That day the fasters felt more weak than hungry. They slept a lot of the time, passing quickly from a lazy consciousness into a deep sleep. They curled up on the floorboards of the porch and let the hours flow past them like currents of hot summer air. They stopped playing cards and rarely talked. Sluggish and drowsy, they paid no attention to the growing crowd of spectators, who had been brought to the house by the Express story. A squad car patrolled the street regularly to discourage any sort of disturbance.
That evening the fasters moved out of the dorms and slept on blankets piled on the porch — all except Aunt Betty, who trudged weakly to her bedroom.
It was a hot, humid night, one that reminded Ganesh of the village, of his talks with Father under the peepul tree, when even the slightest motion would make them break out in a sweat. On such a night the two worlds — American town and Indian village — seemed to merge for him; with the Satyagrahis near him, there was no chance of feeling lonely or alien. Crickets bleeping in the undergrowth added to his sense of oneness; that familiar sound had been with him throughout his life. Each night in the tiny village house the chorus of crickets erected a great wall of sound and now here in this house a similar wall rose into the darkness, telling him the world was one.
The next day followed the same monotonous pattern. Hunger proved less troublesome, but in its stead was a paralyzing sense of fatigue. The Satyagrahis lounged on the porch like cows and goats seeking shade in the heat of an Indian afternoon. As they leaned against the porch wall or curled up or lay outstretched on their backs, Ganesh recalled the stunned life of the village when summer heat crept into the bloodstream, slowing it down, immobilizing every muscle, until only lizards and birds thrived in the sweltering glare. His father had once told him of the tricks a fast could play on the mind and body, but there was a vast difference between hearing about it and experiencing it. How did these American kids do so well? Ganesh at least knew how to meditate and calm his mind, so he could stand against the momentary panic threatening his resolution. But somehow his companions matched his own will. It occurred to Ganesh that even with meditation he might not hold out unless they were with him. Maybe that’s why they could all go through with it — they moved with communal power.
Yet the fast did not go smoothly. That evening Brad Hoover suddenly maintained the fast would not work. It was going to fail because the authorities had only to sit back and wait. “They can watch us starve to death.”
“Ah, they wouldn’t do that,” argued Tom Carrington, but in a voice lacking conviction.
“Sitting here,” continued Brad, “I imagined we were all stretched out on the porch, and the cops and a lot of other people were stepping among us, inspecting the bodies for signs of life, and someone was saying, ‘They went too far, these kids did, they went past the point of no return!’”
“I don’t think I’m hungry,” Helen Soderstrom remarked after a long silence. “No, I’m not hungry. What does it mean when you’re not hungry anymore? Are you — dying?”
“After a while, you are losing hunger,” Ganesh explained. “We should all be feeling better soon.”
“How do you know?”
“My father told me. Once my father fasted for twenty-one days when he was with Swamiji.”
“Was he okay?”
“No,” Ganesh said candidly. “He developed a kidney problem. It took him a long time to be getting his health back.” Ganesh added, “But that was a long fast.”
“How long is this one going to be?” someone asked in the shadows.
Ganesh did not answer. An unasked question hovered in the steamy night air: will we fall sick too?
*
Ganesh’s prediction came true: the next day they all felt better. They experienced a resurgence of energy and total freedom from hunger pangs and from fatigue too.
They strolled in the yard, staring in wonder at flowers and blades of grass, as if seeing everything for the first time.
Ganesh nodded when they told them how wonderful they felt. “It is like burning away what was not good inside. You are feeling light, free. Father told me. Like that.”
“Yeah, but then he fell sick,” someone reminded Ganesh.
About noon the sky clouded over, bringing into the yard a watery gray light that enhanced the greenness of leaf and grass. Then a faint but steady rain began to fall, pinning the Satyagrahis to the porch. Everyone crowded together against the house, as the rain fell musically, lending a sparkle to the cement of the front walk.
None of the Satyagrahis felt like sleeping; with their new-found energy they became restless, imprisoned within the rectangle of the porch by the pelting rain.
Tom Carrington abruptly exclaimed that this was the worst of all.
Everyone stared at him.
“Having nothing to do for so long,” he explained. “Just sitting here. I’m not used to it.”
“Me either!” others agreed.
They all stared at the rain, so gripped by communal power that they could not go inside the house, but had to remain on the porch, jailed by gray bars of rain.
“There is a way not to be restless,” Ganesh declared.
Someone laughed. “Another Indian idea?”
He nodded emphatically. “You can meditate and calm the mind.”
“What’s so good about doing that?”
“The mind is a monkey,” Ganesh said. “Always in motion. Stop it from moving, you are not feeling restless.”
“And then?”
Ganesh paused a moment, considering the answer. It occurred to him suddenly, in a flash of insight, that meditation was an experience similar to that he had on the Cauvery River. He said, “You feel a part of everything. You are here and everywhere. We are all here and everywhere.”
No one spoke.
Then he added, with a sigh, “Anyway, meditation is the hardest thing you might ever be trying in your life.”
“Can you do it?” someone asked.
“Only a little,” Ganesh admitted.
“How do you start?”
Ganesh sat in the lotus position — legs crossed with heels on opposite thighs — with the palms of his hands upward in his lap. “Now close your eyes,” he said.
“Is that all?”
Ganesh laughed. “It might be seeming that way. Only it is hard.”
“How come?”
“Try it.”
So they all did. Not all of them could sit in the lotus position, as it required a great deal of suppleness. They sat therefore with only one heel on the opposite thigh in the half-lotus position. They put their hands, palms upward, in their laps, closed their eyes, and — meditated. Within a couple of minutes someone giggled, then most of them did. All of them opened their eyes and looked around in amusement.
“I see what you mean,” Tom said sheepishly. “You close your eyes and you mind keeps going!”
“Like a monkey in a cage,” Ganesh said with a smile.
“So how do you calm it down?”
Ganesh explained there was more than one way. You might repeat a mantra again and again — hundreds of times without stopping. Or you might ask yourself continually a question: Who am I? And another question: Who is asking who am I? And pursue those two questions like a hunter. Or you could have an image of someone you love or worship in your mind and focus upon it constantly.
“Like the face of Jesus?” asked Helen Soderstrom.
Ganesh nodded. He did not tell her that, in his village, people who meditated used the face of Shiva, Vishnu, or Shakti.
Lucy Smith asked, “What method do you use?”
“I am watching my breath.”
A few Satyagrahis laughed at the idea.
“Yes, I am trying it,” Ganesh affirmed. “You sit with eyes closed and think you see your breathing coming into your nose, then going down into your whole body, then leaving through the nose. You see it coming in and going out, coming in and going out, and you do nothing else but that — just see it. And when your mind is
playing the monkey again, you bring it back to the breath, always to the breath.”
Someone asked did it really work.
“For me a little,” Ganesh said. “But with time it will be working a lot for anybody. Like that. With much, much practice. Until it is not necessary to watch the breath, but the mind is steady, like the light of the sun. Try again.”
So they did, each in his own way, but the experiment lasted scarcely five minutes before the giggling started again and they were talking about what had happened during those few short minutes. Ganesh listened, and it seemed to him that he was listening to himself in the house of his Yoga Master, making the same discoveries, having the same trouble with the mind as they were having. The awareness for him in the village was the awareness for them on the porch: concentration broken by the sound of rain or by a fly crawling on the skin or by a worry or a memory or a self-conscious realization that this was an attempt at calming the mind.
Still, in the village, among his companions and guided by his guru, he had learned patience, far more, he suspected, than his fellow Satyagrahis had at their command. Or so he thought until that evening. It was during a stroll after the rain had stopped. Culver Williamson came up alongside him in the wet grass.
“About that meditation,” Culver began in a hushed tone, as if afraid someone might overhear. “For a while — I mean I think so — my mind was calm. I mean, it stopped thinking about everything. It just watched my breath. At least I think it happened.”
“How did you feel?”
“It was not like anything else.” He added, “And so good I didn’t want it to stop. But it did.”
“Then it really happened,” said Ganesh, recalling how his guru had once told him the same thing. He reached out and touched Culver’s muscular arm, unable to explain to the athlete that he had just achieved something as difficult as anything he had ever accomplished on the football field.
*
Next morning, one by one, the Satyagrahis trudged upstairs to take showers — their daily substitute for breakfast — and then returned to the porch, which otherwise they never left. In fact, they occupied only the middle and western portions, leaving the east side empty, as they crowded together like guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Lucy Smith, seeing Ganesh leave the porch to walk down to the mailbox, got up and accompanied him. “I’m worried about Helen,” she said on the way. “Her hands are shaking.”
“Did you ask her how she is feeling?”
“That’s what really worries me. Helen said she felt good and gave me such a look —”
“If she is sick, she must be stopping.”
“I don’t think we can stop her.”
“We can be calling her parents.”
“We do and she won’t ever speak to us again. I know Helen.”
Ganesh stopped and looked at the pretty girl. “Is it true?”
“Helen is small and doesn’t look strong, but I wouldn’t want to stand in her way.”
Ganesh stared down at the cement walk. Father had told him if he didn’t understand what to do in a situation, he had better wait and see.
“What shall we do?” asked Lucy. “Wait and see?”
Ganesh could not help but smile. “That is a good idea,” he said. “We will be doing like that.”
Then he walked to the mailbox and withdrew a magazine and one letter — from India, from Rama!
Don’t read it now, Ganesh told himself abruptly. He didn’t know why, but something told him to save the letter to read at another time. When? He didn’t know. But he must keep it awhile.
No sooner had he and Lucy returned to the porch than a fat elderly man waddled up the cement walk, wiping his bald sweaty head with a handkerchief. “Is Mrs. Strepski in?” he asked. “Tell her Mr. Patton has come.”
In a few minutes Aunt Betty appeared on the porch, looking pale and weary. She walked unsteadily to the swing and sat down. “Good morning, Bruce,” she said in a small voice. “Come sit down.”
“No, Betty, I’m rushed today.” He stood at the bottom step, regarding her critically. “You don’t look well.”
“I feel just fine.”
“Oh, sure. It’s the fasting, isn’t it.” He glanced reproachfully at the kids ranged to one side of the porch. “Last night I had a call from Commissioner Walton.”
“So now he’s calling my lawyer!” Aunt Betty exclaimed in surprise. “Is he going to listen to reason?”
“Not any reason you want him to listen to, Betty,” said Mr. Patton. “He was damn angry at you giving interviews to the press.”
“I’m glad the Express saw fit to send a reporter. We got some good publicity out of it. It will move public opinion.”
“All it did was move Walton to anger. Now give me a moment, Betty,” said the lawyer, his voice turning buttery and persuasive. “You simply must not go on with this thing. It won’t work, there is no chance at all. Walton convinced me of that. Why didn’t you consult me first? And at your age — fasting!”
“Gandhi did it.”
“Sure, but he was a little Indian fellow —” His last remark apparently made Mr. Patton think of her nephew. “Which one is Jeffrey?” he asked, turning to the kids. “Well, shall we go inside and talk there?” he added.
“No,” she said. “Whatever you have to say can be said in front of my friends.”
“Oh — your friends,” he repeated condescendingly. He glanced at the Satyagrahis. “If that’s the way you want it.”
“It is.”
“Commissioner Walton assures me they have made definite arrangements for you to have a two-bedroom apartment in the new building on Vine and Second. You know. The one that just started renting?”
“I know.”
Mr. Patton chuckled with forced heartiness. “People are clamoring for rentals there! But it’s all been arranged for you and —” He looked around, seeking her resemblance among the frowning youngsters. “And your nephew.”
Without hesitation Aunt Betty said, “Tell Walton I am obliged. Also tell him, if he is really concerned with my welfare, to buy the hamburger stand from that big food chain and let me keep my house.”
She moves with the power of two, thought Ganesh.
“Is that your decision?” Mr. Patton asked stiffly.
“It is.”
“As your attorney I strongly advise you to take Walton’s offer. You can’t win this battle — even with their help.” He turned toward the kids and glared at them. “All you are doing now is alienating the officials who are willing to help you — and ruining your health; that is plain! Do I have your final word?”
“Yes, Bruce, you do.”
A spontaneous cheer went up from the Satyagrahis, as the fat man huffed his way down the sunny cement walk.
*
That night, a moonlit one, Ganesh sat up against the porch railing, his feet straight out, staring at his sleeping companions. Moments earlier he had awakened from a deep sleep, coming to attention like an animal suddenly alert to danger. Now, breathing easy, he studied the huddled forms of the Satyagrahis. Ganesh had nothing but admiration for them. The house might have been their own, considering their intense commitment to its defense.
Moonlight. It streamed through the porch railings, striping the floorboards. Moonlight. How often he had sat with his father under the peepul tree in moonlight! During most of Father’s last illness, he suddenly realized, the nights had been moonlit. In moonlight he had listened to his father trying to distill the experience of a lifetime. But one thing Father had not mentioned was the beauty of friendship. Why? Ganesh asked that now. Why? Perhaps because Father had remained an alien in his adopted land. In truth, Father had been alone, shoring up his new life and new beliefs without help from the past, and when Mother was gone, there had been no one to help him in the present. Swami had not been a real friend; he and Father had shared a different sort of experience. They had yearned together for God, but without having felt for each other what Ganesh n
ow felt for his American companions and they for him. Ganesh had discovered friendship for himself. His father’s wisdom had not touched upon it, so it had been his own truth to find and cherish. Moonlight slanted across the heads of his sleeping friends, a ghostly wash of silver, a silent ocean in which he hoped they swam gently through good dreams. Ganesh looked up at the roof of the porch, aware that beyond it were two more floors of the house and a peaked roof, above which stood an iron-cast rooster dominating the entire yard. This house, rising above him, contained many spirits, both living and dead. Ganesh closed his eyes. He did not count his breath or repeat a mantra, but let his consciousness free itself and drift lightly among the spirits — those of his ancestors, his parents, those of his aunt, his loyal friends. The house was peopled by past and present.
*
Next day many people stood outside the gate not long after sunrise. Most of them, by the look of their overalls and cheap cotton dresses and beet-red faces, were farmers. A stocky woman with very fat legs trudged up the walk bearing a large bouquet of flowers. Satyagrahis got Aunt Betty out to the porch in a hurry. By the time she arrived, the heavyset woman had been standing patiently near the front steps, gripping the bouquet in a rough, stubby hand.
“How d’ya do,” the woman said and thrust the flowers forward.
Lucy Smith dashed down the steps, took the bouquet with a smile, and handed it to Aunt Betty, who slumped wearily in the swing.
“Thank you,” Aunt Betty murmured. Smelling the flowers she added, “You are very kind.”
“My husband and me just wanted you to know we don’t like what the state is doing. Land is land. When you live on it, you own it; it’s yours, no matter what a judge says. Leastwise that is what we was taught and live by. So we want you to know God Bless You, and we wish you luck.” Without awaiting a reply, the plump woman turned and was gone.
“That’s a good sign,” remarked Lucy Smith when the woman had waddled out of sight. “It means people know what we’re doing and why.”
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