The Seeker (14 page)

Shakti removed the cloth from her face. Her usually animated eyes were quiet. Max’s heart broke. All day, he had been chattering about his progress in this or that.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“I’m just insensitive,” he said.

The tractor arrived at the ashram.

“No, I am sorry. I am small,” she said on their walk to the huts. “I work hard but nothing like this ever happens to me.”

“If it’s any help, it was no fun to smell rotting, burning flesh.”

“It sounds more fun than my sleep,” she said and smiled. “I want to see dead people too.”

Max laughed. They said goodbye. She went to her hut and he entered his. Hari was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back ramrod straight against the mud wall on his side, meditating with the usual silent, determined look on his face. He opened his eyes as Max gingerly walked past him.

“I’m sorry,” said Max. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“No, no, I was thinking of going to sleep anyway.” Hari uncrossed his legs and got up from the floor. “I hope you had a good day in the village.”

“I guess,” said Max, suddenly understanding Hari’s decision never to leave the ashram in a way he hadn’t before. “I don’t think I’ll go again. All these unnecessary sights, sounds, information, the phone, the Internet, it just unsettles you. ”

“This dewdrop world is just a dewdrop. And yet. And yet.”

“Sorry?”

“A Buddhist poem,” said Hari. “The world pulls you in despite its incompleteness.”

“You seem to be resisting the pull quite well,” said Max.

Hari went to his bed. “So you think,” he said. “I have a three-year-old son back home in Egypt. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of him.”

Max’s heart welled up on seeing Hari’s moist green eyes.

“Sleep well,” said Hari, pulling his bed sheet over his large frame.

“Thank you.” Max went to his side of the hut and lay down on his bed for a minute, then sat up erect and meditated. Max was lucky. Nothing bound him to the world he had left behind. He would give it all he had.

Max banished all doubt and surrendered himself more fully to every part of the day from then on. He didn’t have more prophetic dreams but he changed in smaller, more meaningful ways. One day, he didn’t suck in his breath while pouring cold water on himself during his daily bucket shower, now reduced to half a bucket. The next day he removed the cloth he put on his head in the fields. His scalp burnt but he felt nothing. That night, he stopped applying Odomos, the mosquito repellent cream that Shakti had given him after his malaria pills finished. The mosquitoes ravaged him but it didn’t matter. The following day, he didn’t curl his fingers on the scorching yoga mat to avoid the stinging, burning sensation on his fingertips. His fingers and toes baked in the heat, turning pink and blistered, causing pain to his body, but his mind remained unaffected. It was as if the part of his brain that processed discomfort and pain as bad had receded; it was still there, just not as active anymore. Something similar happened with most things that had once bothered him: the frogs that danced in front of the squat toilet, the squat toilet itself, the gray-black snake that slithered in and out of the huts from time to time, Hari’s loud snoring at night, the specks inside the water drum. He still saw them, felt them, but the part of his mind that judged those sights and sounds as inconvenient or unpleasant was quiet.

This, in turn, made his asana practice stronger. He didn’t judge which pose he liked, which he disliked, which he could do well, which he couldn’t do well. He didn’t want Ramakrishna to hurry up with the spinal twists or hold the headstand longer. As a result, he observed Ramakrishna more closely and made minor adjustments which galvanized the flow of energy in his own body. His body became fluid, malleable and more receptive to Ramakrishna’s instructions. If only his mind would do the same.

Often he would wake up in the middle of the night with his heart beating wildly. ‘My life, my life’ he would repeat to himself. Those images again. Sophia, three years old, brown head, curly hair, and cute lisp, saving a piece of chocolate for him for when he came back from school by holding it in her mouth. Her outstretched hands and dimpled smile. The small gooey chocolate dripping with her saliva. Staying up all night to tutor her so she’d get into Trinity too. His mother’s eyes widening when he handed her their tickets to Greece from his first real paycheck as an intern at a hedge fund. The pride on his mother’s face when she walked into his doorman building in Manhattan for the first time. Andre’s first time out in a wheelchair after three months of lying in a hospital bed; they had taken him straight to see the bright, shiny Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Tears of joy had rolled down his cheeks. Max’s throat would tighten. What was he seeking? He’d been happy before. Couldn’t he surround himself with friends and family the way the world did and be happy again? Life was meant to be lived, suffering to be experienced, not run away from. He was being brainwashed into joining a cult.

His anxiety would spiral the next day, coming to a head in the one-hour break they had between lunch and the afternoon asana class. With no work to distract him, his mind would spin doomsday scenarios. He’d be broke and unemployable soon, he was squandering his most productive years, all this wasn’t real life, he’d regret this time forever. He remembered himself studying all night in a corner of the living room, obsessed with nailing the SAT while the world crumbled around him—the stock market crash, his mother being out of a job, losing welfare, nights when they went to bed hungry, the terrifying prospect of homelessness, crack entering the projects, his friend Pitbull’s throat slit in a gang fight, Andre going to jail, waves of arson in the neighborhood, nothing had come in the way of getting a perfect SAT score. Where had that Max gone? Why had he dropped out of the world he had worked so hard to get into? So it would go on until pranayama began. Then he regulated his breathing, his mind calmed and his body felt connected to the universal energy again. He didn’t fear suffering. He wasn’t craving happiness. He was seeking something quite different . . . completeness. The way out of the predictable rhythm of birth and death. Joy, grief, anger, guilt, love, passion—he had experienced everything in events past and lives before. A perfect state existed beyond all of these and he would reach it. It was the law of nature. The eagle had flapped its wings high, experienced everything the world had to offer. Now it was time to bring the wings down, go inward, and complete its journey. Max would push through another day.

Days passed, a month, then more. Max went to town only when he wanted to be with Shakti. Otherwise he felt more and more repelled by the sights of living and the sounds of commerce. Emails from home left him indifferent, even a little sad. Sophia wasn’t enjoying substance abuse counseling anymore. Addiction seemed endless and what she was doing wasn’t making a dent. She was trying to figure out what to do next. Jason, a friend from work, didn’t like the increased government financial regulations after the recession and was planning to join a technology start-up. Keith and Tina were planning a move to New Jersey to buy a house after the baby. Everyone wanted a different life but in a narrow realm. Did they ever feel dissatisfied with the same ebbs and flows that billions had experienced before them and billions would experience after?

Yes of course, everyone did, Shakti would say in one of their rare trips out. Who hasn’t had that strange feeling of something indefinable still being missing from one’s grasp even in moments of great achievement? The evolutionary journey from animal to man is one of more and more self-awareness. At its peak, man realizes that his mind is always vaguely discontented and is crying for something beyond the world of people, objects and achievements. Only then begins the journey of involution, of seeking completion within. Until that awakening dawns, he will keep repeating the cycle of seeking, desiring, fulfilling some of his desires, not being able to fulfill others, all the while feeling that familiar, gnawing incompleteness. Max didn’t know if he had experienced any deep awakening. All he knew was that he felt more and more alienated from his life back home. He had left New York in December. It was April now and nothing was pulling him back.

One evening, while meditating in the courtyard, Max had an overpowering urge to speak to Hari. He opened his eyes. Hari was absent from his usual position on the mat next to him. Max was surprised. Hari never skipped evening meditation. Max closed his eyes. Hari’s sharp, green eyes and rugged, handsome face filled his mind. He opened his eyes again. Still no Hari. Max fidgeted through the remaining hour. He paused in front of the partition sheet when he went back to the hut. No sound. Hari must be sleeping. The hotter it got every day, the more exhausting field work became. Max wouldn’t disturb him.

Max walked back to his own side of the hut. He tossed and turned. After an hour, he lifted the dividing sheet and entered Hari’s section.

Hari was sitting on his bed, staring at the wall.

“Hari?”

He turned toward Max. His green eyes glowed in the lamp’s light.

“Mahadeva, you know?” he said softly.

Max was surprised he had broken the silence. There were still three days to go in that ten-day cycle and Hari seldom spoke even on their days off.

“Know what?” said Max.

“I’m leaving later tonight. The tractor will come around midnight,” he said. “It should have been here by now. You have a watch, don’t you? What time is it now?”

“It’s 12.15 a.m.,” said Max, without turning around to get the watch buried somewhere deep in his backpack.

12.17, to be precise
. Though he remained suspended in timelessness during meditation for longer and longer, he had developed an acute sense of physical time in every other part of the day. He didn’t care about the time but he always knew it. Down to the minute. A recent phenomenon he couldn’t explain. It was scary. He had thought of asking Ramakrishna for an explanation when he had first noticed it. But he had pictured the saint’s smile and his eyes shining with the words he’d likely repeat from the first time they had sat together in his hut: Many things will happen here, some hard for the rational mind to understand. They are signs pointing toward the path not the path itself. Don’t be distracted. Thus, Max accepted it as a by-product of his improved concentration and didn’t dwell much on it.

“He must be running late,” said Hari.

“Are you leaving for good?” said Max.

“I don’t know, but I won’t come back for a while,” said Hari.

Despite his newly acquired distance from his emotions, Max felt a pang of sadness. He liked Hari even though they didn’t talk much. His quiet competence in the fields inspired Max. Outside the fields, his kindness shone through in small moments, like waiting for Max outside the bathroom when he was struck with stomach flu and always shining a flashlight if Max came back late from meditation and he was awake.

Max shook Hari’s hand. “I will miss you. Thank you for your kindness.”

“I will too. Sharing the space with you has been easy. It’s seldom so effortless. People have many complaints when they first come,” said Hari.

“Why are you leaving?” asked Max.

Hari shifted in the bed.

“You don’t have to say,” said Max.

“I’m not ready for the summer here,” said Hari, his green eyes dropping. “I tried before but I couldn’t do it. This time, I worked much harder to prepare so I thought it would be different. But I can feel in my gut that I’m still not ready. And now with everything Shakti told me about what’s happening in the Middle East, my heart is not here. I worry for my son even though I know he’s happier with his mother in her big family than he could ever be with me. I have to make myself much tougher before I come back again.”

Max wondered why the strapping film actor, who beat the hard earth into submission in real life and likely beat villains on film, needed more toughening. He wondered what happened in summer. The heat would get worse, of course, but he’d always seen Hari perfectly composed, even as the hot winter had given way to a burning spring.

“Why?”

“Summers are tough here. You will see,” said Hari. He paused. “But you’ll get through them. You are meant to be here.”

They heard the dull engine of the tractor arrive outside.

“I hope you’ll come back soon,” said Max.

Hari got up from the bed. “I hope so too. It gets harder each time,” he said. He picked up his backpack. “My father wants me to run our family business back home in Egypt which I’ve avoided for many years. My son’s mother wants me to be close by. They’re both right of course. It’s hard to explain why I keep coming here, to them—and to myself.”

They walked out of the hut.

“Did Ramakrishna tell you why I was leaving?” asked Hari in a hushed whisper in the courtyard. “I requested him not to share it with you or Shakti so I wouldn’t worry you.”

Max shook his head. “He didn’t say anything.”

“How did you know I was leaving then?”

“I didn’t. Just a coincidence,” said Max.

Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. He had known Hari was leaving. He had sensed it, felt it deep within his bones, the same way he had felt the need to flip over his pillow three days ago. A rusty red scorpion with open pincers had fallen out of the pillowcase. Max had lifted it on a piece of paper and thrown it outside the ashram boundary without fuss.

“Stick to it. You’ll do much,” said Hari.

Max walked with him to the tractor. Hari climbed on. The driver put it in gear and, without looking back or uttering a sound, Hari drove off into the darkness.

April gave way to a sweltering May and Max began to understand why Hari had left. The sun burnt the land as if it were just a few feet off the ground, not millions of miles away. The monsoon that was expected in early May never showed up. Crops withered. New seed refused to bear fruit. The earth turned harder than concrete and broke into little dry pieces.

The three of them kept up their daily routine in the beginning but the prospect of physical hunger soon overcame spiritual hunger. They eliminated the afternoon asana class and worked longer in the fields, spreading out to farm softer land, breaking the earth with axes and the backs of plows. Eggplant and drumstick required more water so they planted only millets. Only a few of the new millet plants broke through the ground. They lavished them with fertilizers. Still the crops languished for they lacked the most crucial ingredient of all: water.

The handpump dried up. Max helped Ramakrishna drill the bore well supplying the pump deeper. Both of them would drill every day until the drill stem cut through their torn, callused palms and their heads spun in the heat. After days of continuous effort, they would be rewarded with a small trickle. They poured three quarters of it in the field and stored the remaining for drinking. With little water available for anything else, they roasted millets and the last of the eggplant and drumsticks directly over a wood fire. They rationed their drinking water to three glasses a day. None of them had bathed or washed their clothes since the water dried a month ago.

The rain remained elusive through June. Max knew he would break soon. Only once before, when he was seven years old, had he experienced this helpless hunger. It was in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash, when his mother could find few cleaning jobs and their savings had run out completely. But they had managed to fill their stomachs with mac and cheese and apple juice in soup kitchens every night. Here, all they had was the meager rations they produced. Max felt dizzy and disoriented all day. The skin on his face, neck and back cracked and peeled. His mouth dried up. He didn’t have a drop of saliva left to moisten his lips. Every day, he stared longer and longer at the wooden gate that separated the ashram from freedom. Any moment now, he would walk out. He was free. He’d come back later when the sun didn’t beat so hard and a thin stream of water coming out of a hundred-foot-deep well didn’t feel like a miracle. But he would look at Shakti working in the fields with a determined look on her mud-streaked face and he would be ashamed at his softness. She was like his mother. Sturdy, determined, relentless. Again and again the same image of his mother would come to his mind. Her face gaunt and colorless, torso bent with pain, and legs swollen with lymphedema, yet shuffling around on her crutches in his apartment, insisting on cooking Sophia and him a Thanksgiving dinner just days before she died. Max could transcend his body’s limitations too. The constant hankering for food, water, and other petty comforts tied him to the physical plane, obstructing the path to transcendence. He could overcome it.

Mid-June. Still no sign of the monsoon that had been expected six weeks ago. The eggplant died. The drumstick crop shriveled but still yielded a little. They reduced their food to two cups of roasted millets and a small serving of dry drumsticks a day. Max lost weight rapidly. He made more holes in his belt with the awl-like tool they used in the fields.

One day he stopped pumping his stomach in the middle of the afternoon pranayama.

He wasn’t sweating like he usually did in the afternoons. Fuck. He was so dehydrated he wasn’t sweating even a drop anymore. Ramakrishna and Shakti were thrusting their abdomens in and out. Did they realize they were in the middle of a drought? They couldn’t burn energy like this. It was dangerous. He couldn’t be part of this madness anymore. He lay back down on his mat and didn’t do the rest of the pranayama or any of the asanas.

The next day Shakti stopped as well.

Max stared at her thin body in the fields that day. Was she trying to keep up with him? But he was trying to keep up with her. They would both kill themselves like that. That night, he didn’t come out for meditation. He lay still on his bed just as his exhausted body told him to. When he went to the bathroom, he saw that Shakti’s mat was empty as well. Max came back and slept. He saw his mother with a crumbling cookie in her pale, bony fingers. Sophia stretching out her hand to offer him the melted chocolate. Swirling, spinning blackness.

One day, this will all come back to you, Max.

Max awoke with a start. His throat choked. Keisha, black eyes brimming with tears outside the clinic in Tarrytown. He had forced her to ride the Metro North train up with him so that no one would see them. Just as he had pressured her to abort their child. His chest filled up. Max hadn’t wanted to be a father at seventeen like all the other guys in the projects. He had wanted to go to college so his mother’s sacrifices wouldn’t go to waste. The mud walls of the hut closed in on him. Max covered his eyes with his hands and tried not to cry and lose water.

You did what you had to, Max, but one day, this will all come back to you.

She was right. It had come back. This was his penance for destroying her life. Keisha had grown up in a strict, religious family. They hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy or the abortion but her guilt had likely made her run away from home.
Was she even alive now?
Max couldn’t stop the tears anymore. Keisha had been so bright, so beautiful. She could’ve run with the drug lords with their BMWs and Mercedeses and worldly talk whom all the girls wanted as boyfriends. Instead, she had dated a poor white kid who was trying desperately to be cooler than he was. He didn’t even to have front with her. She had seen how much he enjoyed math and chemistry and encouraged him to study. Where would he be without her? Yet he’d turned away the moment he got into college. How different her life might have been if he hadn’t entered it. The pain he had caused was coming back. He had to bear it. He rolled over and pressed his aching stomach against the hard bed.

Not a drop of rain fell in the next two weeks. The rain was now eight weeks late. Their well water all but disappeared. Even the millets dried. They cut their food intake further. Max passed the week in a hazy stupor. He woke up with a dull pain in his head every day and did a little pranayama to fill his empty stomach with breath. His guts hurt from severe constipation. He worked listlessly in the fields, feeling nothing—not heat, not exhaustion, not even pain when the millet stalks cut deep grooves in his dry skin, just hunger.

For the rest of the day, he lay on his bed, caked in sweat and mud, images of eighteen year old Keisha’s sharp, shining face filling his mind, stopping him from walking toward the gate.

“Any day now it will come,” said Ramakrishna looking skyward at the flaming sun after completing their spare lunch in the tenth week of the drought on a day when silence broke. “It always comes. Sometimes early, sometimes delayed, but rain comes.”

He looked so unfazed, so oblivious, that Max couldn’t take it any longer.

“I have money,” he said in a raspy voice he couldn’t recognize. His dry, cracked lips hurt when he spoke. “We can get food and water.”

Ramakrishna shook his head. “I am your host. I cannot accept anything from you. And whatever we have is enough for us.”

Hunger roared within Max. He opened his mouth to protest but faltered as Keisha’s small, slim body clouded his eyes again. He looked away. Shakti was picking the last of the millet seeds delicately from her plate. A lump formed in Max’s throat. He coughed.

“It’s not enough for me,” he said evenly.

“My doors are always open for you. May it be easier for you if you come back after a few months?” said Ramakrishna.

Max felt his face redden. He stared at his blistered toes on the burning red mud and breathed slowly.

“It’s just food. Why does it matter where it comes from?” he said.

Ramakrishna was shaking his head even before he completed. “No, no, that is the way it has to be. And we do have enough to live. Fasting is good. It gives the digestive organs a rest. It cleanses the system of toxins. You develop patience and self-control. One who conquers hunger conquers all the senses. Nothing binds him to the material plane then.”

“But this isn’t fasting,” said Max. “We are starving.”

“All I can offer you is my share. Please have that from tomorrow,” said Ramakrishna.

He got up and wiped his plate with dried, burnt leaves and left it in its usual place outside the hut.

Max stared into Shakti’s sunken eyes. “I’m going to leave”—he wanted to say. He knew if he capitulated, she would too. Shakti pulled back a strand of dry hair from her face and looked away. Hot wind stung his eyes. She must be working through her own past as well. He wouldn’t get in her way. All his life, he had made easy choices. Now, no longer. Max wiped his plate dry and left.

From that day, Ramakrishna ate only half a cup of millets a day.

Max apologized and requested him to have more.

“No, no, your talk was good. I had become lazy from habit. I have lived on much less before,” he said.

Another week passed. Max began to worry more and more about Shakti. She had lost at least twenty pounds in the last two months. Her face had lost its color. Her red hair looked dull and eyes bloodshot.

One day, she didn’t wear her glasses and stumbled through the fields like she was sleepwalking. Max had never seen her remove her glasses before. She didn’t wear them again the next day. Her swollen eyes popped out of her sunken face. Twice, she stopped and adjusted her glasses, only there was nothing to adjust. Her thin fingers moved up and down her eyes weakly. Max started to panic. It took all his strength to restrain himself from talking to her.

Later that afternoon, he woke up from a thick sleep to hear Ramakrishna and Shakti arguing in the courtyard. Max walked out of his hut. Ramakrishna was shaking his head. Shakti’s expressions grew more and more animated. A tear trickled down her face. He had never seen Shakti cry. She must be asking for more food and Ramakrishna was refusing as always. Didn’t he know her by now? She was too proud to break silence and ask for more unless she needed it to live.

Enough. This had gone on too long. The tight knot of Keisha’s images loosened. He’d never forgive himself if something happened to Shakti. It was time to tap into the emergency rations they’d been storing away. No matter how meager the crop they produced daily, Ramakrishna would put a portion away for later. It made perfect sense. If the rain didn’t come in another week, the dry land would turn to cement. Thus far, hunger had been tough to bear. Another week and it would be the difference between life and death. Shakti had likely reached that point. What kind of a saint was Ramakrishna if he couldn’t see that?

Shakti went inside her hut. Max walked over to Ramakrishna.

“Shakti looks really sick. We should use the emergency rations,” said Max.

Ramakrishna looked puzzled.

“The supplies in storage,” said Max with rising impatience. He went to the kitchen next to Ramakrishna’s hut. “This,” he said pointing to the four brown sacks, two with millets, one each with eggplant and drumsticks.

Ramakrishna shook his head. “No, no, no. This is for the village. We will give it to them when the tractor comes next.”

Days of hunger and deprivation rose in Max like a red, angry force. He coughed to clear his throat.

“No, you can’t do that,” said Max. “Shakti is dying.”

“I think I told you in the beginning, whatever we produce, we give half to the village,” said Ramakrishna.

Max felt an urgent physical need to lift Ramakrishna by the collar of his long Indian kurta, force him against the wall of the hut and shake the idiocy out of him. He backed away a step. He couldn’t trust himself not to lift his hand.

“No. I helped farm too. We can’t give our food away,” said Max, shaking. Tears stung his eyes. “We can’t help anyone if we can’t help ourselves. This is madness.”

Ramakrishna’s eyes didn’t waver. His face had lost none of its luster in the days of deprivation.

“This is how it has to be,” said Ramakrishna.

He turned around.

Max could no longer restrain himself. He grabbed him by his shoulders.

“She is dying, don’t you understand?” he said, shaking him. “Shakti could die. We can’t let her die. Please.”

“Don’t be crazy, Max. I am fine.”

Max turned around.

“Your glasses?” he said weakly.

“A screw comes loose,” she said.

“You were asking him for food?” he said.

“Not for myself,” she said.

She had been having the same discussion with Ramakrishna as he had just had. Max took his hands off Ramakrishna’s shoulders.

Shakti turned to Ramakrishna. “Can we cook now?”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” said Max.

“Not at all,” said Ramakrishna. He paused. “I know this is difficult, but what we have is enough.”

They ate their scant meal in Ramakrishna’s hut, tucked away from the blazing sun.

“I want to leave,” said Shakti at the end of the meal.

Ramakrishna nodded. “A tractor will come on the third day from today. You can leave then.”

No tractor had come for the last month, probably because the village was enduring the same drought. But they didn’t ask how he was sure that one would come in three days. They just knew it would.

Max hesitated. “I will leave too,” he said.

“I understand. My door will always be open should either of you want to come back,” said Ramakrishna.

Shakti smiled at Max when Ramakrishna left, then burst out in dry sobs. Max wanted to cry too, because he knew she wasn’t crying for the hunger or the thirst. They would pull through another week. She was crying for the loss of a guru, who had given them a glimpse of truth and could light the entire path for them. But leaving, they both knew, was now inevitable. Max put his hands in hers and held her close, feeling her burning skin under him. They had never touched before. Ramakrishna had never explicitly forbidden them, but touch meant desire, narrow craving that tethered one to this limited life. But today, to touch another burning, throbbing body was to feel alive again. For everything around them, the land, their crops, the spare insects, even the resident frogs and geckos, had all shriveled and burned to death.