by Karan Bajaj
Max relied more and more on himself for his asana practice. The sum of all knowledge was within him. A twist there, a bend here, a little shifting of his toes, some responsiveness to the cosmic will, and he got into asanas that he didn’t think were possible. Ramakrishna would tell him the names later: Kapotasana, the dove; Valakhilyasana, the heavenly pose; Gherandasana, the sage’s pose; Kapinjalasana, the partridge pose—and others whose names Ramakrishna didn’t know but whose existence he didn’t doubt because Max was being taught by the all-knowing consciousness within.
• • •
MORE MONTHS PASSED. Once in a while he checked his email. Andre emailed to tell him he had graduated from college and was working with troubled kids in the Bronx. Sophia didn’t end up going to Stern after all. She decided to travel with her new boyfriend to Europe for a few months to figure things out. Max had never seen her so lost before, but he tried not to worry about her. After all, he had left the land he knew for a greater knowing too. One full year ago. It was December again. Max had never felt more at peace. The space within him was growing, filling him with a strange silence. Boundaries of space and time were breaking. He worked hard in the fields, did asana and pranayama, and meditated like before, but none of the activities felt distinct from the others. Something within him remained silent. The body worked, the mind concentrated, but he was unmoved. Complete. The same in every contortion of the body, in every fluctuation of the mind. Winter. Spring. Summer. Another drought.
This time he was alone with Ramakrishna. He understood now why the saint remained unaffected. The sun was not an enemy, the land not an unrelenting ingrate. They were beautiful, majestic, all part of one system, linked by the karmic cycle of cause and effect, action and reaction. The first summer it had caused him sorrow. Now his lean, hard body, likely forty or fifty pounds of unnecessary weight lighter than when he had first come to the ashram, remained unaffected by the drought. It craved nothing for itself. He felt the villagers’ hunger like his own, and this time Ramakrishna and he had more rations to spare for them. Max delivered them every week until the rains came again.
In town one day in August, Max checked his email for the first time in many months. Not a single note from Sophia. Are you okay, my dear? Did you go to Europe? Are you still with that guy? Max checked to see if Andre had written about Sophia but there was just a single note from him.
U inspired me 2 get out of my head, ace. I looked up 2 u all my life. Christ, what happened 2 u ace? U were going places. Get ur life back. I’m always here 4 u.
No word from Sophia. Max was flustered again. Why was the bond with his sister so hard to transcend? Nothing weighed him down anymore, not the body, not its petty need for comfort, not the pull for sensory stimulation. Only his little sister held him from losing himself completely to the blissful void. He banished the image of the little girl with curly hair sliding down an iron slide in Central Park and stopped himself from walking into the phone shop.
On his way back to the ashram that day, he didn’t fall into the state of spontaneous absorption that was coming over him more and more naturally those days. Sophia, my dear, are you well? He forced himself to concentrate on his breath.
23.
The next night, the noise of footsteps broke Max’s concentration. The ashram had filled with temporary visitors once again that monsoon season, and a Bulgarian man and two German girls were staying with them. Max closed his eyes and resumed his meditation.
Heavy breathing. A muffled shout. More footsteps.
Max got up and walked toward the bathroom.
The tall, bald muscular Bulgarian stood outside the bathroom hut, his eyes narrowed, jaw tight, sweat pouring down his temples. He held an aluminum trekking pole in his thick hands.
Max raised his eyebrows.
“Snake inside. Large cobra,” said the man.
Reluctantly Max broke the silence. “It’ll be gone tomorrow,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
The Bulgarian wiped the sweat from his jaw and stared at him. “You crazy, man? I have to use bathroom,” he said, his eyes blinking. “Also I cannot sleep next door with that big bastard right here. They are poisonous. You be dead in minute if it bites. You don’t worry, man. I done this before in mountains.”
Max knew this thick Bulgarian wouldn’t last the week. The rains had picked up. With the rains came insects, frogs, and more snakes. If you didn’t trouble them, they never troubled you. The same living energy coursed through them. Much like humans, they were driven by desire, the desire to eat, procreate, live, and evolve, not to bite and kill what wasn’t food for them.
A slithering sound came from inside.
The Bulgarian’s bald pate shone with fresh sweat. He pushed the door wide open. “Just see the bastard,” he said.
The snake was ten feet long with yellow-brown skin, fiery black rectangular patterns, and a large head. It looped around the squat toilet, its beady eyes gleaming, tongue flicking in and out.
“Move back,” said the Bulgarian. He tightened his grip on the trekking pole. Sweat dripped from the back of his head to his thick neck. The snake must have heard or felt him. It raised its head up and spread its magnificent hood.
Max stood rooted to the ground watching the snake’s shiny, smooth scales and oily brown skin. It was beautiful, magnificent, shaking with life force.
The Bulgarian raised his hands seemingly to bring the pole crashing on the snake’s head.
“Stop,” said Max. “Please stop.”
“What, man?” said the Bulgarian, turning his head around in apparent confusion.
Max didn’t answer. The void within him expanded to include the wondrous life-form in front of him. He was the snake. The majestic twisted body that didn’t know why it was born, why it would die, why it struck everyone with repulsion and fear. We are one, said Max to him. I understand you. Just go outside for now. Slowly, lower your hood, unwind yourself from the toilet, come straight toward us, move forward to the bench in the courtyard and outside the boundary of the ashram. Don’t come back for a few days. Are you listening to me? Do it now.
The snake put its hood down. It untangled itself from the toilet and moved toward them.
“Back,” said the Bulgarian and lifted the pole again.
“Stop,” said Max. He caught hold of the Bulgarian’s sweaty right arm and pulled it down.
“What are you doing, bastard?” said the Bulgarian.
The snake came closer to them. The Bulgarian tried to wrestle his arm away. Max held his thick wrist tight, pressing hard on his veins with his fingernails.
“It hurts, man. Stop. Help,” shouted the Bulgarian.
He lashed out with his left hand.
Max caught it and held both his hands behind him, still staring at the snake.
The snake slithered and curved around their feet. It remained looped around their feet for a minute while the Bulgarian whimpered. Then it uncurled itself, moved toward the lone courtyard bench, and went out of the gates of the ashram.
Max released the Bulgarian’s hands.
The Bulgarian shoved him. “What the hell were you thinking, man? Why did you catch me? We could have died, man. We were dead. Fucking fuck. We were dead,” he said, hopping around.
The sweat from the Bulgarian’s brows poured in a steady stream down his face. All of a sudden he stopped and stared at Max. “You knew it, didn’t you, man? You knew cobra would come toward us and go out.” He made a strange sound with his throat, half laughing, half crying. “Who are you? You are mad, man. You spoke to snake, right? Oh fucking Christ, where the hell am I? The silence, the snake, this Harry Potter craziness. You guys are like devil cult or something.”
Max left him and went back to his bed. He wasn’t sure the snake had understood, but something had happened between them—a transfer of energy, an awareness of presence, something. Whatever it was, the snake had lived. Max
slept comfortably that night.
The Bulgarian left the next morning. He preferred to walk to the village than wait three days more for the tractor.
24.
The next evening, during meditation, Sophia’s face filled Max’s mind. But it wasn’t the Sophia he remembered. She was thirty pounds heavier, her face completely white, her eyes sunken and weary. An angry blue scar crossed her pale cheek. Max opened his eyes. She was sick. He began to breathe faster.
Max closed his eyes again. Now Sophia was in a flowing, light green dress. Her limp hand lifted to swallow a handful of pills. The veins below her eyes grew larger.
Max opened his eyes again. By now he knew enough to know the image was real. Somewhere Sophia was suffering. His lungs exploded. He had known it when her emails stopped. His throat choked. The silence, the space within him, vanished.
• • •
BACK IN HIS HUT, he paced around. He walked out to speak to Ramakrishna but stopped. Ramakrishna wouldn’t say much, but his eyes would speak the truth. Human attachments tethered man to this unfulfilling cycle of birth and death. Liberate yourself from narrow individual bonds. See oneness everywhere. Max sat down on his bed and meditated. Sophia’s body was suffering. Her mind was ill. The body, the mind—they were fickle and destined to decay, subject as they were to the same laws of impermanence that bound the entire phenomenal world. But Sophia, her true essence was fine. Still laughing when she slipped down the iron slide; squeezing her date’s hand at Thanksgiving dinner; eyes dancing, hands moving with abandon when she talked. She was so close he could touch her. Max opened his eyes. She had no one but him.
Max stuffed his backpack with his sparse clothes and left the ashram. The moon, a faint sliver, cast only a bare light on his path. He removed his shoes. Barefoot, he connected easily to the ridges and furrows in the hard land and let them guide him to the village. In three days, he would be back in New York. He’d stay only until he helped her recover. Nothing else in the incomplete material world would ensnare him again. The blackness enveloped him as he walked through the silent, starless night. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the space between his eyes. No new images came. Just Sophia’s pale, worn face and listless eyes. What happened, my dear? I’m coming.
• • •
MAX REACHED THE village at dawn. He took the water from the pail hanging by the well’s side and threw it over his burning eyes. A shriveled old woman with scorched purple-black skin came out of one of the huts. She called out to the others. More doors opened. Three women in saris, four or five lanky men with long white cloths tied around their waists, and a handful of naked kids rubbing their eyes shuffled out of the huts. They greeted Max with broad smiles. The kids surrounded him, pulling at his T-shirt, talking and laughing. A boy brought out a pair of sticks and wanted to play Gilli Danda—lifting the small stick in the air with the big stick and hitting it as far as it could go.
Max hit one into the distance. The kids clapped. Max smiled at them. He knew every kid’s name now. They played with him whenever he came to deliver food supplies to the village. He had taught them a smattering of English and he understood some of the local dialect. A woman gave him a glass of tea. Someone or the other always served him food on his visits. Just like a second family.
Max set the stick down and began walking to Pavur, six miles away. A girl with tiny pigtails pulled at his khakis, asking him to stay. In the distance, an infant cried in an old woman’s arms. Max looked into the eyes of the little girl, smiling through her cute, chipped teeth. He felt hollow; he was sinking, disappearing into space. He was breaking into pieces, melting, merging into the girl. Max had never felt such helpless love before. He stood still, allowing his breath to return to normal. The feeling passed.
Max resumed his walk to Pavur. The girl waved at him. The kids cheered.
Soon they would bind him too.
Max walked faster.
Seeking but not finding the House Builder,
I traveled through the round of countless births;
O painful is birth ever and ever again.
Something, someone, this person, that family had tethered him in every life. This time he was so close to liberating himself from the bondage to this sense of self, to becoming just a channel of the universal. He couldn’t let this narrow love hold him back. Max stopped. Sophia’s pale, sickly face came before his eyes again. His throat tightened. Max looked up at the sky. Hari’s family had pulled him back. The need for comfort had called Shakti. Max wouldn’t let his attachments get in his way. He turned around.
The kids jumped and shouted upon seeing him again. Max tried to smile. Each one of them, everyone in the world, was the same as Sophia. Tears stinging his eyes, he began to walk back to the ashram in his bare feet.
25.
Ramakrishna didn’t ask him where he had been when Max came back later that day. Max remained restless throughout the afternoon. In yoga that evening, his body felt heavy and his limbs moved with effort. He paced in the courtyard after yoga, then skipped meditation and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
Late that night he awoke with a start. His back was on fire.
He jumped out of bed. The fire spread from the bottom of his spine to the middle of his ribs when he stood up. The bones in his back felt as if they were being grated into a paste, then being burned to ash. He lay down and got up again. It hurt so much. He rushed to the bathroom and doused himself in bucket after bucket of cold water. Nothing helped. Max had never disturbed Ramakrishna at night, but he couldn’t help himself. Whimpering in pain, he ran into Ramakrishna’s hut well past midnight.
“Please help me,” said Max. He was disintegrating, dying. “I can’t. My back. It burns so bad.”
Ramakrishna’s concerned face broke into a smile. “Your kundalini has awakened,” he said.
The fire flared up. Max’s head spun.
Ramakrishna made him sit cross-legged on the floor and straightened his back. “Soon you’ll be better, better than ever,” said Ramakrishna.
Max inhaled and exhaled slowly. The fire turned into hot liquid that surged from the bottom of his spine to its middle, up the back of his neck, and down, again and again. Max removed his T-shirt and put his naked back against the hard, cold mud.
“It’s not getting better . . .”
His eyes closed.
• • •
THE FLAME HAD disappeared when he awoke the next day, but his spine tingled with alternate warm and cold sensations. He stepped out of Ramakrishna’s hut. The usually odorless air was alive with smells. He could distinguish each note. There was the fragrance of mud mixed with morning dew, the sweat of the two German girls, the lingering smoke from the previous night’s fire, and the heavy aroma of tomatoes that had been cooked the day before in the afternoon. Each smell had its own texture. The morning colors were different too. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the dawn was a white light far on the horizon. The orange mud in the courtyard was a shade darker than the one around Ramakrishna’s hut. Why hadn’t he noticed these sights, these smells before, each so distinct, so wonderful?
Ramakrishna was instructing the German girls in the courtyard. Max heard every sound made by the girls, their inhalation, their exhalation, their heels shuffling below their thighs, their knees shifting on the floor. A little overwhelmed, Max joined them for asanas.
His body had changed overnight. He felt light as a feather. Warm fluid flowed from the base of his spine to all his nerves. He got up in a headstand. The blood didn’t collect in his head. There was no pressure on his face, no throbbing in his heart, no pulsing sensation in his neck. He closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state. He didn’t emerge from it until he felt Ramakrishna’s hands on his back.
“If you want, you can come down now. An hour is quite enough for the headstand,” said Ramakrishna.
An hour. It couldn’t be. Max had never stayed up
for more than twenty-five minutes at a stretch before, and he had built from five minutes to twenty-five minutes over the course of eighteen months. That day, though, standing on the head felt as comfortable as standing on his feet. He could have remained like that forever.
The German girls were staring at him. Again Max had the same, overwhelming feeling of seeing everything as if it were under a magnifying glass. One girl’s skin was slightly torn under her eyes; the other’s eyebrow hair was uneven. If he stared at them any longer, he would know every thought in their heads. Max averted his eyes and continued with the asanas.
His spine elongated and stretched; he flipped forward and backward farther than he had on his best days before without a hint of discomfort. Max had learned not to be surprised at the coincidences and intuitions and the glimpses of cosmic energy that had entered his life, but when he got into Kakasana, the crow pose, and found his whole body inverting in the air by its own accord as soon as he touched his fingers on the ground, he couldn’t stop himself from looking up straight into Ramakrishna’s eyes.
Just what was happening to him?
We’ll speak after meditation tonight, said Ramakrishna.
Max came down. How did he just hear that? Ramakrishna hadn’t moved his lips.
Yes, it is related, said Ramakrishna.
Ramakrishna had just answered a question Max hadn’t framed in his mind.
Max took a sharp breath. An ocean of cool air washed down his body.
