The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  Max figured the villagers were likely taking debts to tide through the drought and the men were working menial jobs in Madurai to pay them off. So the villagers probably had a little more to eat and drink than they had shown. Maybe the boys on the rope bed would breathe less heavily if Max and Shakti weren’t around. Sure, he was being manipulated but it changed nothing. Misery was written large on their faces. The cycle of hunger and debt and more hunger and more debt would go on.

  “The planet can’t support so many people. There has to be an end to this cycle of birth, death and rebirth,” said Max.

  Even as he articulated this half-formed thought, he realized he was running away from the one man who could show him the end of suffering. Why? To eat more drumsticks and eggplant? While he was busy angling for an extra bowl of millets and a fuck in the fields, the world had continued to spin in its uncaring way. He had come so close to seeing a glimmer of the truth but had got distracted once again.

  “I’m going to go back to Ramakrishna,” he said after a minute. “I’ll withdraw whatever money I can from the ATM, buy supplies for the village and walk right back.”

  Shakti tied her bandana around her hair. “I think that is wise,” she said.

  “Will you come?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing changes for me.”

  “Yet you say it’s smart for me to go back?” he said.

  “The path of liberation is like poison in beginning, nectar in end. The path of the world is nectar in beginning, always poison in end,” she said. “Quoting as it is from Bhagavad Gita.”

  “So come with me,” he said.

  “I do not want to think about the future. I want nectar now,” she said.

  A burnt, brown boy waved at them from a hut on the side of the dirt track. Max waved back distractedly.

  “And I should have poison?” he said.

  “I think you cannot help it,” she said.

  A light, empty feeling arose in his gut. He was afraid of going back without Shakti.

  “Is it safe to live with so little food?” he said.

  “If Ramakrishna is okay all these years, you will be okay too. You are strong, like him. I try to keep up with you all these months,” she said.

  “I was keeping up with you,” he said.

  They arrived at the bus stand. Shakti bought a ticket for the bus to Madurai. They kept their backpacks down and hugged. Tears fell from both their eyes. She touched his face.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “All these ups and downs are just small waves in the yoga of your discontent.”

  “The yoga of my discontent?”

  “In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness. That’s why Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna Vishada Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna’s despondency,” she said. “Your discontent with world as it is will lead you to your union.”

  She waved at him and went inside the bus. Max waved back, a lump forming in his throat. He willed himself to feel nothing. It had to start from here. The narrow need for comfort and companionship had to be burnt in the fire of a broader, universal love. The bus left. Max walked over to the shop with the phone, feeling an aching sadness in his heart.

  Max called his bank, concentrating on remembering long-forgotten security questions, and maximized his ATM’s international withdrawal limit. He left the shop and withdrew $2000 in rupees from the ATM next to the bus stand, enough for the village to survive the season if they bought the essentials of grains and lentils. On his way back to the village, Max stopped in front of the hardware store with the Internet connection. He hesitated. He had to break free from the pull of the world, go deeper within. But he couldn’t stop himself from entering the store.

  Biscuits and chips strung on the façade, shelves full of machine parts, and the proprietor sitting on a chair in the relative coolness of the dark shop interior—everything seemed glaringly opulent in contrast to the sparseness of the ashram and the village. He connected to the Internet, barely noticing how slow it was. Just touching the cold metal of the laptop, knowing how to operate it, the email account itself made him aware of the vastness of his privilege.

  Petty, irrelevant noise entered his silent life as soon as he opened his email. Jobs being changed, houses being bought, babies being welcomed. He skimmed through everything quickly, stopping only at an email from Sophia.

  ‘Maxi, I got admitted to Stern . . . I know you’ll be surprised I’m going to B-School but I gotta make some money! Else I’ll end up back in the projects . . . I’ve realized now I was just trying to be different from you. Send me news. Oh and I’ve met someone! He’s great . . . he’s helping me think through a lot of things.’

  Max was surprised. Sophia had always been so driven by purpose and meaning. He couldn’t see her work in a corporation. Was she okay? She didn’t seem as self-contained and thoughtful as she usually was. He didn’t quite like the sound of the guy she had met.

  Max walked back to the shop with the phone. He dialed Sophia’s number from memory. It went to voicemail. Max disconnected the phone. He wouldn’t call her again. If he wanted to become one with the universal, he had to transcend this narrow love, these binding attachments that fed one’s sense of self. Not that she needed him. She was twenty-six and going to graduate school, not a mother of two trying to feed her children in the middle of a drought.

  Outside the shop, Max began throwing his clothes out of the backpack with a vengeance. He returned to the village with a bag full of powdered glucose, water bottles, biscuits, fruits, lentils, and rice—and just enough diesel for the tractor ride to Ramakrishna’s ashram and back.

  In the village chief’s hut, he succumbed to the villagers’ insistence that he share a portion of their meager rations. They treated him like a messiah. I’m nobody, he wanted to scream at their dried, torn faces. Just someone born in easier circumstances that I didn’t work for in this life. A bony, charred young woman served him potatoes and biscuits. She looked roughly the same age as Sophia but this woman’s future would be as black as her past. Could he help her? Could anyone? Who knew if her pain was the effect of actions from lives past or just a random act of nature? All he knew was that the world was imperfect and an ancient path promised perfection. Now, he would walk the path afresh to bring answers back for everyone. Max looked at the woman’s sallow face and couldn’t taste the potatoes anymore. He had lost his taste for food forever and was glad for it. So fleeting and capricious was the joy of the senses, these external pleasures. Nothing would distract him now in his search for the permanent truth within.

  Max made his way back to the ashram later that evening, once the driver had his fill of the cooked food Max brought for him. Ramakrishna greeted him at the gates with his silent smile. Despite Max’s protestations, he insisted on sweeping the floors of his hut and making his bed just like he had done the first time. It was as if he was welcoming a new guest rather than the one who had left.

  22

  The rain came three weeks later. First, a trickle, then a torrent, breaking the land open and making it soft and malleable again. They planted six rows of new seeds after the first rain, adding rice and tomatoes to their usual three. The bore well filled. The handpump worked again. Crops sprouted, as did insects, and with them came frogs and snakes. New life. Despite the now-abundant food and the luxury of being able to choose between rice and millets, Max stuck to eating one meal a day. And he did well with it. His strength returned, his constipation eased, and he found that he could do asanas and field work with greater intensity than before.

  The monsoon brought new visitors. A Portuguese couple who had cycled for eighteen months from Portugal through Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and finally into India were the first to arrive. Having realized the futility of endlessly chasing new sights and sounds, they abandoned their plans of going to Nepal, sold their bicycles in India, and embarked on the more perilous journey of looking inside. They lasted t
wo weeks.

  They were followed by a Sri Lankan artist who wanted to make herself an instrument of the universal creative force. She left in a week as did the Indian software engineer who had started to think life was an elaborate charade. Others came and went. Max talked to them eagerly in the beginning. Soon though, he fell silent like Hari, became reflective like Shakti. With each passing face, he understood more and more what dying would feel like. He’d remember a collage of faces and smiles—and bid a final goodbye, knowing he hadn’t unmasked the eternal truth. New faces would keep coming. The chatter would go on. None of it would take him closer to his goal of completion, of reaching a spiritual whole with the infinite. Every moment now was dedicated to learning, giving, dissolving his small self. Nothing else mattered.

  Now he worked in the field without thought of enjoyment or pain, and surrendered his body to the universe’s will in his asana practice. His actions were that of a yogi, neither white nor black, just colorless. He was determined to break the cause–effect cycle, produce no reactions, no impressions, neither good nor bad. Slowly he was untethering himself from life.

  His meditation deepened. One day, he saw a bright yellow light in the space between his closed eyes. Liquid warmth surged through his body. The next day the light became brighter. Bells chimed somewhere within him. Max opened his eyes. The chiming stopped. The bells tolled again when he closed his eyes. Deep, sonorous, melodic, tugging at his heart strings. Bright yellow light pulsed from his head to his body. Was this the divine—unknown lights and mystical sounds, the feeling of complete warmth and peace?

  “Don’t be distracted. Don’t get attached to lights and sounds. They are just signposts that you are on the right path, not the end of the path. Keep working hard,” the words that Ramakrishna had said once long ago remained in his head.

  So Max did exactly that. He slept less and less, sometimes only two hours a night, sometimes not at all. His dreams ceased, probably because his mind was at rest. More blinding lights appeared with the passing of the months—yellow, orange, red—and they stayed for longer and longer. Late one night when he was meditating in his hut, a hollow, guttural sound originated in the bottom of his spine. The sound traveled up and down his spine before reverberating in the depths of his heart. Max felt weightless, floating, dissolving into the sound. Radiant white light filled the space between his eyes. The light disappeared. He was submerged in infinite black space. From the blackness emerged the sun, moons, galaxies, stars and hundreds of red planets. They whirled rapidly, crashing against each other and turned into large glaciers, mountains, oceans, and flatland. Max shuddered. All of creation lay within him. He opened his eyes to a bright morning.

  Ramakrishna hadn’t shaken him out of his meditation for asana class that day. Perhaps he knew that Max had felt for the first time the presence of the creating energy, the causeless cause within him. For Max had realized that the sound that originated in his spine was Om, the root in every sound, the word that had vibrated in the act of creation. He had read of the mystical Om in the books at the ashram but he had never experienced it until that day. Om vibrated again and again within him in the days that followed. Soon, Max’s nagging worries about his future began to disappear. This body, this mind that tormented him wasn’t him. The Dutch yoga teacher and the mother of two from Texas, who were staying at the ashram that week, were no different from him. The clay made pots, pans, plates, bricks, houses, but the real nature of all of them was the same clay. One consciousness vibrated everywhere, in everything. Om, the vibration of that consciousness, filled his body and mind, slowly dissolving the images lingering in his memory. Keisha’s face became hazier. Shakti standing at the bus stop, waving goodbye, shimmered and disappeared. His mother’s yellow, contorted face and Andre’s limp, lifeless legs were mere wrinkles on the surface of the pot. Their real nature was unaffected. Other faces he had touched, hands held, promises made, conversations had, all were receding, disappearing into the growing void within him.

  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 flexibility 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 even 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 wrote 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 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. The boundaries of space and time were breaking. He worked hard in the fields, practiced asanas and pranayama, and meditated like before, but none of the activities felt distinct from the other. 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 about 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 kept him from losing himself completely to the blissful void. He banished the image of the little girl with curly hair rushing 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, a clamor of footsteps broke Max’s concentration. The ashram had filled with temporary visitors once again that monsoon season; 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, 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 and with them had come 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 was coiled around the squat toilet, its beady eyes gleaming, tongue flickering.

  “Move back,” said the Bulgarian to Max.

  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 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 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, uncoil yourself from around the toilet, come straight toward us, go 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.