Maya (32 page)

As I watched her struggle, I was overwhelmed with disgust at what I was doing—driving her out in this way. And then, as if in response to my feeling, I heard a voice say,
This dog cannot remain in this place where I bathe and clean my dishes and take my drinking water
. I realized then that ever since the first moment I had seen the dog, this same sentence had been repeating in my mind like a military command, with all the authority of reason. But now I was not just thinking this thought, I was aware that I was thinking, which was a whole different experience. And not only this thought, but everything else as well was now intensely clear and present—the smell of rotting flesh and dank air, the sound of claws scratching against stone, and a swirl of conflicting emotions that fell over man and dog like a shadow across the floor as early-morning sunlight broke through the open doorway and the dog emerged, working to catch her breath, her front legs folding, her chest dropping to the pavement.

I stood staring down at the animal, then turned quickly and walked back through the door, latching it behind me. I went to the tap, rinsed and dried myself, filled the clay jug with water and walked up the stairs.

Back inside the room I changed out of my wet shorts and put on a light lungi, then went over to the bed and positioned myself on its hard surface, crossing my legs one over the other in a half-lotus posture. I sat without moving, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, following the sensation of the air as it passed in and out of the nostrils. With my attention focused, I began watching the memories of what I had only moments earlier seen and done and felt—the abject fear in the dog's eyes, the texture of her fur against my skin, the stink of her wounds, the scratching of her nails on stone, my thoughts and reasons and justifications, the horrible mixture of compassion and guilt that swelled up in my heart as I drove her out the door. As I sat quietly watching, these and other, more distant memories took shape and faded away again, along with an endless stream of thoughts and feelings and sensations, all of them perfectly clear and present, held in the mind's eye like shimmering reflections on the glassy surface of consciousness.

But with the subtlest, involuntary lapse of attention, the glass would become a lens, awareness passing through the translucent images like light through film, filling the darkness with the captivating spectacle of a world where the play must go on no matter the cost. At such times I felt myself falling into the picture, and I needed to begin all over again, patiently adjusting the focus, bringing attention back to the present moment, to the sensation of breathing, to the memory itself as an object that arises and passes away.

I opened my eyes, very slowly, and looked around the room, taking in my books, the desk and chair, the aluminum footlocker, the jug filled with water. According to the clock I had been sitting for almost three hours. As I unwound my legs I felt the muscles tingle and burn, felt myself rise and stretch and walk over to the stove, where I put on water for coffee.

It was midafternoon before I summoned the courage to leave my room. When at last I walked down the stairs and opened the outside door, I found the dog lying exactly where she had fallen. The crows had already eaten her eyes. Her body lay there, stiff and covered with flies, all that afternoon and through the next night, before a sweeper finally came and dragged it down to the river.

27

I
FIRST HEARD ABOUT
Pundit Trivedi through an earnest young student from Kyoto who was then studying at Banaras Hindu University. Pundit Trivedi was well known around the university as an erudite and highly orthodox scholar who had a particular expertise in the literature of the Sankhya—India's most ancient systematic philosophy. I was told that he had accepted some foreign students in the past; the last of these had been a number of years ago, but at this point in life he was no longer willing to teach anyone. Nevertheless, I decided to try.

Pundit Trivedi's home was located in the maze of narrow alleyways behind Tulsi Ghat. Twice I knocked at his door, and both times I was turned away by a servant, apparently on the direct order of the pundit's wife. On the third visit I encountered an elderly man sitting on a chowki on the front porch reading the local Banaras newspaper. He was wearing a white dhoti wrapped around and through his legs, the sacred thread of his brahman heritage looped diagonally over his shoulder and down across the bare, wrinkled skin of his chest. His face was pressed between two pendulous, wing-like ears, and he had a truly imposing raptorial nose on which rested a pair of reading glasses. I was immediately reminded of the magnificent and yet somehow comical Garuda, the mythological bird associated with the great god Vishnu.

I introduced myself in Hindi and inquired if I might speak with Pundit Trivedi. I was told to go ahead and say whatever I had to say. I briefly described my interests and my previous experience and said that I was searching for a suitable teacher to help me deepen my facility with Sanskrit. The old man listened in silence until I was finished, at which point he folded the newspaper and quietly set it to one side. I thought for a moment that he was about to rise, perhaps to go inside. Instead he began questioning me in some detail about my training at Chicago. He wanted to know exactly what I had read, both the root texts and the commentaries. But it was only when I mentioned my evenings with Shri Anantacharya
that he warmed to my request. He proposed a trial period of two weeks, during which time he would reserve the right to terminate our association, no questions asked. I accepted these terms immediately. But when I offered to pay him for his time, the reply was curt and evidently non-negotiable: “My home is not a shop.”

We met the very next day, late in the morning, and every day after that. Two weeks passed in this way, then four, and I gradually began to appreciate just how fortunate I was to have found my way into the world of this kind, learned man and to have him as my teacher during the final years of his long life.

Pundit Ravendranath Trivedi was the last surviving Sanskrit scholar in an unbroken line of brahman intellectuals that stretched back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, perhaps as far back as Vedic times, when, he assured me with great solemnity, his ancestors had presided over the elaborate rituals that brought human society into harmony with the implicit order of the cosmos. Pundit-ji occasionally told me stories about his father, a landed aristocrat and well-known scholar among the Banaras intelligentsia during the days of the British Raj. It was here in the very courtyard where we met for my lessons that his father had conversed with the wise and holy men of Banaras. It was here, as well, that his father had announced his intention to become a sannyasi, as had his own father before him, after seeing the first faint streaks of silver hair over his son's temple. Astrologers were called to determine an auspicious date for the symbolic funeral, the first essential step toward renunciation. The service was performed, and from that day on he was, ritually speaking, dead to the world, released from the all-encompassing web of obligations that Hindu society imposes on every householder. These domestic responsibilities now fell to his son, my teacher.

Years before his father left home, Pundit Trivedi had been groomed for his role as patriarch. His marriage had been arranged with a woman born in the family's ancestral village in eastern Bihar, and within a few years of their wedding, she gave birth to a son and two daughters. In deference to the times, all three children were sent to an English-medium school. A modern education was important if the girls were to marry well. For the boy, though, learning English was something of a formality, as it had been for Pundit Trivedi, since as the only son he would of course remain at home to take over for his father, to assume his place in the long succession of brahman scholars who had walked this same path. Pundit Trivedi
tutored his boy from an early age, as he himself had been tutored by his father. The two of them sat together in the garden, every morning, reciting declensions and conjugations, reading the folk tales of the
Hitopadesha
and the abstruse verses of the
Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi
, an introduction to Panini's sublime vision of Sanskrit grammar.

Who could have predicted what would follow? Who would have thought that so much could be lost so quickly? But we live in the Kali Yuga, the fourth, final, and degenerate epoch, a time when even the most ancient, revered traditions are slipping away.

When the girls reached an appropriate age, they were married and sent off to live with their respective families, just as they were expected to do. It became clear, however, that the boy was not interested in pursuing his studies in Sanskrit. Instead he attended a technical college, where he trained to become an electrical engineer. How this decision was made—how such a thing was permitted to happen, with what amount of conflict and heartache—I can hardly imagine. By the time I met Pundit Trivedi, all of this was history. The prodigal son and I were never introduced, and I saw him only once, as I was leaving from a lesson; he was a distinguished man with graying hair.

With his son in New Delhi, Pundit Trivedi did not renounce the world to take up the life of a sannyasi. Had he gone away, who would have watched over Mata-ji and the complex domestic affairs? It may be that he too had fallen under the spell of the decadent Kali Yuga, for in 1945 he did something else altogether without precedent: he accepted a non-brahman as his student—an Englishman, a magistrate at the high court of Banaras—and began tutoring him in Sanskrit in the same quiet garden where he had passed so many hours with his young son. Since that time he had taught only a handful of Westerners, all of whom were attracted to Banaras because of its reputation as a center of traditional learning.

His most recent student before me had been a prominent German philologist who studied in Banaras during the sixties. The professor had arranged for Pundit Trivedi to receive a post at Humboldt University as a lecturer in Sanskrit. For Pundit-ji to accept this offer would have entailed the final break with his orthodox roots. Of the many difficulties involved, perhaps the greatest was that traveling to Germany would open the unimaginable possibility of death outside the precincts of Shiva's city, the triangle of land bordered on the east by the Ganges and on the north and south by the Varana and Assi rivers.
Kashyam maranam muktihi
. So
says the
Kashikandika
: “Death in Banaras is liberation.” Death in Banaras is death that brings an end to death. And so it was that the invitation to teach in Germany was respectfully declined. Pundit Trivedi elected to remain in the holy city, supervising the family property and discussing politics and philosophy with old friends.

I arrived for our lesson one cool December morning and found my teacher reclining, as usual, on a stone bench in the garden, absorbed in his newspaper. Nearby a cow stood under a canopy of palm leaves, studiously working her way through a mixture of water, oats, and hay. Pundit-ji leaned against a large cylindrical bolster—his “wisdom pillow.” “Without my wisdom pillow I could not remember even one shloka!” This was his standard claim, and it was generally accompanied by a solid slap to the white cloth and a sly smile. He was wearing heavy wool socks, a bulky sweater, and an incandescent orange stocking cap pulled tightly down over his head. A pair of wooden sandals rested on the ground at his side, each one with a single peg made to fit between the first and second toes, each peg rubbed to a soft luster from years of service.

As I stepped from the shadows into the sunlight, Pundit Trivedi looked up from his paper. I saluted him by bowing slightly and raising my hands, palms joined.

“Oh ho! The great Buddhist scholar has arrived! Please, come. Sit down, sit down.” His eyes glittered and he smiled enthusiastically, directing me over to the bench in characteristic north Indian fashion, his right arm outstretched, palm downward, cupped fingers moving rapidly back and forth as though digging a small, invisible hole in the air. He sat leaning slightly forward, back straight, arms at his sides, the way a musician sits with his sitar—his right knee bent sharply over the fulcrum of the left thigh. I went to him and touched my fingers to his feet and then to my own head, after which I settled into my spot on the bench. For a moment we simply sat there silently beaming at each other as though this were the happiest occasion of our lives, the culmination of all our hopes and plans.

“Mata-ji!
Chai laao
!” Through the backdoor of the house I could see the broad silhouette of his wife as she moved toward the kitchen to prepare tea. “You will have some chai, no?”

“Yes, please. How's the new calf doing?” We both turned to examine a miniature white cow that hovered near its mother, wobbling on four bony stilts. She blinked her long lashes uncomprehendingly, as if this new world
had been made just a bit too bright for her taste. The servant, Madhav, rubbed her body vigorously with a large towel, causing her head to bob up and down.

Pundit Trivedi studied the young cow, giving my question serious consideration. “These cold nights are too much for a newborn. She needs to be watched over carefully or we will lose her.” He called out instructions to move the calf away from its mother and into the sun. Madhav acknowledged his words with a nod and began to pull the tottering animal out from under the shelter. This resulted in a loud exchange of plaintive cries between mother and daughter, both of whom were clearly uncomfortable with the new arrangements.

When Pundit Trivedi's father became a sannyasi, he left behind much more than the single great stone house. The house and surrounding property marked the center of a modest feudal estate. Madhav's family had served Pundit Trivedi's family for generations, bound to them by loyalty, tradition, and expediency. According to a long-standing agreement, the land where Madhav and his relatives lived was entirely at their disposal in return for services rendered. So far as I know only one of Pundit-ji's several household servants, a deaf mute who slept in a shed with the cows, did not come from Madhav's extended family. I was told that she had been an orphan child begging near Kashi Viswanath temple. One day, for reasons of her own, Mata-ji singled out this particular girl from among all the other wretched beggar children and brought her back to the house. Here she had lived for over twenty years, earning her keep by washing clothes and cleaning up after the cows. I never heard her called anything other than
Goongi-ji
—from the Hindi for “deaf and dumb.”