by Karan Bajaj
“I believe in karma, in impersonal laws, in cause and effect,” he said.
“All yogis who come here say this, but their faces not happy,” said Nani Maa.
Max stared at her, struck by the sharpness of her diagnosis.
Nani Maa’s hands shook, rattling the teacup. She looked up at him with her dying yellow eyes. “Must be something. Energy, something good somewhere,” she said.
Her scared eyes grew bigger. She set the cup down and gripped Max’s hands. “What happens to me after I die? What happens on the other side?” she said in Nepali.
Max held her hands tight. Without trying, he slipped into a state of deep concentration. He was a girl in the mountains, a young wife and mother in the plains, a woman alone once again. A middle-aged woman put a tin roof on an abandoned house in the mountains, lay the wooden floor, hauled food and supplies from the village, and ate one spare meal a day. Her skin was drying, hair falling. Redness entered her swollen eyes. She was older, tired, dying. Cold hands. Blackness. A flash of light. A Caucasian kid smiling, laughing, playing with toys under a Christmas tree in a brightly furnished living room.
Max shook out of his samyama. Her skin felt warm in his hands.
“You have lived a life of service,” said Max slowly in Nepali. “You will be born again in a kind womb.”
“Not always, not always,” she replied in Nepali, tears in her eyes. “I was selfish. I left my old parents alone. That’s why I am dying alone too. I am selfish now. You have been kind to me, yet I could not bring myself to help you.”
“You saved my life, not once but twice,” said Max. “You don’t remember the first time I came here.”
“I remember. I remember every day,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “Years ago, you asked me about a man when you came. You weren’t ready then. This time I wasn’t ready,” she said.
Surprised, Max recalled their conversation from years ago.
“The doctor from Brazil?” he said.
Nani Maa nodded. She slumped back from the wall to her mattress. “He used to stop here on his way up in the winters. Later, too many people came looking for him and he left the Garhwal Himalayas. Before he went, he told me to share with serious seekers who asked for him that he was going to live in a forest in Bhumthang in Bhutan. But you weren’t ready for him when you came years ago.”
“And I’m ready now?” said Max.
She nodded.
“I couldn’t even walk when I came this time. And look at me now,” he said, pointing to the missing fingers on his hands.
“I saw you then. I see you now. Your eyes were silent when you came this time. They remained calm through the pain. They are even calmer now,” she said. “You should go to him. Bhutan is not far if you cut directly through the hills, maybe three or four weeks away.”
Max took a deep breath. He pictured walking through the snowcapped mountains and entering yet another remote land where a man awaited him with a promise of deliverance. He felt a sliver of excitement. If he started walking now, he’d reach his destination in April. It would be sunny and warm then and he’d be able to renew his efforts afresh. Maybe then he could return with the answers he sought.
“I should have told you before,” said Nani Maa.
Max saw the fear of death in her jaundiced eyes. She hadn’t wanted to die alone. Max pictured himself walking in the forest toward the man, toward his goal. His face melted and turned into the fierce Naga Baba’s face, the squat yogi’s, the shivering young man, the Standing Baba, Shakti, Hari, the kneeling Scottish Catholic priest, and other agitated, restless faces smeared with ash, silhouettes wearing orange robes and yellow garlands, rotating beads in their hands, wandering through buffalo shrines and ice formations in caves, throwing holy water on babies, praying to crucifixes, chanting, muttering, singing. They had all trusted in someone else, something beyond themselves, and the truth had eluded them. All of them clung to one belief or another with the same rigidity people of the world held on to their families and jobs. He had been no different. Why did he want to become one with the eternal consciousness? How did he know it even existed? Lifting your arm up to let go of your sense of self was no different than clinging to your child to further your sense of self. One ambition couldn’t be replaced by another, an old attachment with a new belief. He had learned the simplicity of living, just being, when he was with Ramakrishna. He needed nothing more to go on. No new guru or belief would be his refuge. No longer would he be at war against human nature and be attached to the idea of detachment.
“Keep his secret safe. Perhaps it will be of use to someone else,” said Max.
“You won’t go?” she said. “He is a great man.”
Max shook his head.
“I was scared,” she said. Tears fell from her eyes. “My body was weak. If anything happened, if I broke my leg, I would die slowly in this snow. Then you came, and I just held on. So many times I was about to tell you, but I couldn’t. I don’t know what came over me.”
Max held her bony hand. He touched her face. “I don’t want to meet another great man,” he said. “I want to be here with you.”
36.
Nani Maa stopped eating completely in March. Her shriveled frame was racked by coughs. She moaned softly every time Max moved her to clean her waste, just wanting to be still. Max knew her body was shutting down, so he didn’t force her to have food. All day and night she slept, sometimes peacefully, sometimes waking up, shaking with terror, shouting incoherently.
“Tell Daggu he has to take the last train out. They won’t spare him. Please,” she would shout and burst into tears.
Max would put his hand over her head and calm her down.
Nani Maa would sleep again and not wake up until the next nightmare a day or two later. Soon her pulse fell and her jaw slackened. The red splotches covered her whole body. She took long pauses between breaths. Max knew she would die any moment now. Sensing it could rain any day, he collected dry wood for her cremation.
• • •
LATE ONE NIGHT Nani Maa shook Max awake. She was sitting next to him in a bright red sari, a touch of color in her sunken face. Drops of water fell from her bald head. Her cold, wet fingers found Max’s. She was shivering.
“The Ganges is so cold,” she said.
Max lifted her wet, shivering frame and put her on the rug by the fire.
She stared at Max and opened her mouth. Her teeth chattered. “Will you stay here?” she said weakly. “This is all I have. Someone has to keep it, take care of the people . . .”
Max looked into her eyes. He saw his mother, whose attachment to her children and work had grown in the end. Even goodness shackled a person. Every concept bound. We all built houses on the sand, destined to fade away in dust. Max was gripped by the same melting, dissolving feeling he’d had years ago in the village near Pavur. He was breaking into pieces, falling, fluid, boundaryless, merging into Nani Maa, just one giant heart that felt her fear, her sadness, her goodness, her pride, her love, like his own. Tears stung his eyes, but it was her eyes that were red and watering. He was shivering from the bath she’d taken in the Ganges. His throat was tightening, she was dying.
Max coughed, trying to get a grip on himself.
He put his hand over Nani Maa’s wet, cold head. Her eyes shut. Max covered her with a blanket. All night he sat by her side, holding her hand, listening to her labored sighs, a strange stillness growing within him.
• • •
NANI MAA DIED the next day. Max lifted her thin gray body from the rug, carried it outside, and put it over the dried wood. He piled more wood on top of her body and lit the pyre. When it was over, when her body had been consumed by the fire, he walked to the banks of the Ganges and immersed her ashes in the holy river. Once again he was alone.
37.
Max continued to take care of the guesthouse. New faces came in the
summer. Yogis on a pilgrimage to Gomukh or Tapovan. Men and women seeking solitary spots for meditation. Stranded, lost hikers. Max gave them shelter for the night, fed them what he could, and showed them the routes to remote caves and mountain peaks, whatever they needed to reach their destinations.
They asked him questions. Who was his teacher? What did he believe in? Where was he going? All of their faces, like their questions, merged.
In response, Max smiled and words came out of his mouth: he had no guru, he believed in nothing, he just lived there. He talked to everyone, yet his heart remained silent. His dreams ceased and the images from the past, which had once haunted him, receded. For he understood now that the more he nurtured his guilt about Keisha, his concern for Sophia, his regret for his mother, the more these emotions would sprout, generating the seeds of more emotions, more discontentment. When the memories arose now, he observed them without reacting to them, without nurturing them, and they passed away, leaving him unaffected.
• • •
AS THE THUNDERSTORMS and blizzards resumed in the fall, the yogis began to make their way down from their caves. To prepare for them, Max built two additional rooms in the guesthouse and added new pipes to draw water from the Ganges. As his money dwindled, he planted and began harvesting crops from the small patch of flat land outside the guesthouse before the snow blanketed everything. Instinctively he sowed cabbages, cauliflower, turnips—all vegetables he knew would break through the cold, rocky earth. His hands, the plow, his body, the earth, his sickle, all seemed one, a living organism living in silent harmony with the peerless mountains, which turned from gold to orange, then orange to purple in the soft light of the fall sun. The crops grew flat, slanted, and twisted, yet they bore precious fruit that allowed him to serve more food to his guests.
• • •
EARLY IN WINTER, more yogis came down to ask him for help to meet their special needs before the winter snowstorms cut access to the guesthouse. The Dudhadhari Baba, who lived only on milk, wanted more cartons of milk. The Naga Babas, their long, matted dreadlocks indicating the length of their penance, sought wild herbs to strengthen their necks. Other yogis wanted more food, comfort, shelter. Max worked all day, giving everything he could, and was so absorbed in one activity or the other that he often forgot to sleep. When he did rest, it was never for more than an hour or two. He didn’t seem to need sleep anymore. His body worked, but his mind was still, content, forming no new impressions, holding on to nothing. The void within him was growing. He fell more and more silent.
Late one winter day, the Standing Baba limped into the guesthouse. The wooden swing he rested his arms in while he was standing had rotted. He wanted to continue his austerity in the plains. Max held his hand and guided him down the steep, slippery mountain one step at a time. When the terrain turned particularly treacherous, he tied himself by a rope to the baba’s frail frame, dragging him across the crevasses so he didn’t have to balance on his weakened legs.
With moist eyes, the baba thanked him when they reached the village. “For many years, I have been afraid to make this walk down,” he said. He touched Max’s hands. “You have done much good here.”
Max’s heart leaped and expanded, occupying the space between them.
“You are not even from here,” said the baba. “What is your name? Where do you come from?”
Max opened his mouth. For a moment he couldn’t remember his name. He concentrated. “Max,” he said weakly.
The baba’s eyes softened. “Your palms are bloody from pulling the rope. Come with me. I’ll apply some herbs to them,” he said.
Max stared at the shimmering redness on his hands. He felt nothing.
“Please come,” said the baba.
Max shook his head. “My wounds heal easily,” he said.
The baba stared at him. “As you wish,” he said. He raised his hand and put it on Max’s head. “My blessings are all I have to give for your goodness.”
Max folded his hands and floated down the bare path to Gangotri village, feeling the earth below his feet again. No, his actions were neither good nor bad. They were like those of the rhododendron and the pine trees on the mountains that were his home, which flowered without thinking, then withered away without clinging, helpless to act as they were.
• • •
IN THE VILLAGE, he walked into the small post office and wrote a letter to Sophia. “Dear Sophia. I hope you are well,” he began.
Involuntarily, her image appeared before his eyes. She was heavier than before, but she was smiling, dimples forming at the corners of her lips.
“I’m happy here,” he wrote, then stopped. What he felt wasn’t happiness. It was something else. His old self that had sought happiness itself had dissolved, replaced by just a deep, expanding stillness that was completely empty yet strangely filled with life, energy, and bliss.
He put the nib of the pen to the paper. The words before him blurred and the paper appeared to float. Shimmering vibrations went up and down his spine.
“I send you love,” he finished.
Max signed and posted the letter to his old address. Warm, fluid boundaryless love radiated from his heart, enveloping Sophia and every being in the world.
38.
The guesthouse emptied again late in the winter. Max felt no different in the lull than he had in the midst of activity. Once more, blizzards and avalanches struck. The guesthouse rattled and shook in the wind and the snow just as it had the previous year, the cyclical ebb and flow of nature. Max spent the days fixing roofs and unblocking pipes to keep the place ready for the next season.
• • •
EARLY ONE AFTERNOON amid a thick snowfall, a tall, lean man in a uniform entered the guesthouse. He folded his hands.
“I’m in the Indian army, sir,” he said.
The sickle-shaped scar on his forehead glistened.
Max stared at him. “Viveka?” he asked.
The man raised his eyebrows.
“You look like someone I know,” said Max. “Please sit.”
The army officer sat on the chair next to the fireplace. Max served him tea and sat opposite him on the rug on the floor.
“A foreigner died in the mountains, sir,” said the officer. “The American embassy contacted the Delhi government to find the body. I tell you, sir, our government has no money for the living, but these foreign embassies have dollars for dead people. Anyway, sir, if I can pinpoint a location, the Harsil army camp will send a helicopter to evacuate him. Can you help me look for him?”
Max nodded. “Which part of the mountain?”
“He told people he was going to Gomukh three weeks ago,” he said. “With so many glaciers slipping, I don’t think he would have made it that far.”
“I will go,” said Max.
“I can come with you,” said the man.
“There is no need. The trail is dangerous from here up,” said Max. “Was he hiking?”
“Hiking, meditating, racketeering, who knows, sir? These foreigners think the Himalayas are a joke, like the Alps or something. They don’t realize that there aren’t landmarks or signposts here. Every patch looks the same,” he said. He coughed and lowered his eyes. “Not all of them, of course, sir. You yogis are different. Superhuman. Like God more than men, sir.”
Like God more than men, sir.
The words came out of the man’s mouth, but they were Viveka’s words. Max’s eyes clouded. Something stirred deep within him. He was falling, slipping into a swirling mist.
“How old are you, sir?” asked the man. “I thought you would be sixty or seventy when the villagers told me you knew everything about the mountains. But you look very young.”
Max’s throat went dry. Past and present were jumbling, merging into one. One moment he was on a concrete street looking at a food cart’s tin roof, another on a mountain in front of
a wooden house with a tin roof, now floating in an infinite black timelessness. He held the corners of the rug.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Your body has adapted to the mountains, sir,” said the man.
The body adapts anywhere, sir.
Max looked closely at the man. Was he a ghost, an apparition? The man set his teacup on the floor. His hand, which had been holding the cup, exploded into tiny, radiating speckles of yellow light. The light spread to the cup, then to the wooden floor, turning the floor into a stream of glowing particles. Max gasped. He looked up. There was no one. Just one golden light. Everything had dissolved into it.
I have seen the unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrowless, and deathless face-to-face.
Indeed, sir, indeed you have.
Max blinked. The man’s face came into focus again, hazy and shimmering.
“I will find the hiker,” said Max.
“Thank you, sir. I will come back again tomorrow,” said the man. “Perhaps you will be kind enough to share some of your teachings with me also then, sir.”
Millions of thoughts and ideas, a whole universe of voices, came alive within Max. Deep within him, a whisper arose. “I don’t teach anything, Mahadeva,” said Max. “I just live here. So you alone decide what you want and understand what you get. For me, yoga is both my path and my goal.”
“Sorry, sir?”
These weren’t his words, they were Ramakrishna’s. But they had come from within him. They had existed in that moment. Max exhaled slowly.
“I will go now,” said Max.
He left the guesthouse.
• • •
MAX CROSSED GLACIERS that had slipped on the path, treading lightly on their slanting slopes. He walked up the familiar trail, past the cliff that bent into the stream leading to his cave, farther up beyond the yellow-green shoots and the pine trees that had provided him food and fire. As he walked, his heart filled up with love, almost choking him. The emptiness expanded. A wave of warmth filled the void. Soon the warmth was a continuous column of bliss. His spine was fluid, vibrating. Tears fell involuntarily from his eyes.