Maya (38 page)

Where all of this left my neighbor, I was never sure, but in my solitude this very uncertainty about her feelings provided an opening for endless speculation. After one of our scandalous encounters, she would retreat back under her sari, rise, and walk briskly to the far side of the roof,
occupying herself there with one or another innocuous chore. More than once she disappeared down the stairs, only to resurface five or ten minutes later with a heartbreaking expression of calculated insouciance. As for myself, I would generally collapse forward onto the open text I had been reading and let my face sink into the page. And when I raised my head, the whole thing was likely as not to start all over again, only this time with me in the role of aggressor.

I stare at her unflinchingly, mauling her body with my eyes, while she in her turn feigns total indifference to my attentions. She lolls on the rooftop, stretches like a cat in the sun, runs her small hands down along her hips, stands on tiptoe draping her husband's kurta over the line with her naked stomach exposed to the warm winter sun. All of this, I somehow know, is for me.

The apes were strung out along the ledge between us now, pacing back and forth suspiciously. Something was up, and I wasn't the only one who noticed. My neighbor's body language had shifted, from ease into a wary and anxious crouch. Her nostrils flared; the gold ring in her nose caught the sunlight and flashed. Her fingers coiled slowly around the bamboo stick that lay at her side, soundlessly tightening their grip. Her eyes narrowed, scanning the pack as it spread out along the top of the wall.

The monkeys were clearly deploying themselves for whatever was about to come. One contingent fanned out along the ledge in front while several more circled around in the other direction, completely surrounding the rooftop. A single skinny male lowered himself head first down the inside of the high wall in back, gripping the edge with his toes. He dangled there, moving cagily up and down, all the while shifting his line of vision between the laundry and the rod clenched in my neighbor's hand.

It suddenly occurred to me that this might be a gambit of some sort, intended to distract her attention. The thought had no sooner passed through my head than my neighbor took the bait: springing to her feet, she lunged toward him with a truly vicious open-mouth threat. Sure enough, the monkey she went for was nothing but a decoy, for at precisely that moment the biggest, ugliest member of the gang leapt through the air behind her, snagged the clothesline with his tail, and swung out along its length grabbing frantically at the laundry.

“
Pichay dekho
!” I yelled, waving both arms in the air over my head. “Look behind you!”

She spun around, the bamboo stick tightly clasped in both hands, and as she turned she swung it like a samurai sword—straight from the waist—cutting through the air with a
whiz
that caught the big monkey smack on his ass and sent him flying into a basket of clothes. He cried out with a terrified yelp, and the whole troop panicked and scrambled for safety, leaping wildly, one after another, into the maze of power lines or onto my veranda. A few hurdled straight over the side and down the sheer face of the concrete wall toward the street—anywhere out of reach of that stick. Meanwhile the big guy was left alone, tearing around the rooftop in wide circles, tumbling through shirts and pajama pants, through knotted dhotis and a couple dozen brightly colored socks, all the while clawing madly at a purple sari-blouse that had gotten wrapped around his head like a blindfold. My neighbor was in hot pursuit, her sari streaming behind, hair flying. Her bare feet slapped against the stone, ankle bracelets jingling like crazy sleigh bells as the pole sliced through the air and one stinging blow after another landed on the monkey's radiant posterior. At last he managed to rip the blouse off his head, and with a final desperate howl, he leapt out across the alley, arms and legs flailing. It was as though he had been shot out of a circus cannon directly toward my window. He slammed against the bars in front of my desk. A final poke of her stick sent him up over the edge of the roof.

My neighbor was now stretched over the wall in front of me, leaning forward at the waist, the dreaded stick still held aloft in her hands. She was breathing heavily and glistening with perspiration. Her sari had fallen over one shoulder and her braid had come undone; her hair rippled in a shining confusion down the length of her back. For a good thirty seconds she remained as she was, poised at the edge of the roof, eyes raised, scrutinizing the spot where the monkey had disappeared. In the excitement she seemed to have forgotten all about me. But now, as she lowered her gaze, we unexpectedly found ourselves just a few feet apart and looking straight into each others' eyes.

Never had we been this close. Never this unguarded. Her lips were slightly parted, cheeks flushed. I instinctively bent forward and inhaled the air between us; it was saturated with the smell of her—an indescribably foreign, carnal perfume. I wanted desperately to do something—anything to keep this moment from slipping away. I wanted to reach out through the bars for her hand. I wanted to plead with her to run away with me, to flee to Kashmir. No, to
America
, where her husband would never find us.

She lowered the stick, without once taking her eyes from mine. As she did this, I leaned closer and brought my hands up and circled the bars with my fingers and clung to them.

Even as I struggled to find some way to hold on to the promise of those fleeting seconds, she was already letting go, backing off, forcing me to exchange my fantasies for her own flawlessly innocent smile, the artless, bashful smile of a teenage girl, a young Hindu bride. Now a thousand times more desirable and more impossibly distant than ever before, she pulled the sari up over her head—that familiar gesture—and turned brusquely away. She began collecting the laundry, seeing to it that everything was sorted and hung on the line.

I waited for her to look back. I don't know how long I stood frozen like that before it dawned on me just how ridiculous I would in fact appear should she chance to look over and see me still there, clutching at the bars like some forlorn prisoner, all puffed up with myriad implausible cravings that—if gratified—would have brought ruin upon us both. Immediately I released my grip and dropped into the chair and pretended to straighten the books and papers on my desk. When finally I dared to look up again, she was gone.

* * *

That night I dreamed once again that I was on the Super Fast, plunging through the monsoon darkness of rural Punjab. I saw myself propped forward over my canvas bag, poised somewhere between sleep and waking, knees pressed against the barrier that separated me from the driver, who in his turban and soiled shirt, monstrous, sat gripping the wheel. Over his shoulder I could see the pavement rushing by under a glare of headlights. Silhouetted people and animals sprung up out of nowhere and vanished again like spirits fleeing the light.

This time I knew what was coming: I was waiting for a boy to appear out of nowhere and to die. What I did not know—and what I struggled to understand as I lay in bed, asleep—was
where
the accident would take place. Would it happen in a dream or in waking life? The border between the two worlds had inexplicably ruptured, and somehow my uncertainty
about the past had insinuated itself into this dream as an uncertainty about the future. Memory and imagination had fused.

What I was feeling was, in a way, the same odd sense of detachment from my own experience that was so familiar to me in my dreaming life, as in my meditation practice. But now there was something new in the mix, for my confusion meant that I realized in some inchoate fashion that things were not as they appeared.

30

I
N EARLY
M
ARCH
, I received a letter from Abe Sellars, my advisor at Chicago. He wanted to know how my research for the dissertation was going. He wanted to know when I planned on returning. What he really wanted to know, I suspect, was exactly why he had consented to write me a reference for the Fulbright in the first place. After the party in New Delhi, Frank Davis had no doubt informed him about my decision to abandon the proposal for which I was awarded the money I'd been living on for almost two years now. In that time, I hadn't written Sellars even once. I couldn't face his disapproval. He had an international reputation as an Indologist, but what he truly excelled at was withholding approval. I don't think I ever expressed an idea that (according to him) he hadn't already considered. I remember going into his office one day just after finishing
Eros and Civilization
. I was on fire with Marcuse's mesmerizing hybrid of Freud and Marx, literally vibrating with excitement. Sellars was chairman of the department at the time: a very busy man. He endured my babbling for several minutes, until I sort of wound down in the face of his monumental silence, after which he commented, “I went through my Marcuse period in prep school.”

Maybe in his mind this sort of thing was intended to goad people into doing their best work. I honestly have no clue. But the effect it had on me was totally demoralizing. One of the best things about living in India was that it was pretty much as far away from him as I could get. His letter unearthed a landfill of repressed insecurities, all the old conflicting emotions I still nurtured about power academics.

Meanwhile, at Sanskrit University, things were not going well. This was particularly unfortunate because I needed to hold on to my research visa in order to remain in India, and since bailing on the program at BHU, the visa was now tied to my study of Tibetan across town. The problem was that the Tibetan class at Sanskrit University was a farce. My classmates—
all five of them—were noncommissioned officers in the Indian army. Ever since the Sino-Indian border dispute, Nehru, and after him Gandhi, had made it a point to keep a division of soldiers patrolling the Aksai Chin, where Tibetan is the native language. Ostensibly enrolled at Sanskrit University to learn Tibetan, the real incentive of my classmates was money. They apparently received a sizeable bonus simply for agreeing to study this strategically valuable language. It seems to me it might have been wiser for the payoff to be contingent on their actually achieving an acceptable level of proficiency. As it was, they didn't give a shit if they learned a word of Tibetan. They didn't even come to class.

So it boiled down to just me and the teacher, Tsewang, a young Nepali who had been hired specifically for this job. He had no previous experience teaching Tibetan and was profoundly uncomfortable in his new role. Twice a week he and I sat together conversing in Hindi about whatever crossed his mind. Most of our conversations ended up being about life in the US. I couldn't even get him to speak Tibetan. Since I needed the visa, I really had no choice but to more or less acquiesce in the situation. To make matters worse, I felt a genuine affection for Tsewang, so I didn't dare complain to anyone about his incompetency. I met his wife once, after class—a slight, timid girl dressed in a
chuba
robe and colorfully striped apron, cradling their infant son in her arms. The last thing I wanted was for him to lose his job.

Nevertheless, I plugged away, trying to learn Tibetan on my own. At the Motilal Banarsidass store near Chowk, I found a beat-up edition of Roerich's old
Textbook of Colloquial Tibetan
. This and Jäschke's
Tibetan-English Dictionary
, originally published in 1881, were pretty much the only tools available at the time. I was deeply enmeshed in reading the Indian Buddhist texts in the original Sanskrit, but most of them had long since been lost. Access to this literature was possible only through Tibetan translations made centuries earlier. I needed to learn the language, and to do that I needed someone who, at the very least, would consent to answer my questions. I knew there was a Tibetan temple in Sarnath, so I decided to take the bus out there and look around.

In 1977 there could not have been more than a few dozen lamas living in Sarnath, all of them housed in a series of concrete cells built along the southern periphery of the compound surrounding the Gelukpa temple. Two plump concrete snow lions greeted me, one on either side of
the gateway into the courtyard. They sat on their haunches, teeth bared, forepaws resting on what looked very much like two plastic beach balls. Walking through that gate I was suddenly back in Manali; even here, in the plains, I felt the peculiar sense of entering a “hidden world.” I was greeted by a young monk. Speaking in Hindi, I briefly explained who I was and why I had come. He listened politely then motioned for me to follow him up to the second floor of the residence hall.

It was still early in the day, but the March air was already hot, and I felt the first hint of perspiration on my stomach and chest as I climbed the stairs. At the top we entered a veranda and passed a succession of rooms, finally stopping in front of an open doorway hung with a set of white curtains that blocked our view. An “endless knot” of interlocking orange and red ran around the edges of each panel. From inside came the rich, spicy-sweet smell of Tibetan incense. My guide disappeared through the curtains for a few minutes and then returned.

“Geshe Sherap will speak with you,” he whispered in Hindi, holding the curtains aside.

I thanked him and stepped through.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the relative darkness of the interior. A large tangka hung on the wall directly in front of where I stood. The image depicted a blood-red buddha with thin, serpentine eyes and wearing a crown set with jewels. In his lap, embracing his waist with her legs, sat a white naked female. Her arms were raised in the air, elbows bent, her head held in profile and tilted provocatively to one side, electric blue hair falling down over her shoulders. Rainbows undulated from the couple, fanning out into a background of open sky dotted with stylized wisps of cloud. Below the tangka, on a small table, someone had arranged a series of silver bowls filled with water. In front of them were a brass bell and dorje.