The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  His debit card was rejected once again.

  Outside the kiosk, men on bicycles whizzed past busy shops, hawkers peddled their wares and a bent old man dragged a wheelbarrow filled with brown sacks. Max fingered the card’s silver strip. Had his bank frozen his checking account because he hadn’t used it in more than two years? Max opened the door and walked outside to look for a telephone booth.

  He collided with a tall, lean man on a bicycle who was staring open-mouthed at him.

  “Sorry, boss, sorry,” said the man.

  “Pen, pen, pen, Jesus Christ,” chanted the boys following him.

  Three women selling vegetables, a man hawking newspapers and magazines on a cart, and a few other passers-by collected around him.

  Max wasn’t used to the attention. He hadn’t gone beyond Pavur for three years and everyone there had known him. Here, he felt like an alien once again. Even so, he was surprised that the locals followed him when he walked to the phone booth. Madurai was a temple city and saw its fair share of Western tourists. In fact some were on the street right then. He spotted a young blonde couple, an older, Russian-looking man, and another white family of four, but no one was following them around or gaping at them. Was it because of his height? His ragged clothes? Max couldn’t figure it out but he did find a phone booth. People gathered around the booth to watch him. Puzzled, he turned his back to the street and concentrated on dialing the phone number listed at the back of his bank card.

  “Please enter the last four digits of your Social Security number,” said a mechanized voice.

  In his previous life, Max would have pressed a series of #s to bypass the prompts and connect directly to a live voice. Now, every thought, every action was an exercise in complete truthfulness. There could be nothing relative in the path of the yogi. He couldn’t speak a half-truth, the same way he couldn’t squash the mosquitoes ravaging him or covet a more comfortable way of traveling than the lowest class available on the train. A yogi lived in absolutes. Truth, non-violence, and austerity were his religion. It rid the body of physical craving and the mind of ego, thus reducing the pull of the world.

  Max punched, dialed, corrected, then repunched and redialed his Social Security digits, birth date, and erstwhile street address on the broken phone console before he was finally connected to a live voice.

  His ATM access had indeed been blocked due to account inactivity. They needed the exact amounts and dates of his last three ATM withdrawals to verify his identity.

  “Is there another way?” said Max. “I haven’t withdrawn money in years. It will be hard to tell the exact dates.”

  “I realize the difficulty, Mr. Pzoras, but Capital One bank’s international fraud protection policies aim at safeguarding customers’ interests first and foremost,” said the efficient male voice. “Alternatively, we request a notarized letter stating your reason for not using the bank account. We will process it within seven business days of receipt and reopen the account.”

  Fraud protection. Safeguarding. Notarized. Process. The words of the world sounded heavy and difficult. Max paused, trying to understand everything.

  “Notarized by whom?” he said eventually.

  “Any recognizable US body. Like an embassy or a consulate in your country of travel,” the voice said.

  The nearest consulate was probably in Chennai, another ten hours away and there would probably be more red tape there. Nor did he have money to get there. The yogic test had been performed. Max was now clear that it would utilize far less prana to perform samyama, a blend of deep concentration and meditation resulting in complete merging with the object of focus, on the withdrawal dates. In the last year, Ramakrishna had taught him to practice samyama on his body to understand the working of the cells that made up his vital organs and the interconnected masses of veins and nerves that supplied blood and nutrients to them. Knowing his body would allow him to keep it fit and functioning, making it a sturdy temple to worship the soul within. Now, Max would concentrate on his memory with the same intensity.

  “Could you hold for just a minute?” he asked.

  Max closed his eyes, shutting out the curious crowd outside. He inhaled and exhaled, concentrating on the Ajna Chakra in the center of his forehead, the storehouse of all memory. First, he drowned out the lingering images of leaving Ramakrishna and the last twenty-four hours of walking and bus journeys. Next, he zoned in on the ATM trips he had made more than three years ago, and, finally, he retained his breath, flowing his entire living, breathing energy, his prana toward the Ajna Chakra, merging with the man who walked into the ATMs many years ago.

  He opened his eyes, weak and breathless. His shirt was soaked with perspiration. He gripped the phone tight so that it wouldn’t slip from his sweaty grip and rested his head against the stained glass door.

  “December 3rd, 2010, 4:57 p.m. EST. New York. $200. December 9th, 2010, 12:31 p.m. Rishikesh, Indian Rupees 20,000, US $443.75. July14th, 2011, 2:19 p.m. Pavur, Tamil Nadu, Indian Rupees 100,000, US $1907.30.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, exactly right. Date and withdrawal amounts are both correct. I don’t have the exact time or place printed in front of me. Thank you for confirming, Mr. Pzoras. Your account is now unblocked,” the customer service representative said. He paused. “I can’t believe you’ve kept the receipts all these years. I wish I was that organized,” he added in a slightly embarrassed tone.

  Max thanked him and set the phone down. The crowd watching him outside had swelled. Max stepped out of the phone booth and sat down on the side of the road. He felt dizzy and depleted. If remembering three dates had taken so much concentration, so much prana, how much more would walking on water and levitating demand? Yes, Max could do much if he performed deep samyama on something. But Ramakrishna was right. Pursuing extraordinary powers broke the laws of nature and distracted one from the goal. Every breath spent on clinging to the earthly realm took energy away from merging with the divine. Just like sending waves of prana to heal Sophia from afar had left him weak and feverish for months. Now he understood his urge to finally leave Ramakrishna more than a year after his kundalini had awakened. The veil separating him from pure consciousness had thinned, but to penetrate any further into it, he would have to conduct his own experiments with truth. Only when he verified the knowledge he had received with his own experience would it fuse into his every breath.

  “Photo, photo, photo.”

  People jostled to sit beside him on the pavement. They put their arms around him and asked their companions to click pictures on their phones with Max. One, two, ten, twenty, Max posed with kids, shopkeepers, vegetable vendors, newspaper sellers and their customers, too weak to resist their attention. He recovered his breath after more than an hour and walked back to the ATM. This time his card worked. He withdrew the money he wanted, bought pens for the kids from one of the newspaper sellers, and began walking to the railway station.

  People rushed toward him.

  “Thank you, Thank you, Jesus Christ. Come again, Jesus Christ,” shouted the delighted kids, shaking his hands.

  The vegetable vending women touched his feet. “Bless, bless.”

  A legless beggar on a wooden cart scrambled next to him. He tugged Max’s cargo pants, urging him to put his hands on his head.

  The phone booth owner prostrated in front of him.

  More people joined him. Now, a crowd of folks lay before him.

  “Stop, please stop,” said Max surprised and still dizzy.

  “God, God, God,” chanted a short, fat woman in a yellow saree.

  Others picked up the chant. More people joined them.

  The noise overwhelmed him. “No, I’m nobody. Stop, stop, please stop,” said Max.

  A woman in a bright dress came forward and showed him the picture she had just taken with her phone.

  “Look, you are God. Light. Shining,” she said.

  Max looked at the image on the woman’s phone.

  He smiled and exhaled slowly.


  Ramakrishna had taught him well. Despite the holes in his well-worn clothes, his unkempt hair and tired face, Max’s skin glowed like a lamp—though it was a pale imitation of the ethereal glow on Ramakrishna’s skin. There was a lot more distance to cover.

  “No, not God,” said Max. “Just a yogi. Or trying to be one.”

  He walked away from the surging crowd, toward the railway station.

  The man at the ticket counter asked him where he wanted to go.

  He could go anywhere. All he needed was solitude. He remembered the remote beautiful places he had visited before or heard of in India from the visitors at Ramakrishna’s ashram: Dhanushkot, Sarnath, Kaapil, Arpora. But he knew there could be only one answer. Despite it being winter again, his home, the mountains, the mighty Himalayas were calling him back.

  “Haridwar,” said Max.

  “Second AC or Third AC?”

  “General.”

  The man stared at him. “You can’t go in General, machi. They are unreserved compartments. No seats. No place to sleep. Standing room only. Completely packed. It is a sixty-hour journey. Impossible.”

  Max smiled. “In the beginning, even the journey within is uncomfortable.”

  The man hesitated. “So Third AC then?”

  “No. General.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “You are not well. Do you have fever? Your face is very shiny,” said the man.

  “I’m well, friend, as well as this limited human form can allow,” said Max. “Please let me continue on my journey to liberation.”

  The man stared at Max but eventually sold him a ticket.

  27

  Max went back north the same way he had come, resisting the urge to stop in Dehradun and thank Anand, the Slovenian who had guided him to Ramakrishna. It wasn’t time. He hadn’t yet attained a spiritual union with consciousness, become the universal. He still identified himself as Max, one who was born, grew, decayed, suffered, and died and couldn’t alleviate anyone’s suffering because he hadn’t conquered his own. Yes, he had seen glimpses of the truth, a shimmering, blinding light dancing in the corners of the growing void within him. In those rare moments, there had been pure silence, just the One and no other. But the individual lump of salt hadn’t dissolved completely in the ocean yet. He had to go deeper still.

  A little depleted after his samyama at the ATM, Max used the time in the train to restore his vital energy with kapalabhati, pumping his abdomen in and out, inhaling fresh air and exhaling the stale air with force. He smiled at his co-passengers, unbothered by their surprised stares. The hundreds of people pushing him, climbing over him to get in and out, the kids tugging his long hair, the men and women who touched his skin, the cockroaches who crawled on him and all the sounds and smells alive in a train carriage filled to many times its capacity, they were all him.

  Sixty hours later, early in the morning, the train reached Haridwar. Once again as he had done a few years ago when he had first arrived in the Himalayas, Max took a bus to Uttarkashi and stopped at a hotel, this time needing no warm blankets and hot water, his body immune to the craving for petty luxury. He had expected to wait a few days in Bhatwari until he found some intrepid motorcycle riders again, but he was pleasantly surprised to find a jeep making its last trip to Gangotri for the season.

  Max reached Gangotri late one overcast afternoon in the first week of December with everything he needed for the months to come in his backpack: three gunny sacks containing millets, chickpeas, and kidney beans, a stove, a pen knife to carve wood, matchsticks to build a fire, one change of T-shirt and pants, gloves and a jacket if it got colder than he could force his body to adapt to, and a bed sheet to lie on in a cave. Once again, the village was deserted and the tiny houses and shops covered with soft, white snow. The wind gusted as he started on the deserted, snow-covered trail to Bhojbasa. Clouds blanketed the sun and a wall of gray loomed ahead of him. A heavy rain began as soon as he passed the abandoned forest-office building two miles into the hike. His sweater was full of holes from the frogs that had made it their home in the ashram and rainwater seeped through them, drenching his thin shirt. The rain turned into a light snowfall, then a blizzard. But this time, he was prepared for the wetness and the cold.

  Every day for the last six months, he had performed samyama on the Manipura Chakra in his navel, the junction of the 72,000 root nerves in the body, and his body had revealed its innermost workings to him. Each of the 72,000 root nerves was connected to 72,000 other nerves, all of which transferred prana, vital energy, to all parts of his body. With enough concentration, he could flow prana anywhere he wanted in the body. As he walked, he visualized the prana as a flame and his body as a vibrating stream of light and heat. He increased the prana in the nerves supplying his fingertips and toes to keep them heated. Simultaneously, he pressed his chin to his neck and pulled his perineum to the spine when he walked. The two bandhas trapped the air in his torso and he rotated the air around fiercely so that it collided with his ribs, vertebrae, and sternum. The friction increased the heat in his body, making him immune to the drop in temperature outside. Now, he felt no different walking up the snowy mountain than he had felt walking from the village to Pavur in the blazing heat.

  Halfway on the trail to Bhojbasa, he saw six pairs of heavy boot marks and sharp, narrow imprints of ice axes and trekking poles. Late-season hikers on their way to Gomukh. Wanting nothing to interfere with his solitude, Max abandoned the trail. He removed his shoes and scrambled up a cliff, letting his naked feet find easy grooves in the snow. Without gloves, his fingers held tight to tree stumps and rocks. He moved quickly. The air thinned as he climbed higher. He contracted his diaphragm and lungs, allowing his rib cage to expand so that the air pressure in his chest dropped significantly. The outside air rushed in, spreading fresh oxygen through his chest. He breathed comfortably and kept climbing higher, looking for a hospitable cave for the months ahead. None of the ones he passed looked suitable. Some were too narrow to build a fire in, some too far from a source of water, others opened right on the edge of a ravine. He could make any of them work if he had to, but this wasn’t an endurance test. He wanted to spend his days in meditation, not in foraging for food and melting snow to get water.

  Night fell. The snow abated. Max walked by the dim light of the half moon, letting his bare feet guide him. He crossed a mile-long patch where the snow was so soft that he sunk up to his thighs with each step, before it turned into packed ice again. Another two or three hours in, he ran into a withered tree protected from the snowfall by a giant rock. Max cut its dry branches with his knife and put the wood in his backpack. He climbed higher, watching carefully to avoid hidden crevasses in the white blanket.

  Past midnight, more than ten hours after he had begun climbing, Max came across a suitable space. A large outcropping in the jagged mountain slanted above flat snow-covered ground protecting it from wind. The still air smelled of pine. Yellow-gray roots broke through the snow on the ground under the projecting rock. He cut a piece with his knife and sniffed it. Mushroom or something like it. They would serve him well if his rations ran out. He looked around for water. Finding nothing, Max turned with the mountain, holding tight to the jutting stones, walking gingerly on the narrow, rocky path that separated him from the deep abyss thousands of feet below. The cliff turned sharply. He closed his eyes, concentrating on his navel, pumping prana with force into the fingertips that clung to the edges of the rocks on the outside of the mountain. Nothing could stop him from falling if his fingers went numb. His heartbeat increased. He inched forward.

  The path opened into a large stretch of sharp, snow-covered rocks. Max let go of the cliff. He rested on a rock and breathed slowly. The red heaviness in his forehead reduced. Another mountain arose on the opposite side of the furrowed ice, fifty meters away. Six or seven natural caves stood at the bottom of the cliff. Max’s spirits lifted. Yes, this could work. The mountains on either side would obstruct the wind. All he needed was a source of water an
d this could be home for a few months. The air smelled heavy with dew but he couldn’t see a drop of water around. He walked toward the caves.

  The ground below him shifted. Max looked down. The ice was crumbling beneath his feet. The earth was swallowing him. He jumped back—and crashed into freezing, icy water.

  A stream.

  He had mistaken the thin layer of ice for solid land. Now, he was drenched in icy water but at least his water problem was solved. He pulled himself out and grabbed his dripping backpack. Rubbing his wet hands, he applied the maha bandha within seconds to generate heat within his body once again. He stared at the thin ice shimmering in the moonlight. Bluish-white water seeped through the cracks on its surface. Was he ready?

  Max walked to the edge of the stream and concentrated on the caves on the opposite side. Closing his eyes, he inhaled and exhaled one hundred and eighty times, emptying his mind of images, letting the universe guide him forward. He retained his breath, ten, twelve, fifteen, seventeen minutes, until he couldn’t hold it any longer. Next, he exhaled quickly, emptying his torso like a deflated life vest. He concentrated on the prana vibrating within him and thrust it upward with force. His body was now light as a feather. Max performed samyama on his navel and visualized every root nerve of his body throbbing with the same stream of minute energy particles that the water in front of him was. He took a step forward. Energy merged with energy. There was nothing under his feet.