Maya (2 page)

About halfway to Agra we stopped briefly in the small town of Hodal. While Mahmud bought chai, I sat on a wooden bench under a great banyan tree with roots dropping all around me like stalactites. He returned with a steaming clay cup the size of a shot glass, smelling of cardamom and black pepper, and offered it to me with a smile and one of his narrow, hand-rolled cigarettes. I don't smoke, but I accepted his gift. As we sat together in silence, puffing on our bidis and sipping tea, a camel plodded along the road slowly lifting and dropping its spongy feet. On its back rested a colossal burden of emerald sugarcane stalks. A man wearing only a loincloth straddled the beast's neck. He waved to us from his perch.

We entered Agra in the early evening and the city of the Taj crowded around us, engulfing the Ambassador in a tumult of bicycles and rickshaws. Monkeys ran like squirrels along the edge of the rooftops. Humpbacked cows wandered everywhere, grazing on refuse.

Until that moment, all I had known about Agra came from history books. Tucked in the backseat, examining the details of life outside the car, I felt the pages of those books filling in the unseen dimensions of
the street around us. Sikandar Lodi, one of the sultans of Delhi, founded the city in 1506, but its ancient past is, as they say, shrouded in the mists of time. The Lodi dynasty was conquered by Babur in 1526, and from then on Agra was governed by a succession of Mughal rulers, the most famous of which is Shah Jahan. In the middle of the seventeenth century, he built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved wife, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child. As the shah grieved, artisans were recruited from Bukhara, Syria, and Persia. Marble was quarried in Rajasthan, turquoise transported from Tibet, crystal from China. From Sri Lanka came sapphire, from Afghanistan lapis lazuli, carnelian from Arabia. Over a thousand elephants and twenty times that many workers contributed their labor to the construction of the Taj—a monument to matrimonial devotion, and a monumental reproach to those of us who have not loved so well.

For a short time, Agra was the capital of what was likely the greatest empire of its day. Then the center of political power shifted north, and the city began its inevitable descent into obscurity. It took centuries, though, to make the transformation from a cultural metropolis to the hard-edged working-class city it was when our car, horn blaring, pushed its way into the narrow streets through a haze of exhaust and of smoke from the smoldering dung over which the city's denizens were preparing their evening meals.

Our path eventually led to an obviously affluent neighborhood. Rows of one-story stucco houses lined the unpaved street where pigs and feral dogs scavenged among heaps of garbage. Mahmud stopped the car in front of a brick wall bristling with the jagged edges of broken bottles that had been upended and driven, neck down, into a layer of mortar. He took my bag from the trunk and walked with me through an ornate iron gate into a small courtyard. We said goodbye to each other—Mahmud bowed slightly and saluted, then turned and walked back through the gate. I watched him start the car and drive away.

The Fulbright office had arranged for accommodations with two other students from the institute: Ajay, a government employee from Madras, and Alain, a postdoc from the Sorbonne doing research in Political Science. There was a chaukidar—a sort of guard—who appeared to come with the house. He dressed in wrinkled khaki and passed most of every day lounging by the gate, sipping chai and smoking. One morning on
my way out to class I found him on his hands and knees, just outside our front door, carefully spreading a spoonful of sugar on the porch. When I asked him, summoning my best Hindi, what he was doing, he told me he was feeding the ants. It apparently had something to do with a vow he had made to a local deity.

A few days after my arrival I met Mickey, a twenty-two-year-old from South Boston. Raised Catholic, he had taken robes in Thailand and lived as a Buddhist monk before drifting to India, where he'd been for almost two years now. I was on my way to purchase an aerogramme, and there he was, just outside the post office, fiddling with the rusty lock on his bike. Lanky and muscular, with tawny, short hair, his clear blue eyes the color of the Indian sky. He looked up at me and dusted off his hands. “Hey man, you got a bidi?” Just as if we were old friends. His white kurta-pajama gleamed in the morning sunlight, its creases neatly pressed.

I was attracted to Mickey immediately. He appeared totally self-contained, profoundly comfortable in India. His Hindi was fluent, and he seemed to be expert in living on almost nothing. We hit it off right away, in part because of a shared interest in meditation. He had a room on the second floor of a crumbling red sandstone building, the men's dormitory for Agra College, where he was studying Mughal miniature painting and vocal music. My memories of his room are infested with the whining of mosquitoes that feasted with impunity on our sweating bodies as we sat motionless, legs crossed, on the floor. Everything Mick owned fit neatly on one shelf of his almari, and those belongings included neither a mosquito net nor a fan. It irritated me that he appeared so oblivious to the insects and the heat.

One evening, he managed to fall asleep with his legs wrapped in a full lotus posture. Who knows how long he was sitting there, silently dozing, before gradually folding, little by little, until he toppled forward, his forehead descending in a graceful arc directly onto the point crowning the brass Buddha in his makeshift altar. My attention was so intently focused on the mosquitoes that I literally bounced in terror at his cry. For days afterward he had an ugly wound just over his third eye.

I had some idea that to do anything to escape the droves of mosquitoes would amount to an admission of weakness. If Mick could deal with the discomfort, so could I. Having only been in India a short time, I was just beginning to discover the limits of my willingness to do without the
amenities of life in the West. For a middle-class American graduate student who had become rather proud of his sparse material existence, life in India presented a series of increasingly uncomfortable challenges.

Mickey's Theravadin monkishness set a high bar, but it was nothing compared to the gentle fanaticism of my Marxist housemate, Alain. He shunned cold drinks of all kinds, including the fresh lime sodas that I craved. Not only this, he shrugged off, as an unnecessary luxury, the ubiquitous boiled mixture of tea leaves, milk, and sugar consumed by everyone from Indira Gandhi to the leprous beggar who sipped his chai from a dented bowl clamped between two stumps.

I could not see the point in denying myself these cheap and delicious treats that seemed an essential element of life in India. Nor, in the context of Agra and its poverty, could I take such things for granted. I learned how to savor a two-rupee soda, to give myself over to the luxury of the refrigerated bottle as it rested against my lips, the icy bubbles foaming over my tongue, chilling my teeth and throat, sending up lime-flavored balloons of carbonated air from a thoroughly bourgeois stomach with no greater concern than its own sensual pleasure.

This troubled me. I had come to India not only to do research for my dissertation but also on a sort of ill-defined spiritual quest, which I equated, in part, with the ancient path of renunciation traversed by the Buddha and other great Indian saints and yogis. I wanted to strip off everything inessential until I reached the core, to discover my true self by peeling away, like the layers of an onion, everything I did not really need:
Not me, not mine
.

As it turned out, the discomforts and difficulties involved in just getting through each stifling day in Agra were my salvation. They absorbed my attention, diverting it from another, more fundamental problem. A loss I had not anticipated. A loss I could not affirm. Originally this journey to India was to have been an adventure shared with my wife, Judith. In the weeks preceding my departure things had not gone as planned. Things had not gone well at all. What had happened? How could two people fail so miserably to nourish their hearts' desire? How could we have hurt each other so badly? I asked myself these questions frequently during those first days and weeks in Agra, when the borderline between reality and dream began to erode.

Reality: Judith had never really wanted to come on this trip.

She was an artist, a sculptor whose stylish metal contraptions were built
from the detritus of American industry, most of it scavenged from junkyards around Chicago. She worked out of a warehouse filled with tanks of oxyacetylene and propane, hoses and torches and grinders and impact wrenches, an arsenal of demolition equipment and a one-ton chain-fall hoist she used to move stuff around. What was she supposed to do in India without the tools of her trade? To make matters worse, she'd have to pay rent on the studio the whole time we were gone.

Once I received the Fulbright she had grudgingly acquiesced, step by step, as the signs of our imminent departure accumulated. In the beginning I might have returned the fellowship had she asked me to, though in all likelihood I would have been incapable of doing this without becoming so bitter it would have destroyed the marriage. One always wonders how much of oneself can be given over to a relationship before there is no self left to relate. No doubt Judith was wrestling with some variation of this same conundrum.

Reality: I fucked up.

Or I should perhaps say that I established an unfortunate precedent when, a month before we were scheduled to leave for India, I allowed our friend, with whom we shared a large apartment on East 53rd Street, to slide into bed beside me. This friend of ours was the quintessential earth mother who loved gardening and baking bread. She was a woman who identified strongly, as I discovered, with her sensual appetites. While Judith socialized over brunch, I lay back and let her work me with her hands like a lump of warm dough, rising at her touch.

Reality: I confessed to Judith, naively assuming that our marriage would survive a single indiscretion. Hadn't we talked endlessly about free love? Wasn't
everyone
talking endlessly about free love?

Judith freaked out. Our friend's husband—a graduate student writing his dissertation in economics—moved out. That left just the three of us. The weeks that followed were what you might call tense. Judith and I argued constantly.

The whole thing climaxed at a party I threw for graduate school friends and faculty. I knew I was in for trouble when Judith started drinking early. Jack Daniels on ice. No water. By the time the guests arrived, she was plastered. One of her friends brought along a joint of Thai stick, which didn't help.

I was in the kitchen talking with Abe Sellars, my academic advisor, when someone came in and told me I might want to go outside and see if
Judith was okay.
Outside??
I bolted downstairs, through the small lobby, and out the front door. When I caught up with her, she was standing in the middle of the street in her party dress, consumed with rage, her eyes blazing in the head lights of passing cars. “Fuck her again!” she shrieked, loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. “She wants you! She needs you! She's waiting for you up there, right now, in our bed!”

Among the guests who viewed this spectacle from the box seat of our balcony, I noted Sellars up there sipping his scotch, gazing down like some Olympian deity on me and my sorry life.

Reality: Despite all of this I was nevertheless caught by surprise when, only a few days before our scheduled departure, Judith went off to her studio to work late and didn't return until the next morning, at which time she announced that she hadn't really been working at all. She had spent the night with Bruce Wilkins. Wilkins was a friend of hers who played drums in a proto-metal band called the Roto-Rockers. A guy I barely knew, apart from the few times Judith and I had gone to hear him play at a bar. She had, furthermore, decided she was not going to India with me. She would come along later. On her own. When will you come? I asked. Later, was all she would say, when I've had time to think.

Dream: That she would write telling me to meet her at the airport in Delhi.

Reality and dream: The interminable nights when I would drift in and out of consciousness, waking in a soggy pool of sweat overwhelmed with the sheer strangeness of being in bed alone, of having lost this woman without whom, I now saw, I could not survive.

Yes, I wanted to learn to do without, to escape the confines of my life in Chicago, and god knows I had imagined often enough what it would be like to be on my own again, free to pursue my spiritual aspirations. But no matter how much I tortured both of us with such fantasies, losing Judith wasn't part of the master plan. I reached out in my sleep for the familiar curves of her body. Or was I actually awake in the alien heat, listening to the demented braying of some wretched, brutalized donkey? The threshold between sleep and waking was easily dissolved by a thousand unfamiliar sounds, or by the absence of sound, as when the electricity failed and the ceiling fan coasted to a stop, the reassuring chop of the blades giving way to a dreadful silence that would pry its way into my dreams, rousing me with a start.

If the loneliness in my room was unbearable, the black expanse of the
South Asian night was worse. Just outside the iron bars of my open window lay the tangled alleyways of Agra, a world that belonged, after dark, to the same disease-ridden dogs that cowered during the daylight hours, avoiding all human contact. Out in the shadows they fought each other and copulated and filled the air with their hungry, mournful cries.

Following hours of semiconscious torment, I would fall into a heavy, narcotic sleep that inevitably gave way to the first dim light of day and the rhythmic crunching of termites. The frame and legs of my charpoy were perforated with their holes. My initial sensation every morning was of an invisible weight of damp air and misery pressing my body down into the ropes that crisscrossed the bed. The small space inside the mosquito net smelled of hemp, cotton, and wood. In those first moments of consciousness, I succumbed all over again to the pull of debilitating sadness, a manic exchange of voices, an argument I could not win . . .