The Seeker (21 page)

For days, Max did little besides eat and sleep in front of the fire. Disconnected, dreamlike fragments slipped in and out of his mind. A girl, two children running, an iron slide, a man shivering, an army officer falling off a train, someone dying in a bed of snow, a slender woman with long, silky hair, an earthquake, the ground trembling, a flood. The little finger on his right hand and the middle and index finger on his left blackened, shriveled, and went dead. Mechanically, he applied the herb paste the old woman gave him at the base of his fingers. The paste helped his lifeless fingers fall off without pain.

Slowly, the wounds in his hands and legs healed. His left arm began to move on command—painfully at first, but little by little with less discomfort. His body didn’t burn with fever anymore. He limped around the bare room, touching the wooden door that kept banging open and shut, adjusting the logs in the fireplace, putting his hands over the crumbling timber walls, pressing his bare feet on the wooden floor, adapting to life again.

One day, Max awoke shivering from his afternoon slumber. The wooden door was wide open again. This time, Nani Maa, the old woman, was standing atop the chair driving a hammer through the bolt hinge on the wall. Her shriveled frame shook in the wind. The hammer kept missing its mark. Max limped up to the chair, standing a foot taller than her despite the chair.

The upper pin in the bolt’s hinge was curved. Max took the hammer from her. It slipped from his hands, hitting the floor with a loud thud.

“I do it,” she said.

Max shook his head. He didn’t need his little finger to hold a hammer. He stretched his thumb farther away from his hand and held the hammer tight in the three fingers of his left hand. He pried out the pin, straightened it, and hammered it back in, a series of shocks coursing down his body and through his spine with each blow. Little by little, the bolt returned to its place and held tight.

Max pushed the door in. He bolted it. Again, the hinge loosened. The bolt slipped and the door flapped open in the frigid wind.

“Do you have a wrench?”

Nani Maa didn’t understand.

Max closed his eyes and concentrated on the Ajna Chakra in the center of his forehead. He looked for the Hindi word from the reservoir of memory of lifetimes past. The word wouldn’t come to his lips. He concentrated harder, sweating despite the freezing wind. Nothing. He opened his eyes and stared into Nani Maa’s wrinkled, ash-gray face.

He drew a shape in the air.

Nani Maa nodded.

She shuffled to the cupboard in the corner of the room and rummaged through it. Max stepped outside into the ice, walked over the rocks and broke a branch from one of the withered pine trees near the guesthouse. He tore it into little pieces and returned with a twig.

Nani Maa handed him the wrench. Max held it with both hands and pulled out the bolt hinge. His muscles tensed. He rested for a few minutes, then put a sliver of wood below the hinge and started hammering the hinge in. His heart thudded. He missed a blow and hit his left thumbnail. He ignored the sharp pain and concentrated harder. He hammered again. One pin went in. He kept missing the second pin again and again. Sweating and shaking, he refused to give up. He kept hammering until finally, the second pin went into its hole as well.

He stepped back and pushed the door. The bolt fit. The hinge held. The wind didn’t blow open the door again.

“Good,” said Nani Maa, her face impassive as usual.

Max limped back from the door, then straightened himself and walked erect, ignoring the pain in his knee. He was alive. He was fit. Even a corpse would start walking if it consumed the copious amount of food the old woman put in front of him every day. His eyes met Nani Maa’s. He would take care of her in her last days before he left.

Max helped Nani Maa more and more around the guesthouse. He still insisted on giving her money but he knew the frail, weakening woman needed his physical presence more.

“Every day some change here. The place is not same on two days,” she said.

Max saw what she meant. One day, heavy snow warped the tin roof. Ice and water trickled in through the bullet-sized holes caused by the hail preceding the snowstorm. Max had barely repaired the tin panels by applying the roof filler lying in the bathroom when the bathroom’s roof collapsed. He fixed an old tarp over the roof to get them through the winter rains. The tarp held but water seeped in through the wooden floors of the hut. Next, ice blocked the crude pipe that drew water from the glacier stream a few feet below the hut. Every day, there was something to repair. His mind remained numb but his days were filled with the steady hum of activity needed to keep the small house functioning.

Nani Maa protested. It wasn’t his work. She was still capable of doing things. Max stared at her proud, frail face. She was strong like his mother.

“It keeps me busy,” he said.

“But you go back up?” she said.

Max wanted to caress Nani Maa’s wrinkled, dry face. She had fed him, nursed him, brought him back to life twice. Now, the light in her pale eyes was fading.

Max shook his head. “I won’t go back to a cave,” he said. “But I may leave for my home across the ocean after the winter.”

Nani Maa’s eyes lifted. A touch of color came to her yellow skin. He sensed her joy though, outwardly, she shrugged.

“You stay as you like, go when you want,” she said, adjusting her saree on her bald head. “I am used to being here alone. No one comes in winter.”

She hummed while sweeping the room that evening but retired to her corner of the room without speaking as she usually did.

Nani Maa’s health worsened in February. Her belly swelled and her skin turned cold. The red splotches spread across her whole face. She slept more and more. Max took over cooking from her though she ate just a little of the rice and beans he made for her. Six years after his mother’s death, he was seeing yet another body disintegrate in front of him. This time, he didn’t feel the same agitation build inside him. He had tried, he had tried so hard to penetrate the truth, but he hadn’t been strong enough to find the answers. Now, he had to accept pain, illness, death as the lot of everyone.

He asked Nani Maa if he could take her to a doctor in Gangotri or Uttarkashi.

She shrugged. “Time cooks everyone,” she said. “What can doctor do?”

“Can I call your family?”

“I have no one in India,” she said
.
“My sons in Nepal. Why they waste money to come here?” She paused and talked as if to herself. “My husband died. A widow has no status in society. I thought move change things.”

Her sadness rose within him. Max would die alone too. He could go back home back to New York, but he knew he had crossed a strange boundary. The world of people and their preoccupations seemed infantile in its innocence from where he stood. Yet there was a deep emptiness on this side of the boundary as well. He wished he could make Nani Maa more comfortable. Despite her protests, Max put her next to the warm fire and slept on the opposite side of the bare room.

Later in February, the blizzards stopped. The snow thawed a little and bare trees began to grow leaves again. The air remained frigid but the sun shone for longer and longer every day. One afternoon, a short, squat saffron-clad yogi with a chubby face and pencil-thin legs stopped at the guesthouse. He wore torn ochre robes and his forehead was smeared with white paint.

“
Hari Om Tat Sat,
” he greeted Max with folded hands.

The yogi put his staff and small bundle of clothes down and prostrated before Nani Maa, who was sleeping next to the fire. He got up and circled around her weary, limp body, splashing water while muttering an incantation.

Max served him rice and lentils.

They sat down together to eat.

The yogi said something in Garwhali, the local language.

Max concentrated on his heart and was surprised to understand the words on the man’s lips clearly. He focused on his Ajna Chakra and was again startled to discover that he could converse with him in Garwhali easily. Nani Maa’s care had done him good.

“By God’s grace, she will get better,” said the yogi, gulping down a large mouthful of rice. “Where do you come from, bhai?”

“I’ve lived here for a month,” said Max.

“You speak Garwhali well,” he said. “Have you done any
sadhana,
deep meditation in Himalayas?”

Max hesitated. “I was in a cave before,” he said.

The yogi nodded approvingly. “Which
akhara
do you belong to?”

Max didn’t follow.

“There are three main communities for yogis, the
Juna Akhara
, the
Mahanirvani Akhara
and the
Niranjani Akhara
,” he said. He took his fingers out of the lentils and indicated the three horizontal lines of white paint on his forehead. “See, I am in the Juna Akhara. This is our symbol. You have to choose one.”

“Why?”

The yogi sighed and licked his fingers. “Community is necessary for a man of God. You will realize once you start wandering and need a home on the road,” he said. “Have you traveled in India much?”

Max shook his head.

“You should start soon,” he said. “I have been walking for twelve years. From Vivekananda’s rock in Kanyakumari to the Amarnath shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, there is not a single pilgrimage these two feet have not done.”

Max stared at the narrow, callused feet of the man. He figured wandering was a way to reduce attachment to places and people, but didn’t being a part of a community offset that?

The yogi pushed the leaf plate away. “Delicious, bhai, delicious. You cook very well. You are not from India. Where did you learn to cook?”

“Down in the South,” said Max.

The yogi’s eyes brightened. “You must have gone to the temple in Rameshwaram?” he said.

Max shook his head.

“Lord Rama prayed to Shiva there to absolve his sins after his war with the demon, Ravana,” he said. “It’s an essential Hindu pilgrimage, second in importance only to Kedarnath. Have you seen the buffalo shrine in Kedarnath?”

Again, Max shook his head.

“Lord Shankara appeared in a buffalo’s hind parts there,” he said. “The shrine is very close from here. But first go to Amarnath in the Himalayas. They should be done in an order.”

The yogi named more places he had visited in his twelve years of walking barefoot through India and asked Max if he had been to any of them.

Each time, Max shook his head.

“You haven’t been to any of Lord Shiva’s pilgrimages,” said the yogi. “You must be a Vaishnava, a follower of Lord Vishnu then.”

“No,” said Max.

The yogi’s eyes narrowed.

“Whom do you follow then? Lord Shiva or Lord Vishnu? You have to choose.”

What about the immortal soul within? Weren’t these gods and goddesses and myths and legends just symbols of the infinite truth, representations of one attribute or the other of the One reality, the sum of all attributes?

“No one,” said Max. “I follow no one.”

“You are young,” said the yogi. “There is much time to learn.”

Perhaps it was wise to choose a form, even if a partial representation of the absolute, someone to love unconditionally. And maybe the forms even existed. Who was to say there was no Jesus in the sky or Lord Shankara in a buffalo’s behind? Max knew nothing anymore.

“Choose Lord Shiva,” said the yogi. “He is a powerful lord, a rebel, the original ascetic, the Mahadeva.”

Nani Maa coughed.

Max excused himself and made Nani Maa a cup of lemon tea.

The yogi rested on Max’s rug that afternoon while Max fixed the front door which had unhinged again.

Later that evening, an elderly yogi and a shy, young man in his early or mid-twenties came to the guesthouse. The old yogi was a startling sight. Tall and muscular, his naked body was covered in ash. A large, heavy rock was tied to his penis with a frayed, white rope. The short, squat yogi from the morning bowed before the elderly yogi
,
who acknowledged the greeting by lowering his blazing eyes.

“He is Naga Baba, my guru bhai. I knew he was coming today, that’s why I stayed over,” said the squat yogi, introducing the old yogi with more than a hint of pride. “We are disciples of the same guru, the legendary Babaji. You must have heard of him. He could do anything, even walk on water.”

Like Baba Ramdas, Naga Baba had taken a vow of silence. The heavy rock around his penis was a symbol of both his mastery over desire and his apparently super-human strength. The unremarkable young man accompanying him was his disciple and would be initiated into the yogic life that night. Together they seemed an unlikely pair, the naked Naga Baba with his dreadlocked, hip-length hair and his disciple, wearing two thick sweaters and a jacket, smoothing his neatly parted, oily hair.

Outside, the sky darkened and a light rain began.

“You should start soon before it begins to snow,” said the squat yogi from the morning.

Naga Baba nodded.

Max collected the supplies they wanted. Dry logs, eucalyptus bark, pine needles, a white cloth, a bucket of freezing cold water from the holy Ganges.

The four of them went outside. Naga Baba smiled, yellow teeth glinting in the full moon’s light. He wiped his hand over his forehead, removing gray-black ash and smeared it on the young man’s forehead.

The young man took off his jacket, sweaters, shirt, and pants, shivering and shaking. His eyes were wet with tears.

Naga Baba ripped the man’s thin undershirt. The young man stood naked in the snow, crying.

Max built a fire. Naga Baba cut the young man’s thick head of hair with scissors and a knife. Next, he attacked his mustache. Red speckles appeared on the space between the man’s lips and his nose.

Max put dry logs over the eucalyptus bark, threw in the pine needles and started a fire. The young man wept louder.

“His last tears,” whispered the squat yogi to Max. “Now, a new life begins. Open road, blue sky, the endless beyond, the eternal freedom of a yogi.”

The young man seemed to be shedding tears more for his new life than his old one. He didn’t look like he was enjoying the freedom of having the harsh, cold knife scrape the hair off his head in the sub-zero temperature. Someday, he would do the same to another novice. Perhaps there was comfort in the ritual, some sense of belonging to a community with a shared belief, even if one’s ultimate quest was solitary. Maybe Max could have benefited from that too.

Naga Baba finished shaving off the man’s hair. He blew loudly from a conch shell, the sound reverberating in the silent night. The young man raised his confused, tear-stricken eyes. He began walking around the fire.

Naga Baba blew the conch louder.

The squat yogi chanted an incantation.

The young man circled the fire faster.

Naga Baba blew the conch with all his strength.

Louder, faster, the man spun looking at the full moon above, sweating in the frigid wind, eyes rolling, mouth open.

At last, Naga Baba stopped. He lifted the bucket of cold water high and poured it over the young man’s head. The man fell forward on the ice with the force of the water. His purification was now complete.

As the man lay on the ice, stunned by the cold, Naga Baba leaned down and whispered something in his shivering ears.

“His secret, personal mantra,” said the squat yogi. “These words will take him to Lord Shiva.”

The man seemed to want to go inside the warm guesthouse more than up to Lord Shiva. Max helped him rise. Naga Baba lifted him in his powerful arms, the boulder on his penis swinging, and took him inside the guesthouse.

Nani Maa had slept through the conch shells and chanting.

The next day, Naga Baba and his shivering, newly initiated disciple left for a cave to stay in silence until the young man was fully indoctrinated in the Shaivite belief system. Later that evening, the squat yogi told Max that he could request Naga Baba to initiate Max too. Max was tempted. Beyond the comfort of shared belief, maybe he could learn some discipline from the fierce Naga Baba. But something held him back. He didn’t understand what. Max thanked the squat yogi and told him he wasn’t ready yet.

“You are young. The path is long and hard. Lord Shiva will wait for you,” said the yogi and wandered off into the evening, likely to another pilgrimage point somewhere in the vast Himalayas.

More yogis came in March, all routinely disappointed by Max’s inability to answer their basic questions. Whom did he believe in? Which sect did he belong to? Which holy shrines had he visited? More offered to initiate him, but Max still wasn’t ready. He served them food, fetched water for their needs from the Ganges, gave them his blanket so they could rest comfortably on cold nights, and wished them well for their journeys forward.

One day, a
Khareshwari
, a Standing Baba, from a nearby cave came to the guesthouse. He had been standing day and night for six years. Not once had he sat or lay down to sleep. His legs were thin as an electric wire, his toes withered to bone. Max marveled at the Baba’s discipline. He hadn’t lasted a month with his arm raised.

“How do you overcome the pain?” said Max.

The Standing Baba shook his head vigorously. “
Tapas
is not pain, my son. Austerity is joy. The fire of mortification burns away the effects of past deeds from their seed,” he said, standing in the doorway. “It hurt a little in the beginning. Now, it’s just bliss. Peace. Soon, I will be liberated.”

The Baba’s food had run out. Max gave him supplies for a month. The Baba offered to take Max in as a disciple. His cave had enough standing room for two.

Max thanked him and promised he would consider the offer.

The Khareshwari too looked disappointed in him.