by Karan Bajaj
I almost laughed. The saga of his friend sounded more comic than tragic.
‘Sarkar, you bastard,’ Vinod said, ‘you are the biggest whiner in the world. I haven’t heard a single positive thing from you in the last three months. Come on, boy, see the light. This isn’t some job that you can quit to find another one. It’s life; you have to live it. You don’t have an option, so can’t you quit complaining?’
I agreed with Vinod. What right did Sarkar have to complain anyway? He was acing the course while I was trying to claw my way up from the bottom.
‘Seriously, man, I think I just need a break,’ Sarkar said.
There he goes again, I thought, another break. He always needed a break. What from—smoking up, popping pills, listening to rock and acing the course? I wish I had that kind of stress in my life.
‘Let’s just get out of campus for a while,’ he suggested.
‘I second that,’ Vinod said.
They turned to me. End-term examinations began in less than two weeks.
‘Okay, I guess,’ I said, suddenly feeling the urge to get out of campus as well. Did it matter whether I was ranked 90th in a class of two hundred, or 120th? No one was dispensing honorary degrees to the first hundred of the class. If you weren’t in the top ten, your rank was just a number.
I should have figured a crazy, madcap idea was in the works when Sarkar convinced us to take an auto-rickshaw instead of his beloved bike. But I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Because what we did next was so beyond my sphere of comprehension that I never could have hazarded a guess anyway.
Sarkar told the auto-rickshaw driver to head for the airport.
‘Now what? Getting stoned and watching planes land? Very unoriginal,’ Vinod said.
‘Nope, bigger game.’ Sarkar waved his newly acquired Citibank credit card which a company had doled out to all business school students to start getting them hooked to credit for life. ‘We take the first flight that leaves from Bangalore, wherever it goes. What do you think of that?’
Vinod seemed to like the plan. ‘Very cool, boss. We will be back tomorrow, right? Today is gone anyway. Might as well go to a new city instead of going to a pub again. Let’s take a bet on where we will end up. A bet on the credit card, of course, I don’t have any money of my own,’ Vinod said.
Some folks at the IIM used the credit card to buy books to supplement their coursework, others used it to buy formal suits for interviews, we used it to get stoned in a new city. I felt proud. We were the dream customers of credit card companies—spendthrifts, irresponsible and reckless.
The complete randomness of the journey titillated me, and I complained just once that night when our destination turned out to be the desert city of Jodhpur in Rajasthan. I learnt that the flight would follow a circuitous connection via Delhi, which would further eat into the few hours we would have to spend there.
‘This isn’t the way to see Rajasthan,’ I whined. ‘Americans dream all their lives of coming to India to see Rajasthan’s palaces. It is simply moronic to see it like this in one evening.’
‘Come on, firang, you can always see the pictures of palaces in the guidebooks. I promise this way we will see the real Rajasthan,’ Sarkar said.
‘Balls. Jodhpur isn’t the real Rajasthan,’ Vinod said. ‘It is okay for those who can’t make the journey into the Thar desert, I guess. The real Rajasthan is in Jaisalmer. I know it well, I did a military exercise there.’
Our quest for the ‘real Rajasthan’ took on a new dimension of absurdity as we shook awake a dead-drunk cabdriver to take us to Jaisalmer after our flight finally touched down in Jodhpur at 8 p.m.
I couldn’t help myself. ‘This is just crazy, guys,’ I said. ‘Are we going to drive for five hours just to have a cup of tea in Jaisalmer? In the unlikely case that we do make it there alive, we will have to drive back immediately to board the early-morning flight back to Bangalore, right? Just what is the point?’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Vinod said. ‘We will have more time than that in Jaisalmer. We can probably squeeze in time for a bite.’
‘Great,’ I said, ‘if we can have some toast and omelette in Jaisalmer, the ten-hour round trip definitely seems worth it.’
‘Chill, maachi check,’ Sarkar said, ‘just sit in the car, smoke a joint and watch the stars. It will be well worth it just for that.’
He did have a point. The stars seemed exceptionally bright in the pristine Rajasthan sky, and I settled down in the backseat of the Toyota and rolled down the window. The soft, cool desert breeze, the steady hum of the car’s engine, wisps of Sarkar and Vinod’s conversations and the absolute purposelessness of the journey lulled me into a comfortable, dreamy stupor. I sat comatose, staring at the hypnotic twinkling of the stars from my window, and nodded off from time to time. We reached Jaisalmer earlier than expected and gave the city a pass to drive on for an hour, further into the desert.
It was past midnight, but Vinod convinced us to take a camel ride into the desert. We woke up a couple of stoned camel owners. Sarkar brought out a couple of joints for the journey and I smoked one before mounting my camel. The camel let out a sudden snort, and I looked at it closely. I had never seen a camel before, let alone been on top of one. It was such a majestic, yet oddly shaped animal. I tried to analyse what was so irregular about it. It was… well, asymmetrical, like a giraffe. Any way you tried, you couldn’t slice it in equal, even halves. Slicing camels reminded me of Peter, who had said that they ate camels in Mongolia. Peter would have enjoyed this ride, I thought, and somehow this made me happy. Soon, I began to enjoy the crazy, rhythmic sway of the camel’s long strides through the vast, unending expanse of sand lit by the soft glow of moonlight. ‘Beautiful’ is perhaps too hackneyed a word to express the miles and miles of absolute, complete desolation that stretched before us. It was… was psychedelic, like a trip in the head versus an actual, physical journey.
Our midnight excursion took another surreal turn when our guides made for a camp set up by a tribe of gypsies. The tourists had long gone for the day and the banjaaras were sitting peacefully around a fire, swigging hooch and breaking into impromptu dances. Everyone looked pleasantly stoned and (probably recognizing fellow spirits) welcomed us in. Splendidly clad women in their colourful, shiny clothes, welcoming white canvas tents, a warm fire, the hypnotic dancing—it was, I thought, almost like a scene from an ancient Egyptian porn movie, like a Pharaoh’s harem, if there ever was such a thing. We joined them around the fire. This was one way to live, I thought as I looked around, and a good one at that. Settle down in a place for a while. And when the monotony becomes unbearable, pack your belongings and move again. Alive and free, no attachments, wandering from nowhere to nowhere, living only in the present moment, the future too unpredictable to plan for or be concerned about.
Vinod interrupted my thoughts. ‘Read his hand. He has the most questions,’ Vinod was saying to an old gypsy woman sitting next to me.
Her eyes twinkled and her crusty, wrinkled face came alive. She looked hard and beautiful. ‘They have the gift of reading the future,’ he explained to me. I must have looked sceptical. ‘Suspend your American disbelief and listen to her, you bastard. She knows more about you than you know about yourself.’
She asked me in her musical accent if I was right-handed, and then held my left hand. (‘The left is what the gods give you, the right is what you do with it,’ she said.) Her hands felt surprisingly smooth, despite appearing wrinkled and callused. She studied my left palm for a while, looked puzzled and then asked for my right palm. She scrutinized it intensely. Then she went back to the left again.
‘You have a funny hand,’ she said.
My scepticism had given way to suspense now. She was silent and confident, and obviously knew what she was doing. Hello, am I gonna die soon? Please let me know so I can get the fuck away from B-school and live my last days in peace.
‘The left hand which represents your destiny promises success and happiness. Y
our right hand, your actions, just the opposite. It looks as if you are fighting your destiny when you shouldn’t be doing so. Just let it go, that’s the best I can say to you. Just let it go.’
*
We were back on campus the next day. I wish I could say that the gypsy’s prophecy in Rajasthan led to a dramatic change in my life after we returned. But this isn’t a fairy tale and no such thing happened. End-terms were approaching, the days and nights merged into one long nightmare of frenzied activity and I sleepwalked through the remainder of the term. All the talk about ‘letting go’ was fine as long as I could graduate from school, and the fear that I would not lurked in my mind. The Jaisalmer experience had given me a taste of India though, and each day, I awaited the beginning of my ten-day hiatus in Dharamsala after the examination. I wanted so badly to be free, to live a normal, unregimented life, and ten days in a quaint Himalayan town promised all that and more.
8
A Normal, Unregimented Life?
Finally the first term, the longest three months of my life, was over. I was in a state of happy delirium in the last thirty minutes of the final exam—organizational behaviour—and decided to do a Sarkar on the last question, ‘Detriments of technology on communication’. I blasted the topic, stating that technology—e-mail, BlackBerry devices, voicemails etc.—was in fact the best invention in a manager’s life and ridiculed the shallowness of those who thought otherwise. I was damned if I cared about my grades in OB after I had already bungled the Big Three—accounting, statistics and economics.
The campus came back to life after the last exam as everyone partied hard that night before taking off the next morning for the safe cocoon of their homes. I felt a momentary pang as I thought of Mom and Dad back home in the US. What I badly needed right now was the comfort of my old room, to sleep for an eternity tucked under my blanket, to wake up to a mug of hot coffee from Mom and walk with Dad in the snow. No matter what had gone wrong in my spoiled little life—having my undergraduate application rejected by Harvard, losing Sarah, my first serious love, a spare episode of racism, politics at work—things were always fine at home. I no longer had that protective cushion, and I certainly didn’t want to go looking for comfort with my various aunts and uncles who lived in India. I had made my choices and needed to live with them, though I did envy Vinod as he left, overjoyed, for his home in Ambala.
‘We are going to play big games in the mountains. You should come with us,’ Sarkar had mockingly invited him knowing he would never come for something as intangible as a meditation course.
Vinod just shook his head at our foolishness. ‘What’s the big game in turning down ten days of my mother’s food and living in a hostel again? Of course, if you learn to fly on a carpet at the end of ten days, come and pick me up. I’m so broke I could do with a free ride.’
Instead of a flying carpet though, Sarkar and I found ourselves on an arduously long thirty-hour train journey from Bangalore to Pathankot. If I had any apprehensions about surviving the squalor of a crowded second-class compartment in an Indian train with peanut shells, banana skins, orange pips, tea and water strewn all over the floor, they were soon dismissed. Almost immediately after we’d had our tickets checked and settled down next to the airless ceiling on the upper berth, I drifted into a long, death-like sleep. I woke with a start as I felt myself being sucked into an airless vortex, pulled deeper and deeper towards a gigantic mouth waiting to devour me. (‘What a bastard of a dream. Must have been IIM tormenting me in my sleep,’ I told Sarkar later.) I glanced at Sarkar who was still sleeping in the neighbouring seat, and soon fell back into an exhausted sleep, too drained to move.
We were finally shaken awake by an attendant, who had been summoned by fellow passengers who feared we were drugged, or worse, dead. A quick glance at my watch showed that we had been asleep for nearly twelve hours straight. The Punjabi family on the berths below smiled through their pooris and aloo-bhaji on seeing us up. It was obvious they were bursting with curiosity, but I wasn’t in the mood to bare my soul to them. In the midst of their collective ‘wow’ as Sarkar informed them that we were from IIM, I gestured to him for a cigarette.
Sarkar didn’t look pleased as he made for the door, next to the stinking toilets. ‘She was cute, yaar. I could have scored. I badly need some action,’ he said, referring to the eldest daughter of the family who was reasonably good-looking in a plump, Punjabi way. He held out his pack of cigarettes, himself pulling out a joint.
‘Hey, is it legal to smoke even a cigarette on the train?’ I asked him looking at the ‘No Smoking’ signs on the walls.
‘Yes, of course,’ Sarkar replied, the consummate expert on the Indian legal system. By now, I should have known better than to be surprised by this. ‘Let me show you one of the greatest joys of life,’ he said as he opened the door of the moving train, letting in a sudden blast of cool air which almost blew me away. But he wasn’t planning to jump. We proceeded to sit on the doorstep with the wind blowing against our faces as the train sped past the wild, beautiful landscape.
The combination of the overwhelming relief that we had survived our first term, the many uninterrupted hours of sleep and the abundant supply of marijuana turned out to be ideal fuel for some stimulating conversation. It was evening, and our train was supposed to arrive only late in the morning the following day.
‘Dude,’ I asked Sarkar, ‘Tell me more about Dharamsala. What are you hoping to get there? I mean, it seems woefully out of character for you.’
‘Hmm… let’s see. First I need another joint,’ he replied.
Soon we were sitting there in total bliss, watching the harsh landscape go by, beautiful in its lack of structure or organization. Unlike the US, there were no roadside landmarks like McDonald’s or Wal-marts or IHOPs to give you the uneasy feeling that you can run but never really escape—everywhere you go is a crushing mass of sameness. In India, I thought, every bit is different from the rest because something unique has happened there—maybe a fire burnt down a field, or a tree crashed and blocked a road or someone decided to open a dhaba or a paan shop in the middle of nowhere, or a random group of farmers settled down to play cards in the field at dusk. Through a haze, I saw the fields merge into one giant gorgeous landmass that seemed to be rushing away from the train, and I wondered vaguely about the theory of relativity. I thought of how good I had been at science in high school and wondered whether it had been a mistake to get into finance and business. Maybe I should have stuck to science—become an astronaut and escaped into space. Maybe I would have had a female astronaut as my buddy, and we could have had weightless sex in space, the ultimate kink experience.
Such happy thoughts chased each other in my head. It was an undeniably good life, I thought eventually, and there is some joy in not knowing all the answers. I wouldn’t want to exchange the confusions in my head with the anticlimactic certainty of knowing everything. That would kill the joy of this quest, I thought, with a sudden burst of optimism.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Sarkar said.
‘Nothing, just taking stock. Anyway, to go back to what you were saying, what are you hoping to get there?’ I asked.
Sarkar paused as he usually did before launching into a long, profound monologue, and took another drag.
‘Look, for a long time, I thought I had all the answers to everything, that it could all be worked out scientifically, life and God and all. But then recently, I heard this Goenka chap say somewhere, “The quest for the infinite can’t be fulfilled by the finite.” That struck a chord. I realized I was deluding myself by intellectualizing everything, trying to create complex theories about the nature of truth, none of which were even remotely satisfying. Goenka seemed to know something I didn’t know. So I decided to suspend judgement and see what the course has to offer. Simple.’
‘Hardly simple! Who’s got the time to make up theories about existence when just living takes so much effort? Not me, for sure. I’m a shallow American, after all.
’ I grinned. ‘Anyway, tell me more. What theory did you come up with about God? I always thought of you as an atheist.’
‘Well, I do believe in God, but not as an entity to worship or fear. I believe in His existence as a mathematical concept—an originating force, after which the rules of mathematics and science take over. Good balances evil, creation balances destruction, happiness balances suffering—and after that the universe rolls on without God’s assistance or interference. For every Hitler, there will be a Mother Teresa, for every person dying of poverty in India, there will be a Warren Buffet making billions in the US, for every selfish Chetan, there is a bighearted Vinod Singh, and so on. That explained a lot of things for me. For example, why is the leper on the Calcutta street dying in squalor? It is because Warren Buffet is in his Omaha mansion, being sucked off by his secretary. And why is there suffering for the leper and prosperity for Warren Buffet? Well, mathematics again. If we think of the soul as having many different lives, then on average the soul will be right in the centre. There will be lifetimes in which the soul comes as a leper, and lifetimes in which it comes as a rich bastard, but the net of all the deviations will be in the centre. Not making much sense, am I?’ Sarkar said.
‘No, no. Go on. This is interesting,’ I said, meaning it.
‘Well, that’s really the end of it. So… well, I tried to believe in my theory, but then I realized that all this big talk is just crap. For all my theories, I’m not at peace, and I’m sure there is something I’m missing. And it can’t be found sitting lotus-style in my room reading heavy books,’ Sarkar said.