by Karan Bajaj
“No problem. Train took so much time. You have become Tulsidas,” said the man. “You know Tulsidas? World-famous Hindi poet?”
Max laughed. His heart warmed. They shook hands.
“Be careful to go up in Himalayas. Winter weather very, very dangerous,” said the man.
Max nodded, touched by his kindness. He had planned to make his way up to Uttarkashi that day, but it felt foolhardy to be driven up the icy roads now that it was past ten and pitch-black outside. He said good-bye to the man and took a bus from the train station to Rishikesh, the neighboring town that served as the springboard for journeys into the Upper Himalayas. Once there, he ignored the solicitations for rooms and transport and entered the first shabby hotel he saw. He negotiated the room rate down to Rs 300, six dollars a night. A 400 percent discount from the owner’s initial quote of Rs 1500, he ran numbers in his head from habit as he walked up the slippery concrete stairs to the room on the second floor.
• • •
THE HIGH OF negotiating a bargain with his newly acquired Hindi skills vanished on entering the room. Even six dollars was too high a price for the damp-smelling room. A lone bulb dangled from the chipped ceiling. The narrow bed would have been small for a man half his size, and next to it was a four-foot-tall cupboard, every inch of it covered in dust. Exhausted, Max changed into his warm underwear and lay down, spread-eagled, on the pink bedsheet. He covered himself with thick blankets and stared blankly at the two brown geckos playing with each other on the faded wall in front of him. He switched off the light.
God, what had he done?
His parents had grown up in wooden shacks outside a farm in Corfu, the children of day laborers. If his uncle, a waiter in a Philadelphia diner, hadn’t pulled them into the United States, Max would’ve grown up a peasant in Greece. How casually he had walked out on everything his parents had moved to a new country for. His mother had doggedly dragged Sophia and him to Manhattan on Sundays so they could see from the outside educated, well-bred people living in doorman buildings and eating in candlelit restaurants and aspire to a better life.
Max’s throat tightened. He saw his mother, yellow shirt, green ribbon in her brown hair, her face turning red with humiliation whenever their welfare caseworker showed up to inspect their refrigerator and closets to make sure they were broke. Now he would be on welfare too. A wave of panic surged in him. Unlike his colleagues at work, he didn’t have a daddy who played golf with fellow hedge-fund titans in a country club. No one stood between him and destitution. Jesus, he was fucked. He had to take the next flight back.
So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow, and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrowless, and deathless—immortal, as it were.
Max forced himself to think of the naked, shivering children on the roadside. Viveka’s serene, sure face had promised answers. He would find them.
Max closed his eyes again, trying to empty his mind of thoughts.
• • •
A SCREAM.
Max jumped from the bed, banging his knee against the cupboard. He cried out in pain.
Another scream.
Max looked around wildly.
Loud, toneless music filled the night.
Max’s breathing returned to normal. Someone was tuning a large radio on the other side of the paper-thin wall behind his head. Two AM. He had slept only a couple of hours. The radio screamed again. Max went back to bed. He removed the pillowcase and rolled it up in a ball, stuffing it tight against his right ear while sleeping on his left side. The radio made a squeaky, gravelly sound now. Max turned to his right side, the pillowcase bunched up under his left ear. Then again.
He couldn’t get back to sleep.
What was wrong with him? He had slept easily through gunshots all his life. This was nothing. Max threw the cloth away and continued tossing and turning, the sound crawling up his spine, not getting a wink despite being awake for more than forty hours. Eventually the sound ceased, or perhaps his mind stopped focusing on it. He buried his face in the damp bed.
Don’t go so soon after Mom, please.
Max opened his eyes. Sophia had pleaded with him to stay a little longer in New York. He hadn’t even pretended to think about it. Instead, he had resented her for being too busy counseling addicts in Brooklyn to visit their mother in the hospital. His kid sister. For years, he had sat next to Sophia’s crib, driving away the rats that darted out of the peeling walls when his mother went to work. Why had he been so cruel to her?
Stop.
Max got up from the bed. Sleep was impossible. Three AM. Dawn was still far away, but he had to get on with his journey. Max went down the stairs, out into the cold Himalayan air, his heavy backpack straining his tired shoulders.
• • •
HE WALKED THROUGH the dark, empty streets of Rishikesh, unsure where he was going, just wanting to stop the restless chatter in his mind. Each street looked the same in the darkness. Shuttered mom-and-pop stores, cobbled roads littered with fruit pulp and rotten food remains, stray dogs shivering on the pavements, and the air heavy with the smell of cow dung. Following the light of a lone streetlamp, he turned into an alley. The air felt colder, fresher. Max tracked the sound of running water. The river Ganges shimmered in the light of the funeral pyres burning on its banks. He walked toward the river past the blackened, charred human bodies cremated on the pyres. Kneeling down, he splashed cold water on his face, ready for a fresh start.
Someone touched his back.
Max whipped around.
A stark naked yogi, his entire body covered in a thin layer of white ash, black eyes blazing, stood in front of him. “Come, foreigner, I will show you God.”
Max skipped a breath.
The yogi stretched out a closed fist. “You came from Europe to find guru,” he said in a thick accent. “I am your guru.”
He uncrossed his long fingers to reveal a black slimy mass. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.
“Take your guru’s first offering,” he said, holding Max’s wrist with his other hand.
There was a touch of white in the black. Jesus, a tooth. Black flesh. Burned human remains.
Max pulled his hand away and walked past the yogi.
“Wait. You have to give your guru a donation,” the yogi called behind him.
Max moved faster up the street, retracing his steps to the bus stand next to the hotel.
Three bearded yogis, white paint on their faces and fierce red marks between their eyes, sat on a street corner warming their hands over a fire.
Max’s heart clutched. What had he gotten himself into? Relax. He was in the foothills of the Himalayas, the home of the holy Ganges. The area near the river had to be filled with men of God. Max breathed slowly. The yogis weren’t naked or covered in ash. Yellow robes and bright marigold garlands covered their lean bodies.
“Do you want guru?” one of them called out and took a large drag from the bong in his hand.
Max shook his head.
“Take us to Europe with you,” said another, pulling his long gray hair in a knot. “Cheap gurus outsourced from India.”
The others laughed so much they started coughing.
Max would have to get used to this mocking. Nothing separated him from the throngs of Western hippies searching for themselves in the Himalayas. His Harvard degree, his Wall Street experience wouldn’t give him a leg up this ladder. Nothing would—except his will.
• • •
MAX WALKED QUICKLY back to the bus station next to the hostel. He knocked on the glass window of the dusty booth at the station entrance. A woman trussed up in blankets sprang up from the floor. Her hair was disheveled from sleep. She raised her eyebrows.
“Uttarkashi bus?” asked Max without much hope.
“Five AM.” She shivered in her thin khaki u
niform. “Last bus this season.”
Max’s heart lifted. A sign. Pointing to what, he didn’t know, but at that moment he’d take anything.
6.
Max entered the cold bus, his eyes swollen and heavy. It was four in the morning, but six or seven people were already inside the bus, their heads resting on the metal bar of the seats in front of them. Max looked around for a seat. Most were broken, with steel columns jutting out of their back frames. He found one with a thin cushion and settled into it. Freezing, he huddled against his backpack and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The engine’s roar shook him awake. Broad daylight. They were negotiating a steep uphill curve. The outside tires of the bus were an inch away from the thousand-foot valley below, and the dirt road was crumbling around them. It seemed wiser to keep his eyes shut, so he fell asleep again.
Max’s head banged against the ceiling. The bus groaned to a halt. Two large boulders lay in their narrow path. He rubbed his head and stepped out to join the four men pushing the boulders aside.
“Did they just fall?” he asked in English.
A man nodded. “One minute back.”
Max looked at the giant rocks and weathered trees on the mountains above. No barrier separated them from the road. If the boulders had slipped just seconds later, they would have pushed the bus into the valley below. Every moment on the road was an exercise in surrender.
Max helped the men roll the boulders off the road. Back on the bus, the fifteen or so locals making the journey with Max greeted him with excitement. Two boys, seven or eight years old, wearing imitation Gap sweatshirts gave him high fives. A woman with a rough, cheerful face joked about someone of his height in the tiny seat. Another woman wearing a red sweater over a bright yellow sari offered him apples. A kind-faced man in a hip-length coat with a mandarin collar gave him water. The questions started again. No foreigner ever came in winters. Why was he here? Where was his wife? Did he want a guru? Why was he so tall? The engine roared to life again, filling the bus with an oily smell. The locals left him alone and busied themselves in praying for safety. They folded their hands and closed their eyes every time the bus navigated a treacherous turn. Max stared at the calm, silent face of the driver and slept again, dreaming of burning black bodies with shiny white bones.
The boys woke him up a few hours later. They pointed excitedly to a sign reading Danger! Accident Zone in bold black letters.
“Death point, death point, death point, death point,” they sang.
The woman who had offered him apples pointed to a curve ahead where the previous month a bus had overturned. Soon Max found out why. When they went around the curve, the outside front wheel of the bus flew out, hanging suspended in air for a few seconds. Max’s heart stopped. They were heading straight down the valley, into the swirling, angry Ganges far below.
The driver rotated the wheel furiously.
Max hugged his knees tight, preparing to barrel out of the tiny window.
The bus landed on solid ground again.
Everyone clapped spontaneously. Max’s heart pounded. The air filled with audible sighs of relief. Only the kids looked disappointed.
“Why doesn’t the government make the road bigger?” Max asked when the bus moved at a steady pace again.
“No government here. God takes care of roads in the Himalayas,” said a woman.
• • •
THEY REACHED UTTARKASHI twelve hours after they had left Rishikesh, a mere five hours later than expected, despite the rough roads. Max congratulated the driver on his skill. He wanted a photograph with Max, and Max gladly obliged.
“Any bus to Gangotri?”
The driver shook his head. “No, no, never this season. Never.”
A stocky Indian man wearing a small ponytail and earrings who had been sitting quietly in the front of the bus came up to him. “I can drop you to Bhatwari village in my jeep if you’d like. It’s twenty miles ahead on the way to Gangotri,” he said.
Max shook his hands. “That’ll be great,” he said. “Thank you.”
Max helped the man carry one of his two suitcases back to his jeep in a parking lot next to the bus stand. They put the suitcases and Max’s backpack in the back of the weathered jeep, and Max joined the man in the front.
• • •
THE ROAD BECAME narrower past the Uttarkashi bus stand. They crossed a low-lying cement bridge inches above the river. The riverbank was lined with debris: bricks, concrete, truck tires, engine parts, and tree branches.
“A cloudburst here five months ago,” said the man. “Seven days of nonstop rain. People, houses, trucks, all taken by the river. Some people haven’t even been found yet.”
The roaring, angry river below them was so close Max could touch it. Any moment now, the river could rise and drown them as it had drowned hundreds of others. Or the weak bridge could break. How fragile this body, this life was. The jeep lurched. Max held on tight, feeling a renewed sense of purpose. They crossed the bridge.
A twenty-foot-tall iron statue of an Indian god with long matted hair, sculpted muscles, and a trident in his hand stood incongruously on the riverside.
“Pilot Baba’s ashram,” said the man, pointing to a cluster of white houses scattered next to the statue. “If you want, you can stay here until the winter ends.”
“Is he a guru?”
“Everyone is a guru in India,” said the man witheringly. “Pilot Baba was just a regular pilot in the Indian Air Force. His helicopter crashed here and he had some sort of spiritual realization—perhaps that there is more money to be made in this racket than in flying planes. So he became a guru.”
Max laughed. “How did he find disciples?”
“No shortage of foreigners touring exotic India,” he said. “Pilot Baba teaches that man loses his ego during orgasm, so there is plenty of sex here. Westerners love it. Spiritual McDonald’s.”
As if on cue, a dreadlocked white guy in just a T-shirt and shorts emerged from one of the houses. He shut his eyes and spread his arms out melodramatically in the frigid air. Max’s face went hot with embarrassment. Was there really no difference between him and these eighteen-year-old hippies? He strengthened his resolve to keep pushing forward until he found a real guru.
“Do you want to get off here?” asked the man, slowing down his jeep.
“I’ll pass,” said Max. “There is a man farther up in Bhojbasa I want to visit.”
“The roads are closed beyond Bhatwari,” said the man.
“I’ll take my chances,” said Max.
They took a steep turn and the statue and houses disappeared from view.
Max’s companion raised his index finger. “One percent maximum,” he said. “Only one percent of these yogis at most are genuine, and most of them live way on the top of the mountains where you are going. Out here and below in Rishikesh, searching for God has become a joke.”
Max nodded. “A man with human flesh in his hands offered to be my guru this morning,” he said.
“Covered in ash? Near a cremation pyre?”
“Yes, exactly,” Max said.
“An Aghori baba. They eat animal carcasses and human remains to show their love for even the most repulsive of God’s creations,” said the man. “They look scary but are pretty harmless.”
“And the men with painted faces and red marks?”
“Lord Shiva’s devotees,” said the man. “If I smoked as much hashish as them, even I’d see God everywhere.”
So many teachers, so many belief systems, yet none inspired confidence. Why wasn’t the path to the most fundamental of human quests clearer?
“What do you believe in?” said Max.
The man adjusted his ponytail. “My father was a priest in a temple here,” he said. “I believed in Lord Krishna, his god, until my father got buried in a landslide while conducting
a puja, a worship ceremony for the Lord. After that I left the Himalayas to work in Delhi. Now I come back only to visit my crazy family. Man is far more reliable than God. He rewards you with a paycheck instead of a landslide when you work for him.”
• • •
THE JEEP’S FLOOR shook with a loud clunk. Max held on to his seat tightly. The man changed gears nonchalantly and the jeep resumed its smooth motion. They took a turn into a flat valley. In the distance, a colossal tower of ice arose high above the mist, glittering in the fading light of the evening sun. Max inhaled sharply at his first full view of the mountains ahead.
“Is that where Gangotri is?” he asked.
The man laughed. “Yes, Gangotri is at the bottom of that mountain,” he said. “That’s why all roads are closed beyond here.”
The road ahead was covered in snow, as were the withered trees on either side. The Ganges whispering below them suddenly fell silent, throttled by the heavy chunks of ice floating in its waters. Did the yogis hike up from this point? If they could figure out a way, couldn’t Max? He ran marathons in less than three hours; he hiked steep mountains; his diet was predominantly salads and fruits; he’d never been fitter, healthier, more prepared.
“There must be a way, perhaps on foot,” said Max.
The man shook his head. “Not until March or April.” He took a turn and stopped ahead of a cluster of huts. “Bhatwari village,” he said, pointing to the huts. “Ask around there. Someone will know when the road opens again. Perhaps you can even stay in the village for a few months. Who knows, you may become a guru yourself. This place does that to people.”
Max shook hands. “Thank you for the ride,” he said. He took his backpack from the jeep and came back to the driver’s window. “Can I pay you?”
The man folded his hands and lowered his head in a mock bow. “No, no, great guruji. Just bless my family so they are absolved of my sins.”
Max laughed. “Please, let me. I know how hard it was to get here.”
The man waved his hands. “I was coming this way anyway. My family lives in Pilot Baba’s ashram. I told you they are crazy.”