“Oh, no,” she shook her head, “it’s too much. Really.” She actually blushed.
“Not at all, my dear. I insist. My mind is made up. But this means that you must come again to visit.” He glanced in my direction, then back at Penny. “Both of you must return, when the tiger is older and fully trained.”
“We will!” Penny exclaimed, without a moment’s thought, turning a gleeful smile in my direction. “Won’t we, Stanley?”
“Sure,” I said, with a slight shrug of my shoulders. “Why not?”
Penny continued looking in my direction, searching my face for some sign that—against all odds—such a thing might in fact be possible. But what could I tell her that she didn’t already know? By the time that tiger cub was trained, she would long since have returned to England. After a few seconds her smile faded, ever so slightly, and she turned back to our host. “Thank you, Colonel Singh. For everything. For opening your home to us, for allowing us to share these magical days with you. I shall never forget your generosity.”
This time it was Singh who seemed to be at a loss for words. Whatever his feelings may have been for Penny, at that moment the silence between them was both intimate and tender.
That breakfast—our last meal together—is now little more than a mélange of fading images spread out across the canvas of Colonel Singh’s poignant, solitary world. I see the three of us seated around the white linen tablecloth with our tea and toast, talking together under the weathered tile roof of the colonel’s forest home. The dull luster of a silver teapot polished with wet ash and clay. Three china cups and matching white plates. Three yellow omelets speckled with thin slices of green chili. Penny’s hair pulled back and tied with a scrap of silk, the supple curve of her neck, a slender finger hooked through the cup’s small handle. The precise creases of Colonel Singh’s khaki shirt and trousers, his gleaming boots, the black military turban wrapped proudly above bronzed cheeks.
18
WE ARRIVED BACK in Delhi on a late train. The very next day Penny traveled to Bihar, where she had arranged to photograph Buddhist archeological sites. Our plan was for her to visit me in Manali later on in the summer.
My final weeks in the capital were consumed with preparations for the transition to a new life in India. It was already late March, and at the end of April the period of my official status as a Fulbright scholar would be over—I would no longer bear the institutional imprimatur. I would need to create a new identity from scratch, establish my own boundaries, reasons, justifications. But I had managed to save virtually all of the considerable funds that came with the original award. By continuing to live even more frugally in Banaras, I figured that I would be able to hang on in India indefinitely. I planned to go first to Manali, a village in northern Himachal Pradesh. There in the high elevations, I could wait out the hot season, studying Pali and Sanskrit until late August, when the monsoon had cooled things down a bit on the plains. Then I would relocate permanently to Banaras.
A few days after I got back to Delhi from the Corbett trip, while sorting through the mail in the Fulbright office, I ran into Margaret Billings. Not surprisingly she was aghast at my plans to stay on in India.
“Frankly, Stanley, I’m stunned.” She extracted a cigarette from the box and pushed one end between her lips, torched the other with a blue Bic, and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “From a professional point of view,” she said, “this is certainly a mistake. But I’m talking to myself again.” Two gray clouds spewed out of her nostrils like diesel exhaust. “Why should I care if you ruin your chances for an academic career?”
I didn’t know how to respond. After all, why should she care about me? I never had understood. The attention was flattering, in a perverse way, but also annoying. I stood there mute, hanging my head like a recalcitrant child.
“You know, this could very well jeopardize your ability to get scholarships through your department. There’s only so much you can expect Sellars to do for you—especially if it begins to look like you’re not serious about your work.”
“I appreciate your concern, Margaret.”
“But you don’t care yourself.” Her tone had softened.
“Honestly, I appreciate your advice,” I interjected. “I really do. I plan to be back in the States by next fall. I’m just going to spend the summer in the mountains, working on my Hindi.” All those opportunities to watch Penny had paid off. I lied. Brazenly. Margaret knew it too, but there was nothing more to say. She simply shrugged her shoulders. Clearly she was giving up on me.
We were each weaving the fabric of our lives: I would remain here in India, without any clear idea why; she would return on schedule with the results of her research to tie it all up neatly in a paper that could be presented at the next meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, with no need to wonder why. I left her sitting on the same couch where we had met, the butt of a cigarette glowing faintly between her fingertips.
Seeing Margaret again made me realize how much had changed since the afternoon of our first encounter, how my mood had shifted from the disorientation and despair of those first few months to a sense that things were finally moving in the right direction. After the whole miserable business with Judith and the bleak loneliness of those early months in Agra and Delhi, I had managed to surface with a tenuous faith in my decision to stay on in South Asia beyond the period of the Fulbright award. Meanwhile, my past life was growing ever more remote. I rarely thought about Chicago and Abe Sellars. Research for the dissertation had all but stalled. Reading the Sanskrit texts had become an end in itself.
Since arriving in India I had accumulated a small stack of photographs from home. They came one or two at a time in the mail—pictures of my mother and father, my sister and my brothers, of the Thanksgiving turkey, of Christmas, the tree and gifts, the winter snow, aunts and uncles and cousins. I kept this sheaf of curling photos in an aluminum trunk, wrapped in a handkerchief like a Lakota medicine bundle. Viewing them had become a ritual act. I would bring the little package to my desk, carefully unwrap the square of cotton cloth, and make my way deliberately from one snapshot to the next, allowing them to conjure up a chain of memories that led backward in time to a world both intimately familiar and eerily distant. Everything was just as I had left it, except for one, small detail: these people—people I knew so well—were now living a life I did not share. It was as if some clever censor had airbrushed me out of my own past.
I still have that anachronistic collection of Kodachrome photos tucked somewhere in a drawer. The colors have bleached with the intervening years, but this only contributes to the disconcerting sense that the entire world they depict never did really exist. Each fragile photographic image has become a thinly layered testament to the continuing sequence of losses on which a life is built. I study the two-dimensional faces, those effervescent holiday smiles, and I see all of us somersaulting through a world that is, according to the Lankavatara Sutra, “neither as it appears, nor otherwise.”
One night I dreamed that I was back in America, in an unfamiliar, dingy apartment somewhere in Chicago. I somehow knew that this was an apartment where Judith had once lived, though at the moment it appeared unoccupied—furnished, but otherwise empty of any personal belongings. I was going through drawers and closets, looking for something, though I did not know what. Finally, in a box under the bed, I discovered a fluffy purple beach towel that I immediately recognized as a gift I had given to her on Valentines Day in 1971. Her favorite color was purple, and she had treasured that towel. One afternoon when we were camping in northern Michigan, at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, she left it on the beach. We didn’t realize it was missing until much later, after we had returned to our campground, and by that time it was too late to go back. We never saw it again. Oddly, when I found the towel in my dream I knew immediately what it was, and I knew I had to get it to her. She would be thrilled. But where was she? I hadn’t the slightest idea, and I was seized with a desperate longing for her
company.
This dream and the terrible poignancy it provoked remained with me long after waking. For the first time, I sensed just how much had been irretrievably sacrificed in order to cut my ties with Judith. I realized how I had literally been saved by forgetting, how this ability to simply not remember so much of what we have lost serves as a natural escape from the otherwise unbearable weight of the past.
About this time I began working my way through the Sanskrit text of the Bodhicharyavatara, a medieval poem describing the inner life of a bodhi sattva. I was drawn to it not only because of the beauty of the original language, but also because of the passionate voice of the author, a Buddhist monk named Shantideva. The tone of his writing is deeply personal; his question goes to the heart of the spiritual life: how can we open ourselves fully to the painful contradictions of our love for this world, a world so fragile, so tenuous and fleeting, that it can never truly be our own?
I copied a stanza onto the first page of my journal, where it remained as a sort of maxim guiding my life through the following years. Without making any special effort, I committed it to memory and began unconsciously reciting the Sanskrit several times a day . . .
Yā avasthāḥ prapadyeta
svayaṃ paravaśo ’pi vā/
tāsvavasthāsu yāḥ śikṣāḥ
śikṣettā eva yatnataḥ//
A free translation of my understanding of the Sanskrit might read something like this:
Whatever happens—
whether through your own resolve or the will of another—
circumstances conceal a deeper import.
See this, and learn.
What I loved about this verse is the suggestion that there is something in our present experience that we fail to notice—something profoundly worthwhile. Whatever it is, this “deeper import” is always available, and in this sense it’s completely ordinary. But we don’t trust what is common and easy; we want the exotic, the complicated, the extra-ordinary. Of course the irony of traveling halfway around the world in search of what is most common was not lost on me; but then, what’s more common than irony? The verse called to mind the Vedantic idea of the Satguru—the True Teacher who is always present and available but unnoticed. We recognize the Satguru only when we’re particularly vulnerable, in a rare, unguarded moment of trust and self-surrender. And the lesson he teaches is always the same: Here I am, your own real self in the guise of the other.
Back in Delhi, it was not the Satguru that I found when I looked within or without. There was only the white clown, anxious of losing his balance and tumbling off the high wire into the abyss. Amid the crowds and the traffic, immersed in classes at the university and conversation at the Fulbright office, the abyss was always and everywhere present, for it was none other than this world. This conditioned world, as the Buddhist texts say—this world of endless desire and fear. Samsara. I found myself retreating into solitude. I became more guarded than ever. When Penny once again went on the road I missed her, but I was relieved to have her gone.
A few weeks before I left Delhi, Ed Rivers passed through on his way out of the country. He had written to me from Banaras, requesting permission to stay a night or two at my place while he tied up the final arrangements with people at the Foreigners’ Registration Office and the airlines. During the few days we shared, what struck me most was his apprehension in the face of his impending departure. He did his best to hide it, but his distress was obvious. He was jumpy, on edge. I couldn’t help but recall how on our first meeting back in Chicago, Ed had appeared so comfortably self-contained, as though drawing energy from an inexhaustible source. Even in Banaras, during my Christmas visit, he had been calm and grounded. What had happened now to account for this disturbing transformation?
Pondering all of this it became clear. This wouldn’t be a short visit home with family and friends. This time it would be for good. Very soon—in a matter of hours—India would be, for Ed, nothing but a memory. It’s hard to imagine any context in American society where the preceding eight years of his life would make sense. He had been floating free in a strangely privileged, hermetic environment, a vast, eternal present. But the clock would start ticking with a vengeance the moment his plane touched down in New York. What skills did he have that might help him pull through what was just over the horizon? What had he learned during his long sojourn in the holy city?
As far as I could tell he had mastered two valuable lessons: how to survive on almost nothing and how to work hard with no thought of reward. Perhaps this would be enough. I watched him arrange his few possessions before leaving for the airport. Did this small bag contain all he had in the world?
He spoke vaguely of a plan to go into business with a friend, importing village handicrafts from India into the States. He folded his lungi and packed it.
“You’re taking that?” I suppressed a smile, imagining him walking the streets of an American city in a brightly patterned, cotton wraparound skirt.
“I’ll wear it at home.” His tone was mildly defiant. “It gets hot in New Jersey in the summer. How can I live without a lungi?”
“Sure.” I replied, abruptly contrite. I asked why, after eight years, he was leaving.
“You can’t stay in India forever,” he answered, as if this were obvious.
But I didn’t see why not. There must be a way.
At about ten o’clock a taxi arrived. It was dark, but the night air was still hot. Ed fastened the catch on his bag, picked up the sitar case plastered with fragile stickers, and thanked me for the hospitality. He was wearing the same polyester shirt and pants he had worn that night in Chicago.
19
IN MID APRIL I had my last Sanskrit lesson with Anantacharya. These quiet evenings had been a routine part of my life in Delhi, and even before our final meeting I was mourning their loss. I loved everything about this weekly event, beginning with the long bike ride to Anantacharya’s home through streets filled with children and peddlers. He lived with his family in a bleak, middle-class housing development, row after row of concrete stucco stained from years of heat and rain. I turned into a section marked Block C and peddled up to number 139, where I dismounted and pulled my bicycle under the covered porch. Krishna greeted me and showed me to my customary place on the couch, then disappeared into the kitchen.
There was one chair in the front room. Like the couch, it was a lacquered wooden frame with wide, flat arms, the back and seat a web of white plastic strings. In front of the couch was a coffee table, and a waist-high metal bookcase stood against the wall opposite my seat. High above the bookcase, only a few inches below the ceiling, a black-and-white photograph of Anantacharya’s father hung from two wires: a stern, dignified man with a magnificent moustache that completely obscured his upper lip. He was shown from the waist up, shirtless, the sacred thread looped over one shoulder. The photo had been partially colored by hand and mounted in an ornate gilded frame. On either side were similarly framed pictures of Hindu gods. Windows above and behind the couch had no glass, only vertical bars painted green. The shutters were open, and a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead.
Before long Krishna returned with a glass of water on a saucer, which he placed on the coffee table. Having seen to my immediate needs, he excused himself to summon his father. Meanwhile, I looked fondly around this room where I had passed so many enjoyable hours.
There is something indescribably precious about the deliberate, meticulous work involved in mastering a classical language—memorizing conjugations and declensions, splitting long compounds, unraveling grammar and syntax in order to decipher a message that has miraculously survived its journey through the centuries. Such intricate, all-consuming labor demands great patience, and it had carried me through much of this first difficult year in India. I owed a debt to Shri Anantacharya much greater than he would ever comprehend.
To commemorate our final evening together, my teacher’s wife served me masala dosa and sambar, topped off with a cup of strong, S
outh Indian coffee prepared with sugar and water-buffalo milk. Anantacharya sat to my right, in the chair beside the couch, watching me eat. He was dressed as usual in a dhoti and long kurta. At the bank he must have worn Western-style clothing, but he changed as soon as he got home; I never saw him in anything but a dhoti. Usually he was perfectly groomed, but tonight his long, silver hair had been carelessly pushed back over his ears, and his cheeks were covered with gray stubble. He looked tired. It occurred to me that he was an old man. When I finished the last of the coffee, he rose stiffly and shuffled over the smooth concrete floor to the bookshelf where his beloved library rested. He carefully withdrew a slender volume and examined it, wiping off some dust with the hem of his dhoti.
“You will please take this,” he said, gently depositing the book in my hands. “It is a Sanskrit edition of Raghuvamsha, one of Kalidasa’s finest poems. I worked for many years, collecting and collating every manuscript I could find. So many quiet hours in my father’s study in Madurai. I have also attempted to capture the meaning in English, but I am afraid this was a difficult task. I requested fifty copies printed and bound at my own expense.”
I tried to insist that with my poor knowledge of Sanskrit I was not in a position to appreciate such a gift, but he would hear nothing of it.
“You have traveled all the way from America only to learn our language. I want you to have this.”
I held it carefully. The cover bore an English inscription, in gold lettering, to his father. While Anantacharya continued to speak, I slowly turned the pages.
“I know that you are most interested in Vedanta, and also in the poor grammar of your Buddhist dialecticians—a serious error of aesthetic judgment which I nevertheless forgive.” Here he tilted his head to one side and shrugged his shoulders in mock surrender, as if to imply that he had tried his best to help me refine my taste. “Mr. Stanley,” he said, “we have an ancient saying in Tamil. May I tell it to you?”
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