The Breath of God (37 page)

Walking around the end of the brick building, Tim came across bundles of wood stacked against the wall and extending a block down the street. Scrawny Indian men dressed in tattered clothes and worn sandals carried logs from the street to the brick building. Tim figured a few rupees would get one of these guys to build a cremation pyre.

He wondered whether anyone could bring a body here wrapped in a bedsheet and plop it on a fire.

T
HE MORNING SUN BURNED brightly in the cloudless sky as Grant and Kristin hustled down the dusty road leading from the public parking lot to the ancient ruins of Sarnath, the tiny town where the Buddha gave his first lectures twenty-five hundred years ago. Grant anxiously anticipated what they might find when they reached the temple where Jigme had sent them.

“You think Kinley has been hiding out here?” Kristin asked, the exact question that had weighed on Grant's mind all morning.

“Don't know.” After the disappointment of not finding him in Agra, Grant tried to suppress his expectations that their friend was waiting for them here. He was convinced, however, that their travels to Agra, then Varanasi, and now Sarnath—three holy cities for three different religions—was part of a larger lesson that Kinley had planned for them.

Grant waved off two teenage boys who trotted up to them. Undeterred, one boy held up a souvenir book for them to see, flipping through the colorful pictures of ruins, monks, and pilgrims.

“You English? American?” The boy asked.

“No thank you,” Grant replied.

“Only thirty rupees.”

Grant grabbed Kristin's hand and continued down the road. As far as Grant could tell, Sarnath wasn't a town as much as it was a collection of ruins, temples, and monasteries.

“Twenty rupees. Good buy!” The boy still followed beside them holding up the book.

The second boy then took his cue from Grant's lack of interest in the book to say, “You like Buddha? I give good price.” He held up a handful of carved Buddha figures. “Made from ruins.”

“Sorry,” Grant said, picking up his pace. The dirt road ended at a large field of short green grass, flowering trees, and red brick ruins. Closer inspection revealed that the brick walls, most of which were only a few feet in height, were the excavated footings of buildings whose rectangular patterns suggested the busy complex of temples and courtyards that must have existed here long ago.

“Looks pretty old,” Grant said.

Kristin nodded, surveying the field herself. “The oldest layers date from the third century BC, during the reign of Emperor Ashoka, a Buddhist who made his religion the centerpiece of his enlightened rule. The monasteries and temples flourished for fifteen hundred years, but then several generations of Mughal rulers destroyed the city and its temples.”

“What a shame. Quite peaceful here, especially compared to Varanasi.”

“The name Sarnath actually means ‘deer park.' Even before the Buddha arrived, this place was a refuge where its residents and visitors could contemplate the natural surroundings.”

Grant realized that he could use some time for rest and contemplation, but only after they had the texts. He recalled their conversations with Jigme before they left Agra. The young monk was vague about what they were supposed to do at this temple in Sarnath. If they were to meet Kinley, they had no specific time to do so, unlike their meeting with Jigme at the Taj.

They followed a gravel path through the ruins and approached the one monument from antiquity left mostly intact, a phallic-shaped pillar, which Grant guessed to be over a hundred feet tall. In front of the pillar he saw five monks in flowing tangerine-colored robes sitting in the grass silently contemplating the brick monument.

He hurried forward, searching the faces. They looked Japanese and Kinley wasn't among them.

“On my last trip here,” Kristin said with a note of disappointment in her voice that reflected the way Grant felt, “I photographed a contingent of Tibetan monks worshipping at the Dhamekh Stupa too.”

“What is it?”

“It was built in the sixth century AD, and the stupa supposedly stands on the exact spot where the Buddha gave his first lecture.”

“Kinley chose this location for a reason.” He scanned the tourists and pilgrims walking the grounds.

Kristin nodded to a cypress-lined stone path that ran along the ruins and ended at a temple whose multiple spires pierced the cloudless sky. “That's where Jigme told us to go.”

He took her hand and started toward the temple.

Sick of walking, Tim started to signal for one of the ever-present rickshaw drivers to pedal him the rest of the way to the university when a curious sight caught his eye.

A man who appeared about seventy, or maybe a hard-lived fifty, sat cross-legged on the top level of the ghat just ahead, staring vacantly over the river. Wiry white hair peeked out from under a blood red turban, while a beard of the same color and consistency as his hair fell down the front of his robe. At first Tim suspected the man to be just another of the old men he'd seen sitting along the steps leading to the water, but while the others seemed oblivious to their surroundings, this man turned toward Tim with yellowed and bloodshot eyes. A drugged-out distance in the man's expression registered Tim and looked beyond him at the same time. Normally Tim would have ignored a street person, but he was drawn in by a covered straw basket about eighteen inches in diameter and twelve inches tall sitting in front of the man. Tim suspected what it contained, and the thought excited him.

The man forced a smile, revealing a mouth whose few remaining teeth were blackened and jagged. He then gestured to the basket with some sort of homemade instrument—a flared wooden recorder.

“Twenty rupees,” the man croaked.

“Twenty rupees for what?” Tim asked.

The man jabbed the basket with the instrument. “Twenty rupees.”

Tim thought he saw the basket continue to shake after the jabbing stopped. He dug out a twenty-rupee bill from his pocket and handed it to the man. Although he had his four remaining EpiPens—two of each type—in the pockets of his cargo pants, the quivering basket gave him a delicious idea.

The old man stuffed the bill inside his robe and then raised the recorder to his mouth. The instrument produced a hypnotic, melancholy tone. While he played with one hand, he flipped the lid off the basket with the other. Tim stepped backward when a black cobra popped out of the basket, its body splayed out in its aggressive posture. As the tip of the recorder swayed in front of the hissing creature, the snake danced to the music, following the motion of the recorder. Tim watched, transfixed. To his disappointment, the snake seemed too mesmerized to attack.

After the man finished his song, he started to close the basket's flat top over the snake's scaly head. Then it struck. The snake hit the woven reeds of the top, missing the man's hand by mere inches. Tim's heart lurched. The elderly snake charmer, however, never flinched, closing the lid over the creature. He then returned his vacant gaze to the river, as if a snake hadn't just popped out of his basket and as if Tim were no longer there.

Tim surveyed the area around him. Away from the busier cremation ghats several blocks behind him, only a few people bathed in the disgusting water at the river's edge below, and they paid no attention to Tim and the old man. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. He reached into his pocket for a handful of bills.

“I
S THAT MULGANO ...?” Grant asked.

Kristin laughed. “Mulgandha Kuti Vihar. A shrine. Tibetan.”

Grant thought the temple looked like a Buddhist version of Cinderella's castle.

After climbing a short flight of steps, they entered through the stone archway of a cloistered hallway. Grant felt the anticipation building within him.

Turning left, they followed the cloister to a heavy double wooden door, which opened into a spacious hall. The polished marble floor contrasted with the rough-hewn blocks of the shrine's exterior. Grant's attention was immediately drawn to a life-sized golden Buddha at the opposite end of the room. The statue sat on an altar adorned with freshly cut roses and lilies.

“Now what?” Kristin asked. The hall was quiet and mostly empty.

“Jigme didn't give us much to go on.”

“Maybe we should ask someone if they know Kinley?”

An elderly Tibetan man, dressed in work overalls rather than a monk's robes, was pruning dead flowers from the arrangements on the altar. Two Italian tourists examined a fresco that covered the entire perimeter walls of the hall.

Grant stopped.

The fresco was immediately familiar. He'd seen a similar one during his stay at the monastery in Bhutan.
Another coincidence?
He walked to the left wall where the mural began. The story of the painting started with the birth of a baby.

“Kristin, look. This fresco is almost identical to the one in the Punakha Dzong temple.” He recalled the large hall with the twenty-foot columns and the monumental statues.

She stood by his side. “When we were standing together that day before the lama summoned us, I mentioned to Kinley I saw this work here.”

Instead of the primary colors and hard lines of the painting in Bhutan, Grant noted that this one had a more ethereal quality with softer pastels, yet both told the same story: the life of the Buddha.

“I think it was painted by a famous Japanese artist,” Kristin said. “‘A poor country's version of stained glass' is how Kinley put it, but I find it quite beautiful.” She turned from the mural to Grant. “Did Kinley ever tell you the story in the painting?”

“He did.” Grant scanned the temple again for Kinley and then pointed to the first scene on the far left. “This palace is in Kapilavastu, near the Indian and Nepalese border. Siddhartha Gautama was raised there as a prince in the middle of the sixth century BC. This is his mother.” He pointed to an elegantly dressed pregnant woman sleeping on a raised bed, with the image of a white elephant floating above her. “The elephant spirit came to her in a dream and told her that she would give birth to a unique son. The spirit then entered her womb. Next you see the crowd gathered to look at the blessed baby. This old man is speaking to the crowd. He makes a prediction that the baby will grow into the spiritual leader of the people. The Buddha.”

“When I was here last, I never knew the details.” Kristin stepped closer to the wall. “But hearing it from you, the parallels seem so obvious.”

He nodded. “The birth of Jesus.”

She raised her fingers as if to touch the painting but stopped an inch short of the plaster. “The angel Gabriel coming to Mary in a vision. The virgin birth. The wise men.”

“Religious myths often share similar archetypes.” Grant stepped to his right. “Next we see the baby Siddhartha taking his first steps. Lotus flowers blossomed in his footprints.”

“Like the jeweled flower inside the Taj that led us here!”

Grant again considered what Kinley would want them to find here. He continued, “By the age of twenty-nine, Siddhartha had grown restless with the easy life of a prince. When he left the palace gates one day, he encountered sickness and death for the first time.” A realization occurred to him. “The same age Jesus was during a pivotal point in his life: his baptism by John.”

“Didn't know that,” she said, bending close to the painting of the colorfully robed prince walking among pale figures hobbling in old age. Next to the path, an ox-drawn cart overflowed with dead and decaying bodies.

“The shock that life was not all beauty and youth had a profound impact on Siddhartha, and so he abandoned his princely possessions and left on a spiritual quest. He lived in the wilderness as an ascetic, spending his days in silence, fasting, and meditation. But after six years, he realized that renouncing society was not the solution either. He decided that there must be a middle way.”

In the next scene Siddhartha sat in the classic meditation pose underneath a tree, the same species of tree, Grant realized for the first time, that he'd been lying under in the dzong courtyard when he met Kristin. He turned to see the back of her head with its wide curls flowing down her back. She was studying the depiction of four scantily clad girls dancing around the left side of the seated man, while to his right a group of demons threatened him with swords, spears, and torches.

Grant touched her shoulder. He enjoyed having Kristin's undivided attention as he retold the stories that Kinley had recounted to him. “Here we have the temptation of the Buddha by the Evil One as he sat underneath the Bodhi tree in meditation. First, the Evil One appeared as Kama, the god of desire, and then as Mara, the god of death, to disrupt his concentration. But none of these temptations drew him away from his path.”