Maya

by C. W. Huntington

  Look, I’m sorry, but it’s true. It seems like you did everything you could to deny we ever got married. I’ll never forget your toast the night of the rehearsal dinner: “In sixty years everyone at this table will be dead.” I know it was supposed to be a joke, but it was still a horrible thing to say the night before our wedding. And you weren’t even pretending to joke when you told me that as far as you were concerned marriage was just a word. A “legal fiction,” you said. “And who could commit their life to a fiction?” Your obsession with some kind of capital “T” Truth was like a big steamroller crushing every scrap of romance out of our marriage. The whole thing makes me feel so helpless.

  Stop, Judith. Just stop it.

  I start thinking about this stuff, and I get very angry all over again. And I don’t want to get angry. There’s no point. First of all, it’s over and done with. I mean the past. The past is over. Even more important, though, I need to remind myself constantly that the shit we went through was not entirely your fault. For one thing, I could have told you how much the things you said and did really hurt me. Maybe I didn’t even know myself how old fashioned I am in some ways. I know now that it was a big mistake to keep my feelings to myself, but I was so afraid that you would get claustrophobic if I was completely open about how much getting married meant to me. That’s why I didn’t argue when you refused to get rings, even though I wanted them. And that’s why I went along with it when, later on, you threw away all our wedding pictures—so we could “start over,” you said. I guess I thought that I had to go along with it. I don’t know what I thought. I guess I loved you too much. I probably still do.

  Honestly, when I look back at what I’ve just written, I don’t even know how much of it is true. I mean how much of it is true for you. I’ve never had your side of the story, really. Maybe sometime we can actually talk about all of this.

  Speaking of capital “T” Truth—Bruce and I got into a terrible argument a few weeks ago. He found one of your letters—the last one, where you talked about coming back in the spring. It’s not like I’ve lied to him or anything—he knows very well that I haven’t given up on us. I’ve been totally honest with him about my feelings. It was a beautiful letter, though. All your writing has given me such hope for us. I tell myself that I’m a fool to open up to you again. But this time you really do seem to have changed, and in spite of myself I’m beginning to believe all over again that you love me.

  I can hardly wait for you to see my new place. It’s tiny, but it’s a real home. A room of my own (ha ha)—something I’ve needed for a long time. So when you come back we’ll have dinner here together. I’m still no fabulous cook, but after a bottle of wine it won’t matter. Maybe we really can start over.

  Oh Stanley, as the months pass I find myself remembering mostly all the wonderful, magical adventures we’ve shared. Like the time we were hitchhiking in Tennessee and got picked up by that guy driving the refrigerated truck, and he had us sell cold watermelons at all the rest stops. Remember? He took us out to dinner with the money! I’m almost scared to say it, but lately I’ve been feeling more and more that we will work this out. Somehow we’ll make it.

  Well, I’m tired and it’s time for bed. I love you dearly, husband of mine. It’s true. And I miss you. I miss your hair on the pillow “like a sleeping golden storm.” I miss the undeoderized smell of your body. I miss your touch. God help me, but I even miss those horrible conversations about suffering and death. I know this time apart is good for us—another adventure, I guess—but I do wish you could be here with me tonight. Is that okay?

  The letter was signed in that same scratchy, schoolgirl handwriting. Underneath the signature she had written, “p.s. Merry Christmas and all that.”

  I read the postscript over and over. I just sat there on the couch, holding her letter in both hands, reading and rereading that last line. Her mention of Tennessee and the watermelons reminded me of another time we were hitchhiking—standing by the road just east of Barstow, California, waiting for a ride. We had driven from Chicago to Los Angeles in a brand new Cadillac Seville; its owner had flown out, arranging beforehand for the car to be delivered to him through a drive-away service. Gas for the trip was paid for, so for us it was free transportation, a way to visit friends in Venice Beach. The only problem was that now we had to get back to Chicago—some 2,500 miles away—and it had taken all day just to hitch this far. It was early evening and the desert air was baking hot, the sun shimmering orange just above the horizon. Judith was singing the title song from the musical Oklahoma. We hitchhiked a lot in those days, and she would often sing while we waited for our next ride. She seemed to know the lyrics to every corny Broadway song ever written. The memory was flawless in its detail—the acrid smell of diesel exhaust from the eighteen-wheelers, air rippling over the hot asphalt, the skin on the back of my sunburned neck tight and warm, the sound of Judith’s voice holding us there together, safe. One moment we had shared.

  Merry Christmas and all that.

  My Judith. My dear one. My precious wife. How could our life together be at once so excruciatingly real and so completely, irrevocably lost? How could we have let this happen?

  I am time, almighty destroyer of worlds,

  appearing here for their annihilation.

  With or without your consent,

  these warriors ranged for battle

  shall cease to exist.

  I finally understood: We are made to be broken. To love is to be shattered beyond repair by the realization of an infinite, unending loss. And we all do it, in one way or another, wisely or not. Love is our common offering, a spontaneous giving over of the self to the sweet, sad perfection of this world that slips so easily into memory, this dying world.

  I folded the letter carefully, slid it into the envelope, and walked through the door, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. I hadn’t cried since those early days in Agra—not even when Penny left and I knew she had taken everyone with her and she wasn’t coming back. But now the tears came again, and this time they were for all of us.

  38

  MY ALARM WENT OFF just before sunrise. Today I would meet Nortul. If I were going to arrive at Delhi University by midmorning, I needed to get an early start. I knew the trip through the old city would take at least an hour by auto rickshaw—especially since traffic would be worse than usual because of the recent election. I cleared a place in one corner of the room where I could meditate and settled in.

  There was an open window above the door to my room—which could not be closed—and before long I could hear people outside going to and from the communal bathrooms. They were shouting to each other, singing, whistling, and yelling at their kids. The sounds reverberated up and down the hallway as if it were a gymnasium. Every now and again someone would slam the door with such force that the walls shook. I was already in a dismal mood, and the racket outside my room made it worse. My attention jumped from one sound to the next, and every sound was the catalyst for a frenzy of self-righteous indignation. How could people be such totally thoughtless assholes? Looking at my mind was like standing knee deep in the middle of a stinking, polluted swamp that extended out to the horizon in every direction. Anger and irritation, guilt and regret and fear, all of it smothered in an endless toxic babble of thought. Me, me, and more me, as far as the eye could see. I sat there with my eyes closed for about two hours, watching things come and go, until finally I’d had enough. By that time it was around seven; I opened the drapes and sunlight exploded into the room.

  I took my towel and headed down the hall for a shower. After that I went downstairs for breakfast. Over a pot of coffee, I took stock.

  Nortul Rinpoche was sorting through a collection of old texts that had been brought, in the early sixties, from impoverished monasteries in the hinterlands of eastern Ladakh, a region that is politically Indian but culturally and linguistically a part of Tibet. For the first time, it occurred to me that this was the very same region where Colonel Singh from Corbett
Park had commanded a regiment during the Sino-Indian War. He had actually talked with Penny and me about the artifacts in these monasteries. How is it that I had never before made this connection? Singh himself could have been involved in shipping these very texts to Delhi.

  In any event, it was possible that the material in these crates had not been studied—or even looked at—for several generations. The tiny monasteries in eastern Ladakh were provincial, to say the least. The texts now being stored at Delhi University’s library came from monasteries that had been isolated from the political and scholarly centers of Tibet for hundreds of years. It was at least conceivable that some of them may have been safely locked away from the outside world since the ninth century or earlier, when this area played a critical role in the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet.

  It was just as Penny had said that evening in Corbett—Ladakh had been a crossroads of the Buddhist world. Beginning in early Christian times, and perhaps even before, there was a steady stream of traffic passing back and forth between Mediterranean Europe and Beijing. Merchants moved along trade routes passing near this area on their way to and from Kashgar, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. And in the third century, when Buddhism was just beginning to enter China, this was where Indian Buddhist monks and Chinese scholars met. Kumarajiva—one of the most famous Chinese translators—journeyed to Ladakh and studied Sanskrit there with Indian pundits, who sent him back to An Jing with bundles of texts, including scriptures on the perfection of wisdom and commentaries by Nagarjuna and other early Indian masters. Several hundred years later, Buddhist teachings began to filter into Tibet via this same route. And now, another thousand years down the road, several crates of texts from the region had been transported to the library of Delhi University, where they were at this very moment being pried open by the lama I had been sent to meet.

  I had trouble finding an auto rickshaw willing to make the trip all the way up to the university—and once I did, the driver refused to go by the meter. My driver unwisely decided to take the shorter route—going by way of Chelmsford Road through Azad Market—and the traffic was a nightmare. It was almost noon when I found myself climbing the front steps of the library.

  A uniformed guard asked me for identification at the door. I knew the drill from past experience; Western scholars frequently conduct research at the university, so all I needed to do was show him my card. On the advice of the Fulbright office, I had arranged to have a box of absurdly pretentious business cards printed up shortly after my arrival in India for situations precisely like this. Unfortunately, the chaukidar appeared to be new at his job. Unsure of what to do, and obviously uneasy about this foreigner who was neither student nor faculty, he summoned a tired old man clothed in rumpled khaki shirt and pants—standard issue for every Indian peon. He took my card and disappeared. Several minutes later he returned and motioned for me to follow him up the stairs to a second-floor office. The doorway was hung with a dingy curtain, and a sign on the wall read “Subdirector of Acquisitions.” The peon pulled back the curtain, and I stepped through.

  Inside a ceiling fan propelled a steady blast across the vast arid plain of the subdirector’s desk. The surface area that opened out between us testified to this man’s position in the library hierarchy. Disorderly stacks of parched requisition slips, withered forms, and mummified interoffice memos rattled in the breeze. Several rubber stamps dangled from a little wooden rack shaped like a tree; one or two had dropped to the desk and lay scattered about under the branches like over-ripe fruit.

  The subdirector had been scrutinizing my business card, which he held before him in both hands. When we entered he looked up at me through a pair of very large, very thick lenses. Somewhere back there I could make out two filmy, jaundiced eyes engaged in calculating my dependence on his authority. I knew instinctively that this man was not the least bit interested in why I had come. On the other hand, I was a diversion, an unexpected distraction from the routine of rubber stamps and endless forms, and to this extent I must not be permitted to escape before he had extracted some pleasure from my need.

  “Please sit down, my dear sir. Take your chair, please.” He extended one arm toward the center chair. “From what place you are coming?”

  “Banaras,” I answered, realizing immediately that I should have brought a briefcase. Any real scholar would be carrying a briefcase.

  “No, no. My dear sir,” he offered a cramped chuckle and rapped the edge of my card against the desktop once or twice. “I mean your country. Surely you must be having a country?”

  “The US.”

  “America.” Again the tapping of the card. “New York?”

  “Chicago,” I replied. “I’m from the University of Chicago. It says that on my card.” I nodded in the direction of where it now lay, on his desk, just under his folded hands.

  “Ah, yes. So it does.” He picked up the card and read it out loud. “Stanley Harrington, B.A, M.A, A.B.D. Fulbright Scholar. University of Chicago. Very good. Very, very good.” He eyed me in silence for a moment. “How long you have been in India, my dear sir?” I told him that a little less than two years had passed since my arrival. This seemed to make a positive impression. “Two years. And you are receiving salary from government side, isn’t it?”

  “Fulbright is a federally funded agency, so yes, from the government, you could say.” My Fulbright had expired almost a year before, but as I was still living off the original stipend, the lie seemed justified.

  “You must be receiving dollars. No?”

  “No,” I corrected him. “Not dollars. The Fulbright is paid in rupees.”

  “And, may I ask, how much they give to you each month?” He arched one brow over the black ridge of his plastic frames.

  I offered the stock reply. “The fellowship pays my living expenses—room and food, travel costs. A stipend for books.” I had discovered early on to deflect these queries about salary. If I were to reveal how many thousand rupees a fellowship actually doled out, no working-class Indian would ever have believed it. And if they believed it, I’m not sure what the reaction might have been. During my first year in India I had probably saved at least ten times more than this man could ever dream of earning in the same period.

  “I see. And you are happily married man, sir?”

  I hesitated. “No, I’m not.” This response was greeted with another brief silence.

  “I see. And your father, what he is doing?”

  “My father is a businessman.”

  He nodded in approval.

  This sort of thing went on for several minutes until he grew tired of probing into my personal life and got around to inquiring about my business at the library. I told him I had come to meet with a Tibetan lama—Nortul Rinpoche—who was presently engaged in research here. The name drew a total blank. I reminded him of Dorje Sherap’s visit. He had never heard of any such person. I mentioned the texts from Ladakh. He assured me that I must be mistaken; there were no such texts. I insisted that there most definitely were. Not a chance. Certainly as subdirector of acquisitions he would know, wouldn’t he?

  We went back and forth on this for a while until I suggested that we consult the records for the early sixties. We batted this around for five or ten minutes before he decided that might be a good idea, after all. The subdirector stuck a hand under one corner of his big desk and pressed a hidden button. A buzzer sounded in the room just outside his door. The peon emerged from behind the curtain, bowed, and was summarily dispatched. He reappeared some ten or fifteen minutes later with his charge—a small, harried man decked out in a snugly tailored, baby-blue leisure suit with permanent sweat stains under each armpit. The little man crept past me, lugging a dog-eared tome that he dumped onto the subdirector’s desk with a thud. Several dozen slips of white paper had been stuck between the pages. When he pulled open the cover, they were immediately sucked out into the breeze from the fan and erupted in a miniature white blizzard, dancing and fluttering around the office while
the four of us—myself, the reference librarian, the subdirector, and his peon—rushed madly here and there, tramping them with our feet or snatching them from midair, until we managed to retrieve most, if not all of the scraps.

  After considerable searching, the librarian located an entry made on November 28, 1962, which indicated that three crates of materials had been received from Ladakh and placed in storage. This seemed to jog the subdirector’s memory, for suddenly he acknowledged that there was, in fact, an old Tibetan monk who came now and again to the library. Indeed, he had seen this monk fairly recently, now that he thought about it. As it turned out, he had himself signed the authorization form. Where was it . . .?

  Once again the peon was sent forth, returning after a blessedly short time with yet another record book that was deposited on the desk. The subdirector leafed through its pages for a minute or two, then stopped and read carefully, nodding. “Yes, yes. Here it is: Nyingpo Toobpa. Authorized by the Ministry of Home Affairs.” He poked at the page in front of him. “The form is signed by one of the ministry’s agents.”

  “But that’s not the person I’m looking for,” I objected. “I’m here to meet someone named Nortul.”

  “Nortul?” He seemed puzzled. “But that is not the name on the form. Look here—see for yourself.”

  He pushed aside a stack of papers and slid the book across his desk. It was just as he said: Nyingpo Toobpa. I was about to object again when it occurred to me that if I insisted this was not my man, the whole deal would fall apart, and I’d never get beyond this office. “Well then,” I suggested, “perhaps I could just go meet with Mr. Toobpa. If you’d be so kind as to point the way . . .” I was halfway up from the chair when he smiled indulgently and swung his arm up like a traffic cop, motioning for me to remain seated.