The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  15

  On his fifth morning, the eighth of the ten-day silent cycle, Max didn’t move from his bed when he heard Hari shuffling next door. No, he thought, I can’t keep at it another day. He was done. It wasn’t the hard work in the fields that had got to him though. He actually liked it. Farm work was real work, not pushing around paper or running numbers and creating presentations for pre-alignment meetings before alignment meetings. A thrill passed through his aching, sore muscles every time he forced the plow to break the unforgiving earth. The sun peeled his skin, the wooden plow handle rubbed his palms raw yet it was miraculous, almost divine to picture a shoot emerging from a mere seed, breaking the earth, becoming a plant, and sustaining the one that sowed.

  Neither, he learned, was he tired of having the same food every day. The passionate discussions on restaurants and menus had always grated on his nerves in New York. Here food was simple, focused, the way it had been in his childhood. You ate what came your way, grateful to have a meal at all. It restored your energy and you thought no more of it. Nor did the asanas faze him much. He could sense his body changing in just a few sessions—his spine crackled, his hips opened and his lower back felt hard and strong. Always a light, anxious sleeper, he was sleeping better than he had in years perhaps because his mind didn’t wander in a thousand directions all day the way it had back home. Asanas, pranayama, field work, cooking on the wooden fire, everything required his complete, single-minded absorption, so that when it was time to sleep, his mind had been trained to think of just sleep and not the activities of the day.

  Yes, he could’ve made the ashram his home for a bit—if it were not for the silence, that is.

  The silence turned more and more oppressive with each passing day. Not the absence of chatter but the presence of the vast, unending sameness. Just five days in but each minute felt exactly the same. The scorching sun, the huts, the three impassive faces around him, and the infinite orange mud. Nothing changed. Even more than change perhaps, he missed control. He wanted to do something to shatter the atmosphere. Order pizza after meditation, sip a Diet Coke in the burning farm, joke with Shakti during asanas, ask Hari where he had got his green eyes—anything that would break the heavy silence. It didn’t feel human. They were just programmed circus monkeys doing acrobatics under the command of a bearded, shiny-faced ringleader. For four days, he had jumped through all the hoops. Now, he was done.

  3.30 a.m. Hari’s heavy feet shuffled out.

  Today Max wouldn’t get up. Hadn’t Ramakrishna said everything was one’s own choice?

  He turned to his side.

  Heavy inhalation and exhalation sounds outside. They had begun pranayama.

  He turned again.

  No, he wouldn’t get up.

  The sounds stopped. They must be holding their breath.

  How long would they keep holding?

  He counted one hundred and fifty seconds, then one hundred and ninety seconds, two hundred and ten, four full minutes.

  Jesus, they were still holding.

  Were they holding longer because the weakest link in the chain was absent? But he hadn’t shown them what he was capable of just yet.

  Max jumped out of bed. Today, he would hold his breath until he choked and died.

  He joined them for the next round.

  They continued the rest of the practice as usual.

  For the remainder of the day, Max kept planning to quit but didn’t. He wondered if Ramakrishna had drugged his food so he became a bovine, unthinking, unquestioning little hamster, just like the other two. His irritation with Jesus-face Ramakrishna turned to annoyance with himself. The problem wasn’t the silence. It was that he wasn’t silent. Ramakrishna was right. His mind was on fire. It violated every yogic precept Ramakrishna had talked of, claiming it wanted enlightenment when it craved pleasure, coveting the comfort of chatter, committing violence when it thought negatively about Ramakrishna. His mind knew no contentment, no peace, no maturity.

  And meditation was the greatest charade of all. He had thought he would learn quickly, that’s what he had come to India for after all. He’d read in his yoga books that the human form was incomplete and the end of suffering was in reaching a union with permanent consciousness within. But for the three hours that he sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, trying to empty his mind of thoughts and think of consciousness, he was tormented by the same images. He, twelve years old, putting his black jacket over eight-year-old Sophia’s head when the cops pulled a bent, blood-soaked old woman from a sewer opposite their building. “She looks like a turtle,” Sophia had said later. Max hadn’t been able to stop her from seeing the dead woman. Neither had he been able to stop kids from bullying her in PS 65 after he went to Trinity. Her eyes would be full of tears when she came back from school. Just like Keisha’s eyes were when he left her. He’d been so cruel to Keisha. Her family wasn’t as poor as the rest of the people in their neighborhood and had owned a grocery store and even their own house on Cauldwell Avenue. For years, Keisha, Sophia, and he had studied together in the basement of her house, away from the gunshots and fire-bombings of Mott Haven. Her father had talked to him about men building colonies on the moon one day, her mother had cooked for him. He wouldn’t have made it to Harvard without their support. In return, he had robbed them of their joy, their life, forever. What right do you have to seek peace when you’ve caused so much pain to so many people, Mahadeva? Max, I’m Max, he repeated to himself.

  Just two nights left, eighty percent over, twenty percent to go, it’s over, soon now. No, he was helpless. Without any masks to wear, without the need to front as someone, he had fallen apart. He couldn’t rein in his mind no matter how much he tried to focus on the space between his eyes or observe his breathing. This just wasn’t his path. But where would he go next? New York was too soft, India was too harsh. What did little Goldilocks want?

  That night, he dreamt that the water in the handpump had turned into sulfuric acid. He opened his eyes. A wave of hot, bitter liquid surged from his abdomen into his chest. It wasn’t a dream. Ramakrishna had forced sulfuric acid down his throat. No, it was . . . He stumbled out of the hut and puked his guts out in the squat toilet a few yards away from their hut. As he stood over it, vomiting, a grayish-black snake with white bands, ten feet long, slithered away from the toilet bowl toward the open door.

  Fuck, there’s a snake in the toilet, a snake, screamed Max—silently.

  He’d almost stepped on a snake. His stomach contracted and heaved. He vomited again, then squatted on the toilet and relieved his bowels. So the Delhi belly had struck finally. Or more accurately, the desolate-ashram-with-mud-in-the-handpump belly. Why had it taken so long? It should have happened days ago.

  He put his hands against his heated face and staggered up, feeling faint and dizzy. Where would he get medicine here? He was dead. Ramakrishna and Hari were waiting for him when he walked outside after scrupulously cleaning up every smear of vomit from the bathroom floor with a rag kept in the corner and washing it with clean water from the drum.

  “How bad is it?” said Hari.

  Finally I made you break your silence, I did, I did, I did, Max exulted, dizzy and incoherent.

  “There is a snake,” said Max and tried to say more but the words wouldn’t form in his mouth.

  They supported him to his bed and Ramakrishna made him drink a foul-smelling green liquid. Max gulped the hot potion down without protest.

  “Rest today, rest all day,” said Ramakrishna, putting his hand on Max’s burning head.

  Max nodded and slept.

  His watch alarm went off at 3.15 a.m. He switched it off. As he did, his head exploded, his body burnt. He was going to die. But hadn’t he read that a permanent consciousness beyond birth, suffering, and death lay within him? Concentrate on that. Oh, but his stomach hurt so fucking much. He turned to his side and tried to sleep again. His stomach rumbled again. Max rushed to the bathroom.

  On his way back he saw Ramakri
shna sitting in his usual cross-legged position in the courtyard. Shakti and Hari would join him anytime now. Today, Max officially had the day off. He went back to his hut. Moments later, he heard Hari shuffling out.

  Max turned to his other side.

  Soft voices outside.

  He turned again.

  Ramakrishna had begun his instructions.

  No, he couldn’t miss this. He sat up in his bed and coughed away the burning feeling in his throat, then joined them in the courtyard.

  You don’t have to, said the expression on Ramakrishna’s face.

  I want to, was Max’s unspoken response.

  Max’s palms sweated with every pumping of the first pranayama. Shivers ran down his spine. His throat gagged at the end of three rounds. He coughed and had to hurry to discharge the greenish-yellow phlegm in the bathroom. As soon as he did, a pleasant, cool sensation went down his throat and the bitter bile aftertaste subsided. He joined the others and sat back down.

  Likely in response to Max’s condition, Ramakrishna taught them that day a new breath lock, the Uddiyana Bandha, an abdominal purge. They stood up, leaned forward and forced the stale air inside the torso out, then pulled the abdomen inside the rib cage with a powerful physical contraction. Fifty or sixty times they went, churning the abdomen from left to right, then right to left, again and again, faster and faster like an eddy whirling at maximum speed. At the end of three rounds, Ramakrishna taught them the Maha Bandha or the Great Breath Lock, a simultaneous application of all three breath locks—chin, abdomen and perineum.

  Max lay down quivering on the floor after applying the Maha Bandha, too spent to do even a single asana.

  He closed his eyes and didn’t open them again until class ended. When he got up, he wasn’t dizzy anymore. Instead, gusts of fresh air surged through his body. His stomach felt light, his skin pleasantly warm. He walked around shaking his head in disbelief. His mind couldn’t accept what his body told him.

  He felt fine.

  It was a delusion, an exaggerated exuberance from the oversupply of oxygen in his head. Churning your abdomen like a madman for an hour couldn’t cure something that needed days of rest and medicine. Max went to the bathroom and tried to puke. Nothing. He squatted over the toilet bowl. Nothing. Not only was he cleansed of his illness, but he felt lighter. He would live another day. Tomorrow, he could leave, if he chose.

  Max awoke the next day with tense excitement. Today, he could talk—and leave. The brilliance of the asanas and pranayama was unquestionable, he knew now since his symptoms hadn’t surfaced again. But how long could one keep up with the complete silence? Ten more days perhaps, even a month, if he tapped into his deepest reserves of patience, but it would end sooner rather than later. He had thought that he could handle any hardship because he’d grown up in a kind of urban purgatory, but he was wrong. The self-imposed silence here felt more oppressive than the gunshots and screams of his old neighborhood. Surely he’d find someone like Ramakrishna elsewhere in India and build to excellence in more hospitable conditions.

  Silence would break after the 3.30 a.m. asana class. His last class. Max walked to the warm courtyard in the darkness, surprised not to feel the exhilaration he expected after anticipating this moment for days. He sat in his usual spot for the breathing exercises, feeling stronger than he’d ever felt. A lifetime of waste seemed to have been purged from his system. Ramakrishna had done him good. Never before had he seen a man of this stature.

  As the class progressed, hour after hour, each pose felt smoother, more intentional. Then, the final bow pose. His last asana in the ashram. Max lay flat on his stomach, pulling his legs off the ground by holding an ankle in each arm behind him. He straightened his arms and pulled his legs higher until only his navel touched the ground. His lungs filled up. Warmth spread through his spine. His neck strained. The blazing sun above was so close. He pulled his legs with all his strength. Suddenly, his navel lifted a little off the ground. A rush of air went to his head, hoisted high. His navel touched the ground again.

  For a moment, he had flown.

  Stunned, he looked up at Ramakrishna standing beside him. Ramakrishna’s face was impassive as usual.

  Of course, he hadn’t flown. It must have just felt like it. Right?

  “You are better today, I see,” said Ramakrishna.

  That was when Max knew he wouldn’t leave. Not until he reached a shadow of Ramakrishna’s greatness. Selflessly opening his doors to strangers, offering everything his land produced to others before taking a morsel himself, a mind restrained and composed, not restless and hungry. Max had come to India to become a yogi, a Ramakrishna. How could he think of leaving for petty comforts like hot showers and mindless chatter?

  Max got up, breathless, his face warm, his body pulsing with streams of energy. He had never felt this way after asanas. He felt giddy. Maybe he had flown. The air was electric with possibility. He breathed deeply to calm himself.

  Max faced Ramakrishna, struggling to put his thoughts into words. “The pranayama cured me,” he said finally.

  He wanted to say more, to thank Ramakrishna for allowing him to stay there, to express his gratitude for the gift of Ramakrishna’s teaching. But as usual, he fell silent in his presence and couldn’t look into his eyes.

  “You cured yourself,” said Ramakrishna.

  “Yes, you learn fast,” said Shakti, with the freckles and reddish-brown hair, joining them. Her severe, impenetrable face softened when she smiled. The strict black-rim glasses now looked cute. She spoke with a thick Italian accent. “I am here six months and I do not make headstand as straight as you. I saw you the first day. You have not even practiced asana before, have you?”

  Max shook his head.

  Shakti raised her hands up in the air and threw her head back. “Wow,” she said.

  “You must have in a past life, for sure,” said Hari in a Middle Eastern accent, joining them in front of Max’s yoga mat.

  Max smiled. In India talking about past lives seemed as common as discussing the Yankees lineup back home. He felt a sudden pang of guilt for saying goodbye to Sophia so hastily. Now that he had decided to stay here, would he get a chance to call or email home?

  “You can walk from the village to Pavur. You will find everything you need there,” said Ramakrishna.

  Max’s pulse quickened. He tried to empty his mind of any lingering negative thoughts.

  “I go there today also,” said Shakti. “We go together.”

  Ramakrishna folded his hands and excused himself. Max stood with Shakti and Hari in the courtyard, chatting, laughing, the sun no longer oppressive, the day alive with potential. They shared the basics. Shakti, previously Lucia, was an Italian astronomer, who was using a one-year university sabbatical to find out who she really was. Hari, previously known as Ahmed, an Egyptian film actor, had quit the movie business after a fortuitous encounter with Buddhist meditation. Hari had been at the ashram for nine months, Shakti for six. In a few minutes of talking to them, Max felt more understood than he had by people he’d known all his life in New York. They were burning with the same intangible questions that he was. One day, the fire had raged so strong that they had left their careers, love, and life behind to answer them. But neither seemed troubled by their choice. Hari, in particular, looked completely at peace in the ashram and hadn’t been to the village or surrounding town for months. He wanted to direct his prana, his vital energy, inward and not fritter it away like most of the world did, in travel, in conversation, in frenzied movement that tried to quell the restless mind but further agitated it—quite like the activities Shakti and Max were planning that day.

  “So okay we get ready. The tractor arrives anytime now,” said Shakti and laughed a surprisingly girlish laugh. “Tractor arrives anytime now—so many months and I still laugh when I hear. How my life changes.”

  16

  The old man who had driven in the big faded red tractor from the village to the ashram welcomed them with a wa
rm, toothless smile. They adjusted themselves and three produce bags—two with millets, one with drumsticks—on the narrow, metal front seat.

  Shakti pulled her hair in a ponytail. She wore a light purple dress and a beady, orange necklace with matching earrings, the dash of color giving a radiant glow to her tanned skin. Max was glad he had picked up a new pair of khakis in Bombay. Between the hikes, bus and train journeys, his cargo pants were falling to pieces.

  Shakti said something.

  It was lost in the din of the tractor’s motor as it rumbled toward the village. She moved closer to him. He gripped the seat tighter to avoid flying off the open-air vehicle.

  “How is your first week?” she said.

  Max pulled the spare T-shirt he carried tighter around his head to protect against the beating sun. “A good experience,” he started to say but stopped when it struck him how precious speech was.

  “I’m struggling,” he said. “Badly.”

  Shakti’s eyes narrowed. “But you look like you adjust well,” she said. “Eight or ten people come in last six months and they all leave in first week itself. It makes you feel uneasy when that happens so I think both Hari and I are happy to see someone who can last.”

  “I can’t meditate,” said Max.

  “You have not meditated before?” she said.