He saw the lineaments of the mountains repeated in the strong bones of her face and in her lithe movement. He wished his body were that spare. If he were leaner and far harder of muscle, wouldn’t he better absorb the natural glory of the world, and the monumental stillness of Nepal’s god-bearing mountains? He chided himself. He was doing it again, letting egotistic obsession corrupt the moment and undermine his attention. He must not miss the instant when the mountains first took shape out of the clear dawn air.
He gripped the arms of his plastic chair as the roosters began to crow. It would be soon then. Even with his sunglasses on, he could not bear to look for long at the gigantic fiery ball riding its sea of gold-pink. He was not happy with “gold-pink.” Agnes would probably have a precise word for this magnificent drenching colour. Like heaped rose petals threaded with golden stamens, he wanted to tell her.
Then they were coming. The Annapurnas were emerging, the sight catching him somewhere between humility and wonder, shaken to the marrow that he should be privy to such a sight. When at last they were fully there — these dazzling, inscrutable kings and queens at the top of the world — he understood how the world must have looked on the first day of creation.
This is the first day, he thought, and the Annapurnas re-enact it with every sunrise. His eye was drawn, as always, to the extraordinary fishtail peak, which seemed simultaneously to shimmer and to leap into the air. He interpreted this imagined movement as the yearning the mountain instilled in him — to be good and to find God. At that instant the fishtail mountain smote him with a bolt of light that emptied him of all craving.
He blinked and realized he had been absent some time. He was the only watcher left on the rooftop. He got up quickly and folded the shawl in four on the back of his chair as the other tourists had done.
As he was about to descend the steps to the street, he hesitated, uncertain whether he should offer to pay for his tea, or if this would offend his hostess. The woman beckoned to him with her small, strong, brown hand. She showed him the tall, wide wooden loom where a solidly reassuring pattern was emerging from the single, tensile strands enclosing emptiness. This was another kind of marvel, and he stood nodding, hoping this gesture conveyed his appreciation for her skill. The woman tugged a folded wrap from one of the towers of colour against the wall; a burgundy and green version of the one she had lent him earlier. Her slender finger drew his attention to the repeated motif of solid little houses in simple shapes a child might draw. Each pair of homes was connected by an undulating bridge and framed by palm trees. The shawl’s deep border was woven in tiny diamonds, as minuscule as fish scales. The cloth was burgundy with gold outline on one side, and green and gold on the reverse.
“It takes mountain women three weeks to make this,” she told him. She gestured to herself and to her co-worker at the second loom, her shuttle skimming back and forth through taut strands. She put the shawl into his hands so that he could admire its warmth and weight, and the charm of its design. He appreciated all these things, but was struck most particularly by her sure pride in her work and in the way she spoke the words “mountain women.” She was so certain and rooted in her being. He imagined the shawl must have something of her power, and the power of this place, woven into it. He thought it would make a fine gift for Agnes or for his mother.
Just after he had paid the weaver, she brushed the centre of his palm lightly with her forefinger. “Morning is a lucky time,” she said. Even if she said this to everyone, he did not doubt her sincerity.
He knew he was lucky — lucky to be here, lucky to be alive. Lucky to see the sun rise over the Annapurnas, and to ponder the possibility he had been visited, while he gazed upon the fishtail peak, by the spirits of the mountains the people call the Dakinis, “the sailors of emptiness.”
Two days later, lying sleepless in a damp, truncated cot in a Delhi youth hostel, he began to wonder if his luck had soured. He had been wakened by an unsettling, persistent scratching in the wall behind his head. While he lay rigid, hoping the rats would not succeed in chewing through the plaster, he was suddenly aware of a child-sized hand hovering above his midriff and his money belt. He slapped the hand away before the thief could snip the elastic and abscond with his wallet and passport. The child’s shadow slipped from the room before Pinto even had time to prop himself up on his elbows. He was thankful now for the noisy creature clawing inside the walls. It would have been an administrative nightmare to obtain the money and ID to get home again.
He slept until near dawn, with his socks and his running shoes on, his passport inside one shoe and his travellers’ cheques in the other. What woke him this time was a noise from within rather than without, a dire rumbling in his belly and a sequence of jabbing cramps that sent him speeding to the toilet. He had tried to be so careful about what he ate, but obviously the foreign bacteria had outwitted him. In the two days that followed, as he repeatedly emptied his bowels into a receptacle whose plumbing was at best desultory, he was sometimes sorry for himself. But he was sorrier still for the men who shared the common lavatory and were subjected to his noisy evacuations and stench. No one in his room seemed to speak English, and for the most part they ignored him, the exception being a handsome, fair-haired man with a Danish flag on his backpack.
“Bad gut?” he inquired sympathetically.
Pinto nodded and tried not to look too stricken. The young man held his right forefinger aloft in a gesture Pinto was at a loss to interpret, and then he left. Half an hour later he was back with two large bottles of soda water and a package of plain biscuits.
“Hydrate. Important,” he said, handing the bottles and biscuits to Pinto.
“Thank you so much. Is this enough?” Pinto pulled a rumpled hundred rupee note from his pocket.
“Too much,” the young man protested; but he eventually took the money at Pinto’s insistence. “Take care,” he said as he hoisted the bulky pack on to his back and raised his hand in farewell.
Over the next sixteen hours, the bacteria managed to seed what Pinto could only describe as a pestilence of the spirit. He felt so weak and despairingly lonely he was often on the verge of tears. What on earth had possessed him to travel so far from home, without preparing himself either mentally or physically? He could easily die here in a bare-bones youth hostel in Old Delhi where the rats scrabbled between the walls and he could not even decently flush away the poisons his body kept voiding. In his struggle to surmount this emotional malaise, he revisited the Danish man’s simple act of kindness, savouring the simple words “take care” as though they were a healing draught. He had always found it invigorating to be in the presence of goodness.
He held close as well to the mountain woman’s shawl, bundling it against his belly or sometimes near his face where he could see the little houses and imagine himself safe inside one of them.
Two days later he was walking, albeit still wobbly, three times around the black marble monument that marked the site at the Rajghat where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated. He willingly went barefoot, as ritual prescribed. The grass was thickly wet and a cramp in his foot soon rose to his right calf. Instinctively he clutched his midriff where he was still so tense and tender. How undignified and self-absorbed such a gesture was, when he had so longed for this chance to demonstrate his respect for his spiritual hero in a small but flawless way.
Within an instant, his circumambulation was made perilous by a deluge unlike any rain he had ever encountered. He found it hard to stay erect in the hot, pounding vertical sea that soon drenched his cotton shirt and jeans and all the flesh beneath. He was almost blinded by the downpour and, despite all his efforts to retain some decorum, he was flailing foolishly against the heavy skeins of water. This was supposed to be his third time around. All the gravitas with which he had hoped to invest his ritual had been stripped away from him. The skies of India had spoken. Yet he was at a loss as to what they were saying. Was he judged unworthy? Did this ancient land recognize his complicity in his frie
nds’ deaths; see their very blood soaked into his pores? Or was the relentless, steaming rain washing him clean?
He was doing it again, he thought, yielding to the disgusting prompts of self. It was a monsoon and he was caught in it, like millions of other people all over India. It was a meteorological phenomenon and that was all.
He stumbled on until he was a decent enough distance away from the marble monument before attempting to extricate himself from the sodden straps of his backpack. Even though his preparations for the trip were hectic and ill-considered, he had had the presence of mind to bring several large plastic garbage bags. Holding one aloft as a makeshift canopy, he launched himself through the hurtling rain toward the bench under which he had deposited his socks and shoes. He stuffed these inside his shirt and began to walk to the Gandhi Museum near the entrance to the Rajghat. He very much wanted to look at the Mahatma’s books and personal belongings. And now he was impeded, not just by the monsoon, but by a redoubled cramp in his gut. Surely there would be a toilet in the museum? His need was verging on desperate.
The washroom was the most luxurious he had seen since Delhi airport. In a pristine cubicle, he stripped off his sodden clothes. The toilet’s scathing artificial light revealed a body already strange to him. He had lost so much weight his belly was concave for the first time he could remember.
It was a relief to be dry again and have some respite from the grinding cramps. However, he was still so light-headed that the floor rebounded with an unsettling sponginess as he walked through the various galleries. He stopped and stared, in as fine a contemplation as he could muster, at the artifacts he most strongly associated with Gandhi’s lived ideals: the walking stick that helped support his bird-like body through the punishing miles of the protest marches; the spinning wheels that spurred the people’s reclamation of ancient traditions and self-reliance and the throwing off of British rule. A pair of fragile wire-rimmed spectacles — the ones he wore always perched on the end of his nose — briefly conjured up a flickering presence with a beatific smile who mouthed the encouraging words: Walk on.
There were some objects on display in the glass cases that Pinto found perturbing. He turned quickly away from several diseased teeth extracted from Gandhi’s mouth and saved, he could only assume, by devoted followers. Far worse was the blood-stained dhoti, the garment Gandhi was wearing when his assassin struck. Pinto, who wanted only to be reverent, felt his gorge rise at the sight of this soiled object. Its display struck him as indecorous, if not sensationalistic. But this was not his culture and surely he was wrong to respond with such a judgement?
Was this not one of the reasons he came to India, to be constantly confounded because he was at last in a civilization so vast and so ancient, he must inevitably fail in comprehending even a minuscule part of it? He saw now that his groping words to Agnes about wanting to be lost in something huge were facile and even duplicitous. Was he trying to deceive her or himself? For the truth was he wanted to be extinguished. He wanted the foolish boy who followed his friends blindly into their naïve, ill-thought-out protests to be utterly destroyed. If he had behaved like a man and used his powers of reason far more persuasively, he might have stopped them hurtling pell-mell into the disasters at the animal laboratory, and in Arles. Campbell and Zeke might still be alive. Yet he was so desperate for their friendship and approval he had compromised his principles: never to act on the grounds of heedless passion, but always in the light of moral reason. The boy-man he was had committed utter folly and deserved to die.
If he was to immolate his old self, and be somehow reborn, it could only be here. He knew his chances were meagre and he had limited time. He could not afford to wander the subcontinent for six months or a year, visiting every major holy site. So he had plotted his pilgrimage based on the three places that summoned him most strongly. The first of these was the Rajghat. His next stop would be Pushkar with its holy lake and temple to Brahma. His third would be the temple of the Jains at Rankapur, with its countless marble columns. Since he’d first read about the Jains as a boy, he had been drawn to this religion which seeks to harm no life form whatsoever, not the least gnat or invisible insect in the air or underfoot. He regarded the Jains as very pure, with their masks of gauze to prevent them from inadvertently swallowing any tiny winged creature.
At the bus station, while washing his hands during one of his visits to the toilet, he met a gaunt young man from Toronto named Eli, who sprouted the longest and most densely matted dreadlocks he had ever seen. And the dirtiest, he speculated, given the frequency with which Eli clawed at his scalp. He had been travelling around India for eight months, he told Pinto, and was on his way south to Kerala to spend the winter.
“Delhi belly?” he asked when Pinto suddenly bent double and had to retreat to the cubicle yet again.
“Meet you outside,” Eli called to him through the door. “Got something to fix you right up.”
“Fix up” sounded suspiciously like drugs, Pinto thought, as he sat solidly on the toilet, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands clamped to either side of his head. He did not want to be involved in anything of that sort in India, or perhaps anywhere ever again. Smoking pot was a pastime he’d fallen into in order to enter and share the day-to-day reality of his friends. Both Zeke and Campbell had smoked from morning onward. When he had occasionally tried a solitary joint from the household stash, he found it did little for him, other than make him somnolent or disgustingly ravenous.
When he joined Eli in the waiting room, he was surprised to be presented, not with an illicit substance wrapped in tinfoil, but several ripe bananas.
“Bananas, man,” Eli urged him. “Boiled rice. Porridge. No milk products, although yogurt’s okay. No meat. Nothing fried or spicy. Stick to bananas. Don’t eat any other fruit. And no tomatoes or eggs or pasta. Okay? Want me to write it down?”
“I can do it,” Pinto said, taking out his notebook and duly listing all the proscribed and endorsed foods.
“I got this list from a doctor in Jaipur early on. Stick to it and you’ll be fine. Have a couple of bananas on the bus. Fix you up right away.”
“Thanks.” Pinto was already unpeeling one of the bananas.
“No problem. Boosts my karma, right? Say hello to TO if you get back before me. Hey, that’s my bus just rolled in. Take care, man. Where you headed, by the way?”
“Pushkar.”
Eli raised his eyebrows.
“To see the holy lake that Brahma created,” Pinto clarified. He was aware of Pushkar’s reputation among young travellers as a place to score quality ganja. “The Hindus believe it’s as old as creation.”
“Right,” said Eli. “And the temple with the old, dark-faced god looks like a root dug out of the earth. Yeah, I remember Pushkar. I’m hoping to see the fire ritual in Kerala. Ever heard of that? The words the priest speaks in the ritual are so ancient they predate every human language. So nobody has any idea what the words mean. But just get this. You know what patterns the sounds are closest to? Birdsong! How amazing is that! A human language based on birdsong.”
Eli’s eyes were wide. He slapped his scrawny thigh in emphasis. “Birdsong,” he repeated, shaking his head in a slow wonderment. Then he gave Pinto a high-five sign and sprinted off.
Later, on the air-conditioned bus complete with a clean, well-functioning toilet, Pinto nodded in and out of a dozy haze. Whenever he woke he recalled Eli’s enraptured look when he’d described the ritual language based on the music of birds. Pinto automatically pondered the ethical implications. Wouldn’t human thoughts, and consequently actions, be purer and less tainted by self-obsession if they were framed by a language directly sourced in nature? Wouldn’t such people, at the very least, be free from guile?
The bus abruptly braked. Pinto, who was sitting in the front seat across from the driver, watched three lean brown cows amble across the road. All traffic halted for them and then sped forward again — motorcycles and bubble cars; small buses so den
sely packed with passengers that heads and shoulders, arms and even feet protruded through open windows; vans with four and five people seated on the lowered tailgates, all of them relaxed and exquisitely poised, holding on to nothing. Pinto looked on amazed as his bus passed a massive transport truck with five young men balanced on the casing over the front left wheel. They were all smiling and at ease, apparently unperturbed by the risk they ran of sliding off and beneath the tire’s crushing weight.
The vibrant cartoon colours of the smaller trucks and buses that overtook and passed them made him exuberantly happy. They were painted in swathes of orange and crimson, sky blue and sunburst yellow. And always — in foot-high bold yellow letters on the backs — was the urgent message “Horn Please!” or “Blow Horn!”
The Angel Gabriel would fit right in here, he thought, along with all the thousands of other gods. Blow Horn! He wanted to clap his hands in delight at this brilliant, astonishing flood of life to which he found himself witness. And again the horns honked in a strident discord and everything stopped, in a half-breath, as a black water buffalo loped across the highway. Then everything flowed onward again. Pinto inhaled deeply, a little dizzied by this tumultuous river of vulnerable flesh and hurtling metal. How could he possibly describe this scene if he were asked to do so? All the words that automatically came to mind: teeming, chaotic, heaving, irrepressible, fell far short of what he saw and stirred his mind and body in equal measures of fear and wonder.
The Gabriel horns blew and the pink and orange vans zoomed in and out of focus and young couples balanced sidesaddle on the back carriers of scooters, beautiful as amorous gods carved on temple walls, and the cows and the water buffalo wandered where they pleased, and the homeless dogs lay so perilously close to the roadside, it was a marvel they were unscathed. What a chaotic, miraculous flood of life, always just skirting destruction.
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