Maya
Authors: C. W. Huntington
maya
IT IS 1975 AND INDIA IS IN TURMOIL.
American Stanley Harrington arrives to study Sanskrit philosophy and escape his failing marriage. When he finds himself witness to a violent accident, he begins to question his grip on reality.
Maya
introduces us to an entertaining cast of hippies, expats, and Indians of all walks of life. From a hermit hiding in the Himalayan jungle since the days of the British Raj, to an accountant at the Bank of India with a passion for Sanskrit poetry, to the last in a line of brahman scholars, Stanley's path ultimately leads him to a Tibetan yogi, who enlists the American's help in translating a mysterious ancient text.
Maya, literally “illusion,” is an extended meditation on the unraveling of identity. Filled with rich observations and arresting reflections, it mines the porous border between memory and imagination.
“Rich and evocative.”
âDINTY W. MOORE, AUTHOR OF
THE MINDFUL WRITER
“I've been waiting for someone to write a contemporary âquest for enlightenment' novel, but I didn't expect it to be this good.”
âDAVID R. LOY, AUTHOR OF
MONEY, SEX, WAR, KARMA
“This absorbing and compelling novel feels as intimate as a memoirâpossibly even one's own.”
âKATE WHEELER, AUTHOR OF
WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED
C. W. HUNTINGTON, JR
.,
translates and interprets classical Sanskrit and Tibetan texts and is a professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He is the author
The Emptiness of Emptiness
. This is his first novel.
For Liz
MÄyÄ
, (f.) art, wisdom, extraordinary or supernatural power, illusion, unreality, deception, fraud, trick, sorcery, witchcraft, magic.
âM
ONIER
-W
ILLIAMS
,
Sanskrit-English Dictionary
What prevents you from knowing yourself as all and beyond all is the mind based on memory. It has power over you as long as you trust it.
âN
ISARGADATTA
M
AHARAJ
Contents
B
EGINNING SOMETIME
after 1962, when Allen Ginsberg made his legendary pilgrimage to India, the city of Banaras became the home for a sizeable community of expatriates bound together not only by their shared fascination with South Asian culture but also by the fact that they represented an alien presence in a society that had historically reacted to outsiders with distinct ambiguity. It was, in many ways, a magical time, the temporary conjunction of unstable forces. In 1984, after the assassination of his mother, Rajiv Gandhi enacted much stricter visa regulations, ostensibly in an attempt to regulate the entry of foreigners supporting Sikh terrorists in the Punjab. Since then, the Westerner in India is much more likely to be either a tourist or a professional whose time there is precisely circumscribed, either in its duration or its purpose.
Things have changed a great deal since the days when young people from Europe and North America journeyed overland on the Magic Bus through Baghdad, Tehran, and Kabul, eventually settling in the mountains outside Manali or Dharamsala, or among the twisting alleyways of Banaras, where we could live out solipsistic fantasies of worldly or spiritual power without any fear of being ridiculed or called to account for ourselves by family and friends left behind.
I have never understood whether we remained in India during those years because we were afflicted with the spiritual malaise of our own time and place, or if our unquenchable thirst for South Asian philosophy, religion, music, and art were engendered by the force of the local environment. Whatever the case, expatriates living in Banaras during the sixties and seventies were
mlecchas
, foreigners occupying the no man's land that was neither Western in any recognizable form nor truly Asian. We took possession of India's ancient culture and made it our own, as if by right of birth. At the same time, Indian family life, her feudal politics, and above all the complex hierarchy of social relationships known as caste, were for us so remote as to be virtually nonexistent.
No one, however, could avoid the omnipresent poverty. One had, at the very least, to chew and swallow one's chapati in company with the shrunken frames and hollow eyes of human beings and animals that roamed the Holy City like a silent army of hungry ghosts. One was compelled to bear witness. How each of us accomplished this disheartening task was, in some sense, a matter of style.
The joys of everyday life are not easily dismissed, even though they come bracketed in sorrow. And yet, the constant vacillation between pain and pleasure can wear thin. At one time or another everyone dreams of escape. This is the record of such a dream.
I
WOKE TO THE TOUCH
of her fingers moving up the inside of my thigh. She was leaning over me, the sheets thrown back, one arm tucked under my shoulder, her breasts resting heavily against my bare chest. For a moment I thought it was Judith. Then I turnedâdrifted really, still half asleep, my eyes closedâand pulled her closer, not caring. I felt her lips brush my ear, her breath, her mouth pressed against mine, the long muscle of her tongue . . .
What the fuck am I doing?
But it was obviously too late for such a question.
And anyway, I already knew the answer, only too well:
You wanted out. That's why you didn't care thenânot enough, anywayâand that's why you're here, now, alone.
I leaned over and pressed my forehead against the oval glass, straining to see, my eyes burning from lack of sleep. Shadowy wisps of gray streaked by the window against a background of formless light. My jaw swiveled side to side and I felt my ears pop. The metal body of the Boeing 747 shuddered, rolling the sweep of its wings ever so slightly, first one way, then the other, as Pan Am flight 101 from Chicago, via London and Tehran, descended on the Indo-Gangetic plain through a dense morning fog. The haze lifted only moments before the plane's wheels squealed against the concrete runway. We taxied to a stop a good hundred yards from the main terminal.
In those days at Palam Airport in New Delhi, no enclosed walkways connected aircraft to the terminal; passengers had to disembark down a flight of stairs directly onto the tarmac. While I waited, packed into the aisle with what seemed like one enormous extended Indian family, everyone wrestling with their carry-on luggage and yelling to each other in Hindi, the door of the plane was ceremoniously unbolted and drawn back like an iron gate opening directly onto the vast temple of South Asia. An invisible, viscous odor poured into the cabin, enveloping me in
its spell: sandalwood and shit, mango, jasmine, and diesel exhaust, valerian and turmeric and smoking patties of dried cow dung, chili and asafetida, tamarind, musk, saffron and coriander, burning tires and burning human flesh and hair, cumin seeds sizzling in mustard oil, rotting vegetables and dried urine, ginger and anise and holy basilâleaves of Tulsiâsacred to the great god Vishnu. This potent, beatific fragrance was the traveler's first encounter with the subcontinent, one that lodged itself in my memory with a peculiar force. To this day, I have only to open any old edition of a Sanskrit text published in India, bury my nose deep among the pages, and I am poised, all over again, at the doorway of Pan Am flight 101, about to step down the stairs.
I landed in the early morning of June 26, 1975, approximately six hours before Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's terse announcement was broadcast to the nation over All India Radio: “The president has declared a state of emergency. There is no need to panic.” By the time I got through airport customs, the police had already been deployed throughout New Delhi and across the country, making precautionary arrests of Gandhi's political opponents, many of them future leaders of the Janata Party, whom she had labeled “dupes of foreign governments and ideas hostile to India.”
The Fulbright office dispatched a wonderfully round, black Ambassador car to meet me at the airport and bring me to the Lodi Hotel, where I checked in and went straight to my room. The heavy drapes were drawn and an air-conditioner droned in the darkness. Everything smelled vaguely of mildew. A bucket and tap in the bathroom sat next to the twin-footpads of the Indian toilet. I ladled cold water over my naked body with a plastic cup, toweled myself dry, and collapsed onto the bed. I vaguely recall ordering some food that was brought to the room, but my next distinct memory is waking to a ringing phone and the almost unintelligible Indian accent of the desk clerk asking me to hold for a call.
Indira Gandhi was deeply paranoid of the CIA, and it was not the ideal moment for an American scholar to arrive in India. No one knew what was coming next. The Fulbright people took all of this very seriously; they wanted me away from the capital, where I might inadvertently get swept up in the erupting protests. I had planned to spend my first few months studying Hindi with a tutor at Delhi University, but arrangements had been hastily made to shift my operations to the Central Hindi Institute in Agraâthe Kendriya Hindi Sansthanâan arm of the Ministry of Education intended “to facilitate such courses as are conducive to the
development and propagation of Hindi as an all-India language as envisaged in article 351 of the constitution.” There I would attend classes with non-Hindi speaking students from various locales around India and a handful of other foreigners. The person on the phone said they would send a car within the hour.
“Please wait near the front of the hotel, Mr. Harrington.”
Less than twenty-four hours in India, and things had already taken on a life of their own.
I quickly rinsed off again, got dressed, and ate a small breakfastâan omelet, toast and jam, and a pot of tea delivered to my room on a silver tray by a waiter in a knee-length white linen tunic, scarlet sash, and turban. Moments later I was outside the hotel lobby, cowering in a patch of shade, waiting for the car to arrive. The heat was suffocating, the air so dry it was impossible to sweat. High overhead, iridescent, jet-black birds circled and dipped against a cloudless sky, calling out to each other in a desolate, throaty snarl that struck me as utterly foreign until I realized, with a start, that it was nothing but a flock of crows.
M
AHMUD
,
MY CHAUFFEUR
for the trip from Delhi to Agra, was a polite young Muslim who spoke no English. Though I had memorized a great deal of Hindi grammar and vocabulary in my classes at Chicago, I could barely manage to get a word out of my mouth. For the first hour or so, the two of us struggled to communicate in a variety of creative ways until we gave up and I retreated into a corner of the Ambassador's back seat, peering out the window as rural India presented itself to me for the first time. On either side of the road, hard red earth dotted by scrub brush and gnarly, parched trees stretched to the horizon. Now and again we passed a cluster of earthen houses hunkered down around a single ancient tree, where oxen and water buffalo rested in the shade. A woman in a sari moved languidly along the narrow pathway that led to an open well, a polished brass vessel balanced on her head.