And Laughter Fell From the Sky (28 page)

“Hm.” She wrapped both hands around her tea mug. “If that’s what you want.”

“I don’t know if it’s what I want. In some ways, it’s exactly not what I want. I don’t want to end up a stuffy professor at some low-ranked state university, trying to impress students by mentioning the few obscure papers I’ve managed to publish.” He brushed the shredded leaves off the table.

She took his hand in hers. “Listen, Abhay.” She seemed to be searching for words. “Would it help if I taught you a very simple meditation technique? This is something that can help ground you and also help you be open to God’s guidance. Maybe you just need to relax and forget about yourself.”

The hotness of her skin irritated him. He pulled his hands away and stood up. His metal chair tipped over with a crash. He picked it back up and set it carefully back on its feet. “I don’t think so, Kianga. I just need to be alone.”

She gathered up her mug and his. They walked out of the circle of lantern light and down the sidewalk to the dining hall door. It was locked. Kianga placed the cups on the flagstone floor outside the door and then kissed Abhay lightly on the cheek. He watched her walk away, toward her bike, adjusting the strap of a headlamp around her head. A sudden flash of light appeared as she switched on the lamp, and then she turned away, the light disappeared, and the squeak of her pedals faded as she left.

The next morning, Abhay opened his eyes and tried to sit up in bed. Pain shot from the side of his neck through his right shoulder and upper arm. He eased himself up and massaged his shoulder with his left hand. He must have slept funny. Carefully, he inched off the bed, gathered his towel and soap, and made his way to the bathroom. A warm bath should help. Yet by the time he was standing in line for breakfast, he could still hardly move his right arm. He slid his plate along the counter, clumsily serving himself tea and scrambled eggs with his left hand.

Last night, after his conversation with Kianga, he’d had a strange dream. He was standing at a doorway, and he could see the white door frame—a square frame, luminescent in the darkness around him—but he couldn’t make out anything through the door. It was black outside. He had the sense that he was supposed to walk through the door. But he wanted to be able to see where he was going. He strained his eyes. Nothing materialized out of the gloom.

“What happened to you?” Paloma was at his elbow, watching as he tried awkwardly to spread butter on his bread with the knife in his left hand.

“My shoulder hurts. I think I slept on it wrong.”

“Why don’t you get a massage?” Paloma pointed to a flyer on the wall near the telephone, which advertised “Thai Yoga Massage with Jerome.” “You sign up here.” Paloma tapped a chart at the bottom of the flyer. “I get this massage every week. You keep your clothes on. It is like someone else is doing the yoga for you, and you just relax.”

The price was eight hundred rupees. About twenty dollars. He didn’t have much else to do that morning, before taking a taxi to Pondicherry in the late afternoon. He planned to catch the night bus to Bangalore. With his left hand, he grasped the pen hanging on a string near the flyer and printed his name in block letters in the 10:00
A.M.
slot.

The massage took place in a small, empty white room in the guesthouse complex. The windows let in the sunshine, yet the place was shaded by high trees, so the room was bright but not stuffy.

Jerome was a short, athletic Frenchman who gently stretched and twisted Abhay’s limbs as Abhay lay on a thin futon mattress. Abhay was tense at first, fearing his arm would be hurt with the stretches. As the minutes passed and he experienced no pain, he began to relax into the mattress. A light, spicy floral scent wafted throughout the room. Outside everything was silent, except for the wind rustling in the leaves, and sometimes muffled voices in the distance.

Abhay had the sensation that his body was dissolving. It was not a frightening feeling—it was somewhat comforting. Jerome gently lifted and stretched his limbs. Abhay’s body felt almost transparent. Its parts were starting to fade into the atmosphere. He knew, intellectually, that matter is made up mostly of empty space, since atoms are over 99 percent empty. So logically it followed that his own body was also mostly empty. He’d never before experienced it as such. Now he saw himself as though he were a constellation in a dark night sky, a random collection of pricks of light, with arbitrary lines drawn to suggest a human. The lines delineating his form were fading, and his atoms of empty space were dispersing through the emptiness of the universe.

As Jerome supported and pushed Abhay’s right shoulder and arm into a stretch, Abhay felt no pain, yet he started to cry. It wasn’t a wrenching kind of sobbing, just a gentle release of tears. He was embarrassed. He couldn’t wipe away his tears without changing the position of his body, so he let them come. Jerome continued to work on his arms, then his hips, lifting and bending and leaning on his legs. The crying subsided and was replaced by a feeling of calm. Abhay heard the words: “It doesn’t matter.”

“What?” he said.

Jerome was silently working on Abhay’s feet. The voice had come from near his shoulder—the painful one—so it couldn’t have been Jerome’s voice. Abhay heard it again. This time the voice seemed to say: “It isn’t matter.” The voice was clear and soft—he couldn’t tell if it was a woman’s or a man’s. Abhay realized these words were answers to the questions that had been hammering away in his mind.

Lying there in the warm sunshine, Abhay felt his mind about to bristle with more questions: Who, or what, was providing these answers? How could it not matter? Or if he had misheard the first time, what did the voice mean by the words “it isn’t matter”?

Almost as soon as these questions began forming, he was flooded with the realization: God. Existence. His guardian angels. And himself. It wasn’t matter. It didn’t matter. And he knew.

Chapter 16

T
he next morning, Mahesh, Abhay’s cousin, picked him up from the bus station. “The house is a mess,” Mahesh explained as he stowed Abhay’s backpack in the trunk of the car. “The bore well drilling was supposed to be finished by the time you returned, but unfortunately it started only this morning.” Mahesh removed his glasses, rubbed the lenses with the bottom of his polo shirt, and set them back on. “I think the dust has entered the car, too.”

Abhay didn’t care about the dust in the car, or the noisiness of the city. He was glowing, calm, and blissful from his experience during the massage. He still didn’t know what to do with his life, but strangely, he felt almost thrilled with his uncertainty.

“Looks like you had a good time,” Mahesh remarked. “You have been smiling since I picked you up.”

“It was beautiful,” Abhay said.

As they approached the house, Abhay saw that the gate was wide open, with a truck parked in the driveway. A sea of mud escaped from the yard and into the roadway. Mahesh parked the car outside the compound wall. In the yard, they stepped over the mud and past the rumbling truck, which had a long cranelike attachment at its back—probably the drilling apparatus. The noise, the machinery, the mess—none of it bothered Abhay. He looked at it with interested detachment. He wondered how far down the bore well would have to be drilled.

The noise was loud even inside the house. Abhay deposited his backpack in the room he was sharing with Mahesh.

“Let’s go out somewhere!” Mahesh shouted. They got back into the car. “I’ll take you to see Electronics City,” Mahesh yelled. “You’ll see office buildings just like in America, and houses just like in America.”

Abhay had heard about this, a new section of town called Electronics City. Could it possibly be just like America?

They drove for about an hour through traffic, to the outskirts of Bangalore. Despite the massage, Abhay’s neck, shoulder, and right arm still hurt, although his range of motion was much wider. During the drive he kept tilting his head to the left to stretch his neck. Even the pain seemed delicious to him now.

“Here it is,” Mahesh said.

From the roadway, Abhay saw giant glassy office buildings proclaiming “Hewlett-Packard” and “Wipro” and “3M India.” The buildings themselves looked very Western, it was true—just like innumerable office buildings to be seen from any freeway in the United States. Abhay was amused to see that next to and in between the flashing buildings were browsing cows and corrugated-roof shacks.

“This is one of the largest industrial parks in India,” Mahesh said. “Over a hundred companies on one-point-three square kilometers of land.”

“What was here before?” Abhay asked.

“A couple of villages.” Mahesh waved his hand in dismissal.

Abhay was surprised that he felt no anger at the idea of villages being destroyed for the sake of this industrial complex. It was the cosmic cycle—the destruction of Shiva, the creation of Brahma, the protection of Vishnu.

“Each of these buildings you see is like a campus. If you go inside the gates, it is so clean and beautiful, with gardens, fountains, places to eat, bookstores. Everything you will find there.”

“Can we look at one of them?” Abhay asked.

“No. You must have a security pass. One of my friends took me in once. I am interviewing for jobs at several of the places here, so next time you come to India, I may be able to show you. Let’s go see some houses.”

They drove toward a high-walled complex and stopped inside the gate at the guard stand. As his cousin spoke with the black-uniformed guard, Abhay gazed down either side of the clean, empty roadway at two-story Indian-style houses, with the typical flat roofs and rectangular shapes. However, unlike other Indian neighborhoods, these houses were not walled off from each other but were placed on green lawns, with cement sidewalks running along the street.

“One of my friend’s bosses lives there,” Mahesh said. “These houses go for the equivalent of a million dollars. A lot of the residents are ex-pats—people who’ve come from the U.S. to work in Electronics City for a few years. Inside the complex they have a swimming pool, tennis courts, a clubhouse. Everything just like in America.”

“Would you like to live there?” Abhay asked.

“Of course! Who wouldn’t like to live there?”

They were not allowed to enter the complex—the guards turned them back, since they didn’t have an invitation from any resident—and so they had to reenter the dusty, noisy traffic of the main road.

Just as they turned onto the main road, they were stopped in traffic. A boy in drab shorts and shirt, holding a bucket and a squeegee, approached the car, offering to wash the windshield. Mahesh shouted and waved his hand, and the boy wove his way through the traffic to another car. Abhay looked back to find him, and could see only a sea of cars, their roofs glinting in the sunlight.

“Doesn’t it bother you that millionaires from abroad live in that complex, while these boys in rags try to make money by washing windshields?” Abhay asked this not with anger, but with curiosity.

Traffic started moving again. Mahesh veered into the oncoming lane to pass a slow truck, and then veered back just before encountering a bus barreling toward them.

“I hear you have beggars in your country, too,” Mahesh said. “Does that prevent you from living where you want to live?”

Mahesh was right. Abhay didn’t sleep on the sidewalk with the homeless people in Portland.

Mahesh waved his hand. “That is the way it is. Will our worry feed all these beggars? Of course not. So why worry?”

Traffic had stalled again. Cars sat like glowering animals, honking and growling at one another. A truck just behind them began its yodeling horn. After several minutes, they began inching forward, and the honking subsided.

Abhay didn’t know how to help the beggar boy, but he also realized that he did not blame himself for not knowing.

Later that day, to escape the commotion at home, Abhay wandered around the back streets near his grandmother’s house. His euphoria was starting to dissipate. Instead, he felt a deep satisfaction. He was reminded of Nandan’s words. He did feel as if he had found a glowing pearl within himself. He passed a tiny motorcycle dealership with shiny vehicles displayed on the sidewalk. He walked past new three-story apartment buildings, and past a cow shed tucked between the houses. He nodded and smiled at everyone he saw.

On almost every block were piles of sand or dirt, and stacks of brick, for new construction. On one street Abhay saw a boy worker—perhaps ten or eleven years old—standing outside the compound wall of a half-finished house. He was wearing shorts, a colorful button-down shirt, and sandals. Abhay watched from across the street as the boy used a small scoop to shovel from a pile of red earth and pour the soil through a large screen, set on the ground and tilted at an angle, so the sieved earth fell into a shallow pan below. The boy looked up and caught Abhay’s eyes, and Abhay had an odd sense that the boy was himself, that he was that boy worker who perhaps did not get a chance to go to school.

In a second the boy’s eyes traveled past Abhay, and he pointed and smiled silently. Abhay turned his head, and on the compound wall behind him, partly hidden by the trunk of a tree, was a large gray-furred monkey sitting on its haunches. Its body and face were perfect, beautiful. Its black eyes looked at Abhay, and Abhay, holding as still as he could, looked back at the monkey. In a moment, the monkey pulled its body onto the branch overhanging the compound wall and glided silently up into the leafy canopy until it was invisible.

The boy worker, still smiling, began gesturing and letting out a stream of words at Abhay. “Hanuman” was the only word Abhay caught. Maybe the boy thought the monkey was a representation of the divine monkey who had helped Rama in his quest to save his wife Sita. Perhaps the boy believed that Hanuman watched over him as he worked.

The boy turned once more to his scooping and pouring, and Abhay was flooded with gratitude. God had given him the life he had. He had been educated. He had been blessed with shelter and food, and caring parents.

Abhay continued on his walk and came across an Internet browsing place next to what looked like an open-air workingmen’s café of sorts, with men in pants or dhotis drinking tea and eating idlis while standing at high tables. He ducked into the low doorway of the Internet place and settled into a plastic chair. The computer whirred. He scanned his messages, deleting the junk: several messages from Chris about the latest eBay items for sale, notices about home-based business opportunities, and movie offers from Netflix.

His breath caught in his throat. There was something from Rasika. He clicked on her name with a trembling hand. She wrote:

Can you meet us in Lalbagh? My cousin Mayuri wants me to meet her boyfriend, and Mayuri thought it would be better if there was another man with us, so it wouldn’t look like we were there only with Khaleel. I don’t want to get Yuvan involved. He might not understand.

Abhay took a deep breath and let it flow out. Although he realized Rasika was inviting him as a sort of decoy, he didn’t care. At least she didn’t seem to be married yet, and he would be seeing her again the next day. He wrote down Rasika’s cell phone number. He’d call her as soon as he got back to his grandmother’s house.

He had the nagging feeling there was something else he ought to be doing here at the computer. Abhay remembered how, in Portland, Rasika had praised his intelligence and advised him to make an impact on the world. She’d said, “If you don’t pick something, you’ll never get anywhere.” A line of pain burned down from his neck to his fingertips, and almost as if they had intelligence of their own, his fingers clicked open a new message and typed in the address of his old mentor at Kent State—the professor who had gotten him interested in utopian communities in the first place.

In his e-mail, Abhay updated Dr. Ben-Aharon on his departure from Rising Star and his visit to Auroville, and asked about graduate school possibilities. “I want to study different kinds of communities and societies, and find out what is satisfying to people about various ways of organizing life,” he wrote. “Would this be anthropology? Or sociology? And could I get into a graduate program in either of those fields, given that my undergraduate degree is in general studies?” He didn’t know if he really wanted to be a professor or not, but figured it couldn’t hurt to explore this avenue.

After lunch the next day, a Saturday, he took an autorickshaw to Lalbagh, where he met up with Rasika, Mayuri, and Khaleel as they stood on the grassy strip next to the small parking lot. The day was hot, and Rasika wore a pretty sleeveless white embroidered top over jeans. Her hair was gathered into a large barrette at the nape of her neck, and she wore her usual sunglasses. As soon as Abhay saw her, he knew his love for her was no distraction, no mistake. She barely acknowledged his greeting, and in fact stepped away from him, to the other side of Mayuri and Khaleel.

They walked up a slanted expanse of bare rock, on top of which was one of the Kempe Gowda watchtowers, which looked from a distance like a small temple with a white carved dome on top.

“There are four such towers in Bangalore,” Khaleel said. “They were built in the sixteenth century by Bangalore’s ruler, Kempe Gowda, to mark the four corners of the city.”

Khaleel apparently thought of himself as a travel guide. Abhay knew all about the Kempe Gowda towers. Of course now Bangalore sprawled for miles beyond these watchtowers.

At the top of the rock, next to the tower, a dark man squatted on the ground, roasting corn over coals in a shallow pan. Khaleel took out his wallet and said something to the man, who began to shuck ears of corn from the pile next to him.

“I don’t want one,” Rasika said.

“Come on. My treat,” Khaleel insisted. Abhay sensed that he wanted to impress Rasika.

“They’re very tasty with the salt and masala.” Mayuri smacked her lips.

“Just a small one,” Khaleel suggested.

As the man rotated four ears of corn over the coals, Abhay inched closer to Rasika, who was standing with her back to the pan, gazing at the scene below. The gray rock sloped down and away from them. Layers of Lalbagh trees in various shades of green appeared below them, and past that was the busy intersection outside the park entrance. “Those look like toy cars, don’t they?” he remarked.

“What do you mean?” She gave him a small smile. He couldn’t see her eyes behind the black lenses.

“You can’t really hear the traffic or smell the exhaust, so it all looks really calm down on the street, like something a kid would play with.”

Khaleel handed around the hot corn, wrapped in husks and smeared with red spices. Abhay bit into his. Indian corn tended to be tough, for some reason, yet he enjoyed gnawing on the scorched, mealy kernels. The spices made his lips burn.

Mayuri and Khaleel wandered down the slope, and Abhay and Rasika were left to each other. Rasika held her corn carefully in one hand. Her forearm trembled slightly. She didn’t eat any of it. At the bottom of the rock, they reached a shaded dirt path among the trees.

“How was your trip?” she asked.

“I had an amazing experience.”

She stumbled on the sandy path. He put a hand on her elbow to steady her, and she shrugged him away.