The Yoga of Max's Discontent

by Karan Bajaj

  Max’s heart fell. If Ramakrishna hadn’t reached transcendence yet, what chance did he have?

  “We each have our destinies, Mahadeva,” said Ramakrishna. “If you have walked on this path in another life, you may make more progress in a day here than I make in a lifetime.”

  Max nodded. If nothing else, he would gladly settle for reading people’s thoughts like the man in front of him could. “I will stay. Thank you for taking me in.”

  14.

  Max, now Mahadeva, squatted on an Indian toilet, nervously eying the frogs playing in front of him and bending as much as his screaming thighs would allow. He gave himself five days there. Just until the silence broke. That’s it. Twenty percent would be done at the end of today, forty percent the next day. Then he would have crossed the halfway mark and the reverse countdown would start. He’d learn some basic yoga. Enough to practice in slightly more livable conditions, perhaps in Varanasi or a bigger city like Delhi or Bangalore. No, he didn’t need much comfort, but these conditions weren’t fit for humans. Perhaps they were fine for yogis who had transcended the limitations of space and time, but he had become so addicted to comfort, he didn’t even like the idea of a cold shower in the blistering heat.

  Max peered suspiciously into the large drum of water in the bathroom hut. Large black specks of something floated inside. Probably gecko shit. Because other than geckos, mosquitoes, frogs, and the plentiful red ants, every spot of the packed mud floor and walls was scrupulously clean. Thrusting the bucket inside the drum, he scooped out clean water. He poured the first mug of water on his torso. His heart jumped to his mouth. He hopped from left to right, right to left. How could the water under the scorching earth be so cold? Inhaling and exhaling slowly, he poured the water below his chest this time. Again, he jerked back, breathless and gasping.

  What a privileged little fucker he’d become. He had lived without heat in the most severe of New York winters. He had taken cold showers in Trinity’s gym every morning before going to class. Where had that Max gone? He poured another bucket of water on his head without worrying about breathing. His head pounded. But he didn’t care anymore. Again and again he poured the water, filling more buckets from the drum until he had washed off all the dirt, grime, sweat, and dead mosquitoes.

  Shivering and wet, he ran into Hari with his broad, freckled brown face when he came out of the bathroom.

  Had fun? His green eyes seemed to smile.

  Yes, Max nodded.

  Hari pointed to the hand pump near Shakti’s hut.

  Ah, so the big drum needed to be replenished with water. Of course there was no housekeeping service in this luxury hotel. Max took the bucket to the hand pump. He had seen hand pumps before in his travels and in movies, though he had never operated one. He picked up the handle tentatively and gave it a little push. Nothing. He raised it up higher and pushed harder. A thin trickle of muddy water came from its mouth. Now he understood its function. He placed the bucket under the pump’s mouth and lifted the handle higher, pushing it down with all his strength. A gush of water ran out, filling a tenth of the bucket. Ten thrusts more were needed to fill just one bucket. He walked back across the mud yard to the bathroom with the full bucket and poured it into the drum. Slightly less than a quarter full. He smiled. What a complete idiot he was. He had used seven or eight buckets in his zeal to get clean. Now he had to fill them up one by one by one and carry them to the bathroom drum until the drum was full again. Half an hour later, he had learned a lesson. Water is precious. It’s even more precious when you replenish it yourself.

  Soon he learned the same lesson about food. Every day they worked for hours in the blazing sun, sowing, plowing, harvesting, and cooking each grain of food themselves. Max plowed the hard earth; Shakti watered, fertilized, and spread the mulch; Ramakrishna harvested the day’s crop; and Hari removed hard stalks and weeds with sharp knives. Then they cooked, Ramakrishna working the huller to remove the millet chaff, Shakti slicing and setting dry wood on the fire, Hari cooking the food, and Max cleaning the dishes. So they went, changing responsibilities every day, united in their quest to break the hard, fallow land and make it yield enough for them and the villagers. Max adapted quickly to eating millet, a cheap rice substitute that looked suspiciously like what the cattle were fed at his uncle’s farm in Greece; eggplant; and a slender green stick-like vegetable called drumstick. Sometimes they combined the three into a curry, sometimes they ate them separately, but it was always these three crops every day in the two meals they had, for the dry land bore nothing else. They tasted like . . . nothing. Just flat, soft, and chewy cud. But Max felt heavy and full after eating them, which when he thought about it was enough.

  15.

  On his fifth morning, the eighth of the ten-day silent cycle, Max didn’t move from his bed when he heard Hari shuffling next door. No, he thought, I can’t keep at it another day. He was done. It wasn’t the hard work in the fields that got to him, though. He actually liked it. Farm work was real work, not pushing paper around or running numbers and creating presentations for pre-alignment meetings before alignment meetings. A thrill passed through his aching, sore muscles every time he forced the plow to break the unforgiving earth. The sun peeled his skin, the wooden plow handle rubbed his palms raw, yet it was miraculous, almost divine, to picture a shoot emerging from a mere seed, breaking the earth, becoming a plant, and sustaining the one that had sowed it.

  Neither, he learned, was he tired of having the same food every day. The passionate discussions on restaurants and menus had always grated on his nerves in New York. Here food was simple, focused, the way it was in his childhood. You ate what came your way, grateful to have a meal at all. It restored your energy and you thought no more of it. Nor did asanas faze him much. He could sense his body changing in just a few sessions—his spine crackled, his hips opened up, and his lower back felt hard and strong. Always a light, anxious sleeper, he was sleeping better than he had in years, perhaps because his mind didn’t wander in a thousand directions all day the way it used to back home. Asanas, pranayama, field work, cooking on the wooden fire—everything required single-minded absorption, so that when it came time to sleep, his mind had been trained to think of just sleep and not the activities of the day.

  Yes, he could’ve made the ashram his home for a bit—if it were not for the silence, that is.

  The silence turned more and more oppressive with each passing day. Not the absence of chatter but the presence of the vast, unending sameness. Just five days in, but each minute felt exactly the same. The scorching sun, the huts, the three impassive faces around him, and the infinite orange mud. Nothing changed. Even more than change, perhaps, he missed control. He wanted to do something to shatter the atmosphere. Order pizza after meditation, sip a Diet Coke on the burning farm, joke with Shakti during asanas, ask Hari where he had got his green eyes—anything that broke the heavy silence. It didn’t feel human. They were just programmed circus monkeys doing acrobatics under the command of a bearded, shining face ringleader. For four days, he had jumped through all the hoops. Now he was done.

  Three-thirty. Hari’s heavy feet shuffled out.

  Today Max wouldn’t get up. Hadn’t Ramakrishna said everything was one’s own choice?

  He turned on his side.

  Heavy inhalation and exhalation sounds outside. They had begun pranayama.

  He turned again.

  No, he wouldn’t get up.

  The sounds stopped. They must be holding their breath.

  How long would they keep holding? He counted one hundred and fifty seconds, then one hundred and ninety seconds, two hundred and ten, four full minutes.

  Jesus, they were still holding.

  Were they holding longer because the weakest link in the chain was absent? But he hadn’t shown them what he was capable of just yet.

  Max jumped out of bed. Today he would hold his breath until he choked and die
d.

  He joined them for the next round.

  They continued the rest of the practice as usual.

  • • •

  FOR THE REST of the day, Max kept planning to quit but didn’t. He wondered if Ramakrishna had drugged his food so he became a bovine, unthinking, unquestioning little hamster, just like the other two. His irritation at Jesus-face Ramakrishna turned to annoyance at himself. The problem wasn’t the silence. It was that he wasn’t silent. Ramakrishna was right. His mind was on fire. It violated every yogic precept Ramakrishna had talked of, claiming it wanted enlightenment when it craved pleasure, coveting the comfort of chatter, committing violence when it thought negatively about Ramakrishna. His mind knew no contentment, no peace, no maturity.

  And meditation was the greatest charade of all. He had thought he would learn quickly. That’s what he had come to India for, after all. He’d read in his yoga books that the human form was incomplete and that the end of suffering lay in reaching a union with permanent consciousness within. But for the three hours he sat cross-legged with his eyes closed trying to empty his mind of thoughts and think of consciousness, he was tormented by the same images. He, twelve years old, putting his black jacket over eight-year-old Sophia’s head when the cops pulled a bent, blood-soaked old woman from a sewer opposite their building. “She looks like a turtle,” Sophia had said later. Max hadn’t been able to stop her from seeing the dead woman. Neither had he been able to stop kids from bullying her in PS 65 after he went to Trinity. Her eyes would be full of tears when she came back from school. Just like Keisha’s eyes were when he left her. He’d been so cruel to Keisha. Her family wasn’t as poor as the rest of the people in their neighborhood and had owned a grocery store and even their own house on Cauldwell Avenue. For years, Keisha, Sophia, and he had studied together in the basement of her house, away from the gunshots and firebombings of Mott Haven. Her father had talked to him about men building colonies on the moon one day; her mother had cooked for him. He wouldn’t have made it to Harvard without their support. In return, he had robbed them of their joy, their life forever. What right do you have to seek peace when you’ve caused so much pain to so many people, Mahadeva? Max, I’m Max, he repeated to himself.

  Just two nights left, eighty percent over, twenty percent to go, it’s over, soon now. No, he was helpless. Without any masks to wear, without the need to front as someone, he had fallen apart. He couldn’t rein in his mind no matter how much he tried to focus on the space between his eyes or observe his breathing. This just wasn’t his path. But where would he go next? New York was too soft; India was too harsh. What did little Goldilocks want?

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT HE dreamed that the water in the hand pump had turned into sulfuric acid. He opened his eyes. A wave of hot bitter liquid surged from his abdomen into his chest. It wasn’t a dream. Ramakrishna had forced sulfuric acid down his throat. No, it was . . . He stumbled out of the hut and puked his guts out in the squat toilet a few yards away from their hut. As he stood over it, vomiting, a grayish-black snake with white bands, ten feet long, slithered away from the toilet bowl toward the open door.

  Fuck, there’s a snake in the toilet, a snake, screamed Max—silently.

  He’d almost stepped on a snake. His stomach contracted and heaved. He vomited again, then squatted on the toilet, and relieved his bowels. So the Delhi belly had struck finally. Or more accurately, the desolate-ashram-with-mud-in-the-hand-pump belly. Why had it taken so long? It should have happened days ago.

  He put his hands against his heated face and staggered up, faint and spinning. Where would he get medicine here? He was dead. Ramakrishna and Hari were waiting for him when he walked outside after scrupulously cleaning up every smear of vomit from the bathroom floor with a rag kept in the corner and washing it with clean water from the drum.

  “How bad is it?” said Hari.

  Finally I made you break your silence, I did, I did, I did, Max exulted, dizzy and incoherent.

  “There is a snake,” said Max and tried to say more, but the words wouldn’t form in his mouth.

  They supported him to his bed and Ramakrishna made him drink a foul-smelling green liquid. Max gulped the hot potion down without protest.

  “Rest today, rest all day,” said Ramakrishna, putting his hand over Max’s burning head.

  Max nodded and slept.

  His watch alarm went off at three-fifteen. He switched it off. As he did, his head exploded, his body burned. He was going to die. But hadn’t he read that a permanent consciousness beyond birth, suffering, and death lay within him? Concentrate on that. Oh, but his stomach hurt so fucking much. He turned to his side and tried to sleep again. His stomach rumbled again. Max rushed to the bathroom.

  • • •

  RAMAKRISHNA WAS SITTING in his usual cross-legged position in the courtyard on his way back. Shakti and Hari would join any time now. Today Max officially had the day off. He went back to his hut. Moments later, he heard Hari shuffling out.

  Max turned on his other side.

  Soft voices outside.

  He turned again.

  Ramakrishna had begun his instructions.

  No, he couldn’t miss this. He sat up in his bed and coughed away the burning feeling in his throat, then joined them in the courtyard.

  You don’t have to, said the expression on Ramakrishna’s face.

  I want to, was Max’s unvoiced response.

  Max’s palms sweated with every pumping of the first pranayama. Shivers ran down his spine. His throat gagged at the end of three rounds. He coughed and had to hurry to discharge the greenish-yellow phlegm in the bathroom. As soon as he did, a pleasant, cool sensation went down his throat and the bitter bile aftertaste subsided. He joined the others and sat back down.

  Likely in response to Max’s condition, Ramakrishna taught them that day a new breath lock, the Uddiyana Bandha, an abdominal purge. They stood up, leaned forward, and forced the stale air inside the torso out, then pulled the abdomen inside the rib cage with a powerful physical contraction. Fifty or sixty times they went, churning the abdomen from left to right, then right to left, again and again, faster and faster like an eddy swirling at maximum speed. At the end of three rounds, Ramakrishna taught them to practice the Maha Bandha, or the Great Breath Lock, a simultaneous application of all three breath locks—chin, abdomen, and perineum.

  Max lay down quivering on the floor after applying the Maha Bandha, too spent to do even a single asana.

  He closed his eyes and didn’t open them again until class ended. When he got up, he wasn’t dizzy anymore. Instead, gusts of fresh air circled through his body. His stomach felt light, his skin pleasantly warm. He walked around shaking his head in disbelief. His mind couldn’t accept what his body told him.

  He felt fine.

  It was a delusion, an exaggerated exuberance from the oversupply of oxygen in the head. Circulating your abdomen like a madman for an hour couldn’t cure something that needed days of rest and medicine. Max went to the bathroom and tried to puke. Nothing. He squatted down. Nothing. Not only was he cleansed of his illness but he felt lighter. He would live another day. Tomorrow he could leave, if he chose.

  • • •

  MAX AWOKE THE next day with tense excitement. Today he could talk—and leave. The brilliance of the asanas and pranayama exercise was unquestionable, he knew now after his symptoms didn’t surface again. But how long could one keep up with the complete silence? Ten more days, perhaps even a month if he pulled in every ounce of reserve, but it had to end sooner rather than later. He had thought that he could handle any hardship because he’d grown up in a kind of urban purgatory, but he was wrong. The self-imposed silence here felt more oppressive than the gunshots and screams of his old neighborhood. Surely he’d find someone like Ramakrishna elsewhere in India and build to excellence in more hospitable conditions.

 
Silence would break after the three-thirty AM asana class. His last class. Max walked to the warm courtyard in the darkness, surprised not to feel the exhilaration he expected after anticipating this moment for days. He sat in his usual spot for the breathing exercises, feeling stronger than he’d ever felt. A lifetime of waste seemed to have been purged from his system. Ramakrishna had done him good. Never before, never again perhaps, would he learn from a man of this stature.

  As the class progressed, hour after hour, each pose felt smoother, more intentional. Then the final bow pose. His last asana in the ashram. Max lay flat on his stomach, pulling his legs off the ground by holding an ankle in each hand behind him. He straightened his arms and pulled his legs higher until only his navel touched the ground. His lungs filled up. Warmth spread through his spine. His neck strained. The blazing sun above was so close. He pulled his legs with all his strength. Suddenly his navel lifted a little off the ground. A rush of air went to his head. His navel touched the ground again.

  For a moment, he had flown.

  Stunned, he looked up at Ramakrishna standing beside him. Ramakrishna’s face was impassive as usual.

  Of course he hadn’t flown. It must have just felt like it. Right?

  “You are better today, I see,” said Ramakrishna.

  That was when Max knew he wouldn’t leave. Not until he reached a shadow of Ramakrishna’s greatness. Selflessly opening his doors to strangers; offering everything his land produced to others before taking a morsel himself; a mind restrained and composed, not restless and hungry. Max had come to India to become a yogi, a Ramakrishna. How could he think of leaving for petty comforts like hot showers and mindless chatter?

  Max got up, breathless, his face warm, his body pulsing with streams of energy. He had never felt this way after asanas. He felt giddy. Maybe he had flown. The air was electric with possibility. He breathed deeply to calm himself down.