Maya

by C. W. Huntington

“The point is,” she continued, hesitating slightly to catch my eye, “Davis has built his entire case on a single inscription that he misunderstood, for God’s sake. Typical, isn’t it? Like everybody else there he’s only interested in weaving together a good story. No concern with putting some solid research under his speculation. Things have got to change, that’s for sure. These Chicago people have had their way long enough. Don’t you agree?” She stopped talking and waited for confirmation. Her tone had become slightly indignant, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was directed toward Frank Davis or me.

  “I, uh . . .”

  “Oh shit,” she said. “You’re from Chicago, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. But I don’t work much with Frank Davis. I took a few classes with him, that’s all. He’s around the department.” I paused. “And he’s on my dissertation committee.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I tried to seem reassuring. “The truth is, if you want to know, I sort of wish he weren’t on my committee.” This seemed to make her feel better.

  We sat there on the couch for a minute or two without saying anything more, then it occurred to her to ask me what I was doing in India. I explained that I was here to pull together research for my dissertation on an aspect of Shankara’s work, though I had to admit that the project was not as well defined as I would have liked. She chain-smoked Dunhills while I talked a little about my struggle to find the right text, one that I felt comfortable working on. After listening to me babble for five or ten minutes she finally interrupted.

  “Stanley,” she said, “do you mind if I ask you something?” I shrugged. “Why are you putting so much energy into finding ‘the right text’?”

  I considered this for a moment and got nowhere. “Maybe I don’t understand your question. I mean, shouldn’t I look around and find a project that seems significant somehow . . . to me, at least?”

  “Not necessarily.” She put on a no-nonsense, let’s-talk-business sort of expression. “Wouldn’t it be wiser just to pick something you know you can finish? I’ll give you a clue.” She bent ever so slightly in my direction as though she were going to let me in on a well-kept secret. “Nobody’s going to read that thesis. What you want to do is to come up with a topic that you can squeeze a few articles out of. Get them written and published. Then show up at the conferences and do some glad-handing. Get yourself known.” Her voice had gradually taken on a tone poised somewhere between matriarchal concern and condescension. “The last thing you want to do is spend too much time over here. Sure it’s fun. And important. You want to visit and get a sense for where the material comes from. But unless you’re doing art history or some kind of modern culture studies, you’re basically wasting your time in India.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. She stopped talking and looked in my direction, smoke curling up from her fingertips. “You asked me your question, right? So do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “No. Go ahead.”

  “If what you say is true, then why are you here?”

  She smiled. “Touché! But I told you already. There are things at the archives I need. Let’s face it, though. No one’s fooled. Very little real work gets done in India. If you can manage to collect a few documents, use the grant money to buy some books . . . take a break. Do some shopping. But listen, I’m telling you the truth. It’s not smart to stay too long when you don’t have a tenured position back home. Jobs in South Asian studies don’t exactly grow on trees. You want to get what you need and get back to the States, where you’re in touch. Were you at last year’s AAR conference?”

  I stared at her blankly.

  “There was a panel on Vedanta. You should have been there. You should have presented.”

  “I didn’t make it.”

  “So you weren’t there.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why not?”

  For a moment I considered being completely honest, trying to explain to her that I had trouble with the institutional, professional side of academics. That I wasn’t exactly looking for a career. But I knew damn well she would not be interested in my personal history. Why should I even try to explain myself to her? Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Not immediately, at least, since she excused herself to go the bathroom, leaving me alone for a few minutes with my thoughts.

  It pissed me off that this woman was lecturing me so sanctimoniously. She was nothing but a clone of my fucking advisor. Everything she said amounted to no more than a single piece of advice: Give up even thinking about anything but money and job and status. Academic success was all that counted.

  I thought back to the beginning, to Hesse and Watts, Kerouac, Gary Snyder . . . then Suzuki, Conze . . . to how I first taught myself to meditate by following The Three Pillars of Zen. I actually considered telling her about how I had never been the same since dropping acid, how, deep into a hallucinatory journey, it hit me with the force of a powerful realization that what we call “reality” is simply a matter of perception. She would never understand how little her world mattered to me. That I was looking for something far more important, I was looking for . . . for what? For myself . . .

  Myself?

  The word stuck in my throat. In that instant everything I had gone through during the past few months came crashing down around me like a mud hut in the monsoon rain of rural Bihar. Talk about bullshit. What did all my pretentious so-called spirituality really amount to? The more I thought about it, the more juvenile and self-serving it sounded. Me, me, me. All those years wrapped up so proudly in my spiritual search, my studies, my meditation practice, my need to be left alone. And now I had left my wife and come halfway around the world to be . . . what? Alone?

  Sitting here reflecting on the same advice I had always rejected so scornfully, it suddenly appeared entirely possible that this righteous contempt I nurtured for graduate students and faculty who fretted over publications and career was simply a romantic, adolescent pose. The whole grand, mystical story I’d been telling myself for years about who I was and what I was doing—a story brimming with ambition, resentment, and pride—was nothing more than a kind of elaborate, self-absorbed fantasy. Now what the fuck was I supposed to say to this woman? If only I could have laughed. Instead I pulled my lips together tightly in a forced grin and did my best to look nonchalant as she walked back across the room and sat down again on the couch. The way she looked at me, she obviously expected a reply to her question, which had been left hanging in the air.

  “Dr. Billings, I don’t know why I didn’t go to the AAR meeting. I never go to conferences. And my advisor is constantly telling me the same things you just said.” I wanted to vomit. I must have gone pale or something. I could see that she was studying my face now, as though I had suddenly begun to morph into a werewolf.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. My stomach has been rebelling lately. I’m okay.”

  “You want a drink of water or something?”

  “No, really. I’m fine.” I coughed self-consciously.

  I could see her struggling to pick up the thread. “Well, anyway, the main thing is to get published, go to the conferences, and meet the right people. That’s the way it works. That’s how you get a job.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “If I hadn’t I wouldn’t be here now, that’s for sure. I was presenting sections of my dissertation at conferences as fast as they were written,” she said. “Kept my eyes open for positions I could apply for. I must have sent out at least fifty letters while I was writing. God, I was all over the place, that’s for sure.”

  “What did you write on?” I asked.

  “Gupta administrative policy.”

  “And how did you come up with that topic?”

  “Just like I told you. I sat down and did some serious thinking. Weighed my interests against what I knew I could finish. And what I could extract some good articles from, of course.”

  “And you got what you wanted? I
t paid off?”

  “Yes, it did.” She dusted a few stray ashes off her lap. “It paid off. If things work out, I’ve got a good shot at tenure. Well,” she looked up, “I’ve got a driver waiting outside. I better get going.” She stood, straightened her dress, and casually slung the long strap of her purse over one shoulder. “It was nice talking.”

  I waited until I was sure she was gone, then slunk out the door and pedaled back to my room, with no letter from Judith and lost in a dark cloud of unknowing. I no longer had any idea what I had hoped for out of grad school, or from marriage—or from anything, for that matter.

  Maybe you’ve seen someone do that stunt with a tablecloth, the one where the cloth is yanked out from under a vase so quickly that the vase stays right where it is without falling. If you think about it, there must be a moment—not more than a fraction of a second—when the vase hovers just over the table, poised for the fall that will determine whether or not the trick is a success. I felt just like that fragile piece of china suspended in midair, waiting to see where—or how—I would land.

  5

  I CONTINUED TO PLUG AWAY at my research and to attend lectures at Delhi University. But what I best remember about this time were the regular meetings, three evenings each week, with Shri Anantacharya Swami, my first Sanskrit teacher in India. I had been looking for a more traditional arrangement—something outside the context of the university—and the Fulbright staff helped me find this lovely man.

  Several years before we met, Shri Anantacharya had accepted a respectable position in the federal bureaucracy and moved, along with his wife and ten children, from their home in Madras to what was for them the alien society of northern India. He was a gracious host, an articulate, highly educated scholar who had, before turning to government work, published several studies of Sanskrit drama and poetry. The move north was simply another step away from his old life as a Sanskrit pundit. What was most important now was to see that his children did not lose touch with their roots.

  Through the years he had preserved his love of the traditional literature despite the financial demands that made it necessary for him to sit in front of an anonymous desk, day after day, surrounded by stacks of forms and rows of other desks, peons scurrying back and forth on pointless errands, fans turning slowly over the whole unhappy collection of broken-down file cabinets, murky glasses of chai, and drawer upon drawer overflowing with the ubiquitous rubber stamp. All the while Shri Anantacharya recited to himself verses from the Sanskrit classics he had memorized as a child.

  One evening a week or so after the encounter with Margaret Billings, when my Sanskrit lesson was finished, I fell into a long conversation with my teacher’s eldest son, Krishna. Anantacharya had excused himself and retired to a back room, leaving the two of us to finish our chai and namkin. As it so happened, arrangements were being made for Krishna’s upcoming wedding. He was to be married to a woman whom he had never met, a woman selected for him by his parents.

  Before coming to India I had known about arranged marriages, but I had not realized how common this practice is, or precisely what it means that the vast majority of Hindu weddings are engineered by the parents of the bride and groom. A desirable candidate is located—in the old days by consultation with village elders, more recently through an ad in the personal section of the newspaper. Once an initial contact is established, background checks are then made through a discreet process of inquiry. At some point an astrologer is consulted in order to compare the charts of the prospective bride and groom and to assess their chances for a successful marriage. Finally, if everything appears to be in order, all four parents hammer out the contractual details of dowry, wedding expenses, and any other potential transfers of material wealth.

  “So it is,” Krishna assured me in his polished South Indian English, “that we shall have the greatest possible opportunity for a happy life together.”

  He was astounded at the willingness of Westerners to plunge into marriage simply on the strength of feelings, feelings that were little more than sublimated lust. How could we possibly be so foolhardy as to hope to support the responsibility for our future together—for our children and ourselves—on such an unstable foundation? Where did we derive such unwarranted confidence in our emotions? The ultimate proof of our immaturity in this matter, the kernel of ignorance that lay at the center of it all, was our peculiar conviction that love was possible outside of marriage. Here Krishna’s voice became resolute.

  “Outside of marriage there is only passion, and passion is not to be mistaken for love. Love is built on commitment to one’s dharma—one’s sacred duty—and not on personal desire. One’s dharma is much greater than the personal desires of a man and a woman. The circumstances of life determine to whom we must surrender.” His eyes dropped for a moment; his voice softened. “But the person to whom we surrender is only of secondary importance, for in truth, we are surrendering to our dharma.”

  I mulled this over.

  “Mr. Stanley,” he began again, “why do you suppose we Hindus marry?”

  “Sons?” I suggested hesitantly, then quickly retracted my answer. “Children, I mean.”

  “Besides that.” He smiled. “What other reason could there be, for the man and the woman?”

  Once again I deliberated for a time and finally admitted I was stumped.

  “Marriage,” he said, without the slightest trace of condescension, and with a confidence that I would have given anything to share, “is the seed of love, and the soil where that seed can plant its roots. Only then will it come to flower in children.” On this point he was adamant. “Without the saptapadi, the seven steps, love is impossible. Each of these steps is a vow, and these vows are the foundation of love, not only between a man and a woman, but between man and God as well. One needn’t follow the Hindu system, but there must be a vow. And once made, it can never be broken. I think that Americans find this very difficult to understand and accept.”

  I knew I should just be quiet and listen, but I had to ask. “And what if one is miserable after taking those seven steps? After making the marriage vows? What happens then? Are a Hindu husband and wife always happy together? Do they never argue? Do they never fight and abuse each other? Do they never, ever regret these vows?”

  Krishna reflected for a moment before answering. “It is a risk.”

  “But we’re human,” I insisted. I was determined to press my case. “We can never know what will happen, even tomorrow. What good is it to pretend otherwise?”

  “There is no question of pretending,” he replied. “One resolves to act then lives on the strength of that resolution. It may fail—one may fail to fulfill one’s dharma—but there is no other path to love. There is no mystery, Mr. Stanley. Love is not about getting what we want. Love is about how we live with what we are given.”

  This was not the sort of thing I wanted to hear.

  A handful of letters had come from Judith since my return to Delhi. She wrote of her job as a secretary in some god-forsaken office. She sent a sketch, with a description attached, of a piece she was struggling to complete—an intricate maze of gears and sprockets sprouting like tulips from the carcass of a wrecked car. She was still at it, poking around scrap-metal yards in her rusted Toyota pickup, scavenging bits of jetsam for her creations. But lately she had achieved some recognition. She wrote that her work had been included in a show and a few pieces had attracted the attention of a prominent critic. For years I had watched this process from a distance, secretly envious of her dedication to the task, her relentless labor to give birth to these brutal iron children, blue and orange sparks from the acetylene torch crackling off her welder’s mask as she hunched over her work like some crazy shaman rescuing yet another lost soul from the land of the dead. Her letters described the life she was living without me. Our separation was becoming a given, though neither of us knew what the future would bring.

  Sometime in November, weeks after I had begun to anticipate such a letter and
even to shape my response, she wrote of a “tired anger.” She would not be coming to India. I immediately sat down and composed a dramatic pledge of eternal, undying love. I did my best to convince her that this separation was itself an element of our relationship. “We have to see that what is happening now belongs to our marriage just as much as the time we spent together.” In some perverse way, I actually believed this. A few days later I wrote to her that my letters were like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “You need to assemble them, if you can, into some larger picture, in order to understand me as I am now, as I’ve become.” But I knew that the metaphor was inadequate; it disguised the tenuous complexity of our situation, for both of us were changing far too quickly to communicate through the mail. The feel of the envelope as it slid from my fingers signaled the first leg of a long journey that could only end in loss.

  One day not long after Thanksgiving, I went out and got my hair cut short. Back in my room I looked in the mirror and was shocked with the sudden recognition of my unconscious motivation, the pitiful, childish defiance that lay behind my trip to the barber. Years before, Judith and I had argued absurdly over the length of my hair. She wanted me to let it grow long, down over my shoulders; I wanted it short. In the end I had provoked her by asserting my right to decide for myself how I should look. The result was my “prisoner of war” haircut, as she called it. She could barely wait for it to grow long again. “Only God could love you for yourself,” she said afterward, quoting Yeats, “and not your yellow hair.”

  Undeniably, I had learned something from Judith’s example. She encouraged me to go through the motions and repeat my lines. But I was never convincing in the role of husband. My love was stained with the conviction that all of it was nothing more than a peculiar form of living theater. And still, it was true: Judith made me yearn to love. I longed to commit to her, and to the world, in her superbly romantic way, but always I failed. I dismembered her warm, human affection and replaced it with sadness and pain and fear.