The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  His body burnt. He moved from his thin sheet. His naked body touched the cold, rocky floor. It felt so good, so comfortable. Finally, he was at peace.

  Loud rumbling awoke Max. The cave shook and lifted slowly. He floated in space, weightless, slowly landing on the rocks below. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. The mountain roared again. The sound was within him. He moved and churned with the mountain. A chunk of cave broke open from the top. Bright, dazzling white light flashed across the black sky. Sheets of rain rippled from the blackness, washing over Max. Small bits of snow splattered through the hole. He didn’t move. The light snow brushed against his face. So miraculous was this play of nature, this relative world, incomplete yet so magical. He didn’t mind returning for another lifetime. Max closed his eyes.

  Baba Ramdas was shaking him. Max awoke and stared into his shining, black eyes. Outside, it thundered, deep and powerful. The cave shook again. In sign language, Baba Ramdas urged him to come outside. Max didn’t want to leave. Baba Ramdas persisted. Max limped out slowly, careful to keep his arm raised, shivering. A mountain of snow had piled in front of the caves. Max looked up. The tall cliff was stripped bare. Three caves in the row of seven had collapsed. An avalanche. Baba Ramdas pointed to the black, starless sky, the air saturated with the smell of moisture. There will be more, his eyes said. Max nodded absently. He limped back into the cave and lay down again, staring at the sky through the hole.

  White flashes. Another storm was coming. Maybe it would take this cave—and Max along with it. This body would be shed away like a worn coat. He’d wear another coat. He was so tired already. Next time perhaps he’d be different, better—a good son, a kinder brother, a selfless father, someone capable of love. Max closed his eyes.

  More thunder. Footsteps. Baba Ramdas came in with something in a leaf. Again he asked Max to come out with him. Max shook his head. There was nowhere to go, no one to see. He had abandoned everyone. Baba Ramdas’s black eyes lowered. He set the leaf plate down and sat beside Max. He pressed his right palm against Max’s open palm. Their eyes met. Baba Ramdas stood up and disappeared into the snow.

  Max looked at the plate. Millets and eggplant. He smiled. The same meal he’d eaten every day for three years at the ashram. Such happy, simple times. He went back to sleep without eating.

  When he awoke, snowflakes spiraled slowly in the grayness above him, ice crystals shining in them. White light lit up the sky again and again. A glassy, fluid membrane shimmered over the flakes. He closed his eyes.

  Sophia’s snow globe. She would stare at it for hours. There it was, sitting atop the lone table in the room the three of them shared. There she was, the little girl smiling with her half-broken tooth. She never got gifts in real life but the snow globe was always full of gifts.

  Max opened his eyes. He stared through the fog in his forehead. The cave’s mouth was half covered by snow. New flakes deposited on top. He would be buried in soon. Max closed his eyes again.

  The snowflakes in the globe circled slowly. Sleigh bells sounded. Village children played with sticks at the mouth of the cave. A woman with a blackened, charred body stretched out a hand to him. His mother.

  I chose her womb.

  The snow globe sparkled above him.

  His guilt, his loss, his sadness, every experience, every emotion from every life had led him to his mother’s womb, to this cave, this bid for salvation. His past wasn’t separate from him. He was meant to make his mistakes.

  Trembling, Max sat up. He ate the millets and eggplant. Blood trickled up his veins. The cave’s mouth was filling up. Max crawled to his T-shirt and pants and put them on, the cloth rubbing harshly against the cuts and bruises on his skin. Shivering, he walked upto his backpack and pulled out his jacket. Max put his good right arm in its sleeve. His left arm hung limp and lifeless by his side. He concentrated on his left hand’s fingers, pushing them to move. Nothing. Max stumbled to the front of the cave, jacket flapping by his side. He pushed his body through the fresh deposit of snow and stepped out into the moonlit night. He had failed, he knew that now. But perhaps his body could still be of use to Sophia, to someone.

  Rain washed over him. Max walked over to the edge of the glimmering lake. He took a tentative step forward. No, he no longer had enough concentration. He turned around and walked along the stream, past the empty cave of Baba Ramdas who had likely left for Gangotri knowing that the snowstorms and avalanches weren’t likely to relent that night. Max walked up a glacier cliff, circling around to the other side of the stream. The sky lit up around him. Like fireworks on July 4th. The patchy roof of their building. A jug of lemonade. You never give up easy, his mother had said when they both knew she was dying and yet he had suggested another surgery. The wind knocked Max down again and again. He got up, holding on to the cliff tighter and tighter each time to avoid being blown off. He reached the other side and made his way down the mountain, shaking his left arm, trying to get it to work again.

  The mountain rumbled.

  Max stopped.

  A crash.

  Max looked up. A giant wave of white swirled above him. It rippled down slowly from the top of the cliff, blanketing trees in its path, hungry to envelop him, to take him along with it. Shards of ice rained on him.

  A large black boot fell out of the ice.

  Max broke out of his trance. He threw himself down and dug his fingernails into the snow, grabbing on to rock, plant, grooves in the ice, anything. The avalanche swept over him. He slipped faster and faster.

  A tree stump. Max rolled over it and held on to it with all his strength. His left hand which had been powerless until then suddenly held. A giant slab of ice crashed a few yards in front of him. White powder. Blue ice stung his face. The mountain crumbled around him. Max burrowed a hole in the ice around the tree, forcing the fingers of his left hand to move faster, digging furiously, widening the hole until it formed a little pit. He entered it. For the rest of the night, he pummeled and pushed back the snow filling up the hole as blocks of ice crashed around him. When the mountain finally stopped shaking late in the night, he dug himself out of the pit.

  He walked through the blizzard blindly, guided by a fading image somewhere in the shadows of his mind.

  In the distance, Max saw a solitary light. As he walked closer to it, he knew it was the Old Bhojbasa guesthouse. He had returned after all these years, the same wet, shivering, shaking, broken man. Max limped closer. He sat on the ice in front of the door, breathing slowly, rotating his left wrist repeatedly, trying to shake off his dizziness, and get a grip on himself.

  After a while, he stood up. As calmly as he could, he knocked on the front door.

  The same old woman opened the door, her skin splotched with large patches of red. Without a word, she ushered him in.

  Max stumbled inside.

  She didn’t seem to recognize Max, nor did Max feel the urge to jog her memory.

  The room was still sparsely furnished with just a thick rug and a chair next to the fireplace. Max sat on the rug.

  “I get food,” said the woman.

  Max nodded, his eyes mellow with tears. The woman left. Max huddled inside the blankets she had handed him and warmed his blackened, bony hands above the fire. Some of his fingers had turned violet and felt as hard as wood. His left arm was now just bone with skin stretched tight on it. He shook it. The wooden door opened and shut again and again, letting in gusts of icy air. Max wrapped himself up tight in three layers of blankets and stared at the blinding flashes outside the windows.

  He had failed.

  Max awoke on the rug on the floor early the next morning and drank the whole bottle of lukewarm water lying next to him. Exhausted by the effort, he slept again, waking only to go to the tin-shack bathroom outside the guesthouse. The ice pierced his naked feet. He came back and huddled inside his blankets on the cold, wooden floor.

  The old woman’s white saree brushed against his face.

  “I heat food now,” she said.


  Max nodded gratefully. He stared up at the tin roof and listened to the rhythmic opening and closing of the front door, trying to stay awake.

  The old woman was shaking him gently.

  “You eat now. You not eat in two days,” she said.

  Max nodded again, trying to keep his eyes open.

  The woman returned with a large plate.

  Max sat up cross-legged. Bread, lentils, beans, yogurt—the food before him could last a month in the mountain. Max began to protest but stopped. He had failed. He had to enter the world of mortals again. He ate slowly, reacquainting himself with flavor and spices. Solid pieces went down his gullet, hitting the inside of his ribs. Blood crept up his veins slowly.

  “I have money,” said Max.

  His lips hurt. The door thrust open. Max shivered in the icy gust, staring at the old woman’s half-Indian, half-Oriental face. He wanted to say more.

  “Not worry about money. Just eat. You are thin. Not healthy at all,” said the woman.

  Max folded his hands. He stared into her yellow, sunken face and pale, gray eyes. She was dying too. Sophia’s heavy face appeared before him. Tears began to fall down his face. He wanted to get up and touch the old woman’s feet to show his gratitude but his eyes closed again.

  The door banged shut.

  33

  For days, Max did little besides eat and sleep in front of the fire. Disconnected, dreamlike fragments slipped in and out of his mind. A girl, two children running, an iron slide, a man shivering, an army officer falling off a train, someone dying in a bed of snow, a slender woman with long, silky hair, an earthquake, the ground trembling, a flood. The little finger on his right hand and the middle and index finger on his left blackened, shriveled, and went dead. Mechanically, he applied the herb paste the old woman gave him at the base of his fingers. The paste helped his lifeless fingers fall off without pain.

  Slowly, the wounds in his hands and legs healed. His left arm began to move on command—painfully at first, but little by little with less discomfort. His body didn’t burn with fever anymore. He limped around the bare room, touching the wooden door that kept banging open and shut, adjusting the logs in the fireplace, putting his hands over the crumbling timber walls, pressing his bare feet on the wooden floor, adapting to life again.

  One day, Max awoke shivering from his afternoon slumber. The wooden door was wide open again. This time, Nani Maa, the old woman, was standing atop the chair driving a hammer through the bolt hinge on the wall. Her shriveled frame shook in the wind. The hammer kept missing its mark. Max limped up to the chair, standing a foot taller than her despite the chair.

  The upper pin in the bolt’s hinge was curved. Max took the hammer from her. It slipped from his hands, hitting the floor with a loud thud.

  “I do it,” she said.

  Max shook his head. He didn’t need his little finger to hold a hammer. He stretched his thumb farther away from his hand and held the hammer tight in the three fingers of his left hand. He pried out the pin, straightened it, and hammered it back in, a series of shocks coursing down his body and through his spine with each blow. Little by little, the bolt returned to its place and held tight.

  Max pushed the door in. He bolted it. Again, the hinge loosened. The bolt slipped and the door flapped open in the frigid wind.

  “Do you have a wrench?”

  Nani Maa didn’t understand.

  Max closed his eyes and concentrated on the Ajna Chakra in the center of his forehead. He looked for the Hindi word from the reservoir of memory of lifetimes past. The word wouldn’t come to his lips. He concentrated harder, sweating despite the freezing wind. Nothing. He opened his eyes and stared into Nani Maa’s wrinkled, ash-gray face.

  He drew a shape in the air.

  Nani Maa nodded.

  She shuffled to the cupboard in the corner of the room and rummaged through it. Max stepped outside into the ice, walked over the rocks and broke a branch from one of the withered pine trees near the guesthouse. He tore it into little pieces and returned with a twig.

  Nani Maa handed him the wrench. Max held it with both hands and pulled out the bolt hinge. His muscles tensed. He rested for a few minutes, then put a sliver of wood below the hinge and started hammering the hinge in. His heart thudded. He missed a blow and hit his left thumbnail. He ignored the sharp pain and concentrated harder. He hammered again. One pin went in. He kept missing the second pin again and again. Sweating and shaking, he refused to give up. He kept hammering until finally, the second pin went into its hole as well.

  He stepped back and pushed the door. The bolt fit. The hinge held. The wind didn’t blow open the door again.

  “Good,” said Nani Maa, her face impassive as usual.

  Max limped back from the door, then straightened himself and walked erect, ignoring the pain in his knee. He was alive. He was fit. Even a corpse would start walking if it consumed the copious amount of food the old woman put in front of him every day. His eyes met Nani Maa’s. He would take care of her in her last days before he left.

  34

  Max helped Nani Maa more and more around the guesthouse. He still insisted on giving her money but he knew the frail, weakening woman needed his physical presence more.

  “Every day some change here. The place is not same on two days,” she said.

  Max saw what she meant. One day, heavy snow warped the tin roof. Ice and water trickled in through the bullet-sized holes caused by the hail preceding the snowstorm. Max had barely repaired the tin panels by applying the roof filler lying in the bathroom when the bathroom’s roof collapsed. He fixed an old tarp over the roof to get them through the winter rains. The tarp held but water seeped in through the wooden floors of the hut. Next, ice blocked the crude pipe that drew water from the glacier stream a few feet below the hut. Every day, there was something to repair. His mind remained numb but his days were filled with the steady hum of activity needed to keep the small house functioning.

  Nani Maa protested. It wasn’t his work. She was still capable of doing things. Max stared at her proud, frail face. She was strong like his mother.

  “It keeps me busy,” he said.

  “But you go back up?” she said.

  Max wanted to caress Nani Maa’s wrinkled, dry face. She had fed him, nursed him, brought him back to life twice. Now, the light in her pale eyes was fading.

  Max shook his head. “I won’t go back to a cave,” he said. “But I may leave for my home across the ocean after the winter.”

  Nani Maa’s eyes lifted. A touch of color came to her yellow skin. He sensed her joy though, outwardly, she shrugged.

  “You stay as you like, go when you want,” she said, adjusting her saree on her bald head. “I am used to being here alone. No one comes in winter.”

  She hummed while sweeping the room that evening but retired to her corner of the room without speaking as she usually did.

  Nani Maa’s health worsened in February. Her belly swelled and her skin turned cold. The red splotches spread across her whole face. She slept more and more. Max took over cooking from her though she ate just a little of the rice and beans he made for her. Six years after his mother’s death, he was seeing yet another body disintegrate in front of him. This time, he didn’t feel the same agitation build inside him. He had tried, he had tried so hard to penetrate the truth, but he hadn’t been strong enough to find the answers. Now, he had to accept pain, illness, death as the lot of everyone.

  He asked Nani Maa if he could take her to a doctor in Gangotri or Uttarkashi.

  She shrugged. “Time cooks everyone,” she said. “What can doctor do?”

  “Can I call your family?”

  “I have no one in India,” she said. “My sons in Nepal. Why they waste money to come here?” She paused and talked as if to herself. “My husband died. A widow has no status in society. I thought move change things.”

  Her sadness rose within him. Max would die alone too. He could go back home back to New York, but he k
new he had crossed a strange boundary. The world of people and their preoccupations seemed infantile in its innocence from where he stood. Yet there was a deep emptiness on this side of the boundary as well. He wished he could make Nani Maa more comfortable. Despite her protests, Max put her next to the warm fire and slept on the opposite side of the bare room.

  Later in February, the blizzards stopped. The snow thawed a little and bare trees began to grow leaves again. The air remained frigid but the sun shone for longer and longer every day. One afternoon, a short, squat saffron-clad yogi with a chubby face and pencil-thin legs stopped at the guesthouse. He wore torn ochre robes and his forehead was smeared with white paint.

  “Hari Om Tat Sat,” he greeted Max with folded hands.

  The yogi put his staff and small bundle of clothes down and prostrated before Nani Maa, who was sleeping next to the fire. He got up and circled around her weary, limp body, splashing water while muttering an incantation.

  Max served him rice and lentils.

  They sat down together to eat.

  The yogi said something in Garwhali, the local language.

  Max concentrated on his heart and was surprised to understand the words on the man’s lips clearly. He focused on his Ajna Chakra and was again startled to discover that he could converse with him in Garwhali easily. Nani Maa’s care had done him good.

  “By God’s grace, she will get better,” said the yogi, gulping down a large mouthful of rice. “Where do you come from, bhai?”

  “I’ve lived here for a month,” said Max.

  “You speak Garwhali well,” he said. “Have you done any sadhana, deep meditation in Himalayas?”

  Max hesitated. “I was in a cave before,” he said.

  The yogi nodded approvingly. “Which akhara do you belong to?”

  Max didn’t follow.

  “There are three main communities for yogis, the Juna Akhara, the Mahanirvani Akhara and the Niranjani Akhara,” he said. He took his fingers out of the lentils and indicated the three horizontal lines of white paint on his forehead. “See, I am in the Juna Akhara. This is our symbol. You have to choose one.”