Maya (43 page)

I had been working for over an hour when someone knocked at the door.

“
Kaun hai
?” My first thought was the sweeper. Lately she had been coming around asking for baksheesh, and I was not in the mood to listen to all the stories of her various problems. “Who is it?”

“
Aray, bhaiyaa
! Open up.”

The muscles in my shoulders spontaneously relaxed. I rose and walked over to the door, released the chain, and drew both panels back. “Good morning, Mick.” And it did feel good to see him standing there, radiating ordinariness. His presence made everything seem safe and normal. He already had the blue rubber flip-flops off his feet and was edging his way past me, sniffing at the aroma of South Indian coffee that filled the room.

“Hey man, how's it going? Look what I brought you.” He handed me a small sack made from recycled newspaper. It was saturated in warm syrup. “Jalebi. Still hot.”

“Thanks.” I put the bag on the desk and gestured toward my mug. “Want some?” I didn't wait for him to respond but instead went over and fired up the stove and put some water on, mixing in a big spoonful of fresh grounds. While the water heated I munched on a jalebi. I offered the bag to Mickey, who took one and popped it into his mouth, then sank down onto the bed. He began to swab his head and neck with the cotton gamcha he carried over one shoulder.

“You know something, Stanley? It's hot.”

“You're in India, Mick. This is what they call ‘the hot season.'”

“I mean,” he let his arm fall limply, “it's fucking seriously hot.” He ruminated on this observation. “I saw a fist fight yesterday afternoon out in front of the Lalita. They were really going at it. Two BHU students.”

“People you know?”

“Yeah. It's a union deal that sort of went sour.”

The Lalita was a local cinema in Belapur, and I could easily picture the whole chaotic scene, what is called, in Hindi,
tamasha
. A crowd would have gathered instantaneously, some to egg on the fight, others struggling
to pry the men apart. Most would simply be spectators watching absent-mindedly while the contestants flailed at each other, their arms revolving like the blades of a windmill, like the arms of the girls who used to fight in the parking lot outside my high school.

“I've been tempted myself to take a swing at someone,” Mickey continued. “Which reminds me . . .” He stuck one hand into his jhola, drew out a small piece of stiff gray cardboard, and tossed it onto the book that lay open on my desk. “Here's your ticket. Leaves at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thanks, Mick.” I picked up the ticket and examined it, the Kashi Vishwanath Express for New Delhi station. “Was the station crowded?”

He shrugged. “Don't worry about it. I had it taken care of, you know?”

By which he meant that he had one of his friends—someone with connections at the station, no doubt—pick up the ticket. Anyway, I was deeply grateful. Offering him a cup of coffee was the least I could do.

He took a sip, then gazed out the window, looking down toward the river. “So who exactly is this guy you're going to meet?”

Mickey knew I was studying Tibetan at Sanskrit University, but I had told him very little about Geshe Sherap and our conversation.

“He's a lama. A tulku. You know, the reincarnation of an earlier teacher.”

“Oh, yeah. The Tibetan thing.”

“This is true,” I said. “It's a Tibetan thing.” Mick's stint as a Theravadin monk had left him with a healthy skepticism when it came to certain Tibetan beliefs and practices, and this whole business about reincarnate teachers struck him as over the top. As with so many other things in the world of Tibetan Buddhism, I reserved judgment.

“So what's his name again?”

“Nortul Rinpoche.”

“Sure you don't want company?” He grinned.

I returned his smile and shook my head. “I don't think so. Not this time.”

“I could use some air-conditioning—like at Nirulas. And an ice cream sundae, all slathered with hot fudge and nuts.”

The ends of his mustache twitched as he smacked his lips. Sometime after arriving in Banaras Mickey had grown a Nietzschean affair with long, waxed tips, precisely the sort of thing in vogue among the wrestlers and miscreants with whom he hung out.

“It'd be great to get out of this madhouse for a while. See the big city,
you know? Something different.” His eyes drifted over to the papers that lay scattered on my desk. “What's this?”

“A translation I'm working on.”

“What is it?”

“
Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita
—the
Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines
.” I considered telling him about the dream but then decided against it.

He picked up my copybook and began to read out loud. “‘What do you think, Subhuti, has anyone been slain or killed or made to disappear?'” He studied the page for a few seconds and then continued reading. “‘If a bodhisattva hears this teaching and is neither afraid, shocked, or otherwise shaken, then, Subhuti, that bodhisattva, that great being, may be known to be well prepared.'”

Mick had learned some Pali in Thailand, and he loved to argue about philosophy. One time back in the Agra days we took a bus to Bhopal. We were going to visit Sanchi, an ancient Buddhist site. After hours of nonstop discussion about some abstruse point of Abhidharma, the conversation gave way to the roar of the engine and the sound of rubber turning against hot pavement. I had nearly fallen asleep when out of nowhere he began to sing a bhajan—one of those irresistibly seductive Hindu prayers, a song of yearning for the warm flesh of an adulterous lover, for reunion with the divine. It's possible he didn't even realize he was singing. The melody was barely audible over the sounds of the road. One by one, though, the men and women around us stopped talking and turned to listen, filled with wonder at the sound of this foreigner's voice, a beauty sufficient to move the heart of God.

Mick looked down at the paper in his hand and considered for a moment, draining the last of the coffee. “This Mahayana stuff is crazy shit, Stan.”

I didn't respond.

“What's this mean—‘well prepared'? Prepared for what?”

“Maybe that's not the best translation,” I said, a bit defensively. Vaidya's Sanskrit edition of the text was lying on the desk. I picked it up and located the long compound. “
Mahasamnaha-samnaddho
. . . It means something like ‘he has put on great armor.' You know, ‘girded his loins.'” I smiled. “Hey, how about that? Shall I use it?”

He continued to study the English text. “As in, like, he's prepared for war or something.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Like in the
Bhagavadgita
, where Arjuna is preparing to go into battle.”

“Against his relatives.” As he said this, he looked up and caught my eye.

I nodded.

“So the bodhisattva is well prepared to go out and kill his relatives.”

“I don't think so, Mick.”

“But that's what the
Gita
is all about, right? Arjuna doesn't want to kill his relatives, and Krishna—you know, God—tells him it's his duty. His dharma. He's a warrior. Warriors kill people, Stan. That's what they do. This bodhisattva is a warrior.”

“It's a metaphor, for Chrissake.”

“Okay, then you tell me what it means.”

I felt myself growing impatient. “Doesn't it seem like, well, sort of a stretch, that the bodhisattva is someone ‘well prepared' to go out and
kill
the people he loves?”

“Maybe so,” Mick replied. “But then what about this?” He picked up the copybook and tapped his finger on one line. “‘Has anyone been slain or killed or made to disappear?' It's pretty obvious the answer is no. People aren't really born—right?—so they don't really die, either. So it doesn't matter if the bodhisattva kills them because he won't really have killed anyone. That's what it means, Stan. Just like in the
Gita
. It's obvious.”

He cocked an eyebrow, as if to say
I just cashed you out, Dude, so admit it.

“For God's sake, Mick, it doesn't say he kills them. It says he leads them to nirvana.”

“So what's the armor for?”

“Mick . . .” I took the copybook out of his hands and laid it back on the table. “You can't just go and read a Buddhist Prajnaparamita text as if it were a chapter from the
Bhagavadgita
.”

“Oh?” Again with the eyebrow. “Why not?”

“For one thing, according to Sankhya—the philosophy behind the
Gita
—there's a fundamental distinction between the body and the ‘self' or soul; they're completely different substances, but both of them are equally real. In the Sankhya view, the true self is pure awareness, something called
purusha
. The body is
prakriti
. All sensations are prakriti. So are thoughts and feelings, and everything else, for that matter. So the body is born and it does die. Really die. That's a big difference. In Mahayana Buddhism there's no such ultimate distinction between body and soul or between consciousness and its objects. It's just like you said—in the Mahayana,
at least, everything's equally unreal. It's all
shunya
—empty of any kind of absolute or ultimate reality.”

He blinked. “Sounds to me like some kind of bullshit philosophical hair-splitting.”

This was beginning to piss me off. “Look, Mick, I've got things to do. Okay? I'm really grateful to you for getting that train ticket. I am. But, well, I'm sort of busy now. I've got stuff to do to get ready for the trip.”

He wandered over to the window and looked down at the street, which was busy now with people moving to and from the river. “Life is a war zone, you know? Someone's gotta die so someone else can live. Even if you're a vegetarian, you have to kill the goddamn carrots in order to survive.”

“Oh come on,” I broke in. “You don't really think killing a carrot is the same as . . .”

He ignored my interruption. “If you're here at all, you're guilty.”

“Guilty? Is this some kind of Catholic thing?”

“Sure. Why not? Even God is a killer:
He giveth life and he taketh it away
. Right? Nobody's hands are clean. Sometimes I think the hardest part is just finding a way to live with yourself—with what you do every day, you know, just to exist. Why should a bodhisattva be any different from the rest of us? Has he, like, been granted some kind of reprieve or something from the Buddha? I don't think so. All he's got, so far as I can tell, is compassion. Isn't that right? Compassion. That's all he's got.”

“And wisdom.”

“Wisdom,” he repeated the word. “Well, I hope he has the wisdom to gird his fucking loins.”

He turned away from the window and stared at me with his trademark blank look, then reached over and extracted a jalebi from the bag, which I had left lying on the desk. “Anyway, that's the way I see it. But it's not my problem. You're the scholar.” He dropped the jalebi into his mouth and slung his jhola over one shoulder. “But remember, the quality of your translations will help shape the future of the Buddha's teaching in the West.”

“I'll remember that.”

“So I guess I'll see you when you get back from Delhi?”

“Yeah. And thanks again, Mick. You know, for the ticket and all.”

“No problem. Have a hot fudge sundae for me, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

I watched him slip on his rubber sandals and step through the door. The slapping of his feet echoed against the concrete stairwell as he descended. Through the window I could see him in the street, fiddling with the rusty lock on his bike.

I had to admit he was right—at least he was right about the
Gita
. Krishna had told Arjuna that it was his duty—his dharma as a warrior—to kill his relatives. It's all there in the opening scene, and every commentator from Shankara to Mahatma Gandhi has struggled to reconcile those verses with the teaching of
ahimsa
, or nonviolence, the cornerstone of the spiritual life in India. I went over and pulled a copy of the
Gita
off the shelf, opened to the first chapter, “The Despondency of Arjuna,” and read,

Turning to the index of first lines, I scanned down and found what I was looking for in chapter 11, where Arjuna is granted a vision of Krishna's real identity:

And then it struck me: Kalidas.

36

O
N
M
ARCH
22, election results were announced. Indira had been defeated by a coalition of her enemies. A few days later—on the very morning that Mick delivered my ticket—she officially resigned. The whole country was in the streets celebrating the news. It was not the best time to be traveling to Delhi, but I had my reservation and was determined to go. Geshe Sherap's letter of introduction was tucked securely between the pages of my passport; the passport was zipped into a cloth pouch I wore on a belt under my shirt.

The train left as scheduled at two in the afternoon. I was traveling second class, which meant I had no guarantee of a place of my own until sometime after dark. My compartment was already full beyond capacity—eight of us were crammed into a space designed to seat six. For the rest of the day people would be getting on and off every time the train stopped. But I had long since figured this out. No one wanted to be in an upper berth during the daytime, so unless things got really crowded it was uncontested territory. If I grabbed it early—as I did this time—it was mine for the duration. I shoved my old canvas bag up there, then went to one end of the car and stood in the open doorway, where I could lean out, feel the breeze, and watch the tracks rattle past. Looking out on the rural Indian countryside, I imagined Prince Siddhartha wandering there, searching for a way to live in the face of old age, sickness, and death.