The Seeker

by Karan Bajaj

  “Why?”

  The yogi sighed and licked his fingers. “Community is necessary for a man of God. You will realize once you start wandering and need a home on the road,” he said. “Have you traveled in India much?”

  Max shook his head.

  “You should start soon,” he said. “I have been walking for twelve years. From Vivekananda’s rock in Kanyakumari to the Amarnath shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, there is not a single pilgrimage these two feet have not done.”

  Max stared at the narrow, callused feet of the man. He figured wandering was a way to reduce attachment to places and people, but didn’t being a part of a community offset that?

  The yogi pushed the leaf plate away. “Delicious, bhai, delicious. You cook very well. You are not from India. Where did you learn to cook?”

  “Down in the South,” said Max.

  The yogi’s eyes brightened. “You must have gone to the temple in Rameshwaram?” he said.

  Max shook his head.

  “Lord Rama prayed to Shiva there to absolve his sins after his war with the demon, Ravana,” he said. “It’s an essential Hindu pilgrimage, second in importance only to Kedarnath. Have you seen the buffalo shrine in Kedarnath?”

  Again, Max shook his head.

  “Lord Shankara appeared in a buffalo’s hind parts there,” he said. “The shrine is very close from here. But first go to Amarnath in the Himalayas. They should be done in an order.”

  The yogi named more places he had visited in his twelve years of walking barefoot through India and asked Max if he had been to any of them.

  Each time, Max shook his head.

  “You haven’t been to any of Lord Shiva’s pilgrimages,” said the yogi. “You must be a Vaishnava, a follower of Lord Vishnu then.”

  “No,” said Max.

  The yogi’s eyes narrowed.

  “Whom do you follow then? Lord Shiva or Lord Vishnu? You have to choose.”

  What about the immortal soul within? Weren’t these gods and goddesses and myths and legends just symbols of the infinite truth, representations of one attribute or the other of the One reality, the sum of all attributes?

  “No one,” said Max. “I follow no one.”

  “You are young,” said the yogi. “There is much time to learn.”

  Perhaps it was wise to choose a form, even if a partial representation of the absolute, someone to love unconditionally. And maybe the forms even existed. Who was to say there was no Jesus in the sky or Lord Shankara in a buffalo’s behind? Max knew nothing anymore.

  “Choose Lord Shiva,” said the yogi. “He is a powerful lord, a rebel, the original ascetic, the Mahadeva.”

  Nani Maa coughed.

  Max excused himself and made Nani Maa a cup of lemon tea.

  The yogi rested on Max’s rug that afternoon while Max fixed the front door which had unhinged again.

  Later that evening, an elderly yogi and a shy, young man in his early or mid-twenties came to the guesthouse. The old yogi was a startling sight. Tall and muscular, his naked body was covered in ash. A large, heavy rock was tied to his penis with a frayed, white rope. The short, squat yogi from the morning bowed before the elderly yogi, who acknowledged the greeting by lowering his blazing eyes.

  “He is Naga Baba, my guru bhai. I knew he was coming today, that’s why I stayed over,” said the squat yogi, introducing the old yogi with more than a hint of pride. “We are disciples of the same guru, the legendary Babaji. You must have heard of him. He could do anything, even walk on water.”

  Like Baba Ramdas, Naga Baba had taken a vow of silence. The heavy rock around his penis was a symbol of both his mastery over desire and his apparently super-human strength. The unremarkable young man accompanying him was his disciple and would be initiated into the yogic life that night. Together they seemed an unlikely pair, the naked Naga Baba with his dreadlocked, hip-length hair and his disciple, wearing two thick sweaters and a jacket, smoothing his neatly parted, oily hair.

  Outside, the sky darkened and a light rain began.

  “You should start soon before it begins to snow,” said the squat yogi from the morning.

  Naga Baba nodded.

  Max collected the supplies they wanted. Dry logs, eucalyptus bark, pine needles, a white cloth, a bucket of freezing cold water from the holy Ganges.

  The four of them went outside. Naga Baba smiled, yellow teeth glinting in the full moon’s light. He wiped his hand over his forehead, removing gray-black ash and smeared it on the young man’s forehead.

  The young man took off his jacket, sweaters, shirt, and pants, shivering and shaking. His eyes were wet with tears.

  Naga Baba ripped the man’s thin undershirt. The young man stood naked in the snow, crying.

  Max built a fire. Naga Baba cut the young man’s thick head of hair with scissors and a knife. Next, he attacked his mustache. Red speckles appeared on the space between the man’s lips and his nose.

  Max put dry logs over the eucalyptus bark, threw in the pine needles and started a fire. The young man wept louder.

  “His last tears,” whispered the squat yogi to Max. “Now, a new life begins. Open road, blue sky, the endless beyond, the eternal freedom of a yogi.”

  The young man seemed to be shedding tears more for his new life than his old one. He didn’t look like he was enjoying the freedom of having the harsh, cold knife scrape the hair off his head in the sub-zero temperature. Someday, he would do the same to another novice. Perhaps there was comfort in the ritual, some sense of belonging to a community with a shared belief, even if one’s ultimate quest was solitary. Maybe Max could have benefited from that too.

  Naga Baba finished shaving off the man’s hair. He blew loudly from a conch shell, the sound reverberating in the silent night. The young man raised his confused, tear-stricken eyes. He began walking around the fire.

  Naga Baba blew the conch louder.

  The squat yogi chanted an incantation.

  The young man circled the fire faster.

  Naga Baba blew the conch with all his strength.

  Louder, faster, the man spun looking at the full moon above, sweating in the frigid wind, eyes rolling, mouth open.

  At last, Naga Baba stopped. He lifted the bucket of cold water high and poured it over the young man’s head. The man fell forward on the ice with the force of the water. His purification was now complete.

  As the man lay on the ice, stunned by the cold, Naga Baba leaned down and whispered something in his shivering ears.

  “His secret, personal mantra,” said the squat yogi. “These words will take him to Lord Shiva.”

  The man seemed to want to go inside the warm guesthouse more than up to Lord Shiva. Max helped him rise. Naga Baba lifted him in his powerful arms, the boulder on his penis swinging, and took him inside the guesthouse.

  Nani Maa had slept through the conch shells and chanting.

  The next day, Naga Baba and his shivering, newly initiated disciple left for a cave to stay in silence until the young man was fully indoctrinated in the Shaivite belief system. Later that evening, the squat yogi told Max that he could request Naga Baba to initiate Max too. Max was tempted. Beyond the comfort of shared belief, maybe he could learn some discipline from the fierce Naga Baba. But something held him back. He didn’t understand what. Max thanked the squat yogi and told him he wasn’t ready yet.

  “You are young. The path is long and hard. Lord Shiva will wait for you,” said the yogi and wandered off into the evening, likely to another pilgrimage point somewhere in the vast Himalayas.

  More yogis came in March, all routinely disappointed by Max’s inability to answer their basic questions. Whom did he believe in? Which sect did he belong to? Which holy shrines had he visited? More offered to initiate him, but Max still wasn’t ready. He served them food, fetched water for their needs from the Ganges, gave them his blanket so they could rest comfortably on cold nights, and wished them well for their journeys forward.

  One day, a Kharesh
wari, a Standing Baba, from a nearby cave came to the guesthouse. He had been standing day and night for six years. Not once had he sat or lay down to sleep. His legs were thin as an electric wire, his toes withered to bone. Max marveled at the Baba’s discipline. He hadn’t lasted a month with his arm raised.

  “How do you overcome the pain?” said Max.

  The Standing Baba shook his head vigorously. “Tapas is not pain, my son. Austerity is joy. The fire of mortification burns away the effects of past deeds from their seed,” he said, standing in the doorway. “It hurt a little in the beginning. Now, it’s just bliss. Peace. Soon, I will be liberated.”

  The Baba’s food had run out. Max gave him supplies for a month. The Baba offered to take Max in as a disciple. His cave had enough standing room for two.

  Max thanked him and promised he would consider the offer.

  The Khareshwari too looked disappointed in him.

  35

  As spring began to take hold, Nani Maa faded more quickly, sleeping more and eating less. Sometimes, she would wake up in the afternoon and chant in Hindi from a small copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Max liked to hear her voice. It had remained steady despite the hacking cough she had developed.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked Max one day when he brought her tea.

  She sat up on the rug, managing to prop herself against the wall. The splotches of red had spread from her face to her chest and arms. Her bald head had shriveled and shrunk. Max wanted to comfort her, to say something about a benevolent God that watches over his people. His lips quivered. He couldn’t bring himself to lie.

  “I believe in karma, in impersonal laws, in cause and effect,” he said.

  “All yogis who come here say this but their faces not happy,” said Nani Maa.

  Max stared at her, struck by the sharpness of her diagnosis.

  Nani Maa’s hands shook, rattling the teacup. She looked at him with her dying yellow eyes. “Must be something. Energy, something good somewhere,” she said.

  Her scared eyes grew bigger. She set the cup down and gripped Max’s hands.

  “What happens to me after I die? What happens on the other side?” she said in Nepali.

  Max held her hands tight. Without trying, he slipped into a state of deep concentration. He was a girl in the mountains, a young wife and mother in the plains, a woman alone once again. A middle-aged woman put a tin roof on an abandoned house in the mountains, lay the wooden floor, hauled food and supplies from the village and ate one spare meal a day. Her skin was drying, hair falling. Redness entered her swollen eyes. She was older, tired, dying. Cold hands. Blackness. A flash of light. A Caucasian kid smiling, laughing, playing with toys under a Christmas tree in a brightly furnished living room.

  Max shook out of his samyama. Her skin felt warm in his hands.

  “You have lived a life of service,” said Max slowly, in Nepali. ”You will be born again in a kind womb.”

  “Not always, not always,” she replied in Nepali, tears in her eyes. “I was selfish. I left my old parents alone. That’s why I am dying alone too. I am selfish now. You have been kind to me yet I could not bring myself to help you.”

  “You saved my life, not once but twice,” said Max. “You don’t remember the first time I came here.”

  “I remember. I remember every day,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “Years ago, you asked me about a man when you came. You weren’t ready then. This time, I wasn’t ready,” she said.

  Surprised, Max recalled their conversation from years ago.

  “The doctor from Brazil?” he said.

  Nani Maa nodded. She slumped back from the wall to her mattress. “He used to stop here on his way up in the winters. Later, too many people came looking for him and he left the Garwhal Himalayas. Before he went, he told me to share with serious seekers who asked for him that he was going to live in a forest in Bhumthang in Bhutan. But you weren’t ready for him when you came years ago.”

  “And I’m ready now?” said Max.

  She nodded.

  “I couldn’t even walk when I came this time. And look at me now,” he said, pointing to the missing fingers in his hands.

  “I saw you then. I see you now. Your eyes were silent when you came this time. They remained calm through the pain. They are even calmer now,” she said. “You should go to him. Bhutan is not far if you cut directly through the hills, maybe three or four weeks away.”

  Max took a deep breath. He pictured walking through the snow-capped mountains and entering yet another remote land where a man awaited him with a promise of deliverance. He felt a sliver of excitement. If he started walking now, he’d reach his destination in April. It would be sunny and warm then and he’d be able to renew his efforts afresh. Maybe then he could return with the answers he sought.

  “I should have told you before,” said Nani Maa.

  Max saw the fear of death in her jaundiced eyes. She hadn’t wanted to die alone. Max pictured himself walking in the forest toward the man, toward his goal. His face melted and turned into the fierce Naga Baba’s face, the squat yogi’s, the shivering young man, the Standing Baba, Shakti, Hari, the kneeling Scottish Catholic priest, other agitated, restless faces smeared with ash, silhouettes wearing orange robes and yellow garlands, rotating beads in their hands, wandering through buffalo shrines and ice formations in caves, throwing holy water on babies, praying to crucifixes, chanting, muttering, singing. They had all trusted in someone else, something beyond themselves, and the truth had eluded them. All of them clung to one belief or the other with the same rigidity people of the world held on to their families and jobs. He had been no different. Why did he want to become one with the eternal consciousness? How did he know it even existed? Lifting your arm up to let go of your sense of self was no different than clinging to your child to further your sense of self. One ambition couldn’t be replaced by another, nor an old attachment with a new belief. He had learnt the simplicity of living, just being, when he was with Ramakrishna. He needed nothing more to go on. No new guru or belief would be his refuge. No longer would he be at war with human nature and be attached to the idea of detachment.

  “Keep his secret safe. Perhaps it will be of use to someone else,” said Max.

  “You won’t go?” she said. “He is a great man.”

  Max shook his head.

  “I was scared,” she said. Tears fell from her weakening, proud face. “My body was weak. If anything happened, if I broke my leg, I would die slowly in this snow. Then you came, and I just held on. So many times I was about to tell you but I couldn’t. I don’t know what came over me.”

  Max held her bony hand. He touched her face. “I don’t want to meet another great man,” he said. “I want to stay here, with you.”

  36

  Nani Maa stopped eating completely in March. Her shriveled frame was racked by coughs. She moaned softly every time Max moved her body to clean her waste, wanting to just be still. Max knew her body was shutting down so he didn’t force her to eat. All day and night she slept, sometimes peacefully, sometimes waking up, shaking with terror, shouting incoherently.

  “Tell Daggu. He has to take the last train out. They won’t spare him. Please,” she would shout and burst into tears.

  Max would put his hand over her head and calm her down.

  Nani Maa would sleep again and not wake up until the next nightmare a day or two later. Soon, her pulse fell and her jaw slackened. The red splotches covered her whole body. She took long pauses between breaths. Max knew she would die any moment now. Sensing it could rain any day, he collected dry wood for her cremation.

  Late one night, Nani Maa shook Max awake. She was sitting next to him in a bright red saree, a touch of color in her sunken face. Drops of water fell from her bald head. Her cold, wet fingers found Max’s. She was shivering.

  “The Ganges is so cold,” she said.

  Max lifted her wet, shivering frame and put her on the rug by the fire.

  She stared at
Max and opened her mouth. Her teeth chattered.

  “Will you stay here?” she said weakly. “This is all I have. Someone has to keep it, take care of the people . . . ”

  Max looked into her eyes. He saw his mother, whose attachment to her children and work had grown in the end. Even goodness shackled a person. Every concept bound. We all built houses on the sand, destined to fade away in dust. Max was gripped by the same melting, dissolving feeling he had years ago in the village near Pavur. He was breaking into pieces, falling, fluid, boundary-less, merging into Nani Maa—one giant heart which felt her fear, her sadness, her goodness, her pride, her love, like his own. Tears stung his eyes but it was her eyes that were red and watering. He was shivering from the bath she’d taken in the Ganges. His throat was tightening, yet she was dying.

  Max coughed, trying to get a grip on himself.

  He put his hand over Nani Maa’s wet, cold head. Her eyes shut. Max covered her with a blanket. All night, he sat by her side, holding her hand, listening to her labored sighs, a strange stillness growing within him.

  Nani Maa died the next day. Max lifted her thin, gray body from the rug, carried it outside and put it over the dried wood. He piled more wood on top of her body and lighted it. When it was over, after her body had been consumed by the fire, he walked to the banks of the Ganges and immersed her ashes in the holy river. Once again, he was alone.

  37

  Max continued to take care of the guesthouse. New faces came in the summer. Yogis on a pilgrimage to Gomukh or Tapovan. Men and women seeking solitary spots for meditation. Stranded, lost hikers. Max gave them shelter for the night, fed them what he could, and showed them the routes to remote caves and mountain peaks, whatever they needed to reach their destinations.

  They asked him questions. Who was his teacher? What did he believe in? Where was he going? All their faces, like their questions, merged.

  In response, Max’s lips smiled and words came out of his mouth: he had no guru, he believed in nothing, he just lived there. He talked to everyone yet his heart remained silent. His dreams ceased and the images from the past, which had once haunted him, receded. He understood now that the more he nurtured his guilt about Keisha, his concern for Sophia, his regret for his mother, the more these emotions would sprout, generating the seeds of still more emotions, more discontentment. When the memories arose now, he observed them without reacting to them, without nurturing them, and they passed, leaving him unaffected.