The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  And shortly after I turned forty, a character had walked into my mind and begun to insist that I tell her story: a young woman looking for love—and enlightenment—in all the wrong places.

  While Forest was two and three and four, I’d worked on Enlightenment for Idiots just a half hour a day—stealing time for my characters while caring for him, teaching yoga, and working part-time from home as a Tricycle editor. When Forest was five and a half, I’d gotten the book contract, which enabled me to drop my other work and just write while he went to kindergarten and first grade.

  And a month before my novel’s manuscript was due, Janice and I stepped off a plane in Calcutta.

  * * *

  —

  In Calcutta, a glittering glass-and-steel office complex called Technopolis looms over the festering slums and dusty, cratered roads. On a freeway billboard, an Indian woman in a skimpy leotard lounges seductively on a giant tub of “India’s first probiotic ice cream.” Floating down the Ganges in Varanasi in a rowboat just after dawn, I see a sadhu in an orange loincloth step out of his tent to answer his cell phone, which rings to the tune of a sacred chant in praise of the god Ram. In a gem shop in Rishikesh, an Indian salesman in a Western business suit dangles a giant amethyst in front of three American women in saris; they all close their eyes and chant om together. I walk past them through a sea of plateglass storefronts, looking for the simple little town I remember. It’s like studying my own face in the mirror—as I don my Indian salwar kameez—and trying to find the youthful, fresh-skinned traveler I used to be.

  But the magic of India that had first enchanted me is still here. Golden light still filters through a haze of dust, suffusing everything in its soft, dreamlike glow. The smell is still a ripe perfume of burning cow dung, exhaust fumes, incense, and rotting garbage. Corpses still burn to ashes in pyres lit from a flame that’s been kept alive for thousands of years. On the train from Calcutta to Gaya, I rattle and sway through rice fields plowed by oxen and men in white loincloths guiding wooden plowshares whose design hasn’t changed for centuries.

  Past and present still overlap in a rich collage, creating the sense that anything—anything!—could happen at any moment. And when I plug in my PalmPilot to charge the battery, my electrical adaptor fries with a familiar, almost comforting sizzle.

  A decade earlier, my entire travel budget had come to about $150 a month—about half what it now costs to stay overnight in a business hotel near the Delhi airport. In those days I never took taxis, even for long rides—instead, I jolted everywhere in three-wheeled autorickshaws, holding my shawl across my nose and mouth to keep out the choking fumes. I slept on bug-infested mattresses, the bare floors of ashram dormitories, the wooden benches of sleeper trains, the rutted earth of caves. My backpack held just three sets of socks and underwear, one change of salwar kameez, a baggie of grimy earplugs, and a fluctuating assortment of spiritual literature, which I mailed home periodically to my growing research library.

  In the new India, I can now afford to travel in a bubble of comfort that didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some things haven’t changed, though. I get violently ill the afternoon we arrive in Khajuraho, a dusty little town in central India whose tenth-century tantric temples are covered with exquisite carvings that are among the world’s most famous erotica. I spend one wretched night throwing up in the bathroom of the grubby backpacker joint that my character Amanda would have chosen. Pigeons nest in the bathroom ventilator fan, their droppings coating the bathtub. The smell of the sewer wafts up through the toilet bowl. Through the floor the soundtrack of a Hindi TV show blares, featuring lots of explosions and car crashes. I’m only dimly comforted by the thought: These are great details. I’ll put them in my novel when I get home.

  The next morning, still sick, I beg Janice to call a cab—and we head to the Taj Hotel, where a flutist is playing by the fountain in the crystal-chandeliered lobby, and a bellhop hoists my backpack and asks me, solicitously, if I want him to adjust my neck. As we pull into Rishikesh a day or so later, Janice asks if we should stay in an ashram. I’m only half-joking when I answer, “This time around, I’m not into service work. I’m into room service.”

  But I’ve changed in more important ways as well. The last time I came to India, like Amanda, I’d wandered for months, tethered to my past life by the slimmest of links: a few postcards surrendered to the Indian postal service with no guarantee of delivery; the occasional blurry fax; one or two pricey long-distance phone calls over hissing, echoing lines. This time, two weeks is the longest I can bear to be away from my six-year-old son. In an Internet café in Varanasi, with an orange-robed sadhu asleep by a motorcycle on the steps outside, I download a song that he and his dad have recorded for me. I tear up as Forest’s high-pitched voice sings, “Sending you love on incense smoke / so much love that we practically choke…”

  These days my heart is anchored to my life back home with roots that Amanda could only dream of. My spiritual seeking has less to do with exotic adventures and more to do with honoring the daily rhythms of ordinary life. And this anchoring helps me appreciate India in a deeper way. Sitting under the papery-white bark branches of the Bodhi Tree, I watch pilgrims from around the world chant, prostrate, and meditate—saffron-robed Cambodian monks, maroon-robed Tibetan nuns, black-robed Japanese priests. Everything changes, the Buddha taught; nothing we love can be held on to forever. After more than a decade of love and heartbreak, I understand the power of those teachings from the inside out in a way I hadn’t when I sat under that tree twelve years before.

  As I sit, I close my eyes. This spot is where Amanda will see her ex-boyfriend after months apart. She has news to tell him—she is going to be a mother. Oh, Amanda, I think. You have no idea what you’re in for.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of our itinerary, Janice and I are both ready to head home. We take a rickshaw from the yoga Disneyland of Rishikesh to Hardwar and haul our backpacks onto the train—only to find an Indian couple occupying what we believe to be our seats. After some brandishing of train tickets, we realize—we have the wrong day! We’d been so eager to get home to our kids that we had misread the dates on our tickets. We return to Rishikesh for one last blast of India.

  It’s Holi, the festival of colors, and the streets are filled with revelers tossing colored powder on each other. We’re chased through the streets by two drunk guys who spatter us in purple and green before we make it back to our hotel. There, sipping chai in the courtyard, we meet a Canadian man in his fifties with brilliant blue eyes, who is returning for the first time to the mountain pilgrimage town where he’d lived as a rare Western sadhu thirty-five years ago—this time bringing with him his wife, a red-haired woman in a salwar kameez who has never been to India before. He takes us all out to the streets again, promising to keep the revelers at bay.

  As we sit with him and his wife on boulders by the Ganges in the blazing sun, cooling our feet in the icy green waters, he points to the cave in the hills across the river where he had lived. He tells us how he had turned in his passport at the Canadian embassy and headed barefoot into the mountains wearing nothing but a loincloth. He had lived for years on handouts from village people as he walked from guru to guru, looking for enlightenment. Eventually, one of his yoga masters told him that he had gone as far as he could on his spiritual journey as a renunciate. To go deeper, he needed to go back to the world and grow up. So he’d gone back to Canada, married, and raised five children. He’d founded a successful company that sold decking materials.

  As we talk, he stares out across the waters, as if he might be able to spot the young man he had once been, waving at him from the cave he used to live in. Just downstream from us, a sadhu plunges into the water to receive the blessing of the goddess Ganga, as sadhus have done in this spot for over a thousand years.

  I think of the person I had been when I came to this town before, and of the imaginary c
haracter I am dreaming into existence in my novel. I think of my son, waiting for me in California. I feel the past bleeding through into the present and the present bleeding toward the unknown future, like ink through thin paper.

  SUTRA 12

  Adventures in Dharma Dating

  • • • • •

  THE IDEA FIRST comes up when Forest is almost five, as a joke between me and my editor at Tricycle. As a newly single Buddhist mom, why don’t I post my profile on a couple of the new online “dharma dating” sites and write about my experiences?

  I find the notion both intriguing and horrifying. After my marriage went down in flames, finding a new romance by dating strangers was the last thing on my mind. (Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I was still wearing nursing bras.) For years, I’d mocked the idea of shopping for a mate the way you’d shop for a book on Amazon. (“Add This Man to My Cart!”) Once, while browsing for a used couch on Craigslist, I’d popped over to the Men Seeking Women section for a look, and the ads all ran together in my mind: 6-foot divorced sofa, 45, brown hair/blue eyes, overstuffed cushions, slightly cat-clawed, wants to spank you…

  But lately, several of my friends have actually met partners online; several others have had fun just going out for dinners, movies, and hikes with people they’d never have met without the Internet. According to the New York Times, almost 5 percent of the US population is now listed on Match.com. Arranging dates through Buddhist sites promises something novel: a wide assortment of potential friends, all of them single and interested in connection, and all sharing a primary interest in spiritual practice. As a mating strategy, it probably beats cruising a vipassana retreat.

  Although I don’t admit it to my editor, I’m lonely. I’ve broken up with the lover who helped keep me afloat during the heartsick months after my son’s dad and I separated. We loved each other, but he was a passionate, free-spirited, childless guy whose spiritual practice centered on all-night peyote ceremonies, while I was still trying to get my child to sleep through the night. By the time we had finalized our divorce, my ex-husband and I were good enough friends that we went out to lunch together right after we signed the paperwork. But I miss having someone to share my life—and my bed—with.

  Plus, at almost forty-two, I want another baby. I grew up as the youngest of a pack of seven, where a common question at the dinner table—designed to ascertain, for example, whether we could each have one meatball or two on our spaghetti—was “What’s the ration?” It doesn’t feel right to have just me and Forest at the dinner table, helping ourselves from a bowl full of enough mac and cheese for seconds, or thirds, or fourths if we want it. And I’m still acutely aware of the empty seat where, in my imagination, Sierra should be sitting.

  My biological clock is ticking. Online dating seems as if it could be the fastest, most efficient way to order up the life I dream of: me, a husband, and a couple of kids sitting around the table, trading stories about our day over a meal we’ve cooked together.

  The only problem is, I’ve never really dated.

  In my midthirties, I married my college sweetheart, with whom I’d been an off-and-on couple since I was seventeen. In my twenties and early thirties, during the long periods when he and I weren’t together, I had explored a series of relationships with some wonderfully offbeat men: A Brazilian massage therapist who was paying for his master’s in somatic psychology by programming computers for a 900-line in Las Vegas. A French Zen student who baked a tarte aux pommes for my birthday and offered me bouquets of homegrown chard. A yogi who invited me to a clothing-optional “love and intimacy” workshop at his Santa Cruz home that culminated in a talent show where a seventy-three-year-old woman belly danced wearing nothing but a denim apron.

  None of the connections, however, involved anything that you might call dating. We met while adjusting each other in Downward Dog or squabbling over unwashed dishes in the kitchen of a collective house. We migrated easily back and forth across the boundary between friendship and romance. I’m still friends with virtually everyone I’ve paired up with in the past twenty years.

  Despite a couple of decades of therapy, I don’t have a lot of faith in my ability to make wise choices in the romance department. I’ve analyzed my tendencies to the point that I could write a doctoral dissertation about them: I felt abandoned when my father spent four of the first seven years of my life in Vietnam—so I choose strong, charismatic men who are always on their way out the door. I grew up in a Catholic household where sex was never mentioned—so I choose sensual, passionate, wild, creative lovers who embody all the parts of myself I was not allowed to feel or even express. I am trying to prove to myself—and to the world—that I am no longer the tomboy geek with the big glasses she had chosen because they looked just like her brother’s, who spent the junior high school dance standing in the corner with her best friend, watching the other kids do “the Bump.” And as proof, I offer my lineup of sexy polyamorous boyfriends.

  But any way you analyze it, I’m not sure I will recognize a suitable partner even if he’s exactly what I’ve advertised for.

  And at this point, I’ve been around long enough to know that a romantic partner is not a guaranteed ticket to a suffering-free life. Love, it seems to me, is a combination of serendipity and hard work. Wouldn’t I be better off using my time and energy rooting out the cause of suffering—which my dharma practice tells me is craving—at its source? Instead of dating, shouldn’t I volunteer at a soup kitchen? Shouldn’t I focus on contemplating emptiness and interdependence to the point where I’d get just as much joy from an evening alone sorting socks as from a night making passionate love to Indian sitar music in front of a roaring fire?

  Oh, who am I kidding? “Sure,” I tell my editor. “I’ll check it out.”

  WEEK 1

  I get paralyzed in huge bargain-basement stores. Given fifteen aisles of shoes to choose from, I’m likely to give up on the whole project and go home barefoot. So I pass on the megasites and sign up for the two that sound explicitly Buddhist: dharmaMatch.com and DharmaDate.com.

  Despite its name, dharmaMatch turns out to be a fairly general site, aimed at singles of all religious persuasions “who hold their beliefs, values, and spirituality as an important part of their life.” Its homepage features a lovely young couple locked in an embrace, surrounded by giant soap bubbles—as if to remind us of the impermanent nature of romantic love, even as we pursue it.

  DharmaDate is more narrowly targeted toward Buddhists: “We want it to be an informal sangha meeting place where you can be yourself. Or be your non-self.” The sign-up process includes a series of in-depth questions about practice and beliefs that are explicitly designed to screen out non-Buddhists (who, presumably, would otherwise be flocking there in droves, drawn by the legendary licentiousness and raw animal magnetism of dharma practitioners).

  The first thing I must do, on both sites, is choose a screen name. I try for Yogini, but it has already been taken. Dakini? Same deal. I rule out Bikini as unwise and settle instead on Tahini, which also happens to be the name of my cat.

  Although photos are not required, they’re strongly encouraged, as the bait on the hook in the online sea. So I scramble through my files, trying to find a recent picture that doesn’t lop off my head to focus on Forest. Sign-up questionnaires ask me to evaluate every aspect of myself: physical appearance, lifestyle, personality, dietary preferences. And, of course, spirituality. (“What happens after the body dies?” is a question I’ve never seen before in a multiple-choice format.)

  In the last few weeks I’ve been contemplating putting my house on the market. The analogies to the dating process are unavoidable: clearly, before holding any open houses I should consider some major renovations—and perhaps a professional stager—to increase my curb appeal.

  But without time or money for remodeling, I post myself “as is.” Within hours of posting my profile, an emai
l arrives in my inbox. “Great news!” it crows. “You’ve received a smile on dharmamatch.com from Siddhartha Gautama!”

  Hmm….Is the not-yet-enlightened prince who will eventually become the Buddha really the sort of guy I want to be flirting with this time around? True, Siddhartha was handsome, well educated, and rich. But didn’t he run out on his wife and child to wander around with a bunch of celibate homeless people?

  I click “Send a smile back” nonetheless…and now I am officially a dharma dater.

  WEEKS 2–3

  As the introductory smiles continue to arrive—“…from Manly-Meditator!” “…from DharmaDude!”—the first thing I discover is this: there are apparently a lot of thoughtful, attractive, spiritual singles out there. Sure, there are some scary ones: the guy who rants that he likes trees better than people; the guy who suggests in his opening email that we live together on a ranch in Wyoming, where we will castrate our own goats. But for the most part, the smiles are linked to intriguing profiles: an Argentinean jazz musician in New York City who studies Tibetan Buddhism and hatha yoga and has a nine-year-old son; a burly poet in Ohio, who shares custody of an eleven-year-old daughter; a Zen priest in Southern California, whose online photo features his shaved head and black robes.

  Wait a minute…a Zen priest? Shouldn’t he be beyond all this? I picture him chanting in the zendo: Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to end them—right after I check dharmaMatch for any new hotties…

  It just goes to show, as human beings, we’re hardwired for connection. Of course, our practice helps us dissolve the illusion of a separate self and know that we are supported in every breath by the whole universe. But at the same time, it’s also good to feel supported by a real live person who actually cares that we had a bad day, that the kids were brats, that the boss was a tyrant, that the computer kept crashing, that we failed to solve our koan.