Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  I massaged my knee gingerly. “I can hardly walk. I don’t know how I’m going to carry my backpack.”

  “But it’s worth it!” said Jamie, the guy in the Speedo. “You got your hands to your feet in full Lotus! Did you ever do that before?” There was a note of approval in his tone that had never been there before: I was wounded. Now I was in the club.

  “Never,” I admitted.

  “The pain is probably just your body telling you that it wants you to stay longer,” said Claire. It sounded almost like an invitation.

  “Maybe you’re right.” Despite the pain in my knee, my body still pulsed with the pleasure of the morning practice. Or was it just the feeling of belonging that was so intoxicating? Either way, it didn’t matter. I lay back on my back and closed my eyes, the sun a red glare through my eyelids. I was a decorated veteran of the spiritual wars. I was happy. And what’s great about this happiness is that it’s coming from the inside! It doesn’t need any outside validation! I can’t wait to tell Maxine.

  After I left the pool, I wove through the traffic on my bike, almost crashing into a herd of pigs making their way across the street. Each time I pressed the left pedal, pain shot through my knee. Who needs a meniscus, when I’m almost enlightened? I pulled up to the Krishna Cyber Chai Shop, locked my bike to a rusty railing, and ducked inside to zap off an email.

  I got there just as a burly Australian woman was leaving, her face streaked with tears. I recognized her from yoga class, where she’d been struggling—her shoulders were tight and she couldn’t do backbends. I wanted to ask how she was doing, but I refrained. There was an unspoken etiquette at these places, where you were dipping into your private life in such a public forum—a place where your whole past was eerily accessible yet so far away. It seemed better just to look the other way.

  I sat down at the computer and began hastily composing an email.

  Dear Maxine—I just want to let you know that I’m really getting the hang of this enlightenment thing! It turns out you don’t have to meditate or pray or anything like that. You just have to breathe and sweat and get your body in the right alignment. I did hurt my knee a tiny bit this morning, but it’s nothing serious. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you don’t have to worry. At this rate, I’ll get the book written in a couple of months.

  I hit Send. Then I checked my Inbox.

  And felt enlightenment evaporate.

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m going to anyway: The other day Joe and I went to lunch at Café Gratitude and we ran into Matt. He was with a girl, no one I’ve seen before—long red hair, blue eyes, lots of tattoos. He told us she was a model for an ad he was shooting. She was looking at him like he was God. They were sharing an I Am Sensual smoothie with only one straw.

  I’m only telling you this because knowing you, you’re still hoping that he’s going to miraculously turn into some other kind of person and that you’ll be able to get back together and do the whole thing all over again. So I’m here to remind you: It’s over.

  Do your practice, and all is coming.

  —K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–)

  CHAPTER 9

  PRESS THE TIPS of your elbows toward the floor! From the roots of your arms, reach into the space between the third and fourth finger!”

  I was arched backward over the seat of a metal folding chair, my feet pressed into the baseboard of the wall, squeezing a foam block between my thighs. My arms were reaching back over my head, elbows pressing toward the floor, hands straining to reach the legs of the chair. I thought Matt hated Café Gratitude, I was thinking. Besides, I thought he was in Mexico. “Now draw the skin of your left shoulder in toward the third thoracic vertebrae. Swallow the energy of your throat down to your kidney. Inflate the kidneys with breath! Inflate! Inflate!”

  The edge of the metal chair dug into my back. My knee throbbed. Where exactly were my kidneys, anyway? What kind of an ad was he shooting? Probably Victoria’s Secret. Trying not to whimper, I sneaked a glance at the yogini on the chair next to me, a slender woman whose turquoise tank top and perfect poses I’d been envying all morning. She was thin and flexible, with mile-long legs and a jet-black ponytail. She arched in a graceful curve over the chair seat; even upside down, her chiseled features were exquisite. Her eyes were closed; her face was taut in concentration. I had no doubt that her kidneys were inflated. I felt the sudden, intense urge to yank her chair out from under her.

  After class, the other students left in packs to have dinner at a restaurant down the street. I could overhear scraps of conversation: earnest debates on whether the head of the femur rotates outward, or inward, when you do Revolved Triangle Pose; debates on whether it was all right to do a Headstand on the very last day of your period. The black-haired goddess who’d been practicing next to me had slipped into a long, flowing dress; she walked off with a man who looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model. Of course. They’re probably a couple. They have this great, spiritual relationship, like Shiva and Shakti. After dinner, they’re going to go back to their hotel and have excellent, precisely aligned sex involving lots of straps and blocks and a folding chair.

  The heat felt like an animal wrapped around me. The yoga seemed to have upset my stomach again; I was too nauseated to eat, too nauseated even to talk. I began limping back toward my hotel, my knee throbbing. After the precision of the yoga class, the world felt broken down into precise units of awareness, their intensity almost too much to bear: the traffic not just traffic, but rickshaws, trucks, a bicycle laden with bamboo, a donkey with a dead goat flung over its back. Garbage along the street not just generic trash, but banana peels, orange peels, discarded coconut husks, plastic bags, sanitary napkins, cigarette cartons, and a spotted dog rooting through it all, looking for dinner. The sounds not an undifferentiated din, but bird calls, rickshaw roars, the constant tonk-tonk of a bird pecking a tree.

  Back in my bamboo hut, I lay down on my bed and sipped water from a plastic bottle, hoping my stomach would settle down. The sounds from outside were penetrating but not disturbing, as if they were happening inside my own head: the clanging of a metal bucket, the barking of dogs, voices raised in a shouted, incomprehensible argument, the roar of traffic. My body was lit up in my awareness, little muscles I didn’t even know I had had proclaiming their existence. Some other body, perhaps, could be the doorway to enlightenment; surely not this one. I’d inherited my mother’s thin, wiry frame, without an ounce of extra padding. But there were parts of it that were not my mother’s; the delicate hands, for instance, with the long, nail-bitten fingers. “You have your father’s hands,” my mother had told me once, looking at them as I washed the dishes. “What do you mean?” I’d asked, grasping for scraps of information. For a moment, I hoped a door would swing open, and she would tell me everything about him: how he laughed. The sound of his voice. The way he put those long hands on her belly, feeling me kick. But a dish slipped through my soapy fingers and smashed on the floor. “Goddamn it,” my mother said. “That’s just like him, too. He broke everything he touched.”

  Another wave of nausea passed through me. It must be the water. I had been religiously drinking nothing but the ubiquitous Bisleri water in plastic bottles, but I didn’t trust it. Earlier that day, one of the yoga students had told me that someone had tested the Bisleri and “the E. coli count was so through the roof, you might as well be drinking toilet water.” Was this just a traveler’s myth? I stared at the bottle by my bed, envisioning small bits of fecal matter swimming around in it. After all, what was to stop someone from just filling water bottles with tap water, and selling them?

  For that matter, what was to stop someone from filling yoga centers with fake teachings, and selling them, too?

  Her long red hair swirling around them, her tattooed arms around his waist. I knew I’d never make it to the bathroom in the main hotel building. Instead, I leaned out the window of my h
ut and threw up into the dirt.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, fifteen minutes before my late afternoon interview with Mr. Kapoor, I limped into his empty yoga studio. The fans lazily stirred the hot air. The room smelled of sandalwood, mildew, and sweaty feet. I sat down on the floor and folded into a forward bend, trying to center myself before going upstairs for the interview. Breathe. Relax. This was an incredible opportunity. How many yoga students would kill for the chance for a one-on-one with Sir? I imagined myself back in San Francisco, mentioning my interview casually over sushi after yoga class: When I was in India interviewing Sir—yes, he’s really quite charming when you get to know him…At the pool after class that morning, trying to soothe my aching knee, I’d drunk a beer and fallen asleep in the sun. Now I was so sunburned that it hurt to bend forward. My head was throbbing. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what I had wanted to ask first. Something about his own journey toward awakening. Where had he first—

  “You journalists!” Kapoor’s voice cracked from behind me. “You think that my yoga is not spiritual! But let me ask you this—where is the spiritual person who does not have a body? Show me that person!”

  I jerked upright. “Oh, Sir, I know your yoga is very spiritual. I just have some questions about how—”

  He sat down cross-legged next to me and leaned forward, thrusting his massive face toward mine. “Can you meditate without a body? Can you sing the praises of God without a body?”

  “No, no, you are right.” I fumbled in my pocket for my tape recorder. The interview, like everything else on this trip, seemed to have begun before I was prepared for it.

  “Of course I am right!” he bellowed. “We are not here to debate who is right and who is wrong.”

  I pressed the record button, hoping I had put in a fresh tape. “So let’s start at the beginning. In your system of yoga, how does one reach enlightenment?”

  I seemed to be making him angrier and angrier. “Enlightenment? Who are you to be even using the word?” He slapped his hand against the floor. “You want to feel God. But can you feel the skin on the back of your neck? You want to know the Divine. But do you know your thighbone?”

  Only the thought of Maxine gave me the courage to go forward. “But, Sir, isn’t it a problem to fixate so much on your body, when it’s going to grow old and die?”

  “Old age! What do you know of old age? If you had really contemplated old age, you would not be talking! You would not be hesitating! You would be throwing yourself into the fires of practice. You would not be coming to the yoga shala with your sweat stinking of beer. You would not be sitting on the sidelines, asking questions: Is this the way? Is that?” He leaned forward, his chest swelling like a rooster. “I tell you this: At this age, if I let my body do what it wanted, it would fall into decay. So I tell my body this: I am the master. It will obey my commands.”

  “But what about when the body does not obey? For instance, my knee—”

  “Your knee! Pah! That knee shows your resistance to surrendering to the teacher. If you are truly surrendered, injuries do not happen.”

  “So, Sir, would you say that in your system, the path to awakening involves controlling—”

  “Words! Words! Only words.” He stood up. “You will come to class. You will do your yoga. That is the only way to know anything.”

  That night, in my room, I sat trying to write by the dim light of the bare bulb dangling over my mattress. Mosquitoes whined outside my netting. My pen left inkless scratches on the page, then spurted enthusiastically, puddling blue blots on the paper. Given the failure of my interview with Mr. Kapoor, I wasn’t sure what to take notes on. The women in bikinis slicing through the cool pool waters? My throbbing sunburn? My knee?

  Abruptly, the power went out. The darkness was sudden and absolute.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after yoga, I went out with Devi Das, looking for a store to buy a flashlight and some sunscreen. We walked down a side street that looked like a war zone—gutted buildings, dusty treeless expanses of dead grass. The buildings all seemed to be placed on the landscape haphazardly, as if spilled there from a giant toy box. All of them seeming to be crumbling at the edges, covered with a layer of powdery dust. I felt as if I were crumbling, too—the edges of my personality eroding, with nothing familiar to remind me of who I was.

  Out of the smog on a street corner, a sadhu appeared, making his way through the bicycles and trucks, looking as incongruous here as if a pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales had appeared in the middle of modern downtown London. Maxine, this is how India is—the past and the present appearing simultaneously, as in a dream, as if every civilization that had ever been on this land is still here, nothing ever thrown away, just built over. The sadhu was spinning in circles, muttering to himself. His eyes were rolled back in his head.

  “Is he okay?” I reached for Devi Das’s hand, nervously, then dropped it, remembering that men and women must never touch each other in public.

  “He’s a mast,” said Devi Das. “That’s a person who has given everything over to God—even his mind.”

  “He looks crazy.”

  “In the States, he’d be locked up for sure. But look at him, he is happy.”

  The man came closer. He had no teeth. His robe was in tatters. But his face was lit up in a smile, as if he’d just been given a gift he’d been waiting for his whole life.

  “He is a divine lunatic,” Devi Das went on. “But in India they believe an encounter with a mast is a blessing. Such beings have insight into ultimate truth, although they do not understand the workings of the material world.”

  The man approached, holding out his hands. Thinking he was asking for money, I began reaching for my rupees. But instead he reached his hands toward my belly, pausing with them a few inches away. His eyes came into focus on my face. He said something in a language I didn’t understand.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, stupidly.

  He smiled again, deep folds crumpling into his cheeks. He put his hands together in namaste. “Ba-by. Your baby.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked again.

  He bowed and held his hands toward my belly again. “Blessings on your baby,” he said. His eyes rolled back in his head again, and he spiraled away into the traffic.

  I looked at Devi Das. “What was he talking about? What baby?”

  Devi Das didn’t say anything. He just looked at my belly. Then he turned and bowed in the direction the sadhu had disappeared.

  I looked down at my belly, too.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  What greater calamity can a person suffer in this world than their own youth, which is at once the abiding-place of passion, the cause of dreadful agonies in hell, the seed of ignorance, the gathering of clouds that hide the moon of knowledge, the great friend of the God of Love, and the chain that binds together innumerable sins…

  —Sringara Sataka, AD 600

  CHAPTER 10

  TRAVELING ALWAYS THROWS off your cycle. I’m probably just late.” I poked at the crispy masala dosa, a giant crepe stuffed with potato and spinach. When I’d ordered it, I’d been ravenous. Now the smell turned my stomach.

  “Yes, that’s probably it. I’m sure the holy man got it wrong.” Devi Das took a huge bite of his dosa and chewed. A little sauce dribbled out the corner of his mouth. “What he meant to say was ‘Blessings on your late menstrual cycle.’ But his English wasn’t good enough.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, too anxious and exhausted to answer. We were in a little restaurant a few blocks away from our hotel—if “blocks” could be used to describe the maze of rutted alleys jammed with randy goats and rusted bicycles. If “restaurant” could be used to describe this one room that looked like a converted garage, with a pitted cement floor and a few wooden tables and a gas stove in the back with a mustached man cooking on an iron skillet. If “we” could be used to describe this random pairing of me with Devi Das, a sadhu with dirty dreadlocks and curried potato on his chin. My visi
on of how things should be was so disconnected from the way things actually were that I felt seasick.

  I couldn’t be pregnant. I just couldn’t. It would ruin everything. Bail out on my trip, go back to California and have a baby? Find an abortion clinic in Mumbai? Go back to California and terminate the pregnancy, then fly back to India and get on with my quest for enlightenment as if nothing had happened? Abortion was common in India; I knew that. I’d just read an article about it in India Today. The article said that women usually ended their pregnancies late, in the fourth month, after they had determined through amniocentesis that their child was a girl. I’d seen the posters on the train, trying to convince women not to abort: “Your girl, Your pearl,” they said.

  I picked up my metal cup of steaming chai and took a sip—a sweet, comforting jolt of sugar and caffeine. Devi Das stopped chewing. “Are you sure you want to be drinking that? Of course, it’s none of our business. But isn’t it supposed to be bad for the baby?”

  The baby. I set the cup down immediately, feeling a visceral surge of maternal concern: Must not give caffeine to the baby. “I’m not pregnant.” Jesus. One minute I’m figuring out how to stamp it out so it doesn’t disrupt my life. The next I’m tending it like a rare plant I’ve been trying to grow for years. And I don’t even know if it exists. It? Him? Her? I took a deep breath, picked up the cup again, set it down without drinking any.

  “What I’ve got to do is get a pregnancy test. Where do you get a pregnancy test in India?”

  Devi Das licked his fingers. “We know of a little temple just outside of town where the priest will hang a red silk thread over your belly and tell you if your child will be a merchant, a saint, a politician, or a robber.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. I want one of those little sticks that you pee on and they change color.”