Maya (28 page)

“Okay, so maybe he is a jerk, but that doesn't make everyone in the entire academic world a jerk. And it sure doesn't mean that there aren't a whole lot of insanely egotistical people outside the university. That's for sure. Because there are.”

“It just seems sort of, you know, all about ambition, this need to be recognized as somebody important, somebody with power. It's like this huge competition for status.”

“And of course you don't care about
status
.” There was an unfamiliar, and distinctly unpleasant, edge to her voice. She stared across at me. Her legs were stretched out straight between us, the tin cup of coffee resting on one knee, wrapped in the web of her fingers. “I suppose you intend to live here in this little cabin, all alone, for the rest of your life? Reading your Sanskrit books and meditating. Like your hero—that old man what's-his-name.”

“Kalidas,” I mumbled.

“Kalidas. Right.
Giving up on the whole project of being somebody
. Is that it? Is that your plan?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Stanley the hermit. Stanley who doesn't need anybody or anything—least of all status. Gazing down from his mountaintop retreat on the rest of us with our sorry lives, like some Olympian deity.”

“Look, I'm sorry. What do I know?
I'm
the arrogant jerk.”

“What you are is hurtful. You
hurt
people.” Her eyes were clear and wide and glistening with tears. She set the cup to one side and looked away. “You don't think about what you're saying. And you don't even care about anybody's feelings.”

“I'm sorry. I really am.”

No response. She sat quietly, looking out over the valley.

“It just bothers me, that's all,” I said, aware now that I was pushing it, but I couldn't make myself stop. “I don't know why. People have this terrible need for recognition.”

At this she brought her eyes quickly around and cut me off. “Well it bothers me that you seem so judgmental. Like
you
don't have a huge ego that tramples over
everything
.”

“I just said I'm an arrogant jerk, didn't I?”

“Mmhmm.” Her lips were pressed tightly together.

“But that's not . . .” I reconsidered.

“What? What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say, that's not the point.”

“That's not the point.” She folded her arms. “If that's not the point, then what exactly
is
the point, Stanley?”

In the few days she stayed with me I found it impossible to make any but the smallest concessions in my rigid schedule of meditation and study. These practices were my refuge. And we did not have sex, which pretty much says it all. Not exactly because I didn't want to have sex, because I did. Sort of. But mostly I did not want to, because it was my very desire for her that was most disturbing to me. It was as if I had been thrust back into my own past, back to the early days when Judith and I were first together. Only now I felt like I could see the whole thing all too clearly, every move in the game, and the game was going nowhere. She had a boyfriend in London; I was staying on in India. As for her feelings, I can only guess. She may actually have been in love with me. The sad truth is that I would not have noticed, and I did not ask.

The day she left we made the long hike down to the bazaar in virtual silence. She bought some bananas and an apple for the journey, and I went with her to the bus station and waited while she got her ticket. From Manali she was headed to Dharamsala—a long trip through mountainous roads. We stood outside drinking chai, talking around the fact
that we had made no plans to see each other again. People started to climb aboard the bus.

“I better go,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “you better go.”

I wanted to put my arms around her—and I would have, but that was not possible in India in a public place. So we just stood there awkwardly looking into each others' eyes. There was nothing left to say. And then, without a word, she slung her bag over one shoulder, turned, and stepped up into the bus.

She must have sat on the aisle, because I circled the bus several times and could not see her through any of the windows. Still, I waited, and watched, hoping to catch a glimpse of her inside. At last the driver leaned on the horn, the engine kicked over, and the bus lumbered away, moving through the gears. It gained speed, becoming smaller and smaller, finally disappearing into the distance.

I went immediately to the sharab shop and purchased a flask of Old Monk rum. That night the white clown got seriously plastered. He sat on the porch alone and drank the whole bottle and thought long and hard about what a pretentious asshole he was.

Overnight the weather changed; the next morning was windy and cool. Puffy white dragons roamed the sky. The sun made fleeting appearances over the flooded rice paddies, shimmering in a maze of mirrors until another cloud cast its shadow half a mile wide across the valley, where it crawled over orchards and roofs of golden straw. Without a fire, the interior of the cabin was cold. When the sun shone I was comfortable, but when it was cloudy, a chilly breeze sifted down through the pines carrying the smell of snow and ice, and the coffee at my side steamed in its battered porcelain cup. I had a dreadful hangover and an even more dreadful sense of loneliness and self-loathing. I spent the morning on the porch, bundled up in woolen socks and a sweater, writing in my journal.

That turned out to be my last entry. I began to feel conflicted about the whole project, to distrust my desire to remember. I put the journal away and before long forgot all about it.

Two days after Penny left, I discovered several of her broken bangles under some papers on my desk and spent most of one morning tying them onto twigs with lengths of black thread I had purchased to mend my socks. I carefully assembled the twigs into a set of wind chimes and hung them outside my door, where they revolved in the breeze, the tinkling of glass lulling me to sleep at night and greeting me first thing every morning when I awoke.

In July I received an inland letter from Ladakh, nothing more than a few words telling me she would soon return to Delhi, and from there back to England. I didn't hear from her again until sometime after I had moved to Banaras, when I wrote to her with my new address. She wrote once or twice after that, short, noncommittal letters, and I responded each time, narrating my daily routine, reminding her of all the mundane wonders of India, the kind of details that had so delighted both of us in Delhi. After the last of these exchanges, quite a while passed with no word from her, until one day, long after the fact, I realized it was over.

There is an epilogue, of sorts, to the story of Penny and me.

Only a few months ago I was in Manhattan visiting friends, and one afternoon we went to the Strand to browse. Downstairs, in the religion section, I ran across something on Tibetan tangka paintings, published under a grant from the Collège de France—one of those heavy, expensive
art books with lavish color plates and a scholarly commentary. I turned idly to the flyleaf in back, and there was a photograph of the author, an attractive middle-aged woman with silver hair and green eyes. Penny's eyes. Such beautiful eyes.

23

I
N THE WEEKS
that followed, I immersed myself again in meditation and study. There were days when I did virtually nothing but sit motionless on my porch, from dawn into early evening, settling into the rise and fall of the lungs, watching the passing thoughts and sensations. By mid August, the hot season was over, and India was well into the monsoon. It was time to leave the mountains. The cabin had been swept clean and its single cupboard stocked with tins of sugar, powdered milk, and instant coffee in anticipation of my next visit, whenever that might be. I was headed first to Delhi, to pick up my things, then on to Banaras.

I left Manali just before sunrise on a rickety, broken-down bus. The road south was a strip of asphalt winding between a sheer rock wall on one side and, on the other, a gravel shoulder crumbling away into the Beas River hundreds of feet below. I knew from the ride up that even under the best of circumstances the return trip would be a punishing, overnight journey. And this time of year, during the monsoon, circumstances were far from ideal. Only two hours out we had to stop where heavy rains had brought down tons of rubble, blocking the road. Workers labored with shovels and wicker baskets to clear a path through the debris; the loads they carried were so heavy that it took two people to lift them up onto the head of a third. Men and women filed past my window, alternately filling their baskets and emptying them over the edge.

It seemed like we had barely gotten moving when we ground to a stop once again an hour or so north of Mundi. This time the entire road was washed out. A section of asphalt had collapsed into the swirling whitewater of the river, leaving only a rocky footpath clinging to the wall along what had been the inside of the road. It was obviously the end of the line for our bus. Within seconds everyone clamored for the door, and I was swept along with the crowd. The men rushed around to the ladder in back and climbed up to the jumble of cargo piled high in the rack on top of the bus. I had no idea why they were in such a hurry, but as it turned out, we were playing a game—something like musical chairs. The bus waiting
for us on the other side would not have room to seat everyone, and since no one had a reserved place, it would be first-come, first-served. Many of us would be left standing, packed into the aisle for the next five hours it took to reach Chandigarh. The point of the game was to locate your baggage and fling it over the edge to family members waiting below, then negotiate your way as quickly as possible over and through the rubble to the other bus. If you were among the first to arrive, so much the worse for the others.

It was quite a spectacle: a spindly legged grandpa tottered along with his cane, as fast as he could manage, with bent, arthritic grandma trailing not far behind. A young woman in salwar kameez clutched her howling infant. Men and women staggered under the weight of bags and boxes, plastic satchels, and burlap gunny sacks stuffed with onions and cabbage. Everyone was scrambling over the rocks, stumbling and falling, pushing and shoving to be among the first on the opposite side.

By the time I figured out what was happening, the whole thing was pretty much over. I ended up making the trip across with a group of stragglers, the truly feeble and infirm. When we got there, the new bus was waiting for us, its engine idling impatiently. Emblazoned just above the windshield in bright red lettering were the words
Super Fast
; before and after these words the artist had painted the Sanskrit symbol for
Om
surrounded by wiggly golden lines, as if each mantra were emitting rays of light. We were the last to board; most of my group had people waiting for them, seats saved. I, however, was stuck standing in the aisle, shoulder to shoulder with the other losers, gripping the metal bar on the back of the nearest seat, my bag on the floor between my feet.

We stopped in Mundi for lunch—potatoes and cauliflower partially submerged in a viscous, shimmering concoction of oil and green chilis, with a side dish of dal and a steady stream of hot tandoori roti, their edges charred and crispy. In the days before Starbucks, I used to rank American diners on the merits of their coffee. In Indian dhabas, dal served the same function. On the quality end of the spectrum you have a thick, richly seasoned pastiche of lentils, garlic, and onions that can be mopped up with warm chapatis or heaped onto a plate of rice. The other extreme is the watery, pale-yellow broth I had for lunch that day in Mundi. It may have been the dal that got my stomach churning. Within minutes after the last bite I left the table in search of relief.

The men's lavatory at the bus station was an open sewer. I sloshed
through the door and was nearly knocked over by the acrid stench. A man stood at the opposite wall with his back to me and his dhoti hitched up over one leg, pissing on the floor in front of the broken urinal. Nearby were three stalls, battered wooden doors hanging askew. Inside each was a standard South Asian squatter splattered with shit. One look was enough to propel me posthaste for the hill out back, where I stepped cautiously between piles of fresh and not so fresh human excrement. Behind a scraggly pine I dropped my pants, without a second to spare.

On my way back, I rounded the corner of the building just in time to spot the bus as it began to roll slowly out of the station. I sprinted after it, waving and yelling, enveloped in a dense cloud of diesel exhaust. Fortunately, someone noticed me back there and called out for the driver to stop. An affable, burly Sikh, he laughed out loud as I flung myself through the door and up into the crowded aisle.