Maya (31 page)

Despite my occasional forays into the city's social scene and my association with Richard, Mick was my only real friend—though I can't say I really knew him. He was above all an enigma, a deeply private person. He did not associate with any other foreigners, so far as I knew, and the local Banarsi greasers he called friends were not the sort of people who placed a premium on sharing the details of their emotional life: deadbeats, lechers, thieves, pimps, small-time thugs, the sort of people whose character is perfectly captured in the Hindi word
goonda
. One of them was rumored to have been involved in a local political scandal that ended in murder. I could not understand the attraction these people held for Mick, and I did not have much patience for the demands they placed on our friendship. It was virtually impossible to go to a public place with him and not be accosted. We might be sitting together at the Sindhi restaurant in Belapur or drinking chai at Ravi's, deep into debate over some point of Buddhist doctrine—an interest he had maintained since the days he was a monk in Thailand—when a gaggle of these creeps would suddenly appear, arm in arm, and slouch down beside us. They always traveled in groups, and they all dressed the same: skin-tight polyester, hair slicked back, red betelnut dribbling from the corner of a self-satisfied smirk. I don't recall Mick ever turning them away.

“What on earth,” I once asked him, “do you find to talk about with such obvious losers?”

He looked at me with his usual uncomprehending expression, the one he saved for such occasions—just the hint of a frown, eyebrows ever so slightly arched—as though I ought to know better than to pose such a silly question. After a moment or two, he answered with an air of mild unconcern: “Oh, you know, stupid things . . . nothing, really.”

It's his life, I told myself. None of my business. And I suppose the truth
is that I enjoyed Mick's company in part precisely because he moved so fluidly along the seedy margins of Banaras society. I knew very little about his life before India, but he had told me a few stories about the rough neighborhood in South Boston where he grew up. There was a stint in reform school, where he had been sent as a juvenile offender. He had been involved in a robbery where the clerk was badly beaten. He mentioned this only once in passing and never brought it up again.

In any case, my own life kept me fully occupied. There was my new Sanskrit teacher, Pundit Trivedi, with whom I met every day. And I managed to finagle a visa by gaining admission into a Tibetan language program across town at Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya. Sanskrit University, as it is often called, is a small college founded in 1791 by British officials committed to the preservation of India's classical literature. The Tibetan program was something new—an effort to work with Tibetan scholars now living in exile to retranslate Indian Buddhist texts from Tibetan back into their original Sanskrit. It was a perfect arrangement for me: without Fulbright, I needed the visa, and since Manali I had grown increasingly interested in the living tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

In other respects, though, things were not going so smoothly.

The social and cultural scene was more than a bit distracting, but that was only the beginning of my problems. I was consumed by ideas of what I
should
be doing, and such ideas often conflicted with the realities of living in a busy Indian city. On any given day I was likely to be detained indefinitely by some mindless bureaucrat at the bank or the Foreigners Registration Office, where I spent a good deal of time working out the provisions of my visa. As I had learned in Agra, a seat behind a desk means, first and foremost, the power to make people wait. And I spent a lot of time doing just that: waiting.

One way or another, it seemed, half the time I spent outside the blissfully sequestered precincts of my room was flat-out wasted, and on such occasions, the bug up my ass would
sting, sting, sting
. I had a difficult time adhering to the advice I had found so attractive in that verse from the
Bodhicharyavatara
, the one I had memorized back in Delhi:

Despite everything, I did my best to structure my life in Banaras like a retreat. Immediately after waking I ran through my early-morning exercise routine, then bathed downstairs, came back up, and sat meditation. After sitting I made coffee, had some yogurt and bananas, and read Sanskrit or Tibetan until lunch, which was usually at the Sindhi. In the afternoon I met with my teachers. I returned home in early evening, rinsed off at the tap, read more, had a snack in my room, sat meditation again for several hours, and went to bed. Every day followed the same schedule, and every day began before dawn with the furious clanging of a cheap Indian wind-up alarm clock I had purchased way back in Agra. It ticked so loudly I hadn't been able to sleep at night until I grew accustomed to the sound.

In Manali I had met a Canadian from Vancouver, a student of Apo Rinpoche, who told me he went into a six-month solitary retreat with one of these same clocks. He allowed himself only a short period of sleep, the remaining twenty or so hours of each day scheduled tightly with meditation, rituals, and prayers. The clock was essential to maintaining his schedule, but within the first week it began acting up, the alarm going off unpredictably, depriving him of precious sleep and interrupting his strict routine. For six months he worked with the situation, tinkering with the controls, propping the clock in odd positions, or muffling it while he slept, in the hope that it would be less of a jolt when the bell went off. Nothing availed, though, and for the entire six months, he lived at the mercy of those erratic wheels and levers. The day his retreat ended, he calmly placed the infernal device on the ground outside his cabin and pulverized it with blows from a large rock he had carefully selected weeks before and stored in plain view under the altar, just below an image of the Buddha, in anticipation of this great event—the culmination of six months of intense spiritual practice. He assured me that full and complete awakening could provide no greater satisfaction than he felt the moment the clock shattered under his hands.

I too would gladly have destroyed anything that interrupted the strict regimen of my days—the pattern of my expectations and desires—if only I could have found a mighty enough rock.

26

I
WAS HAUNTED
by memories of the bus and by an irrational conviction that I was somehow implicated in the child's death. It wasn't as if I could have forced the driver to slow down, and once the accident happened, I certainly could not have stopped him from fleeing the scene. Nor was I naïve: I knew what would have happened had the crowd outside managed to get at him. I recalled an article in the
Times of India
that I had read way back in Agra, about another bus that had struck and killed a child; the driver had his hands chopped off by angry villagers. Since then I had heard many such tales of retributive mayhem. The point is, I knew there was nothing I could have done to change what happened that night in the Punjab. So why did I feel somehow responsible?

We bind our hearts to this big drama, and for that we must suffer.

No doubt my old guru's words were true, but it's one thing to suffer out of compassion for others and quite another to feel culpable. Why should an innocent bystander feel guilty? The question was very much on my mind when, one morning just before waking—less than a month after moving to Banaras—I dreamed I was back on the Super Fast.

In my dream it was nighttime, and I could see myself there in the bus sitting just as I had been, behind the driver, bent forward over my bag. It was as if I were looking over my own shoulder—an oddly disembodied point of view that I take for granted in my dreams, though in waking life I've often wondered at this capacity of the mind to somehow climb outside of itself and simply watch as it creates a world out of nothing but memory and imagination. It wasn't until I'd been meditating for years that it occurred to me I was consciously cultivating a perspective already familiar from my dreams. In any case, the angle in my dream abruptly shifted, and the detached observer suddenly found itself firmly lodged in my dream body and staring at the back of the bus driver's head. From this new vantage point I could now see over the driver's shoulder to where his face, caught in the glow of a small illuminated portrait of Guru Nanak,
was reflected in the windshield. The image of his face floated there on the dark surface of the glass like a spirit trapped in the bardo realm between death and rebirth.

At first I couldn't take my eyes off it, but I soon discovered that by simply refocusing my gaze, I could look right through the reflection, out to where the glare of the bus's twin high beams vanished into darkness. I experimented shifting the focus back and forth, looking directly at the reflected image and then through it—a game that once again I found absorbing—until something outside caught my attention: far off in the distance a single point of light emerged out of the void. It was as though the bus had been a rocket drifting alone through deepest space, but now, with this solitary star as a point of reference, I was suddenly aware that we were hurtling directly toward it at a fantastic velocity. Very soon, where the star had been I could make out the fluorescent glow of a streetlight, and then, under the light, a chai stand with people sitting on benches in front and a few children playing nearby. It seemed like the closer we got, the faster the bus moved, as if it were being sucked forward by a powerful gravitational force, until at the last possible instant a boy stepped out of the darkness and the bus plunged into the light and the horn shrieked and I was thrown violently forward.

I lay on my back, engulfed in silence, still half asleep and lost in the feeling of the dream. Over my head the fan revolved slowly, churning the sultry air. My first thought was,
That's not the way it happened. On the real bus I wasn't awake. I didn't see the boy until it was over
. But how could I know if I was awake or asleep on that bus? How could I know anything for sure when I was stoned out of my mind on opium? And then it occurred to me: maybe the whole thing had been nothing but an extremely realistic dream.

It was an extraordinary thought. The very idea that the accident might not have actually happened seemed, at first, beyond comprehension. And yet, on the bus that night after leaving Chandigarh, I had been totally blasted, sliding in and out of consciousness—and opium is notorious for producing hallucinatory dreams. But even ripped on opium, is it possible, I wondered, to conflate waking and dreaming experience so completely? I'd no sooner asked myself the question than I remembered a woman I'd known in Chicago who told me that when she was applying to graduate schools, she once dreamed that she got a scholarship to Harvard. The
dream had been so vivid that she actually believed it was true. It wasn't until she was on the phone telling her father, and he asked about the details, that she realized her mistake. She'd been wandering around literally for days feeling this huge sense of relief that had nothing whatsoever to do with waking reality.

At the time, I'd found her story far-fetched, but now I could empathize—for the past month I had been feeling guilty about the death of a boy who may never have existed. Perhaps the most disturbing thing was that I probably could never know for certain whether I dreamed it or not. I tried to imagine what it would take to get at the truth. Maybe somehow I could go back and make inquiries at the station, or with the police—surely they must keep a record of such things. But then again, maybe not. The accident may well have gone entirely unreported. All sorts of horrible stuff happens in India that never makes it into any official police record. To find out if the accident really happened, I'd have to go back to the Punjab and visit every chai stand between Chandigarh and Delhi.

The feelings were real enough, even if the event wasn't. So how could real feelings be generated by an unreal event? But of course it wasn't the event itself that generated my feelings; it was the
memory
of the accident—or the memory of a dream—which obviously had a power of its own. In fact, it's amazing how powerful memory is, how everything about our present experience is interpreted through its lens—even sense perception is based on recognition. But if I were only remembering a dream, then the sense of culpability I'd been carrying around was
doubly
groundless. I lay there for several minutes pondering all of this, growing more and more disoriented, then finally gave up and threw back the sheet, forcing myself out of bed.

It was late September and the monsoon was winding down, but even at this early hour the air was uncomfortably hot and humid. When I finished my morning calisthenics, I was soaked in sweat. I took my towel from where it hung, picked up the bucket and the clay jar I used for drinking water, and stepped out into the hallway, heading downstairs to rinse off at the tap. I remember pulling the doors closed after me and fastening the chain in case a monkey happened to come down the stairs from the roof. Just as I turned from the door I smelled a faint, repellent odor. Following the scent I walked down the stairs and around the corner to the crawl space where I and the other tenants went for water. There, directly under
the tap, a dog had collapsed on the cool, wet stone. The outside door to the alley was open—someone had obviously forgotten to latch it—and the dog had come in looking for a safe place to rest.

Her hairless gray skin was corrugated with oozing sores; the nipples hung slackly from her chest like tiny withered fruits. She was so still that at first I thought she wasn't breathing. On closer inspection I could just make out the feeble movement of her ribs, a tenuous rise and fall of shallow respiration. Instinctively, I clapped my hands. She did not respond. Again I clapped and shouted in Hindi: “
Hut!
” I stamped my bare foot on the floor a few inches away from her muzzle.
Move it!
Still she did not stir, so I gently shook her with my toes. This time the ragged ears flopped back, and her head rose, ever so slowly. As though she were pushing upward against an overwhelming force, she struggled to lift her brittle, stinking body and drag it out into the hallway. Her spine had been severely twisted and both hind legs appeared to be paralyzed. I had seen dogs like this sprawled in the street, half alive, still lying where they had been caught under the iron wheels of a passing horse-drawn cart. After a few steps it appeared she could go no further, and when she started to lie down, once again I nudged her with the ball of my foot. I distinctly remember that it felt different this time, I was suddenly hyperaware of the sensation caused by her matted fur brushing against my bare skin. She stumbled, regained her balance, and continued to pull her useless, crippled back legs slowly toward the open door.