Maya (14 page)

Amid all of this I had a dream. I was with our old housemate—the woman I had slept with when I set all this misery in motion. Only it was more like a caricature of the actual woman. The woman in my dream was heavy—wide hips, big thighs and breasts, and dark, florid nipples. I was in bed with her and we were having sex, pumping away like machines. We'd been going at it night and day for what seemed like forever when I started to wear out. My penis was sore. Limp.
Not happy
. I said something about taking a break, and immediately the woman in the dream began to harangue me for losing interest in sex. I rolled off her and onto my back and lay there half covered under sweaty, crumpled sheets while she lectured me about how unnatural it was that I couldn't take pleasure in the human body.

In this part of the dream she was hovering over me on her knees, wearing nothing but a pair of faded white panties. I don't know when she put them on—it was a dream—but here's the really weird part: I couldn't pry my eyes away from those panties. I was fascinated and repulsed by a pee stain right in the center of her crotch. It was perfectly symmetrical, like a tantric mandala, a diagram of the psychic universe. All the time she was talking I was totally absorbed in that yellow spot between her legs. A little voice in my head kept repeating:
The pee stain is the key. The pee stain is the key.

In a flash everything became clear. I knew that I had lived through this whole scene many times before, with just this woman, exactly as it was happening in the dream. I even knew, in some vague fashion, that I was dreaming, but it didn't seem to make any difference. The dream itself was déjà vu. Then the thought popped into my head that this could be the last time. I asked myself, in the dream, why I didn't finish with it, now. This is the last thing I remember before waking up, but that question reverberated in my mind:
Why not be done with it once and for all?

But what was “it”?

The scene in the dream was disturbingly similar to episodes Judith and I had been through while wrestling with one or another of our endless problems. From time to time I would lose interest in the unceasing drama and simply bail out and become the man in the bubble. Unreachable. Judith would sob violently. Eventually I would come around and try to apologize, or else fly off into a litany of elaborate psychological or philosophical justifications for my behavior. This would go on just long enough for her sobbing to morph into blind rage that invariably culminated in a
furious storm of threats and accusations. At last this too would pass, and it would be her turn to apologize. Then the inevitable finale: the two of us lying side by side in bed, crying.

The dream was, in fact, not nearly as bad as what Judith and I had actually experienced in waking life many times.

I sent off a barrage of mail, and at the end of the second week of March I received another letter: “Stanley, my decision is considered and final. I want a divorce. I'm very worried that you will return with false hopes and we will both suffer.”

It was over.

If I was afraid to lose her by staying, I was even more afraid to go back. That same day I sat down and wrote to her saying I would not return to Chicago in the spring.

The divorce papers say that I abandoned my wife in June of 1975 without justification and against her will. That's not true. In June of 1975 I left Chicago, bound for New Delhi, but I did not abandon my wife. I didn't leave Judith until early spring of the following year, on the day I mailed that final letter.

After returning from the post office I copied a passage from the
Shikshasamucchaya
into my journal. The original Sanskrit and this, my translation, appear in an entry dated March 17, 1976:

          
Death, departure, new birth, dissolution,

          
separation from people and things beloved,

          
never to come again or to meet again,

          
like the leaves and fruits of the forest,

             
like the current of a river.

11

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF
M
ARCH
the sulfurous heat of summer begins to harden and crack the Gangetic plain that extends from northern Uttar Pradesh down through Bihar to Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal. This was my first experience of spring in northern India, a time when the cool days of winter are transmuted almost imperceptibly into summer's dry, ferocious heat, both a change of season and a subtle disintegration of the will.

Dust from the vast baking plains around Delhi was swept aloft by a dry wind and carried for miles until it drifted down over the inhabitants of the great city where I lived. The beggars lay in the crowded streets, more hopeless than ever, roasting like boney, charred rabbits turned over hot coals. Under banks of whirling propellers, accountants at the main office of the State Bank of India were bent low over their desks, surrounded by towers of massive ledgers, wiping the grit from their glasses. In the fashionable suburbs, dust floated through the streets outside exclusive shops and restaurants, gently working its way into each shiny Mercedes Benz, settling quietly over the German pile carpeting and hand-tooled upholstery. Sweepers in the big homes around Chanakyapuri and Jor Bagh kept busy with damp cloths, wiping down tables and floors several times a day. Heavy slatted blinds were lowered against the encroaching light.

For weeks already I had been unconsciously avoiding the direct sun, holding close to the sides of walls and buildings, straying farther out of my way each day simply to follow a sheltered path. At first I was completely unaware of the powerful natural forces at work on my body, contracting and expanding the muscles of my legs, driving my feet down a circuitous route through the shade, where I lingered an extra moment, struggling to recall a neglected errand, when I need only have looked up to the corrosive yellow fire that burned, hotter every day, in the bleached, cloudless sky.

I needed a break from my research. I'd switched again, gone back to my original proposal, working on early Vedanta, but it wasn't going all that well. I felt trapped between the two worlds of Buddhism and Hinduism,
unable to decide which route to take. Penny and I began to talk of escaping to the mountains for a short retreat. We studied maps and gathered information on the hill stations north of Delhi. Shimla and Dehradun were out; neither of us was especially interested in exchanging a big city for a small one. Nor did we want to visit any of the busy pilgrimage spots like Haridwar or Rishikesh. After Agra and Delhi, we were both starved for a taste of nature in the raw. I was anxious to see uncultivated plants and wild animals, not more cows and people. One of us spotted a shaded area on the map labeled Corbett National Park. There it lay, beckoning to us from the hills near Almora, only a day's journey by rail from Delhi. I asked around, but no one I knew could tell me anything about the place. The more blank looks I drew, the more perfect it began to seem, until eventually the decision was made and the day of our departure was upon us.

We arose before dawn and set out for the train station in a motor rickshaw, sputtering and popping through the warm, dark air. Paharganj, the bazaar across from the sprawling New Delhi station, was already coming alive in the early light. Scraggly horses stood hitched to their two-wheeled tongas, noses buried in torn canvas bags of feed. Smoke blossomed up from the newly lit fires in the chai stalls where the drivers gathered. Cows roamed freely, grazing on mounds of empty green peapods or the severed stalks of purple eggplant that littered the street in front of a long row of dhabas. From the direction of the tracks came the hiss and shrieks of the big locomotives.

The main ticket hall echoed with the cries of vendors. Hundreds of people stretched out on the stone floor, sleeping under cotton shawls. Others sat together in small groups drinking chai and waiting with their battered aluminum footlockers, rolls of bedding, and a clutter of plastic baskets colored red, orange, or turquoise. Penny and I wove a path over and through the crowd, hopping from one empty spot to the next as though crossing a stream, rock by rock, cautious not to accidentally tread on the fingers or toes of someone's sleeping grandmother.

Somewhere along the way a ragged girl and her little brother appeared in our path, their hands out for change. I dispensed fifty paisa to each one, but this wasn't sufficient to buy them off, and they trailed us up the teeming stairs and over the tracks, then down again onto the platform where our train stood waiting. Having made it this far we could afford to relax—so long as we kept a close eye that the train didn't leave without us. We dumped our bags next to a counter operated by the station and
ordered a couple of chairs and a package of glucose biscuits. The little girl planted herself directly in front of me, her brother staked out Penny. Both of them continued to make a big show of it, doing their best to look pathetic. The girl's eyes were half closed, one scrawny arm moving back and forth between her stomach and quivering lips. Her chin drooped and she moaned inarticulately.

I had seen this performance many times since coming to India; the mannerisms were always the same. It's a particular form of street theater usually reserved for foreigners. The basic idea is to act as wretched as you can, and to keep at it until you extract at least ten times the amount you could ever hope to get out of an Indian. The girl performed her role effortlessly, but the little guy next to her was apparently having trouble staying in character. He kept looking over at his sister and smiling in a way that threatened to spoil the whole drama. The longer this went on the more apparent it became that she, too, was fighting back a smile. Every now and again she would reach over and smack him alongside the head or give his ear a twist, but it didn't seem to help much. Despite this obvious handicap they managed to keep it up for several minutes before both of them burst out laughing and ran madly off down the platform, the girl showering her brother with a barrage of mock blows.

We stuffed ourselves into a second-class compartment with a contingent of farmers. Six of us were crammed onto a wooden bench designed to seat three. Penny sat with the open window on one side and me on the other. The day had barely begun, but we were already working up a good sweat. Several of the men were squashed together on my left, smoking bidis. They wore dhotis and dirty white kurtas that flapped around their knees in the wind. A few were barefoot, but most sported the standard-issue footwear for male villagers: flesh-toned plastic slippers with sharply pointed toes. The women squatted on the floor at our feet, saris gathered tightly up around their calves as though each butt had been shoved into a brightly colored cotton bag. Their palms and the soles of their feet had been decorated with ornate patterns of henna. They were all unselfconsciously staring at both of us, laughing and conversing with each other in a dialect I couldn't understand.

One old woman could not take her eyes off of Penny. God knows what thoughts were passing through her head as she contemplated this pale, exotic young female. The old lady didn't have a tooth in her head. She
crouched there with her sari drawn up over her stringy gray hair, gumming a bidi. She squinted, tipped her head, then finally yanked off her glasses—a battered pair of heavy plastic frames distributed free by the government—and cleaned the thick lenses with a corner of her sari. This accomplished, she stuck them back on her face and craned her neck for a better look.

Penny seemed oblivious to the attention—an omnipresent feature of life here as a foreigner. She chatted with me for a while, then turned toward the open window and gazed out between the horizontal iron bars.

After Ghaziabad our car emptied out a bit, freeing up a few inches between me and two old Muslim men who now occupied the space vacated by the villagers. There were no more stops, and before long we fell into the soothing, timeless space of the traveler, where, suspended between coming and going, one often finds an unearned respite, a peace that demands no final resolution, freely given and accepted without a thought of gain or loss. The wheels clicked rhythmically over the track, and our bodies rocked and swayed in time with the motion of the carriage. On long, slow curves I could see the full length of the train to where the engine puffed and wheezed, belching dense clouds of steam and smoke that drifted through our window in a mist of fine black particles. Below us the ties rattled by. We passed small herds of goat and water buffalo grazing near the tracks, men peddling bicycles along ribbons of dust, women and girls gathered in the shade. Farther out, the flat countryside stretched away to the horizon. Penny and I barely exchanged a word, but I could feel her weight and the warmth of her body pressing against me.

Moradabad is two hours east of Delhi on the rail line to Banaras. This was as far as we could go by train. From there we caught a bus north to Ramnagar, the last stop for public transportation to Corbett. We each polished off a plate of rice and watery dal at a grubby little dhaba—the best restaurant in town—then assessed our situation. There were still four or five miles to cover, so we shouldered our bags and headed down the road with the intention of hitching a ride or walking the rest of the way to the park if it came to that.

The sun was bright and warm, but the air at this altitude was cooler than it had been on the plain. In the distance, the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas rose into a cerulean sky. A light breeze dried the sweat on my arms; the sticky scent of pine hung around us like incense. Penny
seemed especially beautiful to me as I watched her stoop to tighten the strap on one sandal. It occurred to me that life would never offer anything finer than this moment, that I would never feel more joyous or free than I felt right now, walking down the road with Penny beside me, my bag over one shoulder, an icy stream rushing nearby, the fresh odor of earth and snow in my nose. The cramped university world of Hyde Park was a faded reflection in a distant, cloudy glass. Even the pretentious babbling of the Fulbright office in New Delhi seemed a million miles away.