A River Sutra (4 page)

The procession has halted at our gates, and guards are steering the camel carts and mounted riders down a side street. People are running from the house to help my relatives dismount from the elephants.

As I walk past the milling dancers I can see the women of the house weeping on the balcony—my wife, my mother, my sister-in-law, my cousins. But I know they are reconciled to my departure, their tears are only an overflow from the excitement of the day.

On the veranda the children are waiting to bid me farewell. They are too young to understand what I am doing, and I do not wish to frighten them so I embrace them as I would have done on any other evening.

When I reach my chambers the servants help me undress, freeing me of the diamond helmet and the garlands of gems that have suffocated me all day. I enter the silence of my marble bathroom. Standing under the shower I let the cool, clear water wash the caked dust from my body, the chaotic scenes of the procession from my mind. Suddenly I am paralyzed by fear. This is the last time I will embrace my children, or laugh with my brother. The last time I will enjoy the privacy of my bathroom.

A servant is knocking at the bathroom door. "The barber has arrived. Your father is calling for you."

I abandon all hope of retreat. The ceremonies of renunciation have progressed too far. I wrap a towel around my waist and come out to join the barber. Seven monks are sitting cross-legged in a row outside the room.

I place my head before the barber and he starts cutting my thick hair. As the wet locks fall on the floor around me, the monks recite the afflictions I will endure when I become a member of their brotherhood.

"You will be a social outcast.
"You will be insulted.
"You will be hounded."
My father is weeping and I can hear my brother

"You will depend on strangers for your most basic needs.
"They will despise your weakness that imposes on their charity.
"You will be heartsick."
The barber finishes shaving my head, and I put my hand up to make sure he has left the five hairs intact that I will require at the diksha ceremony.
"You will experience cold.
"Hunger.
"Heat.
"Thirst.
"Sickness."
The bare skin of my scalp feels strange under my hand. I can feel it prickling in fear as the monks recite their litany of afflictions, preparing me for the future. I look at my father but he averts his eyes. Neither he nor I can any longer avoid the reality of my renunciation, and I cannot tell him now that I should have heeded his warnings.
"You will suffer pain from constant walking.
"You will suffer loneliness.
"You will grieve for your children.
"You will be deprived of the ministrations of any woman lest she arouse your desire."
My father's personality seems to undergo a change as he listens to the chanting. After the excesses of the procession he is subdued, sitting with me all night but at a distance, as if already awed by my new role and the relentless reminders of the masked monks in the darkness outside my chambers.
He leaves me only when he has to return to the stadium to preside over the feast he has organized for the massive congregation.
Now the monks hand me a muslin mask to tie over my mouth. They give me the three pieces of cloth that will be my only garments from today, and I go into the bathroom to change. In the mirror I examine my reflection for the last time. Seeing the five hairs hanging from my shaved scalp, I know I do not have the strength to endure the deprivations of my new life. For a long time I stand there, my forehead pressed against the marble walls of the bathroom.
When I finally come out the old monk gives me a stick tied with woolen tufts to clear my path and a wooden begging bowl, and we climb into the cars waiting to take us to the stadium.
At the gate the monks leave me. Still chanting, they file toward the podium where only twentyfour hours ago I commenced my departure from my father's world.
My father comes to fetch me. Seeing me in the garments of a mendicant, he weeps again, but I can offer him no consolation. I touch his feet as a son for the last time and enter the stadium.
The crowds are silent, watching my approach. I cannot believe it is the same place or that these are the same people from yesterday. There is an atmosphere of tense expectation as I walk around the stadium. It takes me a long time, and I can hear the sound of my bare feet on the baked mud of the field as the crowds fold their hands to me in hushed respect.
At last I climb the podium steps to join the chanting monks. Suddenly the stadium explodes in applause. People are on their feet, clapping and shouting encouragement. For half an hour I stand before them their cheers pounding in my ears. Once more I descend to circle the field, seeking again the blessings of these thousands of spectators to my act of renunciation.
They are still cheering when I return to the podium. Now the monks take my staff and begging bowl. I raise my hands to my shaved head. A silence descends on the stadium as I prepare to imitate Mahavira's last gesture against vanity.
One by one I pull out the long hairs left by the barber, gritting my teeth against the pain. I can feel the blood trickling down my scalp. Each time I wrench my hand away from my scalp, the crowd screams as if sharing my agony.
The monks enclose me in a circle until the crowd no longer knows which of us has renounced the world today. In that closed circle I can hear the monks chanting:
"You will be free from doubt.
"You will be free from delusion.
"You will be free from extremes.
"You will promote stability.
"You will protect life."
My father is looking for me but he will not find me. I have become a stranger, my features hidden behind a muslin mask.

No, I cannot stay longer. You must find someone else to answer your questions.
If I am late, they will leave and I shall have to join a new sect of mendicants.
Don't ask me to do this, my friend.
I am too poor to renounce the world twice.

For some time the memory of the monk disturbs me. When I sit on the terrace before sunrise with my face turned toward the source of the river, I find I cannot concentrate, seeing the monk's intense eyes above the white mask covering his mouth as clearly as if a photographic image is being projected onto the darkness.
In the silence I can hear waves lapping at the riverbanks and I think of the ascetics meditating by the holy pool at Amarkantak, seeking through their meditations to liberate themselves from the cycle of rebirth and death.
At this hour I have sometimes seen the dull glow of something being swept downstream and known it was the corpse of an ascetic thrown into the river with a live coal burning in its mouth. I cannot stop myself from wondering if some day while I am sitting here in the dark I will see the monk's body floating beneath the terrace.
On entering the jungle for my morning walk, I loiter under the trees until it is time to visit Tariq Mia, anxious to avoid the caves for fear of finding myself in conversation with another stranger. To dispel my morbid thoughts I admire the red blossoms shaken from the flame trees by clambering monkeys. Or I pause between the branches rooted in the soil around an immense banyan tree like pillars in an ancient temple to watch birds guarding their nests from the squirrels streaking through the flat leaves.
By the time I climb the summit of the hill, my preoccupation with the monk begins to evaporate like the dew receding all around me in the sunlight. On the far bank of the river the morning sun is striking the canals that irrigate the fields, and I can see farmers moving behind their buffaloes through flourishing crops interlaced by silver ribbons of water.
Now I am full of anticipation at being with my friend. Although Tariq Mia often teases me, sometimes even suggesting I am pretentious, there is a lightness to my step as I descend into the valley that separates us.
A narrow bridge spans the stream that flows past Tariq Mia's mosque. Extending on one side of the mosque is a marble platform leading to the sixteenth-century tomb of the Sufi poet and saint Amir Rumi. Another platform leads to Tariq Mia's residence. Behind the mosque the whitewashed village houses form a pleasant jigsaw up the incline of the hill.
There is a placidness to the scene that suggests the calm of simple lives ordered only by the passing of the seasons and the call to prayer.
But once a year the calm is broken by Sufi singers from all over India who congregate at Amir Rumi's tomb to pay homage to their saint and poet on the anniversary of his death. For ten days and nights the marble platforms are covered with carpets, campfires flicker on the hillside, the hills echo to ecstatic singing. Then the singers are gone and Tariq Mia's mosque is enclosed once more in its habitual tranquility.
Today, by the time I reach Tariq Mia's house, the cane mats are already unrolled on his veranda, the bolster pillows propped against the pillars, and on a small wooden table the chess pieces have been readied for our game.
Tariq Mia stands on tiptoe to kiss my cheeks, his thin white beard brushing my chin. "What an unexpected pleasure! How surprised I was to see you on the bridge!"
A young divinity student with the scholar's black cap on his head enters the veranda with a tea tray. Tariq Mia is an acknowledged Islamic scholar, and there are always young clerics studying under him. I can see the student trying to hide his grin. I do the same. We both know Tariq Mia enjoys the solemn ritual of surprise although he watches for me every day.
"You should not have troubled to order tea. Your students will resent me for delaying their instruction."
"My students will thank Allah for their good fortune, knowing they must endure me the rest of the day. Come, little brother, bring your cup to the chess board."
Although I am past middle age, Tariq Mia is nearly eighty years old so I am not offended that he calls me "little brother," or that at the chess board he often conducts a gentle tutorial as if I, too, am his pupil.
The old mullah seems able to read my mind. If I am downcast he will suddenly banish my gloom by breaking into song. Too conscious of my own dignity, I never fail to be moved by the uninhibited delight in that quavering voice as he sings his Sufi songs of love to God.

"My heart is tangled in the locks of Your hair. I swoon in the gaze of Your narcissus eyes. My whole being circles You.
CanYou see my blood turning into henna To decorate the soles of Your feet?"

Or he will tell me stories while he waits for me to move a knight. I concentrate so hard on evading capture, I do not grasp what he has told me until I am retracing my path to the bungalow.

In our early encounters I could not see the pattern in Tariq Mia's musings, attributing them to the changes of mood brought on by his age. Now, when he stares at the chessboard for too long I know those eyes, as alert as a panther's in that lined face, are about to fix on me, and I affectionately watch creases appearing on the high forehead above the hooked nose, already reconciled to my checkmate.

Today Tariq Mia is not pleased by my gloomy thoughts about dead ascetics.
"India's greatest poet also floated down this river," he remarks with some acerbity. "Kabir, the man whose poems made a bridge between your faith and mine. Meditate on Kabir's toothbrush. You will find it more useful than thinking about an ascetic's corpse."
Dismayed by Tariq Mia's disapproval, I confess that I have never heard of Kabir's toothbrush.
He shakes his head in irritation. "Don't you know the story? How Kabir was sailing down the Narmada, cleaning his teeth with a twig? He threw the twig onto a mud flat in the river. The twig put down roots and grew into a huge tree, the Kabirvad. Poets and singers and mystics have come from all over India to praise God by his many names under the shade of the Kabirvad, even in the worst times of religious slaughter."
Then Tariq Mia asks me why I am suddenly so concerned with ascetics. I tell him about my encounter. Tariq Mia is too wise to question my distraction over the Jain monk. He keeps his eyes firmly on the chessboard, allowing me to reveal the monk's story as I recollect it until I surprise myself by discovering the source of my confusion.
"The fault was mine, I suppose. I was so fascinated by his lavish renunciation ceremonies that I never asked him to explain his first words, 'I have loved only one thing in my life.' Now he has gone without telling me what it was."
At last Tariq Mia raises his eyes from the chessboard. "But of course he told you."
"What was it? The prayer of the Hindu ascetic who asks for eyes in the soles of his feet so he can keep his own eyes on the face of God?"
Tariq Mia puckers his lips in disappointment. "He followed in the footsteps of a man, not a god. What good would eyes in the soles of his feet be?"
I plead with Tariq Mia not to play with me and tell me what the Jain monk loved.
"The human heart, little brother. Its secrets."
"What secrets?"
"The human heart has only one secret. The capacity to love."
Seeing my perplexed expression, Tariq Mia sighs. "Oh, little brother, are you so unfortunate? Have you never been scalded by love?"
I consider the question. I know I was a dutiful son. As for my wife, she was a familiar presence in my house and in my bed, but I had no recollection of burning desire.
"Children! Come here, children!"
Tariq Mia's call brings two young scholars running into the veranda, their loose white pajamas flapping at their ankles.
"Fetch the gramophone. You will find it on top of the green almirah. There is a record in a brown folder on top of the gramophone. Don't drop it. The gramophone needles are in a box in my desk."
Tariq Mia lays a thin hand over mine. The skin is so transparent I can see the pulsing veins beneath as we wait for the students to return with the gramophone.
A scholar hands Tariq Mia an old brown folder, and he releases my hand to slide the record from its cover. He gently polishes the vinyl disc with his sleeve while the students crank the gramophone and fix a new steel needle into the ancient arm. The turntable revolves, then a high voice pierces the morning silence.