Mick had learned some Pali in Thailand, and he loved to argue about philosophy. One time back in the Agra days we took a bus to Bhopal. We were going to visit Sanchi, an ancient Buddhist site. After hours of nonstop discussion about some abstruse point of Abhidharma, the conversation gave way to the roar of the engine and the sound of rubber turning against hot pavement. I had nearly fallen asleep when out of nowhere he began to sing a bhajan—one of those irresistibly seductive Hindu prayers, a song of yearning for the warm flesh of an adulterous lover, for reunion with the divine. It’s possible he didn’t even realize he was singing. The melody was barely audible over the sounds of the road. One by one, though, the men and women around us stopped talking and turned to listen, filled with wonder at the sound of this foreigner’s voice, a beauty sufficient to move the heart of God.
Mick looked down at the paper in his hand and considered for a moment, draining the last of the coffee. “This Mahayana stuff is crazy shit, Stan.”
I didn’t respond.
“What’s this mean—‘well prepared’? Prepared for what?”
“Maybe that’s not the best translation,” I said, a bit defensively. Vaidya’s Sanskrit edition of the text was lying on the desk. I picked it up and located the long compound. “Mahasamnaha-samnaddho. . . It means something like ‘he has put on great armor.’ You know, ‘girded his loins.’” I smiled. “Hey, how about that? Shall I use it?”
He continued to study the English text. “As in, like, he’s prepared for war or something.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Like in the Bhagavadgita, where Arjuna is preparing to go into battle.”
“Against his relatives.” As he said this, he looked up and caught my eye.
I nodded.
“So the bodhisattva is well prepared to go out and kill his relatives.”
“I don’t think so, Mick.”
“But that’s what the Gita is all about, right? Arjuna doesn’t want to kill his relatives, and Krishna—you know, God—tells him it’s his duty. His dharma. He’s a warrior. Warriors kill people, Stan. That’s what they do. This bodhisattva is a warrior.”
“It’s a metaphor, for Chrissake.”
“Okay, then you tell me what it means.”
I felt myself growing impatient. “Doesn’t it seem like, well, sort of a stretch, that the bodhisattva is someone ‘well prepared’ to go out and kill the people he loves?”
“Maybe so,” Mick replied. “But then what about this?” He picked up the copybook and tapped his finger on one line. “‘Has anyone been slain or killed or made to disappear?’ It’s pretty obvious the answer is no. People aren’t really born—right?—so they don’t really die, either. So it doesn’t matter if the bodhisattva kills them because he won’t really have killed anyone. That’s what it means, Stan. Just like in the Gita. It’s obvious.”
He cocked an eyebrow, as if to say I just cashed you out, Dude, so admit it.
“For God’s sake, Mick, it doesn’t say he kills them. It says he leads them to nirvana.”
“So what’s the armor for?”
“Mick . . .” I took the copybook out of his hands and laid it back on the table. “You can’t just go and read a Buddhist Prajnaparamita text as if it were a chapter from the Bhagavadgita.”
“Oh?” Again with the eyebrow. “Why not?”
“For one thing, according to Sankhya—the philosophy behind the Gita—there’s a fundamental distinction between the body and the ‘self’ or soul; they’re completely different substances, but both of them are equally real. In the Sankhya view, the true self is pure awareness, something called purusha. The body is prakriti. All sensations are prakriti. So are thoughts and feelings, and everything else, for that matter. So the body is born and it does die. Really die. That’s a big difference. In Mahayana Buddhism there’s no such ultimate distinction between body and soul or between consciousness and its objects. It’s just like you said—in the Mahayana, at least, everything’s equally unreal. It’s all shunya—empty of any kind of absolute or ultimate reality.”
He blinked. “Sounds to me like some kind of bullshit philosophical hair-splitting.”
This was beginning to piss me off. “Look, Mick, I’ve got things to do. Okay? I’m really grateful to you for getting that train ticket. I am. But, well, I’m sort of busy now. I’ve got stuff to do to get ready for the trip.”
He wandered over to the window and looked down at the street, which was busy now with people moving to and from the river. “Life is a war zone, you know? Someone’s gotta die so someone else can live. Even if you’re a vegetarian, you have to kill the goddamn carrots in order to survive.”
“Oh come on,” I broke in. “You don’t really think killing a carrot is the same as . . .”
He ignored my interruption. “If you’re here at all, you’re guilty.”
“Guilty? Is this some kind of Catholic thing?”
“Sure. Why not? Even God is a killer: He giveth life and he taketh it away. Right? Nobody’s hands are clean. Sometimes I think the hardest part is just finding a way to live with yourself—with what you do every day, you know, just to exist. Why should a bodhisattva be any different from the rest of us? Has he, like, been granted some kind of reprieve or something from the Buddha? I don’t think so. All he’s got, so far as I can tell, is compassion. Isn’t that right? Compassion. That’s all he’s got.”
“And wisdom.”
“Wisdom,” he repeated the word. “Well, I hope he has the wisdom to gird his fucking loins.”
He turned away from the window and stared at me with his trademark blank look, then reached over and extracted a jalebi from the bag, which I had left lying on the desk. “Anyway, that’s the way I see it. But it’s not my problem. You’re the scholar.” He dropped the jalebi into his mouth and slung his jhola over one shoulder. “But remember, the quality of your translations will help shape the future of the Buddha’s teaching in the West.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“So I guess I’ll see you when you get back from Delhi?”
“Yeah. And thanks again, Mick. You know, for the ticket and all.”
“No problem. Have a hot fudge sundae for me, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
I watched him slip on his rubber sandals and step through the door. The slapping of his feet echoed against the concrete stairwell as he descended. Through the window I could see him in the street, fiddling with the rusty lock on his bike.
I had to admit he was right—at least he was right about the Gita. Krishna had told Arjuna that it was his duty—his dharma as a warrior—to kill his relatives. It’s all there in the opening scene, and every commentator from Shankara to Mahatma Gandhi has struggled to reconcile those verses with the teaching of ahimsa, or nonviolence, the cornerstone of the spiritual life in India. I went over and pulled a copy of the Gita off the shelf, opened to the first chapter, “The Despondency of Arjuna,” and read,
I do not want to kill them, O Krishna,
even if I myself am to be killed.
Turning to the index of first lines, I scanned down and found what I was looking for in chapter 11, where Arjuna is granted a vision of Krishna’s real identity:
I am time, almighty destroyer of worlds,
appearing here for their annihilation.
They have already been destroyed by me.
You will be the mere instrument, O warrior!
And then it struck me: Kalidas.
36
ON MARCH 22, election results were announced. Indira had been defeated by a coalition of her enemies. A few days later—on the very morning that Mick delivered my ticket—she officially resigned. The whole country was in the streets celebrating the news. It was not the best time to be traveling to Delhi, but I had my reservation and was determined to go. Geshe Sherap’s letter of introduction was tucked securely between the pages of my passport; the passport was zipped into a cloth pouch I wore on a belt under my shirt.
The train left as scheduled at t
wo in the afternoon. I was traveling second class, which meant I had no guarantee of a place of my own until sometime after dark. My compartment was already full beyond capacity—eight of us were crammed into a space designed to seat six. For the rest of the day people would be getting on and off every time the train stopped. But I had long since figured this out. No one wanted to be in an upper berth during the daytime, so unless things got really crowded it was uncontested territory. If I grabbed it early—as I did this time—it was mine for the duration. I shoved my old canvas bag up there, then went to one end of the car and stood in the open doorway, where I could lean out, feel the breeze, and watch the tracks rattle past. Looking out on the rural Indian countryside, I imagined Prince Siddhartha wandering there, searching for a way to live in the face of old age, sickness, and death.
We sped through an endless network of raised pathways dividing the earth into small, sunken plots of land. In the monsoon they would be flooded with water, muddy and lush with grain; in March they were nothing but open graves, brittle tubs of cracked earth. From time to time we passed a cluster of adobe huts squatting in a common yard of packed clay, a single bucket suspended over the low, circular opening of the well, women in saris threshing wheat in the shade of a gnarled tree, a stone image of the village deity installed at its root.
An hour or so outside of Banaras, near Jaunpur, the train slowed at an intersection, and a group of children gawked, then waved, laughing and pointing at the foreigner who had appeared out of nowhere and was already vanishing into the distance. In the early evening we stopped at Sultanpur, where I purchased chai from a vendor and drank it on the platform. Sometime after dark I climbed up into my berth, opened my bag, and dug out a beat-up copy of the Rupachandrika—a compact book containing some seven hundred pages of essential Sanskrit conjugations and declensions. I worked on memorizing irregular verbs and then read a novel Richard had given me. After a while I dozed off. I woke up around eleven o’clock at night, just as we were entering Lucknow.
Lucknow is a large city, and the station was a madhouse. It was impossible to know how long we would stop before moving on, so for people waiting to board, there was no time to waste. Men and women rushed the train, yelling at the porters, who struggled with enormous bags and trunks. We had not even come to a stop and people were already leaping in the door and pushing their way through the narrow aisles of our car. Everywhere children clung to their mothers and whined, babies howled, and vendors hawked their wares. “Chaaii! Garam chaaii!” Up and down along the length of the train, people shoved steaming clay cups through the open windows. Peddlers crowded around with an endless assortment of cheap plastic toys and water bottles, stainless-steel tiffins, glass bangles, and colored prints of Hindu gods. One man balanced a straw basket on his head; it was stacked high with freshly severed slices of mango and bright orange papaya that had been neatly arranged in an ascending series of smaller and smaller concentric circles. Another man stood behind a hammered brass tray heaped with unshelled peanuts carefully banked around a small aluminum pot filled with hot coals. He scooped up the dry husks, letting them fall from his fingers into a hand-held scale. Next to him a man in baggy kurta-pajama had transformed himself into a sort of living shop. The red frames of his sunglasses—lenses shaped like two huge hearts—obscured the entire upper half of his face. Several dozen pairs of similar plastic frames were pinned to his hat and every square inch of his pants and shirt. Overhead, loudspeakers buzzed with announcements in English and Hindi while the locomotives groaned in and out of the station.
I hadn’t eaten since early afternoon, and I was hungry. I went outside to stretch my legs and stuff down some sabji-puri, being careful to stand outside the window to my compartment, where I could keep an eye on my bag. The puris were hot and greasy, and I used them to scoop green chilies, potatoes, and peas out of a shallow bowl fashioned of dried leaves that had been stitched together with their own stems. From my left a wobbly, box-like cart approached. An old man, barefoot, bald, and naked except for a scraggly gray beard and a loincloth, leaned heavily against one end of the cart, pushing with every ounce of his strength. It appeared to be all he could do to keep the thing trundling along on its tiny casters. There was an A-frame rack in the center of the cart; on it was fastened a collection of magazines in Hindi, Urdu, and English, all of them bearing glossy photographs of Bollywood movie idols—a gallery of smug, meaty-faced demigods with puffy lips and dazzling white teeth. Eyelids at half-mast, they pouted at the camera, as if to make it absolutely obvious, by such prosaic signs, that they were sated with hedonistic pleasures far beyond anything we mortals could possibly conjure up in our wildest, most intemperate dreams.
I had finished eating all but the last couple of mouthfuls of my meal when I noticed a hairless, skeletal dog hiding under the train. I tossed what was left over the edge of the platform and watched him lick the leaves clean. He looked up hopefully, then spooked and ran under the next car and stood cowering in the shadows. As I was crouching there, attempting to coax him out with a Milk Biki, a peddler walked by lugging a brass bucket filled with ice and bottles of soda. I purchased a cold Limca and downed it in one gulp. When I looked back, the dog was gone. I tossed the biscuit over the edge, then boarded my car and climbed back into the upper berth.
Not more than a foot over my head, a fan attached to the curved ceiling rattled in its metal cage like a trapped rat. The night air was cooler, but I was still damp with sweat. I wrapped myself in a lungi, closed my eyes, and was soon rocked to sleep by the clacking of wheels.
I was awakened by an eerie silence; the train was not moving. A dim light filtered into my compartment from outside, and from the bunk below me I could hear the faint, wheezing sound of a man snoring. At first I thought we were on a side track, as often happens, waiting for another train to pass. But after a few minutes I leaned out of my berth and peered down through the window and saw that we had stopped at a small, rural station. I was wide awake now and terribly thirsty from the sabji-puri, so I decided to see if I could find something to drink. Careful not to disturb the people sleeping below me, I climbed down from my bunk, slipped on my sandals, and walked quietly along the aisle and out the door.
The platform was deserted. Inside the station house a neon tube hummed faintly, its sterile light illuminating half a dozen small, translucent lizards that clung to the wall. Otherwise everything was silent and empty—not a person in sight. And then I heard someone shout sahab and I turned, and there, several hundred feet off to my right, where the platform descended to the ground in a long, sloping ramp, I spotted a ramshackle chai stall. The proprietor—a middle-aged Sikh—squatted under a single electric bulb; in front of him I could see the orange glow of coals. He waved in my direction, beckoning me. If I were lucky, I’d have just enough time to get a chai.
I walked as quickly as I could, holding close to the train in case it should start to move. I had just reached the foot of the ramp when a child emerged from the shadows and came toward me, his hand extended. Judging from the boy’s size, he was maybe eight years old; his skin was so pale it seemed to glow in the dim light. At first I thought he was an ascetic; devotees of Shiva often paint their skin with ash gathered from a funeral pyre. But then I realized he was an albino, and I immediately remembered that other child from so long ago, the schoolboy in Agra throwing rocks at a sow and her piglets. The memory made me shudder. The child’s head was cleanly shaven and covered with scabs. Thick rivulets of snot had coagulated on his lips and chin. I dug a worn five-rupee note out of my pocket and placed it in his outstretched palm, depositing the tattered paper there among the few small coins he had collected. Five rupees was much more than he could have hoped for from any Indian. We both knew this, and I knew it probably wasn’t a good idea, but I did it anyway—perhaps because I wanted to buy him off, to make him go away. I managed to smile as I handed it to him and said something polite in Hindi, one human being to another.
As I turned to go the boy asked for mor
e, his voice a low moan. “Sahab . . . Bhukh . . . Bhukh . . .” I was a foreigner and obviously had money to burn. And I had spoken to him, a few kind words. I instantly regretted it.
“Aray, child. Bas. That’s enough.” He moved one hand feebly back and forth between his belly and mouth. I ignored him, turned, and continued to walk toward the chai stand. I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when I felt him grab my pant leg.
“Mat chuuo!” I swiveled and bent toward him and spoke the angry words loudly. I was genuinely offended by this patent breach of etiquette: in India, strangers do not intentionally touch. He would never for a moment have dared to make physical contact with any Indian. He did it only because I was a foreigner. In his eyes, I was an ignorant person unworthy of this most basic sign of respect. This sort of thing happened to me often, which only made it worse. Mostly I just let it pass, but this time all my resentment boiled up. I had been living here for almost two years now, and during that time I had worked hard to find a legitimate place in the culture. I was fluent in Hindi. I even read Sanskrit. In many ways I felt more at home in India than I did in my own country. And despite all of this, everywhere I went I was still treated like a “red monkey,” a stupid hippie fresh off the Magic Bus. Obviously, I could stay here for the rest of my life and nothing would change. And I had just gone out of my way to be nice to this kid. “Do not touch me!” I scolded him, wagging a finger inches from his startled face, then pointedly walked away.
When I felt his fingers brush my leg again, they burned like fire. I lost all patience and was seized with a blind, self-righteous fury. In a single swift motion I whirled around and slapped his hand away. He lost his grip and the coins he had been clutching scattered on the ground, rolling and skipping across the platform. For a second he looked up at me, his face contorted in an expression of disbelief, then panic, as he dropped to his hands and knees and scuttled around in a frantic effort to retrieve the money. The five-rupee note I had given him fluttered onto the tracks, and he clamored after it, vanishing under the train. Filled with shame, I no longer cared about the chai. I wanted simply to run and hide. At just that moment the whistle blasted and couplings rattled up and down the line, as one car tugged against the next.
Maya Page 33
