by Karan Bajaj
She looked at her watch. “Almost eleven. If we do not start now, we will burn up, walking six miles to town.”
They put on their backpacks and lifted the sacks above their heads and walked back to the village. Max was heady and light. The images from his past that had been tormenting him for months had receded. He felt Shakti’s touch on his skin, a loose strand of her auburn hair below his eyes, the smell of her sweat. He stole a glance at her determined, sure face. His eyes stung. She was beautiful.
21.
Something felt different. Max hadn’t been to the village in three months, choosing to stay in the ashram even on days silence broke, so he couldn’t put his finger on it. What was it? He looked around. Everything was just as he remembered. The thirty-odd huts in a neat semicircle, the giant well in the center of the huts, the shop selling cigarettes and sundry items on the far right, the weaver’s shop on the left, the fields with their hardened earth ahead. Why did it look so different, then? It struck him then. He couldn’t hear a sound. The village was completely silent. There was no one around. No women huddling at the wells, no children playing with marbles, not a single farmer plowing the fields, no weaver working in the shop. No words, no whispers, no sign of life.
“Where is everybody?” asked Shakti, her words a shout in the eerie silence.
They approached the hut where the man who usually took their food sacks lived. The wooden door was open. A man lay on the mud floor. His skin looked like the earth—patchy, dry, and black. The man raised a bony hand in greeting. It took Max a moment to recognize him as the erect, proud man who had greeted him the last time they had come with the crops.
Max and Shakti put the sacks in front of him.
His withered, dry face broke into a smile. He said something. Max bent closer. He wanted Max to call the others in the village. They knocked on all the doors. Fifteen or twenty women and a couple of old men shuffled out. Heat and hunger seemed to have driven their modesty away. Their rags showed most of their burned, blackened bodies, their hair was unkempt, and their movements were slow and unsure. They had entered the land of the living dead.
The women stared at the food sacks with bright eyes. They smiled through their cracked lips and stained teeth. Three of them lifted one of the sacks and carried it inside to the tall man’s hut. The others came closer to Max and Shakti and touched their feet, mumbling their gratitude.
Max stood there staring at the food sacks he hadn’t wanted to part with.
“Where are all the men?” said Shakti.
They learned that the men had gone to Madurai, the nearest city twelve hours by bus from Pavur, to find work after farming became impossible in the village.
A middle-aged woman pointed fiercely to a hut on the far left, gesturing that they should go there. The tall man tried to dissuade her, but she persisted.
They walked through the scorching land and entered the hut. The rancid smell of human waste. Two thin boys, five or six years old, whom Max had often bought snacks for and joked with, were huddled together naked on a bed strung together by ropes. They breathed heavily, making loud, scratchy sounds. Max looked away from their scared eyes.
The woman folded her hands. Her eyes begged them to do something. Again and again she raised her arms, praying and begging.
They had been fucking less than a mile away.
Max indicated she should give them the food they’d brought immediately. But he knew the futility of his suggestion. The three sacks of food would be three meals for one day for a village in the throes of a drought. There wasn’t enough food to go around. Today two kids would die, tomorrow some more and then a few more. Hunger, starvation, death were right at his doorstep. How could he have been so selfish, so oblivious? Ramakrishna had been right. They’d had more than enough to eat. Max gripped Shakti’s hand.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?” she said.
“Pavur. Somewhere. There must be an ATM or a bank nearby. I have money,” he said.
She started to say something, but her words were drowned by the anguished cries of the woman. They walked out of the hut, past the two-hundred-foot well, which didn’t seem to contain a drop of water, away from the charred bodies collecting near the hut they had kept the food in. Limp, weary hands waved at them.
A middle-aged man ran toward them with obvious effort.
He lifted his shirt and pointed to his waist.
Max didn’t understand.
“Help. Kidney. Buy kidney,” said the man.
The man wanted to sell his kidney for money. Max had read about impoverished donors selling kidneys to needy, rich people. It hadn’t struck him with any urgency then. Just as droughts hadn’t.
Instead of pity, anger surged within him. Didn’t this happen every year? How could these people be so unprepared, so oblivious? Why did they choose to live here?
The man fell on Max’s feet, pleading.
Max brushed him off. “No need. I will get money,” he said.
They turned around and walked out of the village.
“How many villages will you give money?” said Shakti on the dirt track to Pavur.
He stared at her.
“There are small villages all around,” she said pointing to the huts along the road. “It is the same everywhere. How much money can you give?”
His initial irritation disappeared. Shakti was right, logical as usual. What he gave wouldn’t be a drop in the ocean for this village, let alone the millions of people dying of starvation in the hundreds of villages all over the world. Half of this world lived on less than a dollar a day. Just because he had seen a few kids die didn’t mean it began or ended here. Why did it happen? The questions hadn’t changed since he had begun his journey.
“I also think they put on little show for us,” said Shakti.
Max understood. The villagers knew they were coming that day, so they hadn’t made any effort to hide their needs.
“I read before I came here. Drought and famine are very bad in India but no mass deaths anymore. We were worse off than the villagers. The government sends water tankers to the village every few days. At Ramakrishna’s ashram, we had nothing,” she said. “Farmers’ problems are inflation and debt, not food grain itself.”
Max figured the villagers were likely taking on debt to tide themselves through the drought and the men were working menial jobs in Madurai city to pay them off. So the villagers probably had a little more to eat and drink than they had shown. Maybe the boys on the rope bed would breathe less heavily if Max and Shakti weren’t around. Sure, he was being manipulated, but it changed nothing. Misery was written large on their faces. The cycle of hunger and debt and more hunger and more debt would go on.
“The planet can’t support so many people. There has to be an end to this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” said Max.
Even as he articulated this half-formed thought, he realized he was running away from the one man who could show him the end of suffering. Why? To have more drumsticks and eggplant? While he was busy angling for an extra bowl of millet and fucking in the fields, the world had continued to spin in its uncaring way. He had come so close to seeing a glimmer of the truth but been distracted once again.
“I’m going to go back to Ramakrishna,” he said after a minute. “I’ll withdraw whatever money I can from the ATM, buy supplies for the village, and walk right back.”
Shakti tied her bandanna around her hair. “I think that is wise,” she said.
“Will you come?”
She shook her head. “Nothing changes for me.”
“Yet you say it’s smart for me to go back?” he said.
“The path of liberation is like poison in beginning, nectar in the end. The path of the world is nectar in beginning, always poison in end,” she said. “Quoting as it is from Bhagavad Gita.”
“So come with
me,” he said.
“I do not want to think about the future. I want nectar now,” she said.
A boy waved at them from a hut on the side of the dirt track. Max waved back distractedly. “And I should have poison?” he said.
“I think you cannot help it,” she said.
A light, empty feeling arose in his gut. He was afraid of going back without Shakti. “Is it safe to live with so little food?” he said.
“If Ramakrishna is okay all these years, you will be okay too. You are strong like him. I try to keep up with you all these months,” she said.
“I was keeping up with you,” he said.
They arrived at the bus stand. Shakti bought a ticket for the bus to Madurai. They kept their backpacks down and hugged. Tears fell from both their eyes. She touched his face.
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “All these ups and downs are just small waves in the yoga of your discontent.”
“The yoga of my discontent?”
“In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s sorrow shows him the path to unite with the universal consciousness. That’s why Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna Vishada Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna’s despondency,” she said. “Your discontent with the world as it is will lead you to your union.”
She waved at him and went inside the bus. Max waved back, a lump forming in his throat. He willed himself to feel nothing. It had to start from here. The narrow need for comfort and companionship had to be burned in the fire of a broader, universal love. The bus left. Max walked over to the shop with the phone, feeling an aching sadness in his heart.
• • •
MAX CALLED HIS BANK, concentrating on remembering long-forgotten security questions, and maxed out his ATM’s international withdrawal limit. He left the shop and withdrew $2,000 in rupees from the ATM next to the bus stand, enough for the village to survive the season if they bought the essentials of grains and lentils. On his way back to the village, Max stopped in front of the hardware store with the Internet connection. He hesitated. He had to break free from the pull of the world, go deeper within. But he couldn’t stop himself from entering the store.
Biscuits and chips strung on the façade, shelves full of machine parts, and the proprietor sitting on a chair in the relative coolness of the dark shop interior—everything seemed glaringly opulent in contrast to the sparseness of the ashram and the village. He connected to the Internet, barely noticing how slow it was. To touch the cold metal of the laptop, to know how to operate it, and have an email account itself made him aware of the vastness of his privilege.
Petty, irrelevant noise entered his silent life as soon as he opened his email. Jobs being changed, houses being bought, babies being welcomed. He skimmed through everything quickly, stopping only at an email from Sophia.
Maxi, I got admitted to Stern . . . I know you’ll be surprised I’m going to B-School but I gotta make some money! Else I’ll end up back in the projects . . . I’ve realized now I was just trying to be different from you. Send me news. Oh and I’ve met someone! He’s great . . . he’s helping me think through a lot of things.
Max was surprised. Sophia had always been so driven by purpose and meaning. He couldn’t see her working in a corporation. Was she okay? She didn’t seem as self-contained and thoughtful as she usually was. He didn’t quite like the sound of the guy she had met.
Max walked back to the shop with the phone. He dialed Sophia’s number from memory. It went to voicemail. Max disconnected the phone. He wouldn’t call her again. If he wanted to become the universal, he had to transcend this narrow love, these binding attachments that fed one’s sense of self. Not that she needed him. She was twenty-six and going to graduate school, not a mother of two trying to feed her children in the middle of a drought.
Outside the shop, Max began throwing his clothes out of the backpack with a vengeance. He returned to the village with a bag full of powdered glucose, water bottles, biscuits, fruits, lentils, and rice—and just enough diesel for the tractor ride to Ramakrishna’s ashram and back.
• • •
IN THE VILLAGE CHIEF’S HUT, he succumbed to the villagers’ insistence of sharing a portion of their meager rations. They treated him like a messiah. I’m nobody, he wanted to scream at their dried, torn faces. Just someone born in easier circumstances he didn’t work for in this life. A bony, charred young woman served him potatoes and biscuits. She looked roughly the same age as Sophia, but this woman’s future would be as black as her past. Could he help her? Could anyone? Who knew if her pain was the effect of actions from lives past or just a random act of nature? All he knew was that the world was imperfect and an ancient path promised perfection. Now he would walk the path afresh to get answers back for all. Max looked at the woman’s sallow face and couldn’t taste the potatoes anymore. He had lost his taste for food forever and was glad for it. So fleeting and capricious was the joy of the senses, these external pleasures. Nothing would distract him in his search for the permanent truth within.
Max made his way back later that evening once the driver had his fill of the cooked food Max brought for him. Ramakrishna greeted him at the gates with his silent smile. Despite Max’s protestations, he insisted on sweeping the floors of his hut and making his bed just as he had done the first time. It was as if he was welcoming a guest other than the one who had left.
22.
The rain came three weeks later. First a trickle, then a torrent, breaking the land open and making it soft and malleable again. They planted six columns of new seeds after the first rain, adding rice and tomatoes to their usual three. The bore well filled. The hand pump worked again. Crops sprouted, as did insects, and with them came frogs and snakes. New life. Despite the now-abundant food and the luxury of being able to choose between rice and millet, Max stuck to eating one meal a day. And he did well with it. His strength returned, his constipation eased, and he found that he could do asanas and field work with more intensity than before.
The monsoon brought new visitors. A Portuguese couple who had cycled for eighteen months from Portugal through Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan and finally into India. Ultimately they realized the futility of endlessly chasing new sights and sounds, abandoned their plans of going to Nepal, sold their bicycles in India, and embarked on the more perilous journey of looking inside. They lasted two weeks.
They were followed by a Sri Lankan artist who wanted to make herself an instrument of the universal creative force. She left in a week, as did the Indian software engineer who had started to feel life was an elaborate charade. Others came and went. Max talked to them eagerly in the beginning. Soon, though, he fell silent like Hari, became reflective like Shakti. With each passing face, he understood more and more what dying would feel like. He’d remember a collage of faces and smiles—and bid them a final good-bye, knowing he hadn’t unmasked the eternal truth. New faces would keep coming. The chatter would go on. None of it would take him closer to his goal of completion, of reaching a spiritual whole with the infinite. Every moment now was dedicated to learning, giving, dissolving his small self. Nothing else mattered.
Now he worked in the field without thought of enjoyment or pain and surrendered his body to the universe’s will in his asana practice. His actions were that of a yogi, neither white nor black, just colorless. He was determined to break the cause-effect cycle, produce no reactions, no impressions, neither good nor bad. Slowly he was untethering himself from life.
His meditation deepened. One day he saw a bright yellow light in the space between his closed eyes. Liquid warmth surged through his body. The next day the light became brighter. Bells chimed somewhere within him. Max opened his eyes. The chiming stopped. The bells tolled again when he closed his eyes. Deep, sonorous, melodic, tugging at his heartstrings. Bright yellow light pulsed from his head to his body. Was this the divine—unknown lights and mystical sounds, the feeling of complete warmth and pea
ce?
“Don’t be distracted. Don’t get attached to lights and sounds. They are just signposts that you are on the right path, not the end of the path. Keep working hard.” The words Ramakrishna had said once long ago remained in his head.
So Max did exactly that. He slept less and less, sometimes two hours a night, sometimes not at all. His dreams ceased, probably because his mind was at rest. More blinding lights appeared with the passing of the months—yellow, orange, red—and they stayed for longer and longer. Late one night when he was meditating in his hut, a hollow, guttural sound originated in the bottom of his spine. The sound traveled up and down his spine before reverberating in the depths of his heart. Max felt weightless, floating, dissolving into the sound. Radiant white light filled the space between his eyes. The light disappeared. He was submerged in infinite black space. From the blackness emerged the sun, moons, galaxies, stars, and hundreds of red planets. They whirled rapidly in a circle, crashing against one another, and turned into large glaciers, mountains, oceans, and flat land. Max shuddered. All of creation lay within him. He opened his eyes to a bright morning.
Ramakrishna hadn’t shaken him out of his meditation for asana class that day. Perhaps he knew that Max had felt for the first time the presence of the creating energy, the causeless cause within him. For Max realized the sound that emerged in his spine was Om, the root in every sound, the word that had vibrated in the act of creation. He had read of the mystical Om in books at the ashram, but he had never experienced it until that day. Om vibrated again and again within him in the days that followed. Soon Max’s nagging worries about his future began to disappear. This body, this mind that tormented him wasn’t him. The Dutch yoga teacher and the mother of two from Texas, who were staying at the ashram that week, were no different from him. Clay made pots, pans, plates, bricks, and houses, but the real nature of all of them was the same clay. One consciousness vibrated everywhere, in everything. Om, the vibration of that consciousness, filled his body and mind, slowly dissolving the images lingering in his mind. Keisha’s face became hazier. Shakti standing at the bus stop, waving good-bye, shimmered and disappeared. His mother’s yellow, contorted face and Andre’s limp, lifeless legs were mere wrinkles on the surface of the pot. Their real nature was unaffected. Other faces touched, hands held, promises made, conversations had—all were receding, disappearing into the growing void within him.