An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  I was full of wonder at the immensity and complexity of Buddhist literature, the work of thinkers and scholars now almost lost to memory. But I couldn’t understand much of what these philosophers had written. The most fascinating among them was Nagarjuna, who had challenged even the Buddha by asserting that there could be no such thing as a Right View since all intellectual constructs had no essence. But how did one understand the concept of Emptiness, not to mention the assertion that Emptiness itself was empty? Or, see that compassion flowed out of a realization of Emptiness?

  Meditation might have helped me, but I couldn’t sit still for too long. And although I couldn’t admit it to myself, I was far from ready to embrace as rigorous a practice as Buddhism. I didn’t know what had led Helen towards it. But she seemed not to have been daunted by its immense philosophical and practical difficulties. Or, perhaps she had gone only one step further than the people who meditated regularly and hung thangkas in their homes. In any case, her conversion appeared to me too easy, and my desire to see her vanished.

  I spent the next day walking around the city. The changes I had seen elsewhere had not bypassed Benares. There were phone booths with gaudy acronym-rich sign-boards (STD-ISD-PCO) in the obscurest of side alleys. A pizzeria had opened at one of the ghats. There were indoor shopping malls in the newer parts of the city, their white facades already succumbing to the grime of the streets, and they were mostly empty inside, with more curious visitors than shoppers – peasant pilgrims from nearby villages reverent before the marble floors and the glass windows.

  I was deep in my work and had almost forgotten about Helen when one morning I caught an auto-rickshaw to Sarnath. During my days as a student in Benares, I had often visited Sarnath, seeking a break from the Hindu city. I would walk through the museum that had the famous lion stone capital from Ashoka’s iron pillar and then lie in the dappled shade of one of the big trees that fringed the vast lawns and read the book I had brought with me. I ate at one of the cheap dhabas to the east of the complex. Back on the lawns, I would take a long nap, wake up refreshed to the sound of parakeets darting about in the branches overhead, and then read for a bit before returning to Benares.

  I never paid much attention to the big stupa, the temple where the Buddha had spent a few monsoon months, or the remains of the monasteries. I regretted this while reading about the Buddha in Mashobra, when I often thought about Sarnath, and told myself that I would return to see the place with my newly educated eyes.

  I had intermittently looked forward to it during the previous months of travel. But as the auto-rickshaw slowly negotiated the cluttered outskirts of Benares, often coming to a halt among the rickshaws, donkey carts, mopeds and trucks spewing black diesel fumes, and as the small-town scenes that had grown depressingly familiar passed again before my eyes – the mounds of rusty machinery, the pools of fetid water, the mess of illegal power cables, the young men idle and morose at chai stalls, the corpulent confectioner ensconced before a vat sizzling white with samosas – I began to feel numb.

  The traffic cleared at last; the auto-rickshaw came on to a straight long road through mango and tamarind trees. A few miles away, there was Sarnath, with its deer park, stupas, temples, and its promise of serenity. But, for no clear reason, I didn’t wish to be there.

  When the auto-rickshaw stopped, I went first, trailed by a throng of beggars and mineral-water vendors, to the local museum. An old guard with a white moustache and an antiquated rifle stood at the door. There was no one inside the under-lit building, where, at the end of a long room, past the Ashoka pillar there was an image in sandstone of the Buddha seated in meditation. I stood before the statue, trying to summon up what I had read about it.

  I left the museum and walked to the lawns. Although it was early and dew still lay on the grass, there were a few picnickers, unpacking plastic bags and spreading sheets on the ground. Not far from them, a lone monk moved slowly, apparently in walking meditation, around the big Dhamekh stupa.

  I thought of visiting the stupa built by Ashoka on the spot where the Buddha had preached his first sermon to the five ascetics from his hometown, Kapilavastu. But there was only a circular platform where according to my map the stupa should have stood, littered with decayed flowers and incense and candle offerings. I stood before it for a while, wondering what to do next. I thought I would walk to the Dhamekh stupa and then catch an auto-rickshaw back to Benares.

  I had walked a few metres when I saw the nun coming towards me. White, and of medium height, she was wearing an ochre robe and walked with quick springy steps. There seemed something both strange and familiar about her.

  She came closer and then I saw her face. It was Helen, her head hairless and round but her mouth shaped as always into a smile.

  My first panicked thought was: Has she seen me?

  I wanted to hide. But the nearest tree was some metres away and in desperation I turned my back abruptly, shaded my eyes with my hand, hoping to appear to be looking at something in the distance.

  I half expected her to say my name, and I wondered, my mind racing, how I would respond.

  Tensely, I heard her walk past me, her robes gently rustling. I remained standing there for what seemed a long time, first wondering whether it was safe to move and then almost paralysed by self-reproach.

  The shame and guilt receded as I returned to Benares and became preoccupied with writing. I spent a few more days in the city doing research for it and meeting middle-class people, and though I went again to the bookshop I did not ask about Helen.

  I wrote my book over the spring and the summer in Mashobra. Much of my life had been sheltered, spent in reading and daydreaming. It seemed to me that my travels had exposed my naivety. I had seen a complex world which demanded an experienced mind to understand it. My travels had shown my notions about writing and the writer in general as a private and sterile indulgence. And so, defensively, what I wrote now had a harsh, satirical edge, half showy, half truthful.

  In my over-earnest mood, I thought more about Helen’s decision to become a nun. It now appeared to me to have cancelled out everything she had previously represented: an awareness of and engagement with the larger world, which I had once admired in her, and had even clumsily tried to imitate. I saw her efforts in Nicaragua and Haiti as another instance of the diverse advantages she enjoyed as an American – the same privileges that now permitted her to make herself into a Buddhist nun. I felt that we had moved in quite opposite directions, and that the meeting that I had avoided in Sarnath would only have been painfully awkward.

  I was to see Helen again, in another place and time. But now I was settling into my new self – the self that had travelled and imagined that it had learnt much. I didn’t know then that I would use up many more such selves, that they would arise and disappear, making all experience hard to fix and difficult to learn from.

  The monsoons dragged on into late September while I wrote my travel book in Mashobra. The drumming on the tin roof rarely ceased; the bedclothes never lost their slightly mouldy smell, and the road running through the village more or less disappeared under intricate delta-like formations of mud and rivulets of rain water.

  Late in the evenings, I counted a few more lights on the distant hillsides. Daulatram worked as always in the long printing room, the tips of his fingers black, the printing press steady in its rhythms during the long afternoons. After days of absence, when I feared that he was either ill or dead, the hunchbacked peasant would appear in the orchard.

  When the monsoons ended, I went walking again. The shopkeepers looked older; the more prosperous of them had small black and white television sets nestling amid the jars of pickles and packets of Surf detergent. Montu seemed to have more difficulty moving his enormous weight around the dhaba and had to be helped by his son, Neeraj. One afternoon, when his school had closed early, Neeraj asked me shyly if I knew about computers, what they did and whether he should learn to use them. His mother, who was listening in the adjacen
t room screened off by a torn sari, spoke up. She said that it was my responsibility to find a vocation for Neeraj after he finished his schooling.

  A telephone line was laid through the village, involving much digging beside the main road, and there suddenly appeared in the bazaar short dark men with flat noses and thick lips. They were dressed in rags and spoke a strange form of Hindi, and in the afternoons they stood knee-deep in the ditches, the sun blazing on their sweaty faces. They turned out to be labourers from the tribal regions of Bihar who moved across India, looking for work. They lived in tarpaulin tents by the road, next to the mounds of excavated earth, and their wives cooked on open fires in the way they would have done in the forests they had lived in on the plains.

  The cows mooed forlornly in their shed, but Daulatram hardly ever took them out. I began to long for clean days, and when I finished my book I found myself eager to leave Mashobra, although it was still early in the autumn, with the most glorious days of the year ahead of me.

  I had come to see the village as complete and, though I was waiting to move on, had considered myself content within it. But now I was restless, hungry for new sights and experiences. Confident that I would soon have more money from my book, I went travelling that autumn. I went to South India, Goa and Bombay. I returned north and went to Benares, then travelled, still thinking of the book about the Buddha, to Shravasti, Vaishali, Ayodhya and Kushinagara, the places the Buddha had travelled during the obscure middle years of his life.

  At Shravasti, where a rich merchant had donated a grove to the Buddha, which had been the Buddha’s preferred monsoon retreat for twenty-four years, there was a park with the bare remnants of what were probably the first Buddhist monasteries. Langur monkeys chattered in the bel trees, and even jumped on to the old pipal tree that stood behind railings in one corner. Out in the dry countryside of sheep and scrub, there were stupas, many of them plundered for brick. There was another park at Vaishali, with a dusty museum full of broken relics. At Kushinagara, abruptly in the middle of sugarcane fields, there was the brick mound where the Buddha had been cremated; a giant Buddha, gilded from head to toe, reclined in one of the nearby temples.

  A wayside shrine to Hanuman appeared to contain more life than some of these sacred Buddhist sites. They were peculiarly dead places, long sunk into drabness, from which, it seemed, the elaborate piety, the orange, ochre, crimson, white robes and the new gold-plated monasteries of the Asian Buddhists had arrived too late to rescue them.

  I didn’t return to Mashobra that year. I lingered on in Benares. I was tense, waiting for nothing I could specify, but unwilling to re-enter the eventless life of reading and writing that I had known for some years.

  When journalistic commissions took me to Europe and America the following year, I was happy to leave Mashobra. When I had taken that long bus journey to Nepal with Vinod, I had not expected to visit other foreign countries. But now I sat through the long monsoon months in Mashobra, hoping for the rain to stop, and fearing that it might cause landslides on the road to the plains from Simla and prevent me from reaching the airport in Delhi.

  The weather was clear in London. People everywhere said that they were having the warmest autumn in many years. This talk of the weather was oddly exciting to me, in the way the sight of a cow on a street probably might be to a first-time visitor to India. The familiar cliché was something to hold onto amid the estranging newness of my surroundings. The weather also helped: the secretive autumn air, the sombre colours, the cold blue sky, the shortening days, things I had only read about, and which in my first few hours in England helped to suppress my great anxiety.

  This anxiety had built up over the long hours on the plane. It surged up again in the queue at immigration, where the blank, uncomprehending Sikhs were being interrogated in sharp, severe voices. I took a black cab from the airport: an extravagance given my small budget, but I didn’t feel confident about dealing with public transport.

  The windows in the back were half down and, although I had already read many descriptions of the drive from Heathrow to south-west London as ‘grim’, on my first morning it was the unexpected delight of breathing large lungfuls of fresh air – bracingly sharp, like the air found in the Himalayas – and the ever-present greenness – glimpsed from the plane, but felt much more intimately on ground level – that kept at bay not only my nervousness, but also the passing shabbiness of warehouses and housing estates that I myself, in time, was to see as grim.

  I was staying at the house of a British friend I had known in Delhi. When I arrived, it was empty, my hosts away at work, part of the busyness of London that here in East Sheen’s quiet leafy lanes was hard to imagine. It was my first English house, semi-detached with pink wallpaper and thick carpets and a piano in the dining room. I heaved my bags up to the room on the first floor the letter on the carpet said was to be mine: a narrow bed, a radiator, a bookshelf, a picture of – what?

  I didn’t wait to look. I was impatient to see the view from the room’s only window and, though tired and ready to fall asleep, I stood for a while with my nose pressed to the glass panes, enchanted by the vision of a miniature arcadia, the fenced back garden with its tiny greenhouse, tool shed and a patch of lawn bordered by hydrangeas and petunias on both sides. Towards the back of the yard, forming a natural screen, were the sycamore trees, serenely brown and red. I felt I could spend days there, lying on the grass watching soft white clouds glide across the patch of sky overhead.

  Unwilling to sleep, I went walking around later that empty afternoon and stumbled, quite literally, into Richmond Park. I had seen the large spread of green on my map, but, accustomed only to the shanty-town sprawl of Indian cities, I hadn’t been prepared for the proximity of city and country, the tree-lined avenues past drowsy front gardens that suddenly opened out into vast undulating immensities of green turf. Around the tiny still pond sat elderly men with dogs and walking sticks; the planes slowly circling above in the big pale-blue sky seemed almost to be keeping guard over this tableau of quiet contentment.

  I walked through the wooded depths of the park and then stopped in the middle of a congregation of oaks – so sturdy, these trees, in such contrast to the nervous leanness of the common Indian type – to unpeel from my shoes the leaves they had collected on the damp paths. Later, light steadily diminishing, I lost my way while walking home and wandered around a couple of side streets, where the light falling out of curtained bay windows was to my weary traveller’s senses the glow of domestic comfort and self-sufficiency.

  I wanted to talk to someone. Standing in the kitchen from where I could see the back garden, I rang Sophiya. I knew her from Simla, where she had spent two years researching a thesis on imperial urban planning.

  She seemed a bit subdued. She said she had just broken up with her boyfriend. It had been a stressful time for her, but she was coming out of it.

  I didn’t know what to say. She had never spoken to me about her private life before. In Simla, she seemed to work very hard, with a determination I put down to intellectual curiosity rather than professional ambition; she was always full of interesting details she had uncovered about the making of the city.

  I began to ramble on about what I had seen: the lonely men with dogs in the empty park, the private houses with their living rooms facing deserted streets, and the vast city I had yet to visit, where I imagined the stupendous effort needed to make possible these quiet middle-class lives taking place.

  She said, interrupting me, ‘But where you are is actually a suburb. You should wait until you see the centre of the city.’

  I went there the next day, partly to see Sophiya, who lived in Shoreditch. I went by train, and the men and women in dark suits who joined it at every stop, so preoccupied, so serious, as they unfolded and read The Times and the Guardian, were like a premonition of the city ahead. Outside, the moss-overgrown backs of houses, creepers on sooty walls, clothes lines, back lawns with a tricycle or playpen, a brief glimpse of the grey riv
er and an island, and then warehouses, factories, squat office blocks.

  Like much else, I knew the London light from books. But to see the accumulated mass and solidity of the cluster of buildings on the embankment, to walk through Westminster, past Whitehall and into Trafalgar Square – places bringing back memories of certain streets in Calcutta and Madras – was to know that light’s extraordinary power to confer form and colour.

  I had seen this part of London in old prints and photographs, greatly resembling Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, colonial outposts not untouched by the architectural movements of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In my mind London existed in an endless languid colonial afternoon, the loin-clothed natives resting in the shadows of the high walls, a rickshaw disgorging an overdressed official on the exposed empty street in front.

  I hadn’t been prepared for the crowds that worked there, for the certainty of purpose with which they strode across Waterloo Bridge, the resolute tick-tock of high-heels hitting the pavement. Few people ever looked so energetic in India, and if they did they were usually regarded as eccentrics. Wordlessly again, looking neither left nor right, as if impelled by a great inner panic, they flowed out of the underground station at Tottenham Court Road, a gaggle of pale autumnal faces over black or grey overcoats, among which, with a small twinge of disappointment, I recognized Sophiya.

  In Simla, among the promenading men and women on the Mall, Sophiya in her salwar kameez and with her British accent had seemed glamorous. She also had what appeared to me a highly unusual family history. Her grandfather, born in a remote village in the Punjab, had worked as a coolie in Simla before joining the British army and serving in the First World War. He had fought in Mesopotamia and returned with a wound to his village. His son, Sophiya’s father, had also joined the British Indian Army. He had distinguished himself in the Second World War, during fighting in Italy, before settling down in London, where Sophiya was born.