by Anne Cushman
My father had showed up in Denny’s one night and ordered a burger and a chocolate shake—a business school student at UCLA out for a conference on marketing meat at Texas A&M. He asked my mother out for a beer, then another, then another. The next morning, he stayed in bed with her in his hotel room till noon, missing the lecture on new methods for packaging pork. She’d never slept with anyone who didn’t have a Texas drawl, and his voice in her ear drove her wild—she told Aunt Elsie it was like making love with a TV anchorman. A week later, he sent her a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. Snooping through her closet years later, I found the second half of it tucked at the bottom of a shoebox under my birth certificate—her ticket back to a life she didn’t want any more.
When she found out she was pregnant with me, two months later, she didn’t tell him until it was too late to do anything about it. By then, they were already fighting about everything: the way she left her underwear strewn all over the floor of his studio apartment; the way he stayed out past midnight studying for his final exams at the UCLA library. I was just one more missile they could hurl at each other. One night, she borrowed his bike and rode it down to the library, five months pregnant, ready to give him hell. His carrel was empty, books piled neatly in the corner: How to Sell Almost Anything to Almost Anyone. The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful People. She rode all over campus and finally found him in the student center, drinking beer and playing video games with a couple of guys from his personnel management class. When she ripped into him, he saw the future, and it didn’t look good.
Two nights after graduation, he packed his suitcase and left while she was bartending at the Coyote Grill. He left her a check for five thousand dollars and no forwarding address.
She could have tracked him down and hit him up for child support. But that wasn’t my mother’s style. Instead, she tore up his pictures, gave his clothes to the homeless guy on the corner, and cut his memory out of her heart like a piece of cancerous tissue. Being pregnant was a great way to get tips, as it turned out; so was showing off baby pictures. When I was three months old, she enrolled in a cosmetology school that had cheap day care and began dating a divorced father twenty years older than she was who owned a car dealership. She turned her face to the future and sailed on.
When I’d told Matt that I wanted to track down my father, he had scoffed. “Biology isn’t destiny,” he’d said. “He’s not your father. He’s just the sperm donor.” But Tom had urged me to look up his name in the UCLA online alumni database. And as easy as that, there he was: a real estate developer, living in Seattle with his wife and three children. The alumni magazine didn’t show a picture of him. But there was a picture of the kids: two boys and a girl, all in their teens. All with a tangle of dark curly hair, just like mine. All with my olive skin, my long nose.
I wrote him four or five letters, but I never mailed them. Once, I even picked up the phone and dialed his number, but I hung up as it started to ring. My mother and I were just the first trial run of a family that got discarded, like the first batch of pancakes made before the griddle was hot enough. Even worse than never seeing my father would be to see him and have him turn me away.
But every few months, I dreamed about him. In my dreams, he was a voice in the next room, or around a corner. He called on the phone, but when I picked up, the line was dead. He was waiting for me at a train station, but I got off one stop too late, and couldn’t find my way back to him.
THE INDIAN MAN in the seat next to me closed his laptop with a click and looked at me. “Let me guess. You’re going to India to study yoga.”
I pulled out my earplugs. “How did you know?”
“I don’t know…Maybe it had to do with the stretches you were doing in the aisle by the bathroom.” He was somewhere in his midthirties, with pointed features as crisp as his voice, a lilting British-Indian cadence that made everything he said sound more interesting. “Or the om sign tattooed on your bicep. And by the way, I should warn you that wandering through rural India with that arm exposed will get you approximately the same reaction as walking through Louisiana topless with a crucifix tattooed on your breast.”
I put my hand over my upper arm, wondering if he was joking. “Do you do yoga, too?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? I have a friend who’s an orthopedic surgeon. Specializes in knees. Every time he hears that someone does yoga, he turns to me and says, ‘Oh good! Another payment on my Lexus!’ No, I’m going back there to run a software start-up in Bangalore. My wife is coming in a few weeks. She’s a doctor. She’ll be opening a women’s health clinic.” He slid his laptop back in its case and slipped it under the seat in front of him. “How about you? What part of India will you be blessing with your yoga rupees?”
“I’ll be traveling all over, actually. I’m working on a guidebook about where to find enlightenment.”
He laughed again. “Good Lord. So thousands more rich Californians can tramp all over India looking for inner peace. While meanwhile millions of poor Indians are praying to die and be reborn in California.” He tore open his package of honey-roasted peanuts and popped a handful in his mouth. “So tell me. Why on earth would someone go to India to practice yoga, when you can find a yoga studio on every corner in San Francisco? Where you can also drink the water without getting dysentery?”
“Because India is the birthplace of yoga! It’s the land of the gods. It’s where all the sacred texts come from.”
“Yes, now that you mention it, I have heard that yoga is making a comeback in India. Particularly since the Indians have discovered that there’s an export market for it.”
“For an Indian, you’re awfully negative about India.”
“I’m not negative. I’m an optimist, in fact. I believe that India is going to be the next superpower. And when I say ‘power,’ I’m not talking about yogic siddhis.” He crumpled up the peanut bag and stuck it in the seat pocket in front of him. “But I’m open to being convinced. Tell me more. How are you planning to find your great Indian enlightenment?”
“I’m going to research all the different types of yoga. Hatha yoga, the path of the body; raja yoga, the path of the mind; bhakti yoga, the path of devotion—”
“And what about banka yoga? You’ve left that out.”
“Banka yoga? What’s that?”
“That’s the yoga of building up a hefty Swiss bank account by ripping off gullible American girls who believe you are an enlightened guru.”
I picked up my empty glass of apple juice and began sucking on the ice. “I’m not gullible. I’m a journalist.”
“Of course.” He pressed the armrest button and leaned his seat back a little farther. “So you understand that India is a real-world place, with real-world challenges. If they’re going to be solved, they’re going to be solved by real-world solutions like better engineering and sanitation and birth control, not by gurus spouting moldy texts from a feudal society that died out a couple of thousand years ago. Not to mention the fact that while you Western hippies are traveling around here looking for enlightenment, Indian billionaires are buying up your corporate assets faster than you can say Sun Salutation.”
I was starting to get nervous. “So are you saying that my whole book is bogus? Or is it my whole life you have a problem with?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to give you a hard time. Tell me. I really want to understand. What is it about yoga that appeals to you so much?”
For some reason, it seemed urgent to convince him that I wasn’t a flake, as if the success of my whole project depended upon his belief in it. I groped for words. “There’s a way I sometimes feel when I’m doing yoga.” I’d been inhaling his exhalations for hours; this gave me an illusion of intimacy that was only heightened by the fact that I’d never see him again. “It’s a feeling—just for a moment—that I belong somewhere, even if it’s just inside my own skin. I want to have that feeling more of the time.”
I’d lost him. He didn’t say anything for
a long time. I stared at the TV screen. A man and a woman, both of them very fat, were sitting in the chairs next to Dr. Phil. Then they were standing by a sink full of dishes with him yelling at her, and a wailing kid wearing nothing but underwear and a Superman cape holding onto her legs. The image cut to a car commercial: a beautiful young woman and a gorgeous guy driving fast down a mountain road. As if, if they drove fast enough, they could elude all that suffering forever.
The Indian man reached in his pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me.
A. J. Rao, software design
159 Mahatma Marg
Bangalore, India
email: [email protected]
“Hang onto this,” he told me. “If you get into any trouble, you be sure to send me and my wife an email.”
Do thy duty, even if it be humble, rather than another’s, even if it be great. To die in one’s duty is life; to live in another’s is death.
—Bhagavad Gita, ca. 300 BC
CHAPTER 6
I SPENT MY FIRST night in India kneeling in front of a toilet in the Harmony Hotel, spewing liquids out of both ends of my gastrointestinal tract.
In between rounds of vomiting, I lay on the gritty bathroom floor, too weak to drag myself to my bed, wondering what had made me so sick. The lettuce on the cheese sandwich in the airport? The banana lassi in the Harmony restaurant? Two pigeons had nested in the ventilator fan; the floor was dotted with their grayish droppings and bits of feathers. The smell of the sewer came up through the toilet, which was just a porcelain bowl in the floor. There was no toilet paper, just a tap and a cup of water. From a courtyard outside came the wail of Hindi film music and the blare of a television show that primarily consisted of explosions and car crashes.
When my stomach subsided, just before dawn, I staggered to my bed, a dingy mattress covered with a single sheet, and lay down with all my clothes on. The overhead fan had a bolt missing: It made a shrill whine-thump, whine-thump like an imbalanced washing machine. I fell into a fitful sleep.
A few hours later, a clanging began, as if men were forging steel directly under my bed. It merged with the shriek of recorded chants from a loudspeaker on the roof of a temple down the street. Sitting up in bed, I peered out through the grimy glass and down into a narrow road jammed with autorickshaws—motorized three-wheelers about the size of golf carts, painted bright yellow, belching fumes. The rickshaws were going in both directions, according to no discernible traffic patterns; the whole alley reverberated with the two-toned wail of their horns. There were no sidewalks, so people and bicycles spilled out into the road, bringing traffic to a crawl. The crowd was heaving, shouting, packed shoulder to shoulder; was it some sort of riot, or were they just going to work? A cow stood on the other side of the street, chewing on a newspaper. And there, riding in the back of that rickshaw with the man in the turban…Was that a goat he had in his lap? The cow lifted up its tail and a stream of manure fell into the road. A child darted out from a doorway, scooped up the pile of cow dung with a flat shovel, and carried it back inside like a treasure.
Over the whole scene loomed a giant billboard bearing an advertisement for “Minto’s, the mint with no hole.” “You don’t have a hole in your head,” proclaimed the billboard. “Why do you want a hole in your mint?”
I flopped back on my bed and stared up at the ceiling—peeling white paint and a large brown stain as if someone had thrown a cup of chai at it. From down the hall, I could hear the sound of someone else retching, and my own stomach heaved in sympathy.
I’d exited the airport late yesterday afternoon, dazed and exhausted, into a crush of bumper-to-bumper traffic. My taxi had crawled down a brand-new freeway, past billboards advertising Reliance cell phones and resort property in the Himalayas. An electronic sign blinked overhead: CONTROL YOUR SPEED, CONTROL YOUR MIND. I’d asked the taxi driver to just drop me off at the popular backpacker area near the train station. But instead he had talked me into coming to the Harmony Hotel, which he swore was run by his cousin, who “is also loving the yoga, just like you.”
Where were the restaurants, the stores, the train station, the banks? How did I make a phone call? Who could I call, anyway? To quell my rising panic, I pulled a pen from my bag, looked in vain for a scrap of paper, and began making a list on my palm of things I needed to do: Cash travelers checks into rupees. Find Internet. Find train station. Buy train tickets. The list crawled off my hand, up my arm. Crash went the machines under my floor, and my whole bed vibrated.
Still queasy, I got up to take a shower in the tiny bathroom. The showerhead sprouted from the wall, spraying water over the sink and floor. Actually, it’s much more ecologically sound to not use toilet paper. I scrubbed away at my hands with the tiny sliver of graying soap, hoping I wasn’t going to throw up again. Much cleaner, too, really. I looked in vain for a towel, then dried myself by rolling around on my bed-sheets. I pulled on my clothes and went looking for tea.
“Coffee tea bottled water?” asked the waiter. He was the same man who had checked me in at the front desk last night, but now he was wearing a white jacket. “Milk porridge? Toast butter jam?”
I studied the greasy plastic menu. Veggie cutlets…ornge juice…curd with muesli…Scrampled eggs…I wasn’t hungry, but I should probably try to get something down. “Just some plain toast, please.”
“Very good.” The waiter went through an open door into a tiny kitchen; I saw him take off his jacket, put on an apron, and begin to fill a giant cast-iron pot with water from the sink. I looked around the dining room: four Formica tables and a linoleum floor the color of spilled coffee. I appeared to be the only guest. I continued my list on a scrap of napkin: Buy Immodium. Find enlightened guru. Breath mints?
“Breakfast, madame.” The waiter set a bowl of oatmeal on the table in front of me, with a pitcher of steaming milk and a little plate of brown sugar.
“Actually, I ordered toast.”
“Yes, yes,” he said pleasantly. “But today, toast is not coming.”
I was too tired to ask why. I sprinkled sugar on the cereal, poured on the steaming milk, and took a bite. It was surprisingly good, hot and sweet, sliding down my throat without too much effort. The waiter was still standing by the table, watching me. “You will be staying here long, madame?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. I should leave in a couple of days.” The table had one leg shorter than the others; it lurched and wobbled every time I clicked my spoon into the bowl, giving the meal an unsteady feeling, as if I were eating aboard a ship.
“Going to where?”
“Rishikesh.” I put down my spoon—a few bites was all I was up for—and turned back to my list, in a gesture intended to communicate that the conversation was over.
“Ah! Rishikesh! Rishikesh is yoga capitol of world. Gateway to Himalaya. So many sadhus, yogis, holy men are living in Rishikesh, living on banks of goddess Ganges, eating only air and water and some little bit of chai and biscuits, having the conversations with God and all like that. And also, there is my cousin, who is running very good river-rafting business. You would like to try river rafting?”
“Actually, I’m going to focus on yoga. I’m writing a book about enlightenment.”
“I talk to so many Americans, British, Germans studying yoga, they tell to me, ‘Vikram’—that is my name—‘Vikram, white-water rafting on the bosom of mother Ganges, that is enlightenment itself.’ This is what they are saying to me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded brochure, which he handed to me. “You see here, it describes it all, right here only.”
“Could you tell me where I could find a place to change traveler’s checks around here? Or somewhere I can connect to the Internet?”
“For shops and Internet, will be necessary to walk a little way, very little way, toward train station. Here, this is not really tourist area.”
I looked at him, baffled. “Then why are you running a hotel here?”
“My cousin, downsta
irs, is running rickshaw repair shop. He offers me the space upstairs, very reasonable rate.”
“And the hotel is doing well?”
“Oh, no, madame, as you see, hotel is doing very poorly. Very few guests.” He gestured around the empty room.
“But you seem very happy anyway.”
Vikram beamed at me. “Oh yes, madame. I am always happy. It is like this: What happens to us in life is for God to decide. But whether to be happy or not—that is our choice.”
“HELLO, HELLO, MONEY?”
In the dark, predawn din outside the train station, it took me a few seconds to figure out where the voice was coming from: right around the level of my knees. Weaving my way through the crowd, I looked down to see a boy seated on a battered skateboard, propelling himself after me with his skinny arms. His legs ended in shiny stumps just above the knee. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old. “Money, money, chapati?” He gestured with his hand toward his mouth.
I hiked up my shirt to fish around in my money belt, making impossible calculations in my head: How much was enough, given the preposterous gulf of wealth that lay between us? Should I give him my rupees? My traveler’s checks? My rings? My backpack? My whole life? I handed him a wad of small bills and tried to trudge on. But suddenly there were children all around me, hands outstretched, plucking at my clothes—“Money, money?” A ragged little girl with a baby in her arms, a boy pointing at a bloody gash on his leg…“Hello, hello, one rupee only?” I hesitated, not sure what to do, paralyzed by a bewildering fusion of compassion and irritation. Then I pushed past them, not meeting their eyes, afraid that I would miss my train.
The station platforms were dim and jammed with men, half of whom appeared to be scratching their crotches. My train was supposed to leave in ten minutes, but from which platform? An electronic sign labeled ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES displayed nothing but flashing red lines. An Enquiries and Complaints counter had no one sitting behind it. No one was at the Ladies Only counter, either. I looked around, desperate, and accosted a man in a red uniform with shiny buttons down the front. “Excuse me. Where does the train to Haridwar leave from?”