The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  “It’s just food. Why does it matter where it comes from?” he said.

  Ramakrishna was shaking his head even before he completed. “No, no, that is the way it has to be. And we do have enough to live. Fasting is good. It gives the digestive organs a rest. It cleanses the system of toxins. You develop patience and self-control. One who conquers hunger conquers all the senses. Nothing binds him to the material plane then.”

  “But this isn’t fasting,” said Max. “We are starving.”

  “All I can offer you is my share. Please have that from tomorrow,” said Ramakrishna.

  He got up and wiped his plate with dried, burnt leaves and left it in its usual place outside the hut.

  Max stared into Shakti’s sunken eyes. “I’m going to leave”—he wanted to say. He knew if he capitulated, she would too. Shakti pulled back a strand of dry hair from her face and looked away. Hot wind stung his eyes. She must be working through her own past as well. He wouldn’t get in her way. All his life, he had made easy choices. Now, no longer. Max wiped his plate dry and left.

  From that day, Ramakrishna ate only half a cup of millets a day.

  Max apologized and requested him to have more.

  “No, no, your talk was good. I had become lazy from habit. I have lived on much less before,” he said.

  Another week passed. Max began to worry more and more about Shakti. She had lost at least twenty pounds in the last two months. Her face had lost its color. Her red hair looked dull and eyes bloodshot.

  One day, she didn’t wear her glasses and stumbled through the fields like she was sleepwalking. Max had never seen her remove her glasses before. She didn’t wear them again the next day. Her swollen eyes popped out of her sunken face. Twice, she stopped and adjusted her glasses, only there was nothing to adjust. Her thin fingers moved up and down her eyes weakly. Max started to panic. It took all his strength to restrain himself from talking to her.

  Later that afternoon, he woke up from a thick sleep to hear Ramakrishna and Shakti arguing in the courtyard. Max walked out of his hut. Ramakrishna was shaking his head. Shakti’s expressions grew more and more animated. A tear trickled down her face. He had never seen Shakti cry. She must be asking for more food and Ramakrishna was refusing as always. Didn’t he know her by now? She was too proud to break silence and ask for more unless she needed it to live.

  Enough. This had gone on too long. The tight knot of Keisha’s images loosened. He’d never forgive himself if something happened to Shakti. It was time to tap into the emergency rations they’d been storing away. No matter how meager the crop they produced daily, Ramakrishna would put a portion away for later. It made perfect sense. If the rain didn’t come in another week, the dry land would turn to cement. Thus far, hunger had been tough to bear. Another week and it would be the difference between life and death. Shakti had likely reached that point. What kind of a saint was Ramakrishna if he couldn’t see that?

  Shakti went inside her hut. Max walked over to Ramakrishna.

  “Shakti looks really sick. We should use the emergency rations,” said Max.

  Ramakrishna looked puzzled.

  “The supplies in storage,” said Max with rising impatience. He went to the kitchen next to Ramakrishna’s hut. “This,” he said pointing to the four brown sacks, two with millets, one each with eggplant and drumsticks.

  Ramakrishna shook his head. “No, no, no. This is for the village. We will give it to them when the tractor comes next.”

  Days of hunger and deprivation rose in Max like a red, angry force. He coughed to clear his throat.

  “No, you can’t do that,” said Max. “Shakti is dying.”

  “I think I told you in the beginning, whatever we produce, we give half to the village,” said Ramakrishna.

  Max felt an urgent physical need to lift Ramakrishna by the collar of his long Indian kurta, force him against the wall of the hut and shake the idiocy out of him. He backed away a step. He couldn’t trust himself not to lift his hand.

  “No. I helped farm too. We can’t give our food away,” said Max, shaking. Tears stung his eyes. “We can’t help anyone if we can’t help ourselves. This is madness.”

  Ramakrishna’s eyes didn’t waver. His face had lost none of its luster in the days of deprivation.

  “This is how it has to be,” said Ramakrishna.

  He turned around.

  Max could no longer restrain himself. He grabbed him by his shoulders.

  “She is dying, don’t you understand?” he said, shaking him. “Shakti could die. We can’t let her die. Please.”

  “Don’t be crazy, Max. I am fine.”

  Max turned around.

  “Your glasses?” he said weakly.

  “A screw comes loose,” she said.

  “You were asking him for food?” he said.

  “Not for myself,” she said.

  She had been having the same discussion with Ramakrishna as he had just had. Max took his hands off Ramakrishna’s shoulders.

  Shakti turned to Ramakrishna. “Can we cook now?”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” said Max.

  “Not at all,” said Ramakrishna. He paused. “I know this is difficult, but what we have is enough.”

  They ate their scant meal in Ramakrishna’s hut, tucked away from the blazing sun.

  “I want to leave,” said Shakti at the end of the meal.

  Ramakrishna nodded. “A tractor will come on the third day from today. You can leave then.”

  No tractor had come for the last month, probably because the village was enduring the same drought. But they didn’t ask how he was sure that one would come in three days. They just knew it would.

  Max hesitated. “I will leave too,” he said.

  “I understand. My door will always be open should either of you want to come back,” said Ramakrishna.

  Shakti smiled at Max when Ramakrishna left, then burst out in dry sobs. Max wanted to cry too, because he knew she wasn’t crying for the hunger or the thirst. They would pull through another week. She was crying for the loss of a guru, who had given them a glimpse of truth and could light the entire path for them. But leaving, they both knew, was now inevitable. Max put his hands in hers and held her close, feeling her burning skin under him. They had never touched before. Ramakrishna had never explicitly forbidden them, but touch meant desire, narrow craving that tethered one to this limited life. But today, to touch another burning, throbbing body was to feel alive again. For everything around them, the land, their crops, the spare insects, even the resident frogs and geckos, had all shriveled and burned to death.

  20

  The tractor came early in the morning on the third day. The driver had aged considerably from the last time they’d seen him a month ago. His dry, papery skin was covered with thick grooves, his lips were cracked, and he seemed to have shrunk to half his size. Max shook his burning hand, relieved they were carrying food for the village. He felt ashamed for throwing a tantrum. But Shakti and he were starving too. Just loading the food sacks and backpacks onto the tractor made his head spin. They bent down and touched Ramakrishna’s feet, then folded their hands, thanking him for his teaching and hospitality. Max felt a pang of concern about leaving him alone without emergency rations. But he knew Ramakrishna would manage as he had for all these years. They drove away in the sputtering tractor.

  The tractor ran out of fuel a few miles before they reached the village. The farmer apologized. There was no petrol in the village. They would have to walk. He himself was too tired to walk. Could they ask the villagers to make something from the food sacks they were carrying and send it back? He lay down under the tractor to protect himself from the blazing sun. Max promised himself that he would come back with food. They hoisted their backpacks and loaded the food sacks on their heads, and then began the slow, stumbling walk to the village.

  They stopped for a break mid-way and sat down on their backpacks, sweat pouring down their temples. Max licked his lips. Salt.
He licked some more. Any food would do. Soon, he would eat more. Chocolate biscuits and orange juice. Apples, bananas, rice, bread. Blood coursed through his veins. Max took off his shirt and wiped the sweat off his face.

  Shakti looked around. Seeing just miles of desolate land, she removed her T-shirt and sat in her bra.

  “Where you will go next?” said Shakti, untying her ponytail so that her hair fell over her naked, tanned shoulders.

  Max cupped his hand over his eyes to shield them from the blinding sun.

  “Not back home,” he said. “Maybe Varanasi. I read that it’s India’s holiest place. Anywhere I can find a teacher half as good as Ramakrishna. You?”

  “Back to Milan,” she said. “My sabbatical is almost over. At first, I think I will not join the university but now I want to.”

  “Come with me,” said Max.

  She shook her head. “I feel like this for some time now. I do not want this. I want life. I want family. Imperfect. Comfortable. Beautiful.”

  Max’s eyes watered in the hot wind. He would probably never see Shakti again. An aching loneliness filled him. Yet another friendship left halfway.

  “Even I don’t know if I want liberation,” he said.

  “You do,” she said.

  Max had the sudden urge to pull her sure face closer.

  “Will you have a family with your boyfriend?” he said.

  “Maybe yes. Maybe no. Finding a man is not difficult for me,” she smiled.

  She tossed her hair back, a stream of sweat trickling down the side of her neck to her naked torso. Max stared at the tops of her soft breasts, white against the deep tan on the rest of her body.

  “Not difficult at all,” he said. “You are beautiful.”

  “Yogis not look at woman like that,” she laughed.

  “I’m not a yogi then,” he said.

  He came closer. His lips found hers. He tasted water, salt and blood in her chapped skin. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her to his naked chest. Her burning skin pressed against his.

  “I am messy. I am dirty. I smell. I do not feel attractive,” she said.

  “I love your smell,” he said.

  He spread his shirt beneath them, put her on it and tugged her cargo pants off. He buried his face between her legs smelling sweat mixed with dry earth. She moaned. He moved up and down her lean, hard body, licking, kissing, touching, nibbling, biting, his desire fueled by starvation.

  He stopped and lay on her, still, feeling her writhe under him. She circled his cracked sore nipples with her tongue, caressed his raw skin, rubbed her fingers over his dry, torn hips, and drew blood from his cuts. He gasped with pain, with pleasure and entered her.

  They fucked hard as the sun beat down on them.

  Again and again they went, up, down, his face in her buttocks, her mouth working his penis, fucking, sucking, living, the months of abstinence and denial seeping away from their hard, weary bodies until their skins peeled in the unforgiving wrath of the sun.

  He shifted position and took her from behind, aroused once again by the red-brown hair falling over her shoulders, the fullness of her breasts and her hard waist.

  They screamed together when he came.

  They collapsed in each other’s arms, a sweaty mix of dust and blood, and lay there still and silent, unconcerned with the blazing sun.

  “I want this every day. I like this. I do not like yoga,” she said after a while.

  “Come with me. We can have this every day,” said Max.

  She got up, pushed her hair back and started clasping her bra.

  Max forced himself up as well. A thousand prickly, throbbing, alive sensations coursed through his body.

  “Come with me,” he said again.

  She snorted. “I give us one week, maybe two. You will disappear after that. You want yoga not sex.”

  He put his shirt back on and tousled her hair. “How do you know everything?”

  “I do not know everything but I know you, Max. I see you work. I see you do yoga. You are a parivarjataka, an eternal traveler, a yogi with no home who will not rest until he sees God face-to-face,” she said. “I am not like that.”

  She looked at her watch. “Almost eleven. If we do not start now, we will burn up, walking six miles to town.”

  They put on their backpacks and lifted the sacks onto their heads and walked to the village. Max felt heady and light. The images from his past that had been tormenting him for months had receded. He felt Shakti’s touch on his skin, a loose strand of her auburn hair below his eyes, the smell of her sweat. He stole a glance at her determined, sure face. His eyes stung. She was beautiful.

  21

  Something felt different. Max hadn’t been to the village in three months, choosing to stay in the ashram even on the days when silence broke, so he couldn’t put his finger on it. What was it? He looked around. Everything was just as he remembered. The thirty-odd huts in a neat semi-circle, the giant well in the center of the huts, the shop selling cigarettes and sundry items on the far right, the weaver’s shop on the left, the fields with their hardened earth ahead. Why did it look so different then? It struck him then. He couldn’t hear a sound. The village was completely silent. There was no one around. No women huddling by the wells, no children playing with marbles, not a single farmer plowing the fields, no weaver working in the shop. No words, no whispers, no signs of life.

  “Where is everybody?” asked Shakti, her words a shout in the eerie silence.

  They approached the hut where the man who usually took their food sacks lived. The wooden door was open. A man lay on the mud floor. His skin looked like the earth—patchy, dry, and black. The man raised a bony hand in greeting. It took Max a moment to recognize him as the erect, proud man who had greeted him the last time they had come with the crops.

  Max and Shakti put the sacks in front of him.

  His withered, dry face broke into a smile. He said something. Max bent closer. He wanted Max to call the others in the village. They knocked on all the doors. Fifteen or twenty women and a couple of old men shuffled out. Heat and hunger seemed to have driven their modesty away. Their rags showed most of their burnt, blackened bodies, their hair was unkempt, and movements slow and unsure. Max and Shakti had entered the land of the living dead.

  The women stared at the food sacks with bright eyes. They smiled through their torn skins and stained teeth.

  Max stood there, looking at the food sacks he hadn’t wanted to part with.

  “Where are all the men?” said Shakti.

  They learnt that the men had gone to Madurai, the nearest city twelve hours by bus from Pavur, to find work after farming became impossible in the village.

  A middle-aged woman pointed fiercely to a hut on the far left, asking them to come there. The tall man tried to dissuade her but she persisted.

  They walked over the scorching earth and entered the hut. The rancid smell of human waste. Two thin boys, five or six years old, whom Max had often bought snacks for and joked with, were huddled together naked on a bed strung together by ropes. They breathed heavily, making loud, scratchy sounds. Max looked away from their scared eyes.

  The woman folded her hands. Her eyes begged them to do something. Again and again she raised her arms, praying and begging.

  They had been fucking less than a mile away.

  Max indicated that she should give them the food they’d brought immediately. But he knew the futility of his suggestion. The three sacks of food meant three meals for one day for a village in the throes of a drought. There wasn’t enough food to go around. Today two kids would die, tomorrow some more and then a few more. Hunger, starvation, death were right at his doorstep. How could he have been so selfish, so oblivious? Ramakrishna had been right. They’d had more than enough to eat. Max gripped Shakti’s hand.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where?” she said.

  “Pavur. Somewhere. There must be an ATM or a bank nearby. I have money,” he said
.

  She started to say something but her words were drowned by the anguished cries of the woman. They walked out of the hut, past the two-hundred-foot well which didn’t seem to contain even a drop of water, away from the charred bodies collecting near the hut they had kept the food in. Limp, weary hands waved at them.

  A middle-aged man ran toward them with obvious effort.

  He lifted his shirt and pointed to his waist.

  Max didn’t understand.

  “Help. Kidney. Buy kidney,” said the man.

  Max had read about impoverished donors selling kidneys to needy, rich people. It hadn’t struck him with any urgency then. Just like droughts hadn’t.

  Instead of pity, anger surged within him. Didn’t this happen every year? How could these people be so unprepared, so oblivious? Why did they continue to live here?

  The man fell on Max’s feet, pleading.

  Max brushed him off. “No need. I will get money,” he said.

  They turned around and walked out of the village.

  “To how many villages will you give money?” said Shakti on the dirt track to Pavur.

  He stared at her.

  “There are small villages all around,” she said, pointing to the huts along the road. “It is the same everywhere. How much money can you give?”

  His initial irritation disappeared. Shakti was right, logical as usual. What he gave wouldn’t even be a drop in the ocean for this village, let alone the millions of people dying of starvation in the hundreds of villages all over the world. Half of this world lived on less than a dollar a day. Just because he was seeing a few kids die didn’t mean it began or ended here. Why did it happen? The questions hadn’t changed since he had begun his journey.

  “I also think they put on little show for us,” said Shakti.

  Max understood. The villagers knew they were coming that day so they hadn’t made any effort to hide their needs.

  “I read before I came here. Drought and famine are very bad in India but no mass deaths anymore. We were worse off than the villagers. The government sends water tankers to the village every few days. At Ramakrishna’s ashram, we had nothing,” she said. “Farmers’ problems are inflation and debt, not food grain itself.”