by Karan Bajaj
Max pulled it from inside his shirt and tore off its unused pages. He put the dying match to a page. To his relief, a page caught fire. He added more pages to it and thrust his wet, cold feet on top of the burning paper quickly. His toes burned . . . and thawed. Wincing, he put all his layers of toe warmers and socks back on, wiggling his toes furiously and dancing on the ice until their movement returned to normal. He started walking down at a furious pace. He had walked barely a hundred meters when he saw another glacier in his path.
Max burst out laughing. He was done. He had neither dry matches nor more paper. He couldn’t pull the stunt with his naked feet again. Warm tears rolled down his cheeks. He put his head in his hands and sat down on the ice. He was about to be buried alive in the snow. Was he going to die here? Now? Hadn’t he been safe and warm in New York just a week ago? What a slow, pointless death.
Keisha, I was so wrong, I’m sorry.
Max’s high school girlfriend’s bright, animated face rippled through the blurry whiteness. His heart rose up his throat, choking him. He had ruined her life. Was she even alive? Right now he wanted just one more chance to find her or at least come clean to her family about everything that had happened between them so they wouldn’t blame her. Max put snow on his face to stop the tears. Get a fucking grip. He’d freeze to death like this. He couldn’t think of her now.
Max looked in his backpack for something dry to wipe off the snow. Finding nothing, he threw the backpack aside. He removed his shoes, took off one of three layers of socks from his feet, and wiped his face dry with the moist socks. He stared at the socks. Maybe, just maybe, the extra friction could help.
Max put his shoes back on and pulled a woolen sock over each shoe, tearing them at the ends so they passed over the entire sole. Standing up and leaning to one side, he walked slowly across the forty feet of glacier, catching the packed snow for support after every few steps. His heart thudded out of his chest. Again, he willed himself not to look down.
He reached the other end of the glacier safely and stepped on land again. Science was far more reliable than God. He removed another layer of sock from his feet so he had only one sock left on each foot and jammed the socks on top of the shoes for the journey ahead.
• • •
MAX CHECKED HIS WATCH. Nine PM. Pitch-dark. His head lamp was flickering. Where was he? He should have reached Gangotri by now. Or at least the abandoned ranger office he had seen two miles into the journey. All he saw was snow and rock, snow and rock, snow and rock—and the icy river below. And soon he would slip and fall headfirst into it. He was hobbling like a ninety-nine-year-old man because of his knee pain and could no longer walk straight. No guide was going to come out of a tent with Bengay and a hot flask of tea for him, as had happened on Kilimanjaro when his knee had started hurting on the way down from the summit. He tied his towel around his knee. Gingerly he put one foot down and took one tentative step, then another, slowing making his way down, the pain shooting from his knee to his head like a bolt.
Not a sign of anything. He was completely lost, a mere speck in the infinite ocean of ice. He didn’t have a chance of running into the narrow trailhead in Gangotri. Should he just make camp here until the morning? What camp? He had nothing but a backpack. Without motion, he’d freeze to death. He moved faster. A sudden wave of nausea surged through him. Warm bile rushed to his mouth. He emptied his stomach and lay down spent in the cold snow. The ice seeped through his overcoat, sweaters, and shirts. He didn’t care. He wanted to die.
Enough.
He pushed himself up and took a large sip of the water. He took out the aluminum foil with his food from his backpack and smelled the food. The potatoes inside the bread had gone bad. But it was freezing here. If he died now, even his body wouldn’t rot. How could the boiled potatoes rot then? Maybe the potatoes weren’t bad. Altitude can make you smell stuff, see stuff, think stuff that doesn’t exist, right? Say it, say it, he was going mad. No. He threw the bread away into the blackness surrounding him. He was now officially without food. His head lamp was almost out of juice, lighting the path ahead with just a faint, narrow beam.
Max inched down through the blinding pain in his knee. Shouldn’t he see a flicker of light somewhere? Gangotri, Harsil, Dharali, some town from a distance? What had he been thinking? How had he entered the most formidable mountain range in the world so unprepared? He couldn’t even walk properly on flat land with his old knee injury. Why had he been so arrogant, so foolish? The snow fell faster. He covered his face to stop icicles from forming. Somewhere behind him he heard a soft, thudding sound.
The Brazilian was here to save him.
Ecstatic, he turned around.
A pair of gleaming eyes. A furry face. A deer. No, a snow leopard. Something.
Max ran forward, away from the eyes, falling, picking himself up again, odd flashes of Sophia, an old priest, and a brown woman passing through his head. He stopped when he couldn’t run any longer and looked around. The eyes had disappeared.
Max sat down with his compass, shivering, heart bursting out of his chest, surprised he hadn’t steered off course during his mad frenzied run down. He wished he had. Maybe he’d see something other than the darkness and snow then. Perhaps the destiny he’d been so sure of would steer him better than the compass. It was well past midnight. He had been walking in circles for more than twelve hours. He was out of food and battery power, and his knee was throbbing. Max got up again. Should he head up toward the guesthouse that he had missed before or down toward Gangotri? His life depended on the decision.
Max looked up at the starless, cloudy night. Tears rolled down his face. Help me, please. But there was nothing out there. Just the consequence of his own choices, and he had made the wrong one in coming here. Now he was all alone, one man inching toward his end in an empty, heartless cosmos. He started walking down but his knee buckled under. He knelt down on the ice, then stood up and turned around, walking up instead.
Breathless and freezing, he stumbled up without a thought, just looking at his compass and the ice and snow in front of him. There was no trail, no path anywhere. His head pounded. He was about to die. That he was certain of. Again and again Keisha’s tearful face flashed across the cloudy haze in front of his eyes. He’d abandoned her for his ambitions, to chase the life he thought he wanted. Look where that freedom had gotten him. He’d resented his mother for being needy, for pleading with him to get a good job, to get married quickly and have kids, for feeling anxious when he didn’t visit or call home enough. Now, he was free from her, from everyone. Tears blurred his vision, making it impossible for him to see the compass or where he was going.
Max lost all track of direction. The compass needle wobbled. His head was bursting. He put his hand on his forehead, half expecting to find a gaping hole. Just skin. Dry and cold. And dead. But he couldn’t die. He hadn’t even said good-bye to Andre before he left. He hated good-byes and didn’t really think he’d been gone for very long. How wrong he was. The head lamp died, plunging everything into blackness.
Just ahead out of the darkness, a tree stump peeked out of the snow. Max sat down in the snow and slumped against the stump, trying to keep his eyes open. The wind screamed around him. Sophie, I don’t think I’m gonna make it. His jacket’s hood blew off. Icicles rained onto his cap, but he felt no pain in his skull. Nothing anywhere. He loosened his coat. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t anything. The mountains had won. They could take him now. Max’s eyes closed.
• • •
SUDDEN IMAGES. An old white priest dying on a bed. People with tears in their eyes surrounding him. A window looking out to snow-covered mountains. An olive-skinned woman with a cloth covering her head praying in a cornfield. A man kissing an amulet. More men and women, faces melting into one another, lips muttering, eyes watering, hands folded.
I’ve been searching for Him for so many lives.
Max opene
d his eyes. He felt strangely calm. His head was clear. The snow fell gently around him. The wind didn’t scream in his ears. A yellow light appeared a few hundred meters in front of him. He got up and limped toward it.
“Help,” he shouted, inching closer and closer, when his ankle twisted. He fell. He tried to get up again but couldn’t muster the strength.
9.
Max lay on a hard surface, wrapped inside a blanket. A small wooden fire burned beside him. The sun streamed through the closed windows in front of him. He clenched and opened his fingers. They were stiff but functioning. He wiggled his toes. Working. He touched his ears with his hands. Freezing but intact. He’d live. He opened his eyes. Immediately, he sat up and looked around. The kind old woman who had helped him the previous night was sitting on a chair by his side in a white sari.
“Bhojbasa guesthouse?” he said, struggling to speak with his swollen lips and chattering teeth.
The tiny Indian woman nodded. She was nearly bald and her face was shriveled and wrinkled with large splotches of red.
“Tea?” she said in thickly accented English.
Max nodded. His head hurt. The woman got up from the chair and limped to the other side of the large room. She was so tiny, so frail. How had she helped him up? He looked at the snowy mountains outside the windows, shivering. Everything felt surreal, dreamlike.
• • •
THE WOMAN CAME BACK with a glass of hot tea.
Max raised his stiff arm to take it. He thanked her for saving his life.
“Okay,” said the woman. “Yesterday night is fine. Otherwise storms bad this season.”
A fine night. But of course. Thirty below zero wind chill and bullet-like hailstones were routine for these parts. He wouldn’t last a night in a cave. If he couldn’t do a simple “ladies’ hike,” if he fainted after eating a heavy breakfast and packed lunch and countless nutrition bars and water with electrolyte powders, how would he live farther north of the guesthouse? He’d be dead in a day. What a rash, egotistical bastard he was. An eighty-year-old woman a fraction of his size had to save his life.
“I make food,” said the woman and disappeared.
Max moved closer to the fire. Every muscle in his body ached. The sun was bright, yet he was chilled to the bone despite being wrapped in three layers of blankets. And he was in a hut with a fireplace and a tin roof. Just which cave was he planning to live in? What a cliché he was. An ignorant, arrogant American. He thought he was a mountaineer because he had climbed a few minor mountains with professional guides. He had pondered some shallow questions between vanilla lattes and had started thinking he was a yogi. How callously, how selfishly he had left Sophia so soon after their mother’s death. He needed to take the next flight back to New York and get his shit together. No stupid questions, no privileged pontifications on the meaning of life—just live the life he and everyone else expected him to.
• • •
THE OLD WOMAN returned with a plate of rice and lentils. Max devoured the food. Blood pulsed through his veins. He looked up with moist eyes at the woman.
“You saved my life yesterday. I will forever be grateful,” he said.
The woman shrugged. “You not far. How you hear of this place?” she said.
“A guidebook mentioned it,” said Max.
She shook her head. “No, that is guesthouse on Gomukh trail. This is Old Bhojbasa. Many kilometers off trail. No proper path. No one knows this,” she said.
“I lost my way,” said Max.
The woman nodded and left the room again.
Max wished she would smile a little so he didn’t feel so unwelcome. She must think he was a royal ass—and she wasn’t wrong. He stood up. His knee, which last night had felt like it would come out of its socket, didn’t hurt quite so much. He limped to the window. They were on the edge of the world. Beyond the cluster of bare pine trees in front of the hut lay the formidable Himalayan ranges. He could make out the contours of caves in the icy cliffs. People lived inside them. What a mockery he had made of their will, their determination.
“A yogi going down tomorrow. Then not for many more days.”
Max turned around. The woman had accurately concluded that Max would be too chicken to go down on his own.
“I’m Max,” he said.
The woman didn’t introduce herself. “He leaves early in morning to Gangotri. From there, jeep goes to Rishikesh. Weather clear for three days. It not last long, so we get supplies now,” she said.
So his journey was over before it had started. The Ganges, thin, blue, and frozen, glimmered in the sunlight many feet below. A deer rambled in the snow outside the window. Somewhere a bird called. The same unsettling feeling gripped Max. Who were those people in his dream by the tree the night before? He could have sworn he’d known the old white priest dying on his bed, the brown woman looking at the sky, and the man kissing the amulet. Not just known them. He had felt they were alive within him. Their hearts and minds were his own; only their faces were different. It was as if he’d seen glimpses of a past life. But he didn’t even believe in reincarnation. So how had he known them so well? He thought of the words of the Buddha he had read in the book he had picked up in London. The man had been unrelenting in his quest for answers.
Though my skin, my nerves, and my bones shall waste away and my lifeblood go dry, I will not leave this seat until I have attained the highest wisdom, the supreme enlightenment.
Max just didn’t have that fire.
“Thank you. I will leave tomorrow,” he said.
“I tell him,” the old lady replied.
“Does the yogi live nearby?” asked Max.
The woman nodded.
Max hesitated. “Have you ever met a middle-aged Brazilian man in these parts? He looks much younger than his years. I think he goes by the name of Ishvara. They say he was a doctor in the past. Now he’s a yogi.”
The woman’s expression didn’t change. “Many men come here,” she said. “Some yogis, some serious seeking, some just curious.”
She didn’t have to say where Max belonged in that hierarchy.
“You not waste people’s time if only curious,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” he said.
She left.
Maybe she knew him, maybe she didn’t. Searching for one man in India was like looking for the tip of an icicle in an avalanche. But it didn’t matter anymore. Max’s search was no longer urgent. He wasn’t prepared to meet men like that.
Max spent the rest of the freezing day inside resting, beating himself up over his foolishness, and puzzling over the images from the night before.
• • •
A BAREFOOT YOGI in thin ocher robes and shiny black shoulder-length hair came for him the next morning. He remained silent through the four-hour hike back to Gangotri, and Max didn’t feel the urge to pepper him with questions. Max tried to find out where he’d gone astray on his trek up. But they went back down a different way—or perhaps it was the same. The mountains remained as impenetrable on the way down as they’d been on his way up.
10.
Max reached Rishikesh the following morning, battered and sheepish but relieved to be alive and walking on his own two legs. He checked the flight times from Delhi to London in an Internet café next to the bus stand. The last direct flight left at midnight. It was barely noon. If he started on the five-hour journey back to Delhi now, he would reach the airport with plenty of time to spare. He checked his email.
Jennifer, a girl he had dated for six months a couple of years ago, was in Key West and was remembering a trip they had taken there for a college friend’s wedding. Max had only hazy recollections of the trip. How sharp his image of Keisha had been during the trek. He hadn’t seen her in eleven years, since she had dropped out of high school and run away from home the same year he went to Harvard. A middle school classmate w
ho was a trucker told Max when he bumped into him at a block party on 141st Street during Max’s Christmas break from college that he had seen her trading sex for drugs at a truck stop on Interstate 90 near Chicago. Max had left for Chicago immediately to track her down but hadn’t found any trace of her. Two years later, Pitbull’s cousin had mentioned casually that he’d met a South Bronx girl called Keisha in rehab in Iowa City. On another break from college, Max had visited that rehab and fifteen other sober living homes in the area but drawn a blank. Had Keisha ever contacted her family again? He’d never been able to find out. One summer he had gone to confess everything to her father but they had moved out of their home on Cauldwell Avenue. Was she safe? Alive? He’d been so cruel to her. Max’s heart sank like it always did when he thought of her oval eyes and dark braided hair. He forced his attention back to his email.
You’re right, Maxi . . . I didn’t come to the hospital enough, nor did I help you with Mom’s bills. I’ve been thinking a lot . . .The truth is, I pulled away from her even before her cancer. She was getting so needy—all that talk about settling down and marriage and grandkids and having dinner every Sunday as a family!! I don’t know what to say . . . I’m sorry. But you’ve always handled stuff, so I just assumed you’d take care of her. I wish we had talked more . . . I miss you.
So Sophia had felt the same way. After all those years dreaming of a better future for them, his mother had suddenly become insecure and clingy when they both moved out of the projects. Had her loneliness contributed to her cancer? His stomach tightened. You loved your kids with all your heart. Then they left you and never looked back. The familiar sense of futility began to rise in Max.
More emails. Rachel was having a baby. Save the date for Mike’s bachelor party in Cancún. Anne’s wedding was now confirmed for California in her dream venue. Barack Obama wanted another donation to create history. Habitat for Humanity thanked him for his contribution to their record-breaking holiday fund raiser. Max was flipping listlessly through the life that awaited him back in New York when he froze at a blogger’s response to his email about the Brazilian doctor.