ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that:
1. Plaintiff shall have judgment that the marriage of the parties is dissolved on the evidence found in the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in accordance with Domestic Relations Law, Section 235, Subd. 3;
2. The husband shall pay the wife for support of the above named child(ren) $ per week and alimony for the wife $ per week;
3. The Separation Agreement , executed _______________, 19 _____ which is annexed to the Findings of Fact, shall be incorporated by reference in the Judgment and shall survive;
4. The woman may resume the use of her maiden name, which is Reusswig.
Judith and I were married in July of 1970; I was twenty-two at the time, she was twenty-one. Our friends were startled that we chose to have a traditional Christian ceremony performed in a church. But a wedding is—or, at least, so it seemed to me—the quintessential ritual act, and I subscribed to Victor Turner’s understanding of ritual as a peculiarly potent form of theater. This was one time Judith and I were in complete agreement on the value of dramatic effect. Any theatrical performance is enhanced by suitably majestic architecture, and Bond Chapel—a small, Gothic church on East 59th Street—was the perfect setting for our transformation from man and woman to husband and wife. And if the setting is important for good theater, finding the right script is essential; ideally, the vows spoken on stage should resonate with indisputable literary and historical significance. Measured by this criterion, nothing wields more authority than the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, unchanged from 1662 to the present and used by every one of Jane Austen’s couples:
I, Stanley Harrington, take thee, Judith Reusswig, to be my wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.
So I was on familiar territory. Like the Book of Common Prayer held by the minister who had stood before Judith and me at the altar, clothed in his black gowns and prompting us with these words in stentorian tones, the slender blue triptych resting in my hands was also a ritual object imprinted with ceremonially charged words. Employed, as these words had been, in the appropriate context of the municipal courthouse, this was language that brought to an end what other language had once created. No great mystery here, no mystical juju. Anyone who’s read J. L. Austin’s work on speech acts knows all about the power of performative utterance, the capacity of language—mere words—to create and demolish whole worlds.
I read carefully through the legal jargon one more time, absorbing every tortured locution, then closed the two small doors and laid it aside. For quite a while I just sat there at my desk, staring out the window and down the street. I could see one of my neighbors, the press-wala, standing at his bench next to a mountain of laundry, smoothing out a shirt and straightening the cuffs. Beside him the heavy iron rested on a grate, suspended over a red-orange glow of coals. A solitary rickshaw drifted by, coasting around the corner by Ganga Mat.
I had known for almost a year that the divorce was in the works. But still, to hold in my hands this tangible proof that our marriage was over, a legal certificate generated in some anonymous courtroom in Chicago and sent all the way here to Banaras: it was exceedingly strange. My life with Judith had become a distant memory. Nevertheless, this document was an object of undeniable power, invested with all the ritual authority of the court—the call to order, the judge in his robes, the banging of the gavel. By the sheer force of these words, I knew that something terribly real, something I had once dreamed of and desired with all my heart, had now been irrevocably destroyed.
I couldn’t plunge into my usual routine today; I decided to get out of my room and go for a walk.
Near the little temple at the corner of Assi crossing, I paused for a moment, immersed in the tumult of human speech. A group of fifteen or twenty old women—pilgrims from the country—passed by on their way to the river. They were bunched together like gaily colored birds, singing bhajans in a high-pitched, nasal drone. In the gutter at my feet, squatting behind baskets heaped with fresh coriander, two village girls argued loudly in the local Bhojpuri dialect. A few feet to their left a group of Muslim shopkeepers dressed in checkered lungis and white kurtas stood knee deep in a swirling tide pool of Urdu. The prime minister’s name was cast up now and again on a velvety swish of fricatives, only to be sucked back into the guttural undertow. One of the men was waving his shabby briefcase to emphasize a point—something about Sanjay Gandhi.
Several rickshaws were parked in the shade. On each red vinyl seat a driver leaned back and puffed at a hand-rolled bidi, his feet extended straight out over the handlebars. Wound round each head was a swath of vibrantly colored cloth. Sweet clouds of smoke drifted in the air, mingling lazily with the drivers’ rough Bihari patois. Nearby, two middle-class babus wearing dhotis and black, pointed slippers were carrying on a sedate discussion in cultivated, Sanskritized Hindi—“Standard Hindi,” as it was called by the linguists at the university in Delhi. Their pronunciation was quick and sharp, each crisp syllable grafted onto the next with surgical precision. A young French couple crossed the street with their long stringy hair, gaudily embroidered Afghan vests purchased in Kabul, and bare, grime-coated feet. A languid succession of round, heavy vowels rolled from her pursed lips while he listened, self-consciously wagging his head in agreement. All around me, men, women, and children quarreled and bartered, discussed, joked, scolded, and bantered in a multitude of languages and dialects. The rhythm of their voices was captivating—a grand, invisible realm of sound, dominion of the mighty Logos, the Maharaja of Nomenclature and his Court of Verbosity.
Behold the cavalry of sturdy substantives on horseback, troops of light-footed participles, a humble, exploited peasantry of pronouns and prepositions. Cloistered in the harem and languishing under fans of woven grass wielded by a core of eunuch articles, definite and otherwise, are the adjectives, vain and prone to excess. Some are clothed seductively in diaphanous diphthongs; others are wrapped in gowns of richly embroidered phonemes, their feet pressed into tiny sibilants. Necklaces of semivowels shimmer at their throats; their fingers are adorned with clusters of surds and chunky, garish sonants. The atmosphere is thick with labial perfume. Outside the palace the bazaar teams with offensive idioms and guttural riffraff. Here and there in the crowd one spots an old, worn-out cliché hobbling along, an offensive quip darting among the shadows, or a charming expression from the village decked out in her best sari. A gang of ugly remarks lounging around the nearby paan stall eyes her as she passes. Not far away an overworked metaphor sits hunched behind his chai, brooding on the continuing string of accusations he cannot afford to feed and clothe. The holy city is home to an endless succession of gross insults, bold assertions, and redundant misnomers that are born and die in the streets; but it has, as well, spawned generations of subtle discourse and eloquent turns of phrase. The citizens of Banaras are born in the shadow of Bhojpuri, raised by Hindi, educated in English, and die with Sanskrit whispering in their ears.
In Chicago, I once consumed several weeks working my way through a small shelf of medieval texts known as the Pancharatra, an amalgam of Vedic exegesis and early tantric lore. According to one of these treatises, the Ahirbudhnya, the appearance of the self and its world is an emanation of Lord Vishnu’s all-encompassing mind. During the period between the destruction of one world and the creation of another, when neither time nor space exists, Vishnu falls into deep, dreamless sleep; his awareness is present only as nada, described as “the long, drawn out sound of a temple bell.” When he begins to dream, this elemental vibration rises into divine awareness “like a bubble floating up from the depths of the ocean.” At the surface the bubble bursts into consciousness, spilling forth the fourteen vowels and thirty-four consonants of Sanskrit—the stuff out of which the dream of self and world takes shape and into which both ultimately collapse once agai
n.
These same primal elements of language are visualized by the yogi in the form of a serpent, the kundalini, lying dormant at the root of the spine, in the lowest of the seven chakras. With adequate practice, the kundalini can be roused in meditation through the use of specific mantras. Once awakened, it moves upward along a central channel, through the navel and heart chakras, and into the throat, where it emerges in audible form as the seed syllables, or dhatus, of Sanskrit, each one associated with a particular tantric deity who protects and dispenses the energy of universal consciousness. As the kundalini approaches the crown chakra, the yogi effectively becomes God, reversing the process of creation, moving from waking consciousness into dream, from dream to dreamless sleep, and from dreamless sleep to an unborn, undying state known only as “the Fourth,” characterized in the texts as Pure Being, Pure Awareness, and Pure Bliss: Sat, Chit, Ananda.
* * *
Absorbed in these ruminations and adrift on the voices all around me, I was jolted back to my senses by the furious clanging of rickshaw bells. The driver had veered to avoid colliding with a cow that stood placidly in the center of Assi crossing eating a cardboard box; the rickshaw now careened straight toward where I stood paralyzed, unable to decide which way to jump. For a split second I met the driver’s eyes and my stomach wrenched. The center of the man’s face was rotted away with leprosy. Where the tip of his nose and his upper lip should have been, there was a naked, suppurating wound, a single hole punched above a crooked ring of paan-stained teeth rushing down on me. He flung out a warning cry—no word, but a rough, wet ball of sound—and shot past, disappearing around the corner and down toward the river.
I caught my breath and looked around. To my left the girls sat, quietly now, behind their baskets of coriander, arranging leaves in neat piles; the Muslim men were gone.
“Stan? You okay man?”
“Oh. Hey.”
It was Richard. Since my move to Banaras the previous August, we had bumped into each other from time to time, mostly at concerts. In the interims between his periodic liaisons with the foreign women who passed through town, he visited the prostitutes near Chowk. This afternoon he was, as always, well dressed, in a carefully pressed, tailored kurta-pajama of raw silk.
Richard was not what you would call a contemplative person; he showed little interest in philosophy or spiritual things of any stamp. I remember one time when a group of us were sitting around a table at Ravi’s chai shop. Ruth, the German musician who had a cabin in Manali, was talking about how she always performed puja to Sarasvati before practicing her flute. Richard had remained silent the whole time, listening, but at this point someone asked him if he did any kind of regular puja or meditation. At first he said nothing; he simply gazed at Ravi, watching him flip an omelet. I thought he hadn’t heard the question, but then he responded, laconically, something to the effect that practicing his tabla was as close to religion as he ever wanted to get.
Before coming to India Richard had worked as a carpenter somewhere near Bristol in the UK. In the off-hours he was a musician—drummer in a garage band that played the clubs. Then the Beatles released Revolver, with George on sitar, and Indian classical music was suddenly everywhere. A friend took him to a tabla performance in London, and according to Richard that was it. As he told me one afternoon while tuning his drums, “Somethin’ just sorta come over me, and I split.” He packed a small bag, withdrew his life’s savings, and took the ferry from London to Amsterdam. From there he traveled for two months in a haze of hashish and Hendrix, riding the Magic Bus through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Finally arriving in Delhi in late summer of 1968, Richard eventually found his way from there to Banaras, where he began studying tabla. He had never returned to England.
Richard and I had few common interests, but we talked together now and again. I liked his unpretentious, working-class edge. He devised an endless succession of entrepreneurial schemes to supplement his dwindling savings, and recently we had begun to see more of each other as the result of his latest enterprise, a flourishing business in whole-wheat bread. He baked it himself in a big tandoori oven constructed in a friend’s courtyard near Sonarpur. Early every morning he stoked up the fires—both the one in his chillum and the one in the oven—and prepared several dozen loaves, which he delivered by bicycle, still warm, to his enthusiastic customers.
His route brought him through Assi and by my place every other day. On such occasions he would stop in to drop off a loaf of bread and report whatever gossip was going the rounds. Lately it was some tidbit about Marie, a French nymphet who occupied Harold’s old room in Lanka. “You remember ’arold, right? The American fella who ate an eggroll from the Winfa an nearly died a food poisnin? So his visa expired and he left for Nepal, and now this dishy chick from Paris lives in his flat. Apparently she’s got some famous guru in Poona. What’s his name? Oh yeah, Rajneesh. That’s it. Has everyone doing somethin he calls ruddy ‘sex yoga.’” Before Marie, the news generally included some mention of Dieter, a German sitar-wala whose blatantly racist views provoked frequent arguments and the occasional fistfight. Dieter detested India and Indians and made no effort to cloak his feelings, yet through some profound karmic irony he had been living in Banaras for years and showed no inclination to leave anytime soon. Richard knew them all. It was no surprise that he should happen to appear now, just as I was nearly run down by a rickshaw.
“Looks like he clipped you.” He gestured toward my pant leg, which had been torn open, apparently by the rear axle of the rickshaw as it swept past. Through the tear I could make out a small cut.
He inspected the wound and offered a long, low whistle. “Could a’ been worse. He was an ugly bloke, that’s for sure.” He looked up. “Hey man, how ’bout a chai?”
I was in no hurry to go back to my room and the blue notice, so I accepted his invitation.
He led the way across the street and up four or five stairs to a small clearing under a pipal tree that provided shade for a nearby chai stall. We found a seat on a circular concrete platform that surrounded the tree’s immense, ribbed trunk; the stone was cold and polished to a smooth finish from years of service. The French couple I had seen earlier in the street now occupied a bench across from us. He was holding forth while she listened, her fingers nervously twisting a thick tangle of ash-blond ringlets that fell down over her neck. The air smelled pleasantly of ganja and incense. Just inside the tiny shop—not much bigger than a packing crate, really—a skeletal man with greasy, shoulder-length hair crouched behind a stove, fanning the smoldering dung with a tattered mat. He was barefoot and shirtless with blue-black skin; the bottom half of his lungi had been tucked in at the waist to form a short skirt that hung around his knees, leaving the stringy muscles of his calves exposed. When he saw us, he pulled himself up and peeled back his lips in a broad, crooked smile.
“Namaste, Richard!”
“Namaste, Chai Baba. Doe chai pilaao.” Richard brought up two fingers and tapped them against his forehead, at once a greeting and an order.
Chai Baba’s eyes slid around to me and he raised both hands, palms joined in formal greeting. “Namaskar, Babu.”
Chai Baba made it a point to know every foreigner who stuck around town for more than a week. He talked with them, hung out and smoked ganja, did business with them, made connections. Networked. I was not one of the regular crowd at his shop—stoners that flew by with the seasons between Kathmandu and Goa like migratory birds, touching down en route for a month in Banaras in fall and spring, but still he knew all about me. He knew everything about everybody, but nobody seemed to know much about Chai Baba. He was reported to have a wife somewhere, but no one I knew ever actually saw her. And I was told that the child who worked around the shop was his son. There were plenty of other stories I never bothered to confirm, like the one about how he had once traveled to Germany in a VW bus with half a dozen Euro-hippies. They supposedly made it all the way to Berlin before the authorities sent him packing
back to India at the Reich’s expense. He was even said to have wandered as a sadhu for some years, studying under an Aghori master.
I nodded at Chai Baba and summarily pushed my palms together, which was sufficient for him as he turned and went back to the fire. He took up a blackened, dented pan and set it over the coals. He filled the pan with hot water that fell in a steaming arc from the spout of an aluminum kettle. He then pried open the lid of a yellow Dalda can and measured out two heaping spoonfuls of powdered tea leaves, tossing each of them into the pot with considerable flourish. From a second can he spooned out twice that amount of sugar and repeated the process, ladling milk from yet another container. Finally, he selected a single green pod of cardamom from a tiny jar, delicately cracked it between the nails of his thumb and forefinger, and let it fall into the boiling liquid. He picked up the pan and swished it around once or twice, then poured the mixture through a plastic sieve into two smudged glasses and delivered them to us where we sat.
As he handed me my tea, Chai Baba’s eyes flicked to the rip in my pant leg, and once again the bottom half of his face curled back in a toothy smile.
“Rickshaw nail you?”
He spoke his own peculiar dialect of English, an eclectic ragbag of words and phrases gleaned from years spent listening to nonnative speakers. He was similarly conversant, from what I could tell, in French, German, Russian, and Japanese.
“Bummer.” He laughed. “Rickshaw also nail Chai Baba.” He indicated a jagged red scar just over his left knee. “Many years before. Hard lesson, no?”
I was already in a foul mood, and the supercilious grin began to irritate me. I responded abruptly in stuffy, formal Hindi: “What lesson?” Immediately that verse from the Bodhicharyavatara, my mantra from the early days in Delhi, flashed to mind.
Chai Baba cocked his head to one side, as if he hadn’t understood my question, then switched to Hindi himself: “Rastay say hut jaao, babu, nahin to chot lag jaaega.” Maybe he thought the answer was so simple it should be obvious: “Get yourself out of the way, Babu, and you won’t get hurt.”
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