Maya (36 page)

In Chicago, I once consumed several weeks working my way through a small shelf of medieval texts known as the Pancharatra, an amalgam of Vedic exegesis and early tantric lore. According to one of these treatises, the
Ahirbudhnya
, the appearance of the self and its world is an emanation of Lord Vishnu's all-encompassing mind. During the period between the destruction of one world and the creation of another, when neither time nor space exists, Vishnu falls into deep, dreamless sleep; his awareness is present only as
nada
, described as “the long, drawn out sound of a temple bell.” When he begins to dream, this elemental vibration rises into divine awareness “like a bubble floating up from the depths of the ocean.” At the surface the bubble bursts into consciousness, spilling forth the fourteen vowels and thirty-four consonants of Sanskrit—the stuff out of which the dream of self and world takes shape and into which both ultimately collapse once again.

These same primal elements of language are visualized by the yogi in the form of a serpent, the kundalini, lying dormant at the root of the spine, in the lowest of the seven chakras. With adequate practice, the kundalini can be roused in meditation through the use of specific mantras. Once awakened, it moves upward along a central channel, through the navel and heart chakras, and into the throat, where it emerges in audible form as the seed syllables, or
dhatus
, of Sanskrit, each one associated with a particular tantric deity who protects and dispenses the energy of universal consciousness. As the kundalini approaches the crown chakra, the yogi effectively becomes God, reversing the process of creation, moving from waking consciousness into dream, from dream to dreamless sleep, and from dreamless sleep to an unborn, undying state known only as “the Fourth,” characterized in the texts as Pure Being, Pure Awareness, and Pure Bliss:
Sat, Chit, Ananda.

* * *

Absorbed in these ruminations and adrift on the voices all around me, I was jolted back to my senses by the furious clanging of rickshaw bells. The driver had veered to avoid colliding with a cow that stood placidly in the center of Assi crossing eating a cardboard box; the rickshaw now careened straight toward where I stood paralyzed, unable to decide which way to jump. For a split second I met the driver's eyes and my stomach wrenched. The center of the man's face was rotted away with leprosy. Where the tip of his nose and his upper lip should have been, there was a naked, suppurating wound, a single hole punched above a crooked ring of paan-stained teeth rushing down on me. He flung out a warning cry—no word, but a rough, wet ball of sound—and shot past, disappearing around the corner and down toward the river.

I caught my breath and looked around. To my left the girls sat, quietly now, behind their baskets of coriander, arranging leaves in neat piles; the Muslim men were gone.

“Stan? You okay man?”

“Oh. Hey.”

It was Richard. Since my move to Banaras the previous August, we had bumped into each other from time to time, mostly at concerts. In the interims between his periodic liaisons with the foreign women who passed through town, he visited the prostitutes near Chowk. This afternoon he was, as always, well dressed, in a carefully pressed, tailored kurta-pajama of raw silk.

Richard was not what you would call a contemplative person; he showed little interest in philosophy or spiritual things of any stamp. I remember one time when a group of us were sitting around a table at Ravi's chai shop. Ruth, the German musician who had a cabin in Manali, was talking about how she always performed puja to Sarasvati before practicing her flute. Richard had remained silent the whole time, listening, but at this point someone asked him if he did any kind of regular puja or meditation. At first he said nothing; he simply gazed at Ravi, watching him flip an omelet. I thought he hadn't heard the question, but then he responded, laconically, something to the effect that practicing his tabla was as close to religion as he ever wanted to get.

Before coming to India Richard had worked as a carpenter somewhere near Bristol in the UK. In the off-hours he was a musician—drummer in a garage band that played the clubs. Then the Beatles released
Revolver
, with George on sitar, and Indian classical music was suddenly everywhere.
A friend took him to a tabla performance in London, and according to Richard that was it. As he told me one afternoon while tuning his drums, “Somethin' just sorta come over me, and I split.” He packed a small bag, withdrew his life's savings, and took the ferry from London to Amsterdam. From there he traveled for two months in a haze of hashish and Hendrix, riding the Magic Bus through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Finally arriving in Delhi in late summer of 1968, Richard eventually found his way from there to Banaras, where he began studying tabla. He had never returned to England.

Richard and I had few common interests, but we talked together now and again. I liked his unpretentious, working-class edge. He devised an endless succession of entrepreneurial schemes to supplement his dwindling savings, and recently we had begun to see more of each other as the result of his latest enterprise, a flourishing business in whole-wheat bread. He baked it himself in a big tandoori oven constructed in a friend's courtyard near Sonarpur. Early every morning he stoked up the fires—both the one in his chillum and the one in the oven—and prepared several dozen loaves, which he delivered by bicycle, still warm, to his enthusiastic customers.

His route brought him through Assi and by my place every other day. On such occasions he would stop in to drop off a loaf of bread and report whatever gossip was going the rounds. Lately it was some tidbit about Marie, a French nymphet who occupied Harold's old room in Lanka. “You remember 'arold, right? The American fella who ate an eggroll from the Winfa an nearly died a food poisnin? So his visa expired and he left for Nepal, and now this dishy chick from Paris lives in his flat. Apparently she's got some famous guru in Poona. What's his name? Oh yeah, Rajneesh. That's it. Has everyone doing somethin he calls ruddy ‘sex yoga.'” Before Marie, the news generally included some mention of Dieter, a German sitar-wala whose blatantly racist views provoked frequent arguments and the occasional fistfight. Dieter detested India and Indians and made no effort to cloak his feelings, yet through some profound karmic irony he had been living in Banaras for years and showed no inclination to leave anytime soon. Richard knew them all. It was no surprise that he should happen to appear now, just as I was nearly run down by a rickshaw.

“Looks like he clipped you.” He gestured toward my pant leg, which had been torn open, apparently by the rear axle of the rickshaw as it swept past. Through the tear I could make out a small cut.

He inspected the wound and offered a long, low whistle. “Could a' been worse. He was an ugly bloke, that's for sure.” He looked up. “Hey man, how 'bout a chai?”

I was in no hurry to go back to my room and the blue notice, so I accepted his invitation.

He led the way across the street and up four or five stairs to a small clearing under a pipal tree that provided shade for a nearby chai stall. We found a seat on a circular concrete platform that surrounded the tree's immense, ribbed trunk; the stone was cold and polished to a smooth finish from years of service. The French couple I had seen earlier in the street now occupied a bench across from us. He was holding forth while she listened, her fingers nervously twisting a thick tangle of ash-blond ringlets that fell down over her neck. The air smelled pleasantly of ganja and incense. Just inside the tiny shop—not much bigger than a packing crate, really—a skeletal man with greasy, shoulder-length hair crouched behind a stove, fanning the smoldering dung with a tattered mat. He was barefoot and shirtless with blue-black skin; the bottom half of his lungi had been tucked in at the waist to form a short skirt that hung around his knees, leaving the stringy muscles of his calves exposed. When he saw us, he pulled himself up and peeled back his lips in a broad, crooked smile.

“Namaste, Richard!”

“Namaste, Chai Baba.
Doe chai pilaao
.” Richard brought up two fingers and tapped them against his forehead, at once a greeting and an order.

Chai Baba's eyes slid around to me and he raised both hands, palms joined in formal greeting. “Namaskar, Babu.”

Chai Baba made it a point to know every foreigner who stuck around town for more than a week. He talked with them, hung out and smoked ganja, did business with them, made connections.
Networked
. I was not one of the regular crowd at his shop—stoners that flew by with the seasons between Kathmandu and Goa like migratory birds, touching down en route for a month in Banaras in fall and spring, but still he knew all about me. He knew everything about everybody, but nobody seemed to know much about Chai Baba. He was reported to have a wife somewhere, but no one I knew ever actually saw her. And I was told that the child who worked around the shop was his son. There were plenty of other stories I never bothered to confirm, like the one about how he had once traveled to Germany in a VW bus with half a dozen Euro-hippies. They supposedly made it all the way to Berlin before the authorities sent him packing back
to India at the Reich's expense. He was even said to have wandered as a sadhu for some years, studying under an Aghori master.

I nodded at Chai Baba and summarily pushed my palms together, which was sufficient for him as he turned and went back to the fire. He took up a blackened, dented pan and set it over the coals. He filled the pan with hot water that fell in a steaming arc from the spout of an aluminum kettle. He then pried open the lid of a yellow Dalda can and measured out two heaping spoonfuls of powdered tea leaves, tossing each of them into the pot with considerable flourish. From a second can he spooned out twice that amount of sugar and repeated the process, ladling milk from yet another container. Finally, he selected a single green pod of cardamom from a tiny jar, delicately cracked it between the nails of his thumb and forefinger, and let it fall into the boiling liquid. He picked up the pan and swished it around once or twice, then poured the mixture through a plastic sieve into two smudged glasses and delivered them to us where we sat.

As he handed me my tea, Chai Baba's eyes flicked to the rip in my pant leg, and once again the bottom half of his face curled back in a toothy smile.

“Rickshaw nail you?”

He spoke his own peculiar dialect of English, an eclectic ragbag of words and phrases gleaned from years spent listening to nonnative speakers. He was similarly conversant, from what I could tell, in French, German, Russian, and Japanese.

“Bummer.” He laughed. “Rickshaw also nail Chai Baba.” He indicated a jagged red scar just over his left knee. “Many years before. Hard lesson, no?”

I was already in a foul mood, and the supercilious grin began to irritate me. I responded abruptly in stuffy, formal Hindi: “What lesson?” Immediately that verse from the
Bodhicharyavatara
, my mantra from the early days in Delhi, flashed to mind.

Chai Baba cocked his head to one side, as if he hadn't understood my question, then switched to Hindi himself: “
Rastay say hut jaao, babu, nahin to chot lag jaaega
.” Maybe he thought the answer was so simple it should be obvious: “Get yourself out of the way, Babu, and you won't get hurt.”

At that moment the French hippies called out for another round. Chai Baba went over and collected their dirty glasses then slouched back inside the shop.

In the street a camel sauntered by with a load of firewood strapped to its back. A man walked in front of the big animal, holding a long tether that was secured, at the other end, to a bridle. The two of them moved leisurely in the direction of Harishchandra Ghat. Richard and I sipped our chai and watched the camel's head as it faded into the distance, swaying gracefully, high above the crowded street, like a cobra dancing for a snake charmer. Richard put down his glass, removed a package of bidis from his
jhola
bag, and lit one up. The tip crackled and spit.

“Yesterday afternoon I may a' passed up the opportunity of a lifetime,” he remarked casually, plucking a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicking it into the gutter.

“How's that?”

“Guru-ji took me with him to a concert at that girl's school over near Lahurabir. You know the one. Up toward Sanskrit U.”

I tipped my head slightly in the Indian manner, indicating I was familiar with the place. It was an English-medium school catering to the daughters of well-off families—the kind of people who considered themselves “modern.”

“There were at least three hundred girls in the audience—teenagers, you know? Guru-ji had me up on stage with him. Must a' been waiting an hour, I bet. The principal and three or four other blokes up there talking. You know how they do before concerts—bloomin' malas and everything. Guru-ji tuned his tablas, and I just sat there looking out at all those girls giggling with each other and whispering back and forth while the old men talked.”

I could easily picture the scene. Garlands of bright orange marigolds strung around the musicians' necks and draped over the stage. The pristine white cushions where they sat, cross-legged, behind their instruments. Richard's teacher powdering his hands and fiddling with the ring of wooden pegs that ran around the periphery of the drums, each peg tucked under a rawhide string that could be stretched by whacking it up or down with a small silver hammer, altering the tension on the head and changing the tone. Richard the handsome foreigner, doubtless the center of attention during those interminable speeches, sitting up next to his teacher in a position of real status. The girls and he could stare at each other to their hearts' content, something that would be entirely inappropriate under any other circumstances.

“Guru-ji is always tellin' me I should get married, how it would be good for my music. You know, sett'le down, get a woman to do the cooking an' shopping an' all. Mostly I just ignore him, but lately he's made a bloody crusade of it. So get this: after we'd been sitting up there for a bit, he turns to me an' he says”—at this point Richard puts on his best Indian-English accent—“‘Richard, while I am playing I want that you should be taking opportunity to examine these girls. So many girls. Surely one of them will make a good match for you. When I finish you will please show me your choice.' Can you imagine, Stan? He was gonna try to fix me up—you know—with a
wife
! I swear to God I'm not joking. Cross my heart.”