not see her through any of the windows. Still, I waited, and watched, hoping to catch a glimpse of her inside. At last the driver leaned on the horn, the engine kicked over, and the bus lumbered away, moving through the gears. It gained speed, becoming smaller and smaller, finally disappearing into the distance.

  I went immediately to the sharab shop and purchased a flask of Old Monk rum. That night the white clown got seriously plastered. He sat on the porch alone and drank the whole bottle and thought long and hard about what a pretentious asshole he was.

  Overnight the weather changed; the next morning was windy and cool. Puffy white dragons roamed the sky. The sun made fleeting appearances over the flooded rice paddies, shimmering in a maze of mirrors until another cloud cast its shadow half a mile wide across the valley, where it crawled over orchards and roofs of golden straw. Without a fire, the interior of the cabin was cold. When the sun shone I was comfortable, but when it was cloudy, a chilly breeze sifted down through the pines carrying the smell of snow and ice, and the coffee at my side steamed in its battered porcelain cup. I had a dreadful hangover and an even more dreadful sense of loneliness and self-loathing. I spent the morning on the porch, bundled up in woolen socks and a sweater, writing in my journal.

  My head is pounding and I feel like shit.

  Penny is gone.

  She was with me for only a few days, cooking, washing dishes, reading, but somehow she managed to make the place more hers than mine. More ours, I should say. Even while she was here I knew I would miss her. Even when I was most impatient, there was always that familiar, comforting warmth. And today, now, her absence dominates everything.

  I don’t understand. I was doing fine. Then she walked into my cabin—a serene, self-contained environment, complete in every detail before her arrival—and from that moment nothing was the same. She was everywhere. Hair pins, a brush, the skirt tossed over a nail by the door, a bottle of perfume alongside my books and papers. And now she’s gone and I’m lonely and miserable.

  How is it that when I sa
y goodbye to Penny it’s like I’m saying goodbye to everyone I’ve ever known?

  That turned out to be my last entry. I began to feel conflicted about the whole project, to distrust my desire to remember. I put the journal away and before long forgot all about it.

  Two days after Penny left, I discovered several of her broken bangles under some papers on my desk and spent most of one morning tying them onto twigs with lengths of black thread I had purchased to mend my socks. I carefully assembled the twigs into a set of wind chimes and hung them outside my door, where they revolved in the breeze, the tinkling of glass lulling me to sleep at night and greeting me first thing every morning when I awoke.

  In July I received an inland letter from Ladakh, nothing more than a few words telling me she would soon return to Delhi, and from there back to England. I didn’t hear from her again until sometime after I had moved to Banaras, when I wrote to her with my new address. She wrote once or twice after that, short, noncommittal letters, and I responded each time, narrating my daily routine, reminding her of all the mundane wonders of India, the kind of details that had so delighted both of us in Delhi. After the last of these exchanges, quite a while passed with no word from her, until one day, long after the fact, I realized it was over.

  There is an epilogue, of sorts, to the story of Penny and me.

  Only a few months ago I was in Manhattan visiting friends, and one afternoon we went to the Strand to browse. Downstairs, in the religion section, I ran across something on Tibetan tangka paintings, published under a grant from the Collège de France—one of those heavy, expensive art books with lavish color plates and a scholarly commentary. I turned idly to the flyleaf in back, and there was a photograph of the author, an attractive middle-aged woman with silver hair and green eyes. Penny’s eyes. Such beautiful eyes.