Maya (23 page)

17

W
E RETURNED IN TIME
to rinse off at the tap before late afternoon tea, followed by dinner and the colonel's ritual nightcap. It was hard to believe that this was only our second evening together; I had already become attached to the house and its comforts, and to the alien, savage intensity of the jungle outside. But we were to leave the following morning. Singh had made arrangements to send us back with his driver to Ramnagar, where we would catch the train for Delhi.

While Penny was getting ready for bed, I went out to stretch my legs. The fresh night air was sobering after having spent the last few hours settled back by the fire with the colonel's whiskey. I walked unsteadily around the drive for a while, my head tipped back, gazing up into the immensity of the cosmos. The sky looked like one of those cheap velvet paintings, the plush carpet of the universe plastered over the inside of a gigantic dome, a blackness so dense it absorbed time and space and then let them rip through again in a billion points of cold white fire. On an impulse, I headed toward the stables to check in on Sita. I wanted to see if elephants slept on their feet like horses and cows.

I crept up to the huge door and peaked in. Sure enough, there she was, standing motionless, her big head dipped forward between those magnificent ears, eyes closed like some hoary sage immersed in deep samadhi. The expert nose drooped limply down into the straw. Was she dreaming of tigers? I studied the mountainous silhouette of her body as it loomed over me in the darkness. All at once I realized that I was utterly exhausted. I found my way back to the room, climbed in bed next to Penny, and immediately fell into a fitful sleep.

That night I dreamed that I was being pursued through the jungle by Kalidas. He was accompanied by a trained tiger able to track me down by following my peculiar scent—the smell of Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. I was running for my life. Stumbling through the brush I jettisoned my bag, which was stuffed with heavy dictionaries and
grammars. I kept hoping to come upon a river, so I could use that trick you always see in the movies when convicts escape the bloodhounds by swimming downstream. In my panic to shed the library stench, I began frantically to strip off one piece of clothing after another, until at last I was crashing naked through a dense tangle of vegetation. But it was to no avail. My skin itself exuded a telltale aroma of bound periodicals, xerox fluid, and those foul little ammonia wafers they put in urinals. I entered a clearing and sprinted for the other side, then tripped and fell. Within seconds, Kalidas and the tiger burst out of the jungle. The old man barked a command, and the animal lunged toward me where I lay in a crumpled fetal position, knees drawn tight against my chest, arms thrown up around my head.

I must have cried out in my sleep and woken Penny, for the next thing I remember is the warmth of her arms wrapped around me. Half lost in dream, I drifted into her embrace, giving myself over to her touch. We lay together in silence, legs entwined, while she stroked my hair, gently kissing my face and neck. And then we made love, our bodies moving together and merging as the early morning light filtered through the shutters.

At breakfast the colonel seemed uncharacteristically jumpy. Twice he asked how we had slept, then called for a fresh pot of tea. While we waited, he fidgeted with his napkin, rearranged his chair, and commented repeatedly on the weather. At last the tea arrived and Jagjit circled the table, filling our cups. Only then, after the servant had once again disappeared, Singh let it be known that he intended to name the tiger cub in the back room after “Miss Ainsworth.” He made quite a production of the announcement, stressing that he had, until now, been unable to reach a decision on this important matter. He obviously intended for Penny to take it as a considerable honor. He ended by formally requesting permission to use her first name.

“Oh, no,” she shook her head, “it's too much. Really.” She actually blushed.

“Not at all, my dear. I insist. My mind is made up. But this means that you
must
come again to visit.” He glanced in my direction, then back at Penny. “Both of you must return, when the tiger is older and fully trained.”

“We will!” Penny exclaimed, without a moment's thought, turning a gleeful smile in my direction. “Won't we, Stanley?”

“Sure,” I said, with a slight shrug of my shoulders. “Why not?”

Penny continued looking in my direction, searching my face for some sign that—against all odds—such a thing might in fact be possible. But what could I tell her that she didn't already know? By the time that tiger cub was trained, she would long since have returned to England. After a few seconds her smile faded, ever so slightly, and she turned back to our host. “Thank you, Colonel Singh. For everything. For opening your home to us, for allowing us to share these magical days with you. I shall never forget your generosity.”

This time it was Singh who seemed to be at a loss for words. Whatever his feelings may have been for Penny, at that moment the silence between them was both intimate and tender.

That breakfast—our last meal together—is now little more than a mélange of fading images spread out across the canvas of Colonel Singh's poignant, solitary world. I see the three of us seated around the white linen tablecloth with our tea and toast, talking together under the weathered tile roof of the colonel's forest home. The dull luster of a silver teapot polished with wet ash and clay. Three china cups and matching white plates. Three yellow omelets speckled with thin slices of green chili. Penny's hair pulled back and tied with a scrap of silk, the supple curve of her neck, a slender finger hooked through the cup's small handle. The precise creases of Colonel Singh's khaki shirt and trousers, his gleaming boots, the black military turban wrapped proudly above bronzed cheeks.

18

W
E ARRIVED BACK
in Delhi on a late train. The very next day Penny traveled to Bihar, where she had arranged to photograph Buddhist archeological sites. Our plan was for her to visit me in Manali later on in the summer.

My final weeks in the capital were consumed with preparations for the transition to a new life in India. It was already late March, and at the end of April the period of my official status as a Fulbright scholar would be over—I would no longer bear the institutional imprimatur. I would need to create a new identity from scratch, establish my own boundaries, reasons, justifications. But I had managed to save virtually all of the considerable funds that came with the original award. By continuing to live even more frugally in Banaras, I figured that I would be able to hang on in India indefinitely. I planned to go first to Manali, a village in northern Himachal Pradesh. There in the high elevations, I could wait out the hot season, studying Pali and Sanskrit until late August, when the monsoon had cooled things down a bit on the plains. Then I would relocate permanently to Banaras.

A few days after I got back to Delhi from the Corbett trip, while sorting through the mail in the Fulbright office, I ran into Margaret Billings. Not surprisingly she was aghast at my plans to stay on in India.

“Frankly, Stanley, I'm stunned.” She extracted a cigarette from the box and pushed one end between her lips, torched the other with a blue Bic, and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “From a professional point of view,” she said, “this is certainly a mistake. But I'm talking to myself again.” Two gray clouds spewed out of her nostrils like diesel exhaust. “Why should I care if you ruin your chances for an academic career?”

I didn't know how to respond. After all, why
should
she care about me? I never had understood. The attention was flattering, in a perverse way, but also annoying. I stood there mute, hanging my head like a recalcitrant child.

“You know, this could very well jeopardize your ability to get scholarships through your department. There's only so much you can expect Sellars to do for you—especially if it begins to look like you're not serious about your work.”

“I appreciate your concern, Margaret.”

“But you don't care
yourself
.” Her tone had softened.

“Honestly, I appreciate your advice,” I interjected. “I really do. I plan to be back in the States by next fall. I'm just going to spend the summer in the mountains, working on my Hindi.” All those opportunities to watch Penny had paid off. I lied. Brazenly. Margaret knew it too, but there was nothing more to say. She simply shrugged her shoulders. Clearly she was giving up on me.

We were each weaving the fabric of our lives: I would remain here in India, without any clear idea why; she would return on schedule with the results of her research to tie it all up neatly in a paper that could be presented at the next meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, with no need to wonder why. I left her sitting on the same couch where we had met, the butt of a cigarette glowing faintly between her fingertips.

Seeing Margaret again made me realize how much had changed since the afternoon of our first encounter, how my mood had shifted from the disorientation and despair of those first few months to a sense that things were finally moving in the right direction. After the whole miserable business with Judith and the bleak loneliness of those early months in Agra and Delhi, I had managed to surface with a tenuous faith in my decision to stay on in South Asia beyond the period of the Fulbright award. Meanwhile, my past life was growing ever more remote. I rarely thought about Chicago and Abe Sellars. Research for the dissertation had all but stalled. Reading the Sanskrit texts had become an end in itself.

Since arriving in India I had accumulated a small stack of photographs from home. They came one or two at a time in the mail—pictures of my mother and father, my sister and my brothers, of the Thanksgiving turkey, of Christmas, the tree and gifts, the winter snow, aunts and uncles and cousins. I kept this sheaf of curling photos in an aluminum trunk, wrapped in a handkerchief like a Lakota medicine bundle. Viewing them had become a ritual act. I would bring the little package to my desk, carefully unwrap the square of cotton cloth, and make my way deliberately from one snapshot to the next, allowing them to conjure up a chain of memories that led backward in time to a world both intimately familiar and eerily distant. Everything was just as I had left it, except for one, small
detail: these people—people I knew so well—were now living a life I did not share. It was as if some clever censor had airbrushed me out of my own past.

I still have that anachronistic collection of Kodachrome photos tucked somewhere in a drawer. The colors have bleached with the intervening years, but this only contributes to the disconcerting sense that the entire world they depict never did really exist. Each fragile photographic image has become a thinly layered testament to the continuing sequence of losses on which a life is built. I study the two-dimensional faces, those effervescent holiday smiles, and I see all of us somersaulting through a world that is, according to the
Lankavatara Sutra
, “neither as it appears, nor otherwise.”

One night I dreamed that I was back in America, in an unfamiliar, dingy apartment somewhere in Chicago. I somehow knew that this was an apartment where Judith had once lived, though at the moment it appeared unoccupied—furnished, but otherwise empty of any personal belongings. I was going through drawers and closets, looking for something, though I did not know what. Finally, in a box under the bed, I discovered a fluffy purple beach towel that I immediately recognized as a gift I had given to her on Valentines Day in 1971. Her favorite color was purple, and she had treasured that towel. One afternoon when we were camping in northern Michigan, at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, she left it on the beach. We didn't realize it was missing until much later, after we had returned to our campground, and by that time it was too late to go back. We never saw it again. Oddly, when I found the towel in my dream I knew immediately what it was, and I knew I had to get it to her. She would be thrilled. But where was she? I hadn't the slightest idea, and I was seized with a desperate longing for her company.

This dream and the terrible poignancy it provoked remained with me long after waking. For the first time, I sensed just how much had been irretrievably sacrificed in order to cut my ties with Judith. I realized how I had literally been saved by forgetting, how this ability to simply not remember so much of what we have lost serves as a natural escape from the otherwise unbearable weight of the past.

About this time I began working my way through the Sanskrit text of the
Bodhicharyavatara
, a medieval poem describing the inner life of a bodhi
sattva. I was drawn to it not only because of the beauty of the original language, but also because of the passionate voice of the author, a Buddhist monk named Shantideva. The tone of his writing is deeply personal; his question goes to the heart of the spiritual life: how can we open ourselves fully to the painful contradictions of our love for this world, a world so fragile, so tenuous and fleeting, that it can never truly be our own?

I copied a stanza onto the first page of my journal, where it remained as a sort of maxim guiding my life through the following years. Without making any special effort, I committed it to memory and began unconsciously reciting the Sanskrit several times a day . . .

A free translation of my understanding of the Sanskrit might read something like this: