‘My mother didn’t have the strength to turn her back on her family and her country, I do.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Surinder and I are going to the States. This country is too small and nasty for me.’
She turns from the smoke and the smothered love and walks towards the car.
We drive from the loneliness of the funeral pyre to the crowds of the back streets of bedlam that constantly assault with sounds, smells and sights. Padma sits numb while I’m high on sensory overload and sick from Wonderland’s roller coaster of extreme emotions.
Amid the manicured lawns of the embassy district cars slow down to avoid what appears to be a branch on the road. But it’s not a branch. It’s the twisted limbs of a beggar who’s been hit by a car; he is lying in the middle of the road crying and reaching out his hands for help. We pull over and Jonathan jumps out. But as he approaches the stricken man, a bus lurches to a halt; its driver gets out, grabs the beggar by his arm, drags him to the gutter and dumps him, his face and abdomen bleeding from the bitumen. He’s dragged in anger, not in sympathy; human debris removed. The driver, his route now clear, jumps back on his bus and drives away.
India is the worst of humanity.
At the traffic lights, Pooja runs up to our car; she is a local beggar who knows we are the softest touch around. We’ve given her clothes, food and pay good money for the paper she sells. She has rat-tail Rastafarian hair, dimples and dirty teeth but still manages to be the most beautiful child I’ve ever seen, with a smile that would melt stone. She moves to tap on the window but sees we’re upset and hesitates. She gives me a newspaper and pats my hand.
‘Poor memsahibs. Ap teekay hoga.’ (You will be okay).
The pity in her liquid brown eyes is an extraordinary communication of kindness from a child who has nothing to a woman who has everything.
India is the best of humanity.
Padma and Surinder travel to New York and Jonathan sets off for Pakistan. Left alone again, I feel the germ of a desire to cope with such shifts of extremes. Living a dutiful life as an Indian memsahib is not the way to do it. Padma’s sorrow has made me sick of the nasty gossip delivered in rapid, loud, high-pitched sing-song voices; such secrets and judgements are soiling my soul. I have almost died physically and now I feel I’m dying spiritually. I’ve crashed into another wall of bad karma and in the process lost my lightness of being. I miss silence, space and solitude, the luxuries of my country with its empty lands and calm cities. I realise Indian Jim’s suggestion of ‘doing my duty’ is not enough to sustain me anymore. Being healthy and wealthy won’t get me peace of mind, body and soul.
I must find peace in the only place possible in India. Within.
CHAPTER FIVE
Insane in the Membrane
I decide to start my quest for inner peace with a brain enema.
A couple of my friends have undergone this treatment at the extreme meditation ‘camp’ called Vipassana in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. I’d always thought Vipassana was a western practice but it’s actually a Buddhist technique that began in India.
Buddhism was born in India but its teachings were lost to the country after Islamic invasions. The Vipassana meditation teachings were preserved as a trained technique within Burmese monasteries and only recently reemerged via an unlikely guru. S.N. Goenka is a small pudgy man with a tendency to snort like a bull and squint like a squatting bullfrog. Born into a strict Hindu Indian family, he grew up to become a rich industrialist with stress migraines so bad he required morphine fortnightly. He found Vipassana meditation was the only thing that could eradicate what he called the ‘snakes, scorpions and centipedes’ within. On a trip to India some years later he taught his parents and twelve of their friends; they then wanted courses for their friends, and the method mushroomed in India (and beyond) after twenty-five centuries of absence.
Goenka’s courses are based on the original teachings of the Buddha, but without the robes, head shaving, chanting, bell-ringing or begging – which is a good thing because I’m hardly ready to be a monk and my impressions of Buddhism are that it’s a rather extreme religion that requires followers to spend too much time inside their own skull. I would never have considered a ten-day date with my mind in Australia, but here, I have the time, the need and the desire to remove the blockages of the past and find a new way of living.
Vipassana centres are all over India but I choose one that I hope will be the quietest in this chaotic country. An overnight train trip across the green Punjab, a five-hour taxi ride below snow-covered peaks and a long walk up a steep Himalayan hill beyond the meditating monks of Dharamsala is the small town of Dharamkot.
I approach the green metal gates of the meditation centre with caution, for from tomorrow talk is forbidden. On the train I had nightmares of the horrors of being alone inside my own head. I saw my mouth bursting with forbidden words and my body gripped in a straightjacket surrounded by white coats. My friends’ laughs and warnings echoed in my head – few think I’ll make it and one even offered me a case of beer for every day I survive. The general impression is that I can’t shut up for ten minutes let alone ten days and nights. I kind of agree with them. I am slightly scared of going psycho.
The centre doesn’t look like a loony-bin, it actually seems peaceful; surrounded by pine trees are numerous small cottages, a large meditation hall and bathroom blocks with showers and pit-toilets. A small fence strictly divides it into male and female sections. After handing in my passport, my book, my diary and my pens, I’m given the only thing I can read for ten days: the rulebook and schedule. Over the next week I’ll study that pamphlet as much as the princess in Still Life with Woodpecker contemplates the Camel cigarette packet. Yet it won’t speak to me in the same way – I won’t see alien life forms, or secret messages, just a way of life I never thought I’d embrace. The rulebook contains my vows as a temporary monk. For ten days I’m not to kill, not to lie (easy when you can’t talk), not to steal, not to speak and not to have sex. I find a pen at the bottom of my backpack and decide to write a few words every day on the back of the rulebook. I feel sinful already but I’m keen to remember the experience.
I’m given the number of my ‘cell’. The word is apt. It has a damp concrete floor, a tin roof and plastic walls, and is just big enough to allow me to stretch my arms out. Inside are a hard bed, a shelf and a hook. I’ve stayed in some pretty depressing rooms in India but this feels like a self-imposed prison.
I put my backpack down, hang up my jacket, put my mineral water up on the shelf and sit on the bed. I open the door and watch the mangy monkeys swing through the mossy pine trees. I explore the boundaries of the centre like a caged animal, return to my cell and sit on the bed. I’m bored already and day one hasn’t even started. We are still allowed to talk and to leave, and I hear people planning to go out for a coffee. So I go back, get my money and have my last caffeine and cake.
This late snack makes me not really notice that dinner is only stale numkeen (salty spicy Indian chip things) and a banana (which I don’t like). I love a big dinner but for the rest of the course this is it – a great breaky and lunch but a tiny dinner. Soon my stomach is rumbling louder than the first Goenka video in the meditation hall. My last words are to complain about a bad back and plead for a position by the wall. Mouths rammed shut in case they leak, we troop off to bed like prisoners to the gallows.
Day One
A gong breaks the silent, dark, dead hour of four. I ignore it. At four-twenty it rings again and a little bell is jangled outside my room. It’s dark and cold. As I stumble to the hall I notice the fat white moon bulge with luminosity. I’m not a morning girl but I instantly feel excited by this new adventure of dawn. The thrill doesn’t last long, as dawn is spent with eyes shut, focusing on my breath; this is most uninteresting and I fall asleep a lot. I frequently jerk myself awake and take a peek to see if anyone has noticed; my classmates (mostly foreigners) all look very focused, except
for the Indian woman in front of me who is snoring.
Two and a half hours later we’re gonged for breakfast. The routine then involves a one-hour meditation at eight and a two-hour sit from nine until lunch. Then there’s three more long meditation sessions before the pathetic excuse they call dinner, another meditation, a video from Goenka and another little meditation before bed.
It’s a boring technique. There’s no mantra to focus on, white light to receive or god to picture; we’re just told to observe our breath. All damn day. Apparently we need to learn to concentrate and to focus the mind so we can realise subtle truths. But my realisations for the first day are hardly subtle. They are:
My nostrils breath differently. Most of the time my right nostril takes in air on a sideways angle, while the left sucks in air directly below it.
I always need to have a song in my head and they are rarely good ones. Today’s major tune is ‘Breathe’ by Kylie Minogue. It’s very boring when you only know the chorus and can’t do any Kylie dance moves.
I’m impatient. By the second meditation session, one part of my mind has already dictated the unread chapters of the novel I had to hand in for locking up yesterday. Another part has finished the novel and determined it’s not a bad book. A third section is worrying that when I do pick up the novel again it’s likely the wrong things will happen.
Wonderland is within. I’m hyperactive and insane: one thought leads to something ridiculously unrelated and never comes back to the first. My thoughts don’t make sense, or come to any conclusions or insights. And there’s rarely one thought at once, there are layers of boring, repetitive, crazed snippets. I’m regurgitating memories, plans, information, music, movies, ‘Friends’ episodes, ‘Dr Who’ highlights and daydreams. It’s mayhem in here.
My body is weak. It’s aching already.
I’m kind of disturbed by the fact that there are thirty girls around me I don’t talk to, or touch, or acknowledge in any way. No body language is allowed – no smiles of reassurance or grimaces at recognised or shared experience. A few girls are already crying and it feels selfish not to comfort them. I crack after lunch and squeeze one girl’s elbow and smile in sympathy. Obviously, for some, meditation brings up less rubbish and more pain.
I feel like I’m trapped in a TV episode of ‘Survivor Spiritualists’. The last one left gets enlightenment.
Day Two
Song for the day – ‘I Was Made for Loving You Baby’ by Kiss
Today I realise that my brain is beyond mad. It’s now sprouting huge paragraphs from novels I’ve never read, using language I don’t even understand. I seem to have suddenly acquired the vocabulary of Helen Razer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last and I come out of the meditations as moronic as I go in. I feel like I’m on drugs but there’s no-one to bring me back to earth or share the experience with. My brain is so desperate for friends it’s started talking to itself, taking on male and female characters with strong accents and weird attitudes. I’ve heard the Dalai Lama warn that too many westerners come out of meditation retreats thinking they are Buddha. My self-image is not that good: I think I’m Sally Field in Sybil with a major multiple personality disorder. Conducting my own psychotherapy, I half hope for repressed childhood memories; all I come up with are ABBA and Kiss songs. I finish Arrival and Dynasty before noon.
After five more hours of pussycat t-shirt dresses, glittery high heels, bad makeup, silly tunes and long tongues, Goenka reveals I’m not the only one doubting my sanity. But the teacher is not here. Vipassana is too popular for Goenka to take courses now and he appears via a scratchy video tape, starting every little lecture with a heavy sigh and an ominous drawl.
‘The secccoooooond daaaaaaaay is over. You have eieeeeeeeght days to gooooo.’
Tonight he drones that we have wild ‘monkey’ minds, and while reining them in takes time, it will be worth it because controlling the mind is the only way to truly realise the expression of goodness and decency. My mind is most definitely wild ape territory. So, rubbing my painful joints as I fall into bed, I decide I’m willing to give Goenka’s way to peace a chance.
Day Three
Song for the day – ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’
Today I realise I’ve spent more than thirty-six hours concentrating on my nose and lips. It’s only slightly less boring than focusing on breathing. I don’t even like these areas of my body and dammed if they feel any different for all the attention. I’m starting to get cranky. Why am I wasting ten days of my life learning to sleep sitting up? At one stage I begin to doze and jerk awake so suddenly that I bang my head against the wall. I crack up as quietly as I can. I’m actually dying for a good laugh; this meditation stuff is intensely serious and most of us look very depressed.
Yet, through the crankiness, cold, back pain and exhaustion, I feel a slight tinkling of emerging exhilaration. Unfortunately it’s not yet coming from within. Spending twelve hours a day shut up inside makes me feel the outside world more keenly. At times the silence is deafening. Over the last five years I’ve slowly been losing my hearing from too many loud gigs, concerts, dance parties and radio headphones. I now realise what it will be like if I go deaf. Silence is strange, isolating and scary. But silence is sensual, for my other senses are becoming heightened. I nearly explode with joy at the feeling of sun on my face and tree moss under my fingers. Sitting having lunch, I notice a raindrop clinging to a railing. It’s shining like a perfect diamond. I move my head down and the light hits the raindrop through another band in the spectrum – it glows red like a garnet. I dip my head again, it becomes sapphire; again, and it’s topaz; and then I lift my sights to transform it back to a diamond. I spend forty-five minutes moving my head up and down making rare jewels out of a drip. Have I discovered the true wealth of nature, a natural drug of the brain, or am I just missing TV a little too much?
The two Indian women in the group have left – they kept talking and couldn’t hack it. There’s only us foreigners now.
Goenka tells us that soon the mental defilements will pass away and we will have healthy thoughts. I’m not sure if the raindrop love affair counts as healthy. He insists wisdom is within us all. I find this hard to believe; I seem to be regurgitating anything but wisdom. Tomorrow we will learn a new technique to find this inner truth. I’m just thrilled I will be able to take a break from focusing on my nose.
Day Four
Song for the day – ‘Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry, Daddy’s Going to Buy You a …’
Today I’m feeling very dizzy and faint and I have a horrific headache from coffee withdrawal. My bowels are also missing caffeine and it seems I’m not the only one; everyone is scoffing tablespoons of laxatives. How are we meant to cleanse our brains when our bodies are as clogged as India’s toilets? I’m also suffering sensory deprivation and feeling exhausted beyond all tiredness. And I realise now why there’s a vow not to kill. There’s a mad Indian down the hill who’s been yelling some political slogan through a distorted loudspeaker for four hours; I’m meant to be cultivating tolerance and infinite compassion, and all I can think about is how I’d like to murder him.
Our new meditation technique involves observing sensations on the body. We are told to focus on its parts bit by bit and feel heat, cold, tingles, tickles, air, etc. I feel nothing except huge blocks of pain in my back and legs. We’re told to be aware, but not to react; then we’ll break down the barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind and be able to live in a state of equanimity. It’s mission impossible. Goenka has started to chant a Sanskrit tune at the end of each meditation that sounds just like the lullaby about daddy offering to buy a child a rocking horse and a diamond ring. Inside I sing along, I have no self-restraint at all.
Day Five
Song for the day – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’
I’m beginning to think there are some people not suited to Vipassana and that I’m one of them. I have a mind that has prospered on an ability to do more than
one thing at once. I can interview someone, queue up a CD, read a screen, calculate the number of minutes to a newsbreak and think about what I’m going to have for lunch, all at once. So now, while I’m focusing on my body parts, my brain just can’t cope with something so one-dimensional. To amuse itself my mind has decided to dump its mental inhabitants and take up with floozies residing in each body part. All my limbs and organs have names and personalities. My ankle is Christine (I think that’s because ‘ankle’ sounds like ‘uncle’ and I had an Aunt Christine). Christine is very obstinate. My elbow is a cranky old Doris, my back a stubborn truckie called Stan, my thighs are two lesbians wanting to get it on, and my neck is an hysterical old Indian woman. This is not normal. Physically, I’m faring no better. A new rule requires us to sit still for one hour – it’s agony, my legs have such bad pins and needles I fear I will never walk again.
I can’t do this.
By training our mind not to react to body sensations such as pain or pleasure we’ll supposedly learn to reduce aversion and craving, thereby leading us to liberation and true happiness. I’m flunking Freedom 101. It’s halfway through the course and if I could walk I’d run. Extracting deep cravings and conditioning by meditation is like psychological dental surgery.
Day Six
Song for the day – ‘I Could Be Happy’
It’s starting to happen. I’m feeling happy. I have self-control. I’ve sat still for one whole hour! It’s exciting to know I can take charge of my mind and body and focus away from pain and discomfort and unhappiness.
Of course I’m not there yet. After six days of close proximity to thirty other women, I’m feeling a desire to categorise them all. This is kind of like a silent boarding school – factions are forming and I’m feeling annoyed by some women who have never even looked at me and who, of course, I’ve never spoken with. One I’ve christened ‘Old Mad Bag’ always pushes for one of the few seats in the dining hall and today she moved my raincoat that clearly bagsed my spot. Another I’ve named ‘Piggie’ because she refuses to wash her greasy curly ponytail and slurps her tea like a sow. I’ve decided ‘Miss New York’ is a designer, ‘Hippie Trippie’ is an E-loving raver, ‘Monkey Rapper’ adores Puff Daddy, and ‘Rattie’ should stop twitching her nose. They probably call me ‘The Freak’ because of the way I’ve started giggling at myself. Perhaps I’m going mad, or perhaps the realisation of my craving and negativity is making me happy. Goenka is right: accepting suffering doesn’t have to be pessimistic. A new mantra forms in my mind.
Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure Page 8