Every Day We Disappear

by Angela Long

  The Meditation Teacher

  “Please leave shoes here,” read the sign beside the door of the gompa at the Root Institute for Wisdom Culture. I placed my flip-flops neatly beside the others, slid the wooden door closed, and entered another world. Gone was the birdsong, the rumble of bus and rickshaw, the Hindi pop music, the laughter of children running through the rice fields. Even the air changed. Dry. Cool. The smell of cedar, cinnamon, of wet spring leaves. I looked at the others already sitting on their meditation cushions, cross-legged, eyes closed.

  A woman with short black hair sat at the front of the room on a slightly raised dais. She wore a long burgundy robe cinched at the waist. To her right sat a small brass bowl, a bouquet of dahlias, a glass of water, a tape recorder. She smiled and gestured towards the cushions placed strategically throughout the room. Which place should I choose?

  Everyone looked so vulnerable with closed eyes – the young man with full lips and long dark lashes, the older man with the salt-and-pepper beard and purple cotton pants, the red-haired woman brushing a strand of hair from her forehead. A woman in the back still had her eyes open. I noted her greying bob and the Kashmiri shawl draped around her shoulders. She stared out the window at the pipal tree. I walked towards the empty cushion beside her.

  Each time the door slid open a new retreatant entered. One of the four women I was sharing a dorm with came in – Deva, originally from Mumbai, now living in Cologne. I admired her shimmery black hair and ruby nose ring. She settled on a cushion in front of the altar, framed by flowers and golden light cast from the statue of the Buddha.

  I closed my eyes, listening to the door slide open and closed, to the other retreatants settling into their cushions, to the gardeners speaking Hindi to one another outside.

  It was time for the introductions. The woman on the dais was from Amsterdam. “Think of me as a nun without the shaved head,” she laughed.

  Yosef from Israel. Jessica from America. Neil from Australia.

  “I’m crazy for the dharma.”

  “My boyfriend broke his leg and now we’re stuck here for awhile.”

  “I don’t know anything about Buddhism and have no idea why I’m here.”

  It was my turn next. I hated these kind of things and could already feel the colour rising to my cheeks. “I’m here because of a leaf,” I said and instantly regretted it. Everyone turned to look at me. “A bodhi leaf, at the temple.”

  ~

  There was no wind. The air was still and hot. I sat on a bench beneath an ancient bodhi tree and concentrated on the foliage above my head, willing a leaf to fall. If a leaf fell, I’d promised myself to learn about the man who’d sat here over 2,500 years ago and supposedly attained nirvana.

  To be honest, I didn’t know why I’d made such a promise. I’d never really been interested in Buddhism – or any other religion – before now. And I had serious doubts about eternal bliss. But this was India. I’d learned this was the type of thing you did here, and to forget about what I used to think.

  My concept of normality had shifted the moment my cab pulled out of Indira Gandhi International Airport: cows lounged in the middle of the roundabout blocking traffic; a beggar-woman held what looked like a dead baby in her arms. When the taxi stopped at a red light, she’d jutted her bundle through the open window: “Milk, please. Milk, please. Madame. Please.”

  My eyes were closed. I opened them sporadically, curious about the commotion around me. A group of people dressed in grey robes circled Mahabodhi Temple in a clockwise direction, chanting. An old woman in a long red dress and colourfully striped apron fell to her knees, slid herself prostrate, and touched her forehead to the white marble walkway. She stood, brushed the dirt from her apron, adjusted her braids, and began again. Hindu tourists jingled bangles and anklets, posing for photos in their jewel-toned saris as close as they could get to the glassed-in bodhi tree trunk. A skinny guard with a long wooden baton shooed away little beggar boys who alit like fruit flies upon offerings of cookies and cakes. Birds chirped. A loudspeaker played the same monotone chant over and over again. I sat. Waited.

  The next time I opened my eyes, a group of monks in brick-coloured robes sat cross-legged on the marble, eyes closed in meditation. Other monks began to settle around me as gracefully as a flock of birds. Everyone else, even the beggars, had disappeared. I decided it was time to give up this silly game.

  As I wove through the spaces left between monks, I saw it, fluttering down from the bodhi tree’s upper branches.

  I watched it fall like the first snowflake of winter. It landed on the toe of my right foot. I looked around, smiling, wondering if anyone else had witnessed this little miracle.

  “That one’s meant for you.” I turned to see a monk smiling so mischievously I almost thought he was flirting. But then he laughed, the innocent laugh of a child.

  “Do you really think so?” I bent to pick up the heart-shaped leaf with tiny, interconnecting veins.

  The monk stopped laughing. “I know so,” he said and walked away.

  I moved to the outermost pathway of the temple, where the circular flow continued. There were more old women with braids, more prostrating, more beggars, more tourists. There was a painter’s palette of robes: maroon, white, saffron, grey, orange. There were bodhi trees and palm trees, and islands of statues adorned with marigold blossoms. The chanting on the loudspeakers rose above it all. I ran a finger up and down the stem of the leaf and joined the flow.

  ~

  “Everybody ready to suffer?” the woman on the dais asked. We all laughed nervously. “Most of us think sitting still for forty-five minutes on a cushion will be a pleasant experience.” She straightened her back, adjusted her robes. The pixie-like, sparkly-eyed big sister disappeared. “Let’s get into meditation position. Cross your legs. Think as though you are building the foundation of a house.” She waited a moment. “Relax your spine. Your mouth. Your brow. Keep your eyes closed.”

  A gong sounded. It moved like a wave throughout the room, vibrating until it disappeared.

  “Watch your thoughts pass like clouds in the sky. One after the other.”

  We woke every morning in the darkness at 6 a.m. and went to sit on our cushions. We’d been discouraged from speaking; we’d been assured it was all part of going inwards. In silence, we ate in the garden alongside a trio of goats the retreat centre had saved from being slaughtered as a Hindu sacrifice. In silence, we walked from the mediation hall to our rooms and back again along white stone pathways.

  In silence, my body ached and my mind became a separate entity I no longer wished to associate with. It developed crushes on unlikely members of our group: the much older Hans from Germany, the much younger Yosef from Israel. I became jealous of anyone better looking (Deva), or who’d had the sense to bring comfy yoga pants (everyone). Annoyance festered at the way people ate, walked, washed their dishes, coughed. The only beings that didn’t annoy me were the goats. Every day I fed them my papaya peels after breakfast, whispering endearments lest I got caught speaking.

  Every evening, I walked in the darkness to the communal bathroom to brush my teeth. Then I climbed under my mosquito net and tucked the edges snug under the mattress. The person closest to the light switch was in charge of waiting until exactly 9:30 p.m. until she plunged us into darkness. Each of us alone in our fine-meshed cocoons. Our beds so close we could hear the rise and fall of one another’s breath. But we were strangers now beneath the cloak of silence. Invisible. We kept our heads down, mindful of the loudness of a footstep, a door closing, a suitcase unzipping, a page turning.

  At the end of Day Three, the cicadas began their noisy chorus. Then a feeling I thought I’d left on the other side of the world found me again. Dark and heavy as the humid night. Now I understood why they’d asked about the state of our mental health on the registration form. I understood why a woman in the last retreat had jumped from
the rooftop of her third-floor dormitory. Going inwards could be deadly.

  The feeling was as stealthy as the mosquito that found her way into my cocoon every night. Once the feeling had stayed with me for weeks. I hadn’t wanted to open the curtains in the morning. Or eat. Or be alive. And here in Bodh Gaya, I heard Michel’s voice again, echoing from eight years earlier. “You’re weak!” he yelled. “You’re so insecure!” He slammed his fist on the kitchen table. “Don’t you get it?” he said, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me. “You’re empty inside!”

  I felt myself shrinking smaller and smaller. The mosquito net billowed around me like a new universe. I was terrified. Terrified of the void. For years I’d done anything to avoid it. Drank too much. Surrounded myself with overly positive people. Had sex with inappropriate men. Holed up on remote islands. Flown to Paris. Flown to Cancún. Flown to Delhi. I’d charged it to my credit card. I’d waitressed until my feet ached.

  I tried not to cry. I knew they’d hear me. They were shifting too much to be sleeping. They’d know the truth if I cried. They’d know Michel had been right. I was weak. Insecure. Empty. That should be my mantra.

  A mosquito buzzed. I broke Rule Number One: No Killing, and killed it with an angry slap. I felt like hitting everything – my pillow, Deva, the concrete walls. I wanted to run screaming from the room and into the night. I hugged my pillow to my chest, squeezing it so hard my arms hurt. I tried to do what the woman on the dais had taught us: breathe. Inhale-One-Exhale-One. Michel yelling, “You’re crazy. You’re just like my mother!” Inhale-Two-Exhale-Two. Michel and the one-night stands, the tree planting cook, the eighteen-year-old rideshare passenger, the German tourist, the pottery school classmate. Inhale-Three- Exhale-Three. “Why do you imagine things? What’s wrong with you?” Inhale-Four-Exhale-Four. The yelling. Every day. Our neighbour in the courtyard, me on the fire escape. “Ça va?” she asks, looking up. Are you okay?

  I thought of the bodhi leaf pressed between the pages of my guidebook. The only reason I was still here was because of that stupid leaf. I thought it had been a sign. But everyone here had one. Some overlaid with gold leaf, others laminated. You could buy them from the gift shop at Mahabodhi Temple, or from young monks who pulled them out from the folds of their robes, whispering a price.

  I’d been a fool to believe in signs. To believe India could be different than the other places. That I could wear a necklace of rudraksha seeds and be married within the year. That I could eat yak butter and never get sick again. That I could wash away bad karma in a river. That Friday was my lucky day and six my lucky number. That a bracelet blessed by the Dalai Lama could protect me from the evil of an invisible force. That I should wear a diamond and the colour cream. The only thing I’d learned in India was that life really was just suffering. The woman on the dais reminded us of this several times a day.

  “The Buddha’s first Noble Truth,” she said. “Life is suffering.”

  Before we retired for the evening, she never failed to remind us of the biggest suffering of all: Death. “See you in the morning,” she said. “If you’re still here.”

  But then, on Day Seven, something changed.

  “Good morning, everyone,” the woman on the dais said. “I’m really happy to see you again.” We got into meditation position. She rang the gong. I listened to the birds chirping, so loud this time of the morning. Thoughts passed like clouds. My mother crying at the departure gate when I flew from Toronto to Delhi. The man beside me coughing – why did he always start coughing as soon as the gong sounded?

  “The Buddha said there are four basic things we need in life: food, clothing, shelter, medicine,” said the woman on the dais. “If you have those four things, one should simply try to be content. To have a contented mind, a calm mind.” I shifted on my cushion. She continued, “Our mind is like an endless movie filled with thoughts. Don’t engage with them. The problem is not so much that there are thoughts, the problem is that we believe them.” The woman on the dais cleared her throat. I stretched my neck – to the left, to the right. “The past does not exist,” she said. “It’s merely a thought in the present. The only reality is the present moment.”

  I stopped shifting and stretching and listened. I’d heard it all before, but now it began to sink into me like a stone in water.

  During breakfast, I began to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. The elderly gardener in a turban cradling a giant dahlia blossom in his hands. The velvety texture of papaya on my tongue. The bald man carrying a tray of freshly-cut fruit. How gently he placed the tray on the table, as though it were laden with delicate crystal. At 9:30 p.m., I enclosed myself in the mosquito netting and slept like I’d never slept before.

  At the 6:45 a.m. meditation session, I was able to sit for the full forty-five minutes without shards of pain piercing my neck and my feet turning to stone. The woman on the dais fixed me with a stare of her clear blue eyes and smiled.

  The feeling of lightness continued through to Day Eight. Day Nine. I actually began to enjoy waking at six o’clock in the morning. On Day Ten we took photos, exchanged email addresses. Anna left for Varanasi, Yosef headed to Kathmandu, Deva to Goa. But my backpack remained stowed beneath the bed. I couldn’t decide where to go next. I flipped through my guidebook, reading of cave murals and tiger reserves. I flipped to the bodhi leaf. Traced the edge of the heart. I held it to the light, examining the tiny, interconnecting veins.

  I thought of the woman on the dais, riding off on her bicycle to visit Mahabodhi Temple, her eyes as bright as the strings of prayer flags strung across the front gate.

  I thought of the bald man. That afternoon, he’d asked why I’d come here. “Because a bodhi leaf fell at my feet.” I’d laughed.

  “It was a sign,” he’d said. The temple bells began to ring. “Where are you going next?”

  I looked towards the rice fields, to the dusty hills in the distance. Along the footpaths, young monks in brick-red robes played tag. “Nowhere,” I said.

  The Volunteer

  It was the accent that got me at first. I was a sucker for an accent: French, Spanish, Irish. I’d had relationships with men of all those nationalities and never tired of the way they rolled their R’s or elongated their vowels. “Say it again,” I’d begged. This was serious business – the headiest of aphrodisiacs. And this guy, the guy with a bald head who was just about to sell me a chocolate bar, was none other than Italian.

  “Chocolate is my only weakness,” I said stupidly, nervous in the face of the most beautiful accent in the world.

  “Then let me buy it for you,” he said, and I felt as though I’d just sucked back a dozen raw oysters. I stared into his lovely Mediterranean eyes. There was no going back.

  It didn’t matter that we were at a Buddhist retreat centre where a large sign dominating the front gate listed seven rules: “Number Four: Be Celibate: No sexual activity.” It didn’t matter that he was a long-term volunteer with an eye on monkhood.

  The retreat was over. He was Italian. His name was Giuseppe. He indulged my chocolate weakness. He took me out for lunch at the Tibetan place that sold momos. He told me he was a jazz musician. He made love to me in a three-dollar-a-night hotel beside a swamp where mosquitoes bred and families of pigs wallowed. He called me bellissima.

  He asked if I’d wait for him while he completed a month-long silent retreat at the centre, which was due to commence in two days’ time. I hesitated. “I won’t go if you say no,” he said.

  No, I felt like saying, but stopped myself. “If it’s important to you, you should go,” I said, trying to sound casual, trying on a new way of being that recommended rejoicing in the happiness of others no matter how much you wanted them to pack up their meditation cushion and visit the Taj Mahal with you. Buddhists called this love. I called it difficult. The Italian looked at me, pleased. I felt as though I’d passed some kind of test.

  “Then we
shouldn’t waste any time,” he said, brushing away the mosquitoes congregating above our pillows.

  I waited. I checked out of my retreat dormitory and into a one-room adobe hut beside a patch of grass where the gardener tethered the goats after breakfast. From here I could watch the retreatants gather to enter the main gompa – a flat-roofed temple filled with colourful Tibetan Buddhist hangings, golden statues, and red cushions. The gong sounded. It was time for round two of meditation and chanting. I tried to catch a glimpse of my lover’s bald head as he slipped out of his flip-flops and entered the main doors.

  The retreatants were under strict orders for the month. Not only were they forbidden to speak, they were forbidden to make any kind of gesture. No eye contact. No smiles. They’d been encouraged to keep their gaze either averted or lowered, and focus on the present moment. They’d been encouraged to examine the leaves in the bodhi trees flickering in the wind, the birds chirping in their boughs, while keeping in mind the impermanent, suffering, and non-self nature of such phenomena. But under no circumstances were they to examine their new girlfriend peeking out from behind the curtains of her hut.

  Signs were posted all over the grounds warning visitors: “Retreat in Progress. Strict silence enforced.” The centre’s spiritual director from Minnesota constantly made the rounds in her traditional Tibetan white blouse and brick-coloured, ankle-length skirt, glaring at those who showed signs of wanting to communicate.

  After a few days, my resolve to wait for this man who’d shown such promise began to wane. My habitual cynicism, mellowed by my ten-day retreat, resurfaced. My peace-is-in-the present-moment stupor lifted. I heard my every unmindful footstep grate upon the white stone pathways like fingernails on a chalkboard. I tried to walk as stealthily as a cat stalking its prey. I tried not to talk, not even to whisper, to other guests staying here during the retreat – a PhD candidate from NYU researching a giant Buddha statue, a Physics professor from Buenos Aires trying to re-calibrate his spiritual rhythm. I tried to meditate diligently and read books by Buddhism’s hottest stars: Tenzin Palmo, Pema Chödrön, the Dalai Lama.