23
IN THE WEEKS that followed, I immersed myself again in meditation and study. There were days when I did virtually nothing but sit motionless on my porch, from dawn into early evening, settling into the rise and fall of the lungs, watching the passing thoughts and sensations. By mid August, the hot season was over, and India was well into the monsoon. It was time to leave the mountains. The cabin had been swept clean and its single cupboard stocked with tins of sugar, powdered milk, and instant coffee in anticipation of my next visit, whenever that might be. I was headed first to Delhi, to pick up my things, then on to Banaras.
I left Manali just before sunrise on a rickety, broken-down bus. The road south was a strip of asphalt winding between a sheer rock wall on one side and, on the other, a gravel shoulder crumbling away into the Beas River hundreds of feet below. I knew from the ride up that even under the best of circumstances the return trip would be a punishing, overnight journey. And this time of year, during the monsoon, circumstances were far from ideal. Only two hours out we had to stop where heavy rains had brought down tons of rubble, blocking the road. Workers labored with shovels and wicker baskets to clear a path through the debris; the loads they carried were so heavy that it took two people to lift them up onto the head of a third. Men and women filed past my window, alternately filling their baskets and emptying them over the edge.
It seemed like we had barely gotten moving when we ground to a stop once again an hour or so north of Mundi. This time the entire road was washed out. A section of asphalt had collapsed into the swirling whitewater of the river, leaving only a rocky footpath clinging to the wall along what had been the inside of the road. It was obviously the end of the line for our bus. Within seconds everyone clamored for the door, and I was swept along with the crowd. The men rushed around to the ladder in back and climbed up to the jumble of cargo piled high in the rack on top of the bus. I had no idea why they were in such a hurry, but as it turned out, we were playing a game—something like musical chairs. The bus waiting for us on the other side would not have room to seat everyone, and since no one had a reserved place, it would be first-come, first-served. Many of us would be left standing, packed into the aisle for the next five hours it took to reach Chandigarh. The point of the game was to locate your baggage and fling it over the edge to family members waiting below, then negotiate your way as quickly as possible over and through the rubble to the other bus. If you were among the first to arrive, so much the worse for the others.
It was quite a spectacle: a spindly legged grandpa tottered along with his cane, as fast as he could manage, with bent, arthritic grandma trailing not far behind. A young woman in salwar kameez clutched her howling infant. Men and women staggered under the weight of bags and boxes, plastic satchels, and burlap gunny sacks stuffed with onions and cabbage. Everyone was scrambling over the rocks, stumbling and falling, pushing and shoving to be among the first on the opposite side.
By the time I figured out what was happening, the whole thing was pretty much over. I ended up making the trip across with a group of stragglers, the truly feeble and infirm. When we got there, the new bus was waiting for us, its engine idling impatiently. Emblazoned just above the windshield in bright red lettering were the words Super Fast; before and after these words the artist had painted the Sanskrit symbol for Om surrounded by wiggly golden lines, as if each mantra were emitting rays of light. We were the last to board; most of my group had people waiting for them, seats saved. I, however, was stuck standing in the aisle, shoulder to shoulder with the other losers, gripping the metal bar on the back of the nearest seat, my bag on the floor between my feet.
We stopped in Mundi for lunch—potatoes and cauliflower partially submerged in a viscous, shimmering concoction of oil and green chilis, with a side dish of dal and a steady stream of hot tandoori roti, their edges charred and crispy. In the days before Starbucks, I used to rank American diners on the merits of their coffee. In Indian dhabas, dal served the same function. On the quality end of the spectrum you have a thick, richly seasoned pastiche of lentils, garlic, and onions that can be mopped up with warm chapatis or heaped onto a plate of rice. The other extreme is the watery, pale-yellow broth I had for lunch that day in Mundi. It may have been the dal that got my stomach churning. Within minutes after the last bite I left the table in search of relief.
The men’s lavatory at the bus station was an open sewer. I sloshed through the door and was nearly knocked over by the acrid stench. A man stood at the opposite wall with his back to me and his dhoti hitched up over one leg, pissing on the floor in front of the broken urinal. Nearby were three stalls, battered wooden doors hanging askew. Inside each was a standard South Asian squatter splattered with shit. One look was enough to propel me posthaste for the hill out back, where I stepped cautiously between piles of fresh and not so fresh human excrement. Behind a scraggly pine I dropped my pants, without a second to spare.
On my way back, I rounded the corner of the building just in time to spot the bus as it began to roll slowly out of the station. I sprinted after it, waving and yelling, enveloped in a dense cloud of diesel exhaust. Fortunately, someone noticed me back there and called out for the driver to stop. An affable, burly Sikh, he laughed out loud as I flung myself through the door and up into the crowded aisle.
An hour or two later we pulled over for a routine stop at Sundernagar, a cluster of dilapidated tea stalls huddled together near a bend in the road. Until then the bus had been traveling along one side of a deep gorge engulfed by steep, forested mountains. At Sundernagar, on the southernmost rim of the Himalayas, the valley abruptly opened up to a breathtaking view down and out over an endless expanse of verdant plains.
Grateful for this respite, I dragged myself out of the bus and over to a wooden bench, where I found a spot among several local patrons. My legs and feet throbbed. I ordered a chai, milk and sugar mingled with a hint of cardamom and the gritty taste of red earth. Behind me the high peaks rose into the late afternoon sky; in front, to the south, the hills tumbled down into the flat Punjabi haze. From far away the odor of jasmine drifted up. The air in Sundernagar was hot and humid, and for the first time in months, I was drenched in sweat. But it felt good; it felt like I was returning home. This was India in the monsoon, India at its most Indian. It was like being born, all over again, into an exotic, magical place that was, now, deeply familiar.
I was reflecting on such things, sipping my chai, when I looked over and noticed, for the first time, that the driver was sitting beside me. His gray beard was tightly braided, drawn upward and tucked into the turban; his eyes shone darkly under luxuriant brows. He was unwrapping a tiny parcel, carefully folding back the paper along worn creases. He saw me looking at him and smiled.
“Charas.” He nodded toward the sticky black ball that now rested in one palm, broke off a small piece and offered it to me. “Zaraa khaa-lijiyay, sahab. Have a bite!”
I hadn’t smoked dope for over a year, much less eaten hash. Of course I’d done plenty back in Chicago—grass and hash was the least of it. Friday nights Judith and I usually got roasted with a group of friends and went dancing at one of the clubs uptown. There was a period, in our prime, when her idea of a good time was a fifth of Southern Comfort and several hundred mic’s of blotter acid. But all this was ancient history. Although ganja was a staple of the Indian scene, since arriving here I had completely lost interest in getting high. On this particular late afternoon, though, something felt different. Maybe it was the driver’s congeniality, or—more likely—the lingering effects of Penny’s visit. Since her departure, a month earlier, I had been totally isolated, doing nothing but reading Sanskrit and sitting meditation. I missed her. A lot. In particular, I missed the wild sense of possibility that I had felt with her, the sense that anything could happen and that whatever happened would be an adventure. I had grown accustomed to thinking of Penny as more cautious than me, more bound to convention, but the ironic truth was that in her absence, my life had become
rigid and closed. And now I was returning to the plains, a place that, in many ways, she had helped me to love. What’s more, I wanted to return—not simply to the plains, but to the world. I reminded myself of what I took to be the core teaching of Vajrayana Buddhism: salvation flows not from avoiding what we fear as impure but from embracing it as our own. So when the driver offered me a piece of his oily hashish, I took it from him, placed it on my tongue, and washed it down with a swallow of chai.
This is the
body of Christ.
Amen.
This is the
blood of Christ.
Amen.
Gatay
Gatay
Para gatay
Para sangatay
Bodhi
Sva
Haaa!
It was dusk when we reached Chandigarh, and I desperately wanted to get out to find something to eat. The charas was kicking in pretty heavily, though, and I wasn’t sure if I could navigate the crowd and find my way back to the bus. It had occurred to me sometime after we left Sundernagar that the driver’s so-called hash was black and oily because it wasn’t hash at all; it was opium—or maybe a mixture of hash and opium. One way or another, I was extremely high and apparently getting higher by the moment. Everyone in the station was floating several inches above ground, like a school of fish, only it was all happening in slow motion, as if the fish were swimming in honey. I leapt, very carefully, off the last step of the bus and joined them, propelling myself in the direction of a centrally located refreshment stand.
There I managed to order two samosas and a Limca. While the man behind the counter watched me with curiosity, I painstakingly sorted through a twisted knot of paper money. I selected a five-rupee note and handed it to him, my arm telescoping oddly out of a luminous void into the space between us. At what appeared to be a very great distance, the bill dangled from my fingers, then set itself free and sank, languidly settling at last on the marble surface of the counter. I laughed self-consciously, then immediately regretted it.
A number of passengers had disembarked in Chandigarh, and when I got back to the bus, I found an empty seat directly behind the driver. This was a stroke of exceedingly good fortune. Here I could hide out in relative comfort, eat my dinner, and watch the activity outside through the open window next to me without fear of being left behind again. We wouldn’t be in Delhi until sometime early the next morning, so all I had to do now was settle in for the ride. As I bit through the warm crust of the samosa, sinking my teeth into a spicy mixture of potatoes and peas and onions, I was feeling pretty good about the situation.
It was dark by the time we pulled out on the final leg of our journey, through the Punjab and Haryana, where the monsoon earth was wet and the one-lane blacktop rolled straight out to the horizon between hulking, bulbous trunks of palms. The curves were gone now, and so were we, gone full throttle, as if pursued by some unseen diabolical force. The bus sped forward into the darkness, a mountain of battered steel hurtling blindly past villagers on foot and bicycle, veering around cows and ox carts, between goats and children, chickens and sleeping dogs. In the black emptiness of night the demonic shriek of the horn substituted for eyes. The shapes ahead were winged spirits flying in and out of the darkness as we tore past. I slumped forward over my bag, drifting between waking and sleep, my knees pressed against the short barrier that separated me from the driver.
God knows how long we had been traveling—several hours, maybe—when without the slightest warning, the bus skidded to a stop and I was thrown violently forward, my face slamming hard against a metal bar. People in the aisle were catapulted to the floor. A woman screamed, and I felt my heart knocking against my ribs like a jackhammer. From some remote corner of my brain adrenaline sirens wailed, and I struggled to pull the world into focus. A baby bawled loudly two or three rows behind me. I saw a dark wet spot on my bag, touched my lip, and brought my finger away smeared with blood.
Just outside my open window, a large crowd had gathered under a fluorescent streetlight that cast a pallid glow over their faces. I could see the shadow of something lying crumpled in the dirt. A man stooped over and picked it up, and I watched as he cradled a small, limp body. One whole side of the child’s face had been crushed, the flesh was badly torn, and a dark spatter of blood covered his head and chest; he appeared to be either unconscious or dead. The man was staring down at the boy, his jaw slack, mouth hanging open. All around him women wailed and clutched at their saris. The sounds they made were appalling; I have never heard anything, before or since, so rawly human, so saturated in despair. Their cries rose up from a dark world buried deep beneath the earth.
I barely had time to take all of this in before I realized we were once again creeping forward, forcing our way through the crowd, horn screeching mercilessly. I heard a loud thud, then another as the bus door strained and buckled under the weight of men throwing their bodies against it, trying to force their way inside. People were yelling and banging on the metal sides of the bus with their bare hands. One man had a long stick that he swung crazily through the air. He brought it down hard against one of the headlights, and the glass exploded into darkness. Several others perched on the front bumper, obscuring the driver’s vision. They were clinging at the windshield wipers. I could make out human faces contorted in fury and indignation, some of them pressed against the glass, demented, frightful masks ripped from the medieval Flemish countryside of Pieter Bruegel and transferred here, through some cruel majesty, to rural northern India. A man hung from the rearview mirror by one hand, running alongside the bus, legs pumping wildly. His other hand was clenched in a fist that slammed repeatedly against the driver’s window with such ferocity it was a miracle the glass did not shatter. All the while the bus was picking up speed. One by one the men relinquished their grip and leapt or tumbled to the side, rolling head over heels in the dirt. Within seconds we gained the open road, and it was over. The tires hummed; wind rushed past the open window next to where I sat gripping my bag.
The whole ghastly episode could not have lasted more than a few minutes, from beginning to end. One or two of the passengers shouted halfheartedly at the driver, who leaned forward now, gripping the big wheel before him as if he had the power to wrench it free, intent on putting distance between himself and the nightmare behind. No one seemed to know what to do or say, and as the road whipped by we retreated into a stunned, delirious silence. I remained frozen, waiting for someone to act. But we plunged into the darkness, and at some point I realized it was not going to happen. The bus would not stop. We would not go back. We would continue on, together, just as we were.
I retreated into a frightful, trance-like stupor, staring fixedly at the back of the driver’s head, my lip throbbing. This man had most likely labored all his adult life behind the wheel of some vehicle or another. And on this particular night, of all those many years of nights, he had struck and very likely killed a child. His bulky shoulders were hunched, locks of gray hair curled from under the folds of his turban. The threadbare collar of his shirt was grimy and soaked in perspiration. These and other details of his appearance now held my attention with unearthly urgency, as if placed under a high-powered microscope. Our driver had suddenly become other than human, a demon or a fierce deity of some kind—Lord Shiva himself, perhaps—but no longer one of us.
24
SOMETIME AFTER THE ACCIDENT I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep and awoke just before dawn, as the bus was sputtering into the Inter State Bus Terminal in Old Delhi. The driver was up and gone almost before the engine died, vanishing into the crowded station. The rest of us stumbled bleakly out the door. I was still drifting in a weirdly detached state from having partaken in the driver’s stash almost fifteen hours earlier. I briefly considered trying to report what had happened, but I hadn’t the first clue where to go, and I was worried what would happen if I—a foreigner—spoke up. From everything I’d heard about the Delhi police, I wanted nothing to do with them. It seemed
best just to get the hell out of there. I had no trouble finding a motor rickshaw to take me to the Fulbright office and my things.
The chaukidar at the gate let me pass with a nod. It felt strange to be back in that unbelievably quiet and clean office, surrounded by expensive furniture and carpets—especially given what I’d just been through. The lobby was deserted at this hour, the air conditioning turned up so high the place felt like a meat locker. I went immediately to the bathroom and took a look at myself in the mirror. It was not a pretty sight. My clothes were rumpled and filthy, my hair an oily mess. I hadn’t had a proper bath in months, and I’m sure I was casting forth a righteous odor. But there was nothing to be done for it. I washed up as best I could, rearranged my hair, and stepped out to find Mahmud waiting for me with a glass of chilled water. He greeted me as if my sudden appearance after three months, looking like I’d just escaped from a train wreck, was nothing odd. The expression on his face revealed nothing. I would have loved to find a hot shower and a bed, but the train for Banaras would be leaving early that afternoon, and I was determined to be on it. I no longer had a room in Delhi, and despite my utter exhaustion, I didn’t want to spend the night in a hotel.
I walked to the nearest chai stand for a quick snack, and when I returned the staff had begun to arrive for work. The next few hours were consumed with organizing my financial affairs and taking care of other mundane business. By lunchtime I was ready to leave. The director, Mr. Singh, was in his office doing paperwork, and I stuck my head in to thank him and say goodbye. He rose from his big chair to shake my hand. I’m sure he washed immediately after. Mahmud summoned a taxi and helped me load the aluminum footlocker crammed with books accumulated in Agra and Delhi. Fifteen minutes later I was in the New Delhi train station, where I purchased a ticket on the Kashi Vishwanath Express and made my way to the platform with plenty of time to spare.
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