by Karan Bajaj
I’m merely seeing the painting of the moon, Max; you have a chance at seeing the moon.
Often he would stand at the cave entrance and stare at the half-moon above him, thinking of Anand’s words from years ago. Why was the truth still eluding Max? He was no closer to experiencing the peace and stillness of pure consciousness than he’d been when he had first started his journey. He thought of karma and the laws of cause and effect. Were these memories of pain that never left his side just the effect of the pain he had caused himself?
I hear this after giving my life to you both.
His mother’s shaking voice rang in his ears. Max had blamed her for their poverty, for getting pregnant with him at nineteen, for not planning her life better—all because he was angry at her after he abandoned Keisha. But it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t even known Keisha was pregnant. Max had been afraid to tell her because she had always wanted him to leave the projects and never look back. The baby’s cries resounded in the cave. Max put his hands over his ears. He had denied a life the chance to work out its karma. Could there be a worse crime? His mother had devoted her life to Sophia and him. Keisha had loved him. Sophia and Andre had cared for him. He had abandoned everyone. All he had given them in return was pain.
For so many lives, Max had hurt, damaged, destroyed. A Scottish minister who had left his young wife to live alone in the mountains. The Israeli woman who could never really love her children and resented them for caging her. Max shuddered as the images from his innumerable past lives arose in his mind. Could there be an end to this endless cycle of causing and begetting suffering? He’d read of ascetics who inflicted pain upon themselves to speed up the universe’s retribution for their misdeeds rather than allow nature to take its course. Could penance be his salvation?
• • •
LATE ONE WINTER AFTERNOON when the snow pounded the cave and the temperature dropped several degrees below zero, Max lifted his left arm up and decided not to put it down again until he achieved his goal. He relished the searing pain in his muscles and resisted the urge to tighten and untighten his fist. He wouldn’t allow himself even the slightest relief. This time he wouldn’t run away from his past the way he had at Ramakrishna’s ashram. The effects of his past bad karma had to be burned away to dust. Only then could he be free from the bondage of cause and effect, destroy the individual and become the universal.
He kept his arm raised when he ate and performed his evening samyama. The stabbing pain went from his arm to his shoulder socket to his neck and skull when he lay down at night. Blood rushed to his forehead. His head pounded. Max looked up at the black stone roof of the cave and thanked the universe for his discomfort. He didn’t put his arm down that night. Finally, some choice he had made was working.
The next morning, Max went out of the cave to relieve himself. He struggled with unfastening and fastening his pants. When he came back in, he stripped off his clothes. He didn’t need them here anyway. The discomfort of the cold was also good.
The sharp burning sensation in his muscles turned into a blazing fire the next morning. Tears streamed down his eyes. Max vomited and felt a little better. By afternoon, it felt as if someone was sawing off his arm with a sharp knife. Electric shock waves ripped through his body. The images from his past receded into the growing red blur in his forehead. Yes, his penance was working.
By the next morning, the pain was steady and constant. Max struggled to light a fire with one hand, eventually succeeding in finding a jagged edge of a rock to rub against the magnesium stick. He lit a small fire and slept again after eating a bit of chickpeas and rice.
When he awoke in the evening, he could feel the old farmer-driver from the village driving a large, red tractor over his arm again and again, wanting to cut off every nerve, every vein in it. Shakti’s pealing laughter resounded in the cave. You won’t rest until you see him face-to-face, Max.
He looked at his arm with detachment. This pain wasn’t him. This body wasn’t him. The mind that classified this numbing, grating sensation as agony wasn’t him. He could overcome this. It was simple.
32.
Max didn’t put his arm down through that month. His muscles withered. The pain refused to relent, but he didn’t think much of it anymore. Melting snow and foraging for roots became more difficult with one hand, so Max just ate less. Hunger was good, necessary. He couldn’t have left the cave, anyway. One storm crashed after another that winter. Max lit small fires to keep the snow from depositing on the entrance. The temperature dropped. One day he caught a cold. He was more surprised than discomfited by it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. His body was immune to petty illnesses. Max did pranayama to expunge it, but he couldn’t churn his abdomen at the same speed as before. His belly kept colliding against his spine, making him cry out in pain. The cold stayed. Another sign of purification. He lay down at the back of the cave waiting for it to pass.
A hazy fog filled the space between his eyes. He was slipping, falling into blackness, into infinity, progressing closer to his goal.
• • •
MAX WOKE UP after a day, maybe two, with his throat parched. He had eaten most of the snow on the cave floor, so he forced himself to get up. Dizzy, his head spinning, he crawled to the cave’s mouth. Just a light snowfall. Max stumbled outside. He picked himself up, carefully keeping his left arm raised, and walked a little in the fresh snow. When he felt faint again, he knelt down on the ice. The afternoon sun cast a reddish-orange shadow on the sea of white around him. Max cupped his palm and collected a few snowflakes. His tongue stung. He forced himself to eat more.
Clouds covered the sun. The white mountains turned a glittery silver in the fading light. The stream shimmered in the still air. He looked around. No sign of Baba Ramdas, no sign of anyone, just silence, pure stillness. This world, it was so soft, so beautiful. Max began to cry.
Through his tears, he crawled back inside the cave. The feathery whiteness below him was colored with specks of red. He turned around. A trail of blood followed him inside. Max inspected his body dispassionately. Something had scraped his thigh. A steady stream of blood trickled from it. He should get the herb that grew right behind the cave and healed wounds. Maybe in the evening. All he wanted now was to lie down and fill his heart with the shining stream and silver cliffs. They were so symmetrical, so beautiful. Fresh tears came to his eyes.
A scorpion scuttled up his torso. Max didn’t want to brush it off and hurt it. He let it inch up his ribs to his neck and dry lips. Everything was one consciousness. Beautiful. Max closed his eyes. The scorpion made its way farther up, opening its pincers wide. Max slept peacefully.
When he woke up, the cave was black. The scorpion had gone. He was alone, all alone. Just him and the infinite blackness. He should get the herb. He pushed himself up. His open wound stared at him. Deep, red, rich, alive, stunning. Max lay down again.
His body burned. He moved from his thin sheet. His naked body touched the cold, rocky floor. It felt so good, so comfortable. Finally he was at peace.
• • •
LOUD RUMBLING awoke Max. The cave shook and lifted slowly. He circled around in space, weightless, floating, slowly landing on the rocks below. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. The mountain roared again. The sound was within him. He moved and churned with the mountain. A chunk of cave broke open from the top. Bright, dazzling white light flashed across the black sky. Sheets of rain rippled from the blackness, washing over Max. Small bits of snow splattered through the hole. He didn’t move. The light snow brushed against his face. So miraculous was this play of nature, this relative world, incomplete yet so magical. He didn’t mind returning for another lifetime. Max closed his eyes.
• • •
BABA RAMDAS WAS shaking him. Max awoke and stared into his shining black eyes. Outside, it thundered, deep and powerful. The cave shook again. In sign language, Baba Ramdas urged him to come outside. Max didn
’t want to leave. Baba Ramdas persisted. Max limped out slowly, careful to keep his arm raised, shivering. A mountain of snow had piled in front of the caves. Max looked up. The tall cliff was stripped bare. Three caves in the row of seven had collapsed. An avalanche. Baba Ramdas pointed to the black, starless sky, the air saturated with the smell of moisture. There will be more, his eyes said. Max nodded absently. He limped back into the cave and lay down again, staring at the sky through the hole.
White flashes. Another storm was coming. Maybe it would take this cave and Max along with it. This body would be shed away like a worn coat. He’d wear another coat. He was so tired already. Next time perhaps he’d be different, better—a good son, a kinder brother, a selfless father, someone capable of love. Max closed his eyes.
• • •
MORE THUNDER. FOOTSTEPS. Baba Ramdas came in with something in a leaf. Again he asked Max to come out with him. Max shook his head. There was nowhere to go, no one to see. He had abandoned everyone. Baba Ramdas lowered his black eyes, set the leaf plate down, and sat beside Max. He pressed his right palm against Max’s open hand. Their eyes met. Baba Ramdas stood up and disappeared into the snow.
Max looked at the plate. Millet and eggplant. He smiled. The same meal he’d eaten every day for three years at the ashram. Such happy, simple times. He went back to sleep without eating.
• • •
WHEN HE AWOKE, the snowflakes spiraled slowly in the grayness above him, ice crystals shining in them. White light lit up the sky again and again. A glassy, fluid membrane shimmered over the flakes. He closed his eyes.
Sophia’s snow globe. She would stare at it for hours. There it was, sitting atop the lone table in the room the three of them shared. There she was, the little girl smiling with her half-broken tooth. She never got gifts in real life, but the snow globe was always full of gifts.
Max opened his eyes. He stared through the fog in his forehead. The cave’s mouth was half covered by snow. New flakes deposited on top. He would be buried in soon. Max closed his eyes again.
The snowflakes in the globe circled slowly. Sleigh bells sounded. Village children played with sticks at the mouth of the cave. A woman with a blackened, charred body stretched out a hand to him. His mother.
I chose her womb.
The snow globe sparkled above him.
His guilt, his loss, his sadness, every experience, every emotion from every life had led him to his mother’s womb, to this cave, this bid for salvation. His past wasn’t separate from him. He was meant to make his mistakes.
Trembling, Max sat up. He ate the millet and eggplant. Blood trickled up his veins. The cave’s mouth was filling up. Max crawled to his T-shirt and pants and put them on, the cloth rubbing harshly against the cuts and bruises on his skin. Shivering, he walked over to his backpack and pulled out his jacket. Max put his good right arm in its sleeve. His left arm hung limp and lifeless by his side. He concentrated on his left hand’s fingers, pushing them to move. Nothing. Max stumbled to the front of the cave, jacket flapping by his side. He pushed his body through the fresh deposit of snow and stepped out into the moonlit night. He had failed, he knew that now. But perhaps his body could still be of use to Sophia, to someone.
• • •
RAIN WASHED OVER HIM. Max walked over to the edge of the glimmering lake. He took a tentative step forward. No, he no longer had enough concentration. He turned around and walked along the stream, past the empty cave of Baba Ramdas, who had likely left for Gangotri, knowing that the snowstorms and avalanches weren’t likely to relent that night. Max walked up a glacier cliff, circling around to the other side of the stream. The sky lit up around him, like fireworks on July Fourth. The patchy roof of their building. A jug of lemonade. You never give up easy, his mother had said when they both knew she was dying and yet he had suggested another surgery. The wind knocked Max down again and again. He got up, holding on to the cliff tighter each time to avoid being blown off. He reached the other side and made his way down the mountain, shaking his left arm, trying to get it to work again.
• • •
THE MOUNTAIN RUMBLED.
Max stopped.
A crash.
Max looked up. A giant wave of white swirled above him. It rippled down slowly from the top of the cliff, blanketing trees in its path, hungry to envelop him, to take him along with it. Shards of ice rained on him.
A large black boot fell out of the ice.
Max broke out of his trance. He threw himself down and dug his fingernails into the snow, grabbing on to rocks, plants, grooves in the ice, anything. The avalanche swept over him. He slipped faster and faster.
A tree stump. Max rolled over it and held on to it with all his strength. His left hand, which had been so powerless, suddenly held. A giant slab of ice crashed a few yards in front of him. White powder. Blue ice stung his face. The mountain crumbled around him. Max burrowed a hole in the ice around the tree, forcing his left fingers to move faster, digging furiously, widening the hole until it formed a little pit. He entered it. For the rest of the night, he pummeled and pushed back the snow filling up the hole as blocks of ice crashed around him. When the mountain finally stopped shaking late in the night, he dug himself out of the pit.
He walked through the blizzard blindly, guided by a fading image somewhere in the shadows of his mind.
• • •
IN THE DISTANCE, Max saw a solitary light. As he walked closer to it, he knew it was the old Bhojbasa guesthouse. He had returned after all these years, the same wet, shivering, shaking, broken man. Max limped closer. He sat on the ice in front of the door, breathing slowing, moving his left wrist in circles, trying to shake off his dizziness and get a grip on himself.
After a while he stood up. As calmly as he could, he knocked on the front door.
The same old woman opened the door, her skin splotched with large patches of red. Without a word, she ushered him in.
Max stumbled inside.
She didn’t seem to recognize Max, nor did Max feel the urge to jog her memory.
The room was still sparsely furnished, with just a thick rug and a chair next to the fireplace. Max sat on the rug.
“I get food,” said the woman.
Max nodded, his eyes mellow with tears. The woman left. Max huddled inside the blankets she had handed him and warmed his blackened, bony hands above the fire. Some of his fingers had turned violet and felt as hard as wood. His left arm was now just bone with skin stretched tight on it. He shook it. The wooden door opened and shut again and again, letting in gusts of icy air. Max wrapped himself up tight in three layers of blankets and stared at the blinding flashes outside the windows.
He had failed.
• • •
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Max awoke on the rug on the floor and drank the whole bottle of lukewarm water lying next to him. Exhausted by the effort, he slept again, waking only to go to the tin shack bathroom outside the guesthouse. The ice pierced his naked feet. He came back and huddled inside his blankets on the cold, wooden floor.
• • •
THE OLD WOMAN’S white sari brushed against his face.
“I heat food now,” she said.
Max nodded gratefully. He stared up at the tin roof and listened to the rhythmic opening and closing of the front door, trying to stay awake.
• • •
THE OLD WOMAN was shaking him gently.
“You eat now. You not eat in two days,” she said.
Max nodded again, trying to keep his eyes open.
The woman returned with a large plate.
Max sat up cross-legged. Bread, lentils, beans, yogurt—the food before him could last a month in the mountain. Max began to protest but stopped. He had failed. He had to enter the world of mortals again. He ate slowly, reacquainting himself with flavor and spices. Solid pieces went down his gullet, hitting
the inside of his ribs. Blood crept up his veins slowly.
“I have money,” said Max.
His lips hurt. The door thrust open. Max shivered in the icy gust, staring at the old woman’s half Indian, half Oriental face. He wanted to say more.
“Not worry about money. Just eat. You are thin. Not healthy at all,” said the woman.
Max folded his hands. He stared into her sunken yellow face and pale gray eyes. She was dying too. Sophia’s heavy face appeared before him. Tears began to fall down his face. He wanted to get up and touch the old woman’s feet to show his gratitude, but his eyes closed again.
The door banged shut.
33.
For days Max did little besides eat and sleep in front of the fire. Disconnected, dreamlike fragments slipped in and out of his mind. A girl, two children running, an iron slide, a man shivering, an army officer falling off a train, someone dying in a bed of snow, a slender woman with long, silky hair, an earthquake, a flood. His right hand’s little finger and left hand’s middle and index fingers blackened, shriveled, and went dead. Mechanically he applied the herb paste the old woman gave him at the base of his fingers. The paste helped his lifeless fingers fall off without pain.
Slowly the wounds in his hands and legs healed. His left arm began to move on command—painfully at first, but little by little with less discomfort. His body didn’t burn with fever anymore. He limped around the bare room, touching the wooden door that kept banging open and shut, adjusting the logs in the fireplace, running his hands over the crumbling timber walls, pressing his bare feet on the wooden floor, adapting to life again.