by Anne Cushman
“And suppose I don’t get enlightened and you do?” Maya pulled out her Swiss Army knife, popped it open, and began cleaning her nails. “Am I supposed to keep on loving you?”
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t. I’ll still be the same person. Enlightenment doesn’t change your personality.”
“Wonderful. I’m so relieved that you won’t suddenly stop being a total jerk.” She turned to Devi Das. “Do you have any more sodas? I forgot to tell you, I get carsick.”
Like us, Siddhartha and Maya had reasons for wanting to go see Maitri Ma now, at the tail end of March, rather than waiting more sensibly until May, when the mountain roads would be clear of snow. Maya was due back at her nursing job, and Siddhartha had to complete his paper on dialectical hermeneutics in the work of Hegel and Wittgenstein for a peer-reviewed journal. Together, the four of us had taken the train to Bangalore, where I’d gotten in a visit with Dr. Rao to make sure that everything was still going well. From there, we’d caught a plane to Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Siddhartha had assumed the role of commander in chief of our expedition, choosing everything from our route to our choice of snacks. Normally, that would have irritated me. But at this point in my pregnancy, my brain seemed to have turned to pudding, and my decision-making capacity had shrunk in proportion to the growth of my belly. I was happy to waddle along in his wake, letting someone else be the grown-up.
Our driver, Mr. Desai, had one glass eye that was permanently rolled to the far right, creating the reassuring delusion that he was constantly monitoring traffic approaching from the other side of the car, when in fact he couldn’t see anything at all in that direction. We roared along narrow mountain roads with crumbling edges overlooking precipitous drops. Mr. Desai’s strategy around the hairpin curves seemed to be to accelerate into them to get through the danger zone as quickly as possible. Warning signs flashed by: LIFE’S A JOURNEY—PLEASE FINISH IT. CORNER CUTTERS OFTEN LAND INTO GUTTERS.
“Do you know the story of how the Ganges River descended from heaven?” Siddhartha asked us, as we passed around sodas and fruit and cookies and chikki, a peanut candy sticky with sugar and ghee. His tone made it clear that he was going to illuminate us, whether we thought we knew or not.
“What do I care?” Maya gulped at the soda that Devi Das handed her. “Apparently, I’m not the one who’s getting enlightened this week.”
Siddhartha interpreted this as an enthusiastic assent. “Well, apparently the goddess Ganga was so annoyed at being compelled to leave heaven that she descended in a great torrent, strong enough to wipe out the entire earth.” I could see him smoking a pipe, lecturing Berlin undergraduates on Kant. “But Shiva, seated in meditation at Gangotri, blocked her descent with his hair, and she became entangled there for thousands of years.” He turned to our driver. “Isn’t that right, Desai-ji?”
“Yes, yes, all that you are saying is most correct.” Mr. Desai threw his cigarette butt out the half-opened window and began fumbling around for another one. “But finally, Parvati, Shiva’s wife, she was getting so jealous. ‘Who is this lady playing so long, around and around, in my husband’s hair?’ she was asking. ‘This I cannot tolerate!’”
“Totally understandable,” sniffed Maya.
I loved this about Indian mythology—that even the deities were wracked with petty human emotions. It made it seem more likely that they would sympathize with my situation. I pictured Parvati stomping around her apartment in a snit, maybe even calling up one of the other goddesses on the phone to bitch about Shiva. “Get a load of this, Lakshmi. How am I supposed to deal with this one?” And Lakshmi would remind her of the Rules, urge her to act like a Creature Unlike Any Other. If he’s got another goddess playing in his hair—he’s just not that into you.
“So then Parvati demanded that Shiva wring out his dreadlocks like a wet dishrag, releasing Ganga, who then flowed down from the mountains into the plains. You can see her there below.” Siddhartha gestured out the window at the river, a band of silver hundreds of feet below. “That is why Gangotri is such an optimum place to get enlightened. It marks the very spot where the goddess Ganga first touched the earth.”
“Stop the car.” Maya cupped her hand over her mouth. “I’m going to throw up.”
Half an hour later, we were back in the car again. Siddhartha, chastened, was sitting with his arms around a wan Maya, pressing acupressure spots on her wrists and assuring her that he’d always care about her, even if the worst happened and he attained total enlightenment by the end of this week. “After all, enlightenment, per se, does not preclude the possibility of intimate personal relationships.”
“Saraswati has a husband,” Maya said. “I don’t think she sees him much any more, though.”
“Saraswati has a husband?” I asked. “Where is he?”
“He’s a divorce lawyer back in Santa Barbara. A lot of Saraswati’s students go to see him, once they start evolving beyond the confines of their relationships.” Maya looked at Siddhartha, and I could practically hear her thoughts: I might be evolving any minute.
By the time we finally pulled into Uttarkashi, a freezing rain was falling, and it was almost dusk. The city roads were mired in mud, with an occasional patch of dirty, icy snow. But the fact that Uttarkashi was deserted only increased everyone’s sense of excitement: We were getting to Maitri Ma ahead of the crowds. We were approaching the Las Vegas of enlightenment with a winning tip. We checked into one of the few open hotels and ate dal and rice and sour yogurt; then went to our rooms, which were cold and smelled of mildew, with mattresses we didn’t want to look at too closely. I was longing for a hot shower, so Devi Das went into our bathroom and turned on the water heater, which squealed, hissed, then exploded with a bang, filling the room with scalding steam. Devi Das slammed the bathroom door shut and went to fetch the hotel manager, who turned it off for us, shooting me a reproving look: “This is not tourist season, madam.” Once we crawled into our beds, Devi Das fell asleep immediately. But I lay there awake for a while, staring into the darkness, shivering.
When I was nannying for Sam and Tamara, one of their favorite games was “treasure hunt.” I’d save it for those long weekend afternoons when their parents were out playing golf (him) or getting facials (her), and the kids’ usual packed schedules—preschool, ballet, Mandarin, karate—gave way to the endless whine of “what can I do now?” I’d hide my clues all over the house and garden—just scribbled crayon drawings on folded scraps of construction paper, since neither of the kids could read yet. They’d climb the lower branches of the backyard oak, peer inside the chamber of the grand piano, peel the jackets off their favorite books. They’d find clues in the arches of their mom’s high-heeled shoes, in the neckband of a stuffed bear, inside their dad’s guitar.
My trip around India was starting to feel just like that game. I was dashing here, dashing there, following illegible clues tucked in obscure places. But who was leaving the clues? And what if he or she were truly as clueless as I was?
I rolled onto my side. When Sam and Tamara did finally find the treasure, it was never anything very big—just a bag of chocolate chip cookies, or a pair of plastic water pistols. Nothing they couldn’t have gotten without all that searching, simply by asking for it. But, of course, it wasn’t the treasure itself that was the point. It was the looking for it.
THE NEXT MORNING, Siddhartha headed out to the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering to find a trail guide to accompany us to Maitri Ma. The rest of us sat in the hotel restaurant, sipping chai, our backpacks piled around us. Devi Das had offered to carry one for both of us; it loomed bigger than all the rest, with two sleeping bags lashed to the bottom.
The plan was to drive up the road to Gangotri as far as we could go before snow and mudslides blocked the road. We’d heard contradictory reports: You could get within three miles of Gangotri. No, the road was blocked ten miles away. In the absence of any hard data, we’d decided arbitrarily to average them and a
ssume that we’d have about a six-or seven-mile walk. Then we’d spend the night in Gangotri before hiking in to see Maitri Ma—a two-mile hike up a snowy trail.
It was a good thing that Maitri Ma was so hard to reach, I told myself. In a few years, Maitri Ma’s cave would have an email address and a website; the guru would still be in silence, but she would have an assistant with an iPhone. This was my chance to experience the real thing.
But I was getting nervous that I wouldn’t be able to haul my belly that far, even without a backpack. And this was the first time I wouldn’t be in range of a hospital if something went wrong. I fell back on the mantra I’d used all along: Nothing is unusual about this pregnancy. People have babies in India all the time. Besides, Maya was a nurse. I’d be more at risk back at home driving on the freeway at rush hour. I was two and a half months away from my due date. I’d be fine.
From: HeyBaby.com
To: [email protected]
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From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hooray!
Amanda, this is the best news I’ve gotten all day. A female guru in a forest? Not discovered yet? A two-day hike in? In other words, this is our exclusive scoop? You’ve made my day. Be sure you get one of our friends to get a picture of you sitting with her, and do something with your hair, first; it’s OK if you look a little windblown but lose the ponytail, please, and it wouldn’t hurt you to put on a little bit of lipstick first. See if you can spruce her up a little, too. I imagine it’s been a while since she’s plucked her eyebrows. Congratulations. This might save your manuscript from the dustbin.
TWO HOURS LATER, we were all in the car again, winding up the road to Gangotri.
Sitting in the front seat with Siddhartha and Maya was Vikram Singh, a taciturn mountain guide from the Nehru Institute. In a few weeks, he told us, the road would be roaring with buses and jeeps delivering pilgrims to Gangotri. But now it was almost deserted. As we climbed higher and higher, I pressed my face against the glass. Snowy peaks soared ahead of us, twenty thousand feet high. I was driving straight into every fantasy I’d ever had about finding a guru in India.
Heavy physical labor is one of the risk factors for premature labor. Our car maneuvered around a sadhu walking by the side of the road—an early pilgrim making the journey on foot.
I pressed my nose against the glass. It wasn’t just for myself that I was doing this. It wasn’t just for Maxine. It was for my baby.
I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have a career. I didn’t have a partner. I couldn’t give my baby a dresser that matched his crib or a college education fund. I couldn’t give him a father, or even a grandfather. But maybe if I could offer him inner peace, then everything would be all right. I wouldn’t just be a screwed-up single mom who got pregnant at the wrong time.
I couldn’t turn back now.
Devi Das put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I closed my eyes and tried to believe him.
A FEW HOURS later, Mr. Desai pulled to the side of the road. “No more driving. Road is closed.” He gestured to a three-foot-wide slide of mud and rock tumbled across the pavement.
“How much further is it to Gangotri?” asked Siddhartha.
“Three kilometers. Five, maximum.”
“That means it’s probably about ten.” Devi Das looked at me.
“Five miles, give or take. Can you do it?”
A few gentle laps. A walk around the block. “I can do it,” I said.
We clambered over the pile of dirt and headed up the road. I plodded along, my back aching, a shooting pain traveling from my sacrum down the outside of my hip with every step. Siddhartha and Maya disappeared in the distance ahead of us. Our guide stayed with me and Devi Das, a sheepdog making sure the stragglers stayed with the flock. I was grateful Devi Das was carrying the backpack. Having my swollen belly slung out in front seemed a bad choice, from an ergonomic point of view. Why weren’t babies gestated on our backs?
The mountain slopes around us were thick with trees, which Mr. Singh named for us: blue pine. Oak. Walnut. Horse chestnuts. Deodar. Rhododendron, flowering early with huge crimson blossoms. We passed an occasional sadhu; an old man leading a donkey with a pile of sticks on its back.
The Bhagirathi River snaked along in the deep gorge below us. “It’s named for King Bhagirathi, who is the one who persuaded the Ganga to descend from heaven,” Devi Das told me. “He sat in Gangotri and prayed for ten thousand years, begging the goddess to come down to Earth to purify the sins of his ancestors.”
I looked at the river rushing below. “Do you believe in sin?”
“We believe the true nature of the soul is pure and spotless. But sometimes it gets covered over with a thick layer of grime that needs to be wiped off.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. We were moving too slowly even for our guide—he had walked ahead to check up on Siddhartha and Maya. “Devi Das. Do you think I’m crazy, doing this?”
“We are probably not the right person to talk about craziness. But we can tell you this: You never know where a path is leading you.” He stopped to pick a pebble out of his sandal. “When our brother died, we just kept thinking, ‘If only we’d made pancakes that morning, instead of oatmeal.’ We almost did. We’d had fresh blueberries from the farmer’s market, and some buckwheat flour, and we could have made buckwheat blueberry pancakes with maple syrup. But we decided on hot cereal instead, and just sprinkled the blueberries on the top. Afterward, we kept thinking that if we’d made the pancakes, they would have taken longer than the oatmeal. We would have gotten to that intersection ten minutes later. That guy would have slammed into somebody else, instead.”
“Oh, Devi Das. You can’t think like that.” I didn’t tell him how often I thought the same way: that if I’d just pulled a different condom out of the box, I wouldn’t be pregnant right now. Or that if I’d been in a different position when it broke, this baby would be an entirely different person.
“But that’s exactly our point. Who is to say what is risky, and what is not? Are pancakes safe and oatmeal dangerous? Who can say which road leads to enlightenment, and which to disaster? All you can do is trust your instincts, moment to moment.”
I plodded on in silence for a few minutes. “When your brother was in the car accident. Did he die right away? Or was he in the hospital for a while?
“He was in the ICU for a week.”
“And were you with him? Did you get to see him at all?”
“We were with him round the clock.” He didn’t look at me. “But he didn’t regain consciousness. We just wanted to talk to him, just wanted to tell him we loved him. But he never woke up.”
It was almost dark when Devi Das and I finally tramped into the town of Gangotri. It was a ghost town: a jumble of water-sculpted, caramel-colored granite, with the pale green river foaming and splashing around it, surrounded by abandoned buildings and boarded up tourist hotels. Snow was heaped on the tops of buildings, squeaked underfoot whenever we left the rutted, trampled roads. The peaks loomed above us, although we were already at ten thousand feet. I stopped to look up at them. Just a couple of miles up the trail was the cave where Maitri Ma was spending the winter.
We walked around the temple, closed
up and barricaded with an iron gate. “Next month, the goddess Ganga will be coming back here,” our guide told us. “There will be big puja and festival to welcome her home. But now, she is still living downriver, in her winter temple.”
We caught up with Siddhartha and Maya in a mud lean-to where a couple of men in camouflage army jackets were brewing chai over a wood fire. I collapsed on the rickety wooden chair and gratefully gulped the hot brew, too exhausted to try to figure out who these guys were—off-duty soldiers? Deserters? Locals who picked up the jackets secondhand? The chai was achingly sweet and tasted of smoke, ginger, and black pepper. The baby wriggled in enthusiastic appreciation. Maya sat down next to me.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not that great. My back is killing me and I’ve got a splitting headache.”
“Any contractions?”
“No.”
“Then you’re fine. The headache is probably just the altitude. The caffeine should help.”
A swami approached and bowed to us, wearing—in addition to the usual orange robes—a not-so-usual pair of orange bedroom slippers. Our guide spoke with him in Hindi, then turned to us. “Hotels—all closed. But Swami Nityananda will be letting us stay in his temple, fixing us dinner, breakfast, tea, all that. No money—donation only.” So we followed the swami up the road to a shack made of sheets of corrugated metal attached to crumbling brick walls with what appeared to be bundles of twine. He served us piles of rice and dal on metal plates, then showed us to a warren of tiny back rooms to sleep. I stepped outside to the snowbank that served as the toilet, and squatted in the icy wind to pee. Then I lay down across from Devi Das on a thin mattress draped across a sling of rope, like a hammock, and pulled a pile of musty blankets around me. The wind whistled through the plastic bags that covered the window.