The Seeker (4 page)

A knock.

Max looked up from the clutter of numbers on his computer screen. Outside his glass-walled office on the forty-eighth floor of the Trump building opposite the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, clouds covered the rising winter sun.

Sarah, his boss and their firm’s Managing Director—a hard-driven woman in her late fifties—stepped into his office.

“How’re you doing, Max?”

He stood up. “Good. Thank you.”

“No, how are you really doing?” she said, standing beside him, a foot shorter than him. “I know how hard it’s to lose a parent.”

Max’s gaze shifted from the light furrows on her face to her kind eyes.

“Really, I’m fine,” said Max. “Thank you for asking.”

She gave him an awkward half-hug. “Did you look at the study request? If I don’t get the data to Tom by noon, he’ll rip me a new one.”

“I’m on it.”

Max grouped multiple Excel files together and applied array formula after array formula to make the numbers break and tell him a story. A week ago, the private equity firm he where worked as a vice president had been evaluating the purchase of a mid-size snack food company that made cookies and crackers. Now they were analyzing a processed fruit-juice corporation. If Max liked what he saw in the company’s balance sheet and revenue projections, his bosses would decide if they could make a quick profit by buying the company and selling it again in a couple of years. Max compared the company’s cost of goods sold to its closest publicly traded competitor. His firm could cut $3 million in costs immediately by shifting the apple juice base to the similar tasting but far cheaper pear juice. Shortening the juice-box straw by just a tenth of an inch would net another $2 million. Still more could be saved by changing the dark blue package embossing to cobalt blue. Yes, it was a great company to buy. With a few easy fixes, you could bleed it dry and reinvest the savings in advertising. Fruit juice made up only six percent of an American kid’s fluid intake. If Moms replaced just one can of soda or iced tea with the company’s juice box, his firm would make a killing.

How did this become my life?

Max’s chest tightened. Sweat formed on his temples. He looked up from the numbers. Years ago, the city had put up a medical waste incinerator opposite the children’s park in Port Morris to burn amputated limbs, bloody bandages, cancerous tissue, aborted fetuses, and other infected hospital materials. It was supposed to be installed in the Upper East Side, but Manhattan residents had protested about the threat of respiratory ailments so the city had dumped it in the Bronx instead. Children were clearly more disposable there. Each time Max had walked past the shiny blue metal-top building on a break from Harvard, he had thought he was on the verge of an insight. He was standing in the middle of two worlds, between the death and destruction in the projects and the hope and life in Trinity and Harvard. He was meant to discover something about the nature of suffering and why it chose who it did. Why hadn’t he dug deeper to find that insight?

Opposite the Hudson, a factory emitted a spiral of gray smoke. Sarah stepped out of her office and spoke animatedly to a group of shiny-faced, blue-eyed analysts bustling around in the lobby. They laughed with their broad chins and perfectly straight teeth.

After all those years, he was still trying to belong.

In high school, each day from 4-6 a.m., he had cleaned the bathrooms of the Harlem Public bar, scraping hardened chewing gum off the urinals, removing T-shirts flushed into toilets, and washing off dried vomit from trash cans. At Trinity, he’d rush into the gym showers and scrub himself again and again so his classmates wouldn’t smell the Clorox and Pine Sol on his body. He’d hang with his friends after school, hungrily watching them eat pizza and drink soda at Pizza Pete’s, telling them he didn’t like the flat taste of cheese, unwilling to admit he couldn’t spare a quarter for a slice of pizza every day. Back in the projects, he’d take his shirt out and sling his pants low and play with Pitbull’s sawed off shotgun, not once mentioning Calculus, SATs, college applications, and everything else that possessed him. Every day, he’d worn a mask. And now once again he was fronting as a suave corporate type with his Borelli shirt and Ferragamo shoes.

“How’s it going?” Sarah popped her head into his office.

Max gave her a thumbs up.

“Tom’s real hot on consolidating the production network,” she said. “Can they operate with three plants instead of four? What’s the trade-off between transshipment and site costs?”

“I’ll dig into it,” said Max.

“You haven’t gotten to the supply chain yet?”

Max shook his head.

A wave of irritation swept over her face. “If you’re not up for it today . . . ”

“I’m on it.”

Sarah left his office.

Max opened the Excel file. Again, his stomach tightened. Even his kid sister had had the courage to do her own thing. Sophia hadn’t fit in with the girl cliques in the projects so she’d learnt to rely on herself. Defying their mother, who’d wanted her to get a well-paying job, she was counseling teen junkies in a Brooklyn treatment facility. Andre was studying criminal behavior at John Jay to help kids get out of the same gangs that had crippled him. Who had Max become?

So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless, immortal as it were.

He understood now why Viveka’s description of yogis on the top of the mountain had struck him. They had stripped their life down to its barest essence to find the same insight about suffering he’d felt close to uncovering years ago. Without his mother’s hospital bills to pay, without her voice in his head urging him to become someone, nothing stopped him from seeking the same insight. Did the yogis find any answers? After a moment’s hesitation, Max switched over from Excel to Chrome and began searching for Himalayan yogis on the Internet.

He skimmed through story after story of young Westerners traveling to India to seek spiritual enlightenment. A shadow of doubt arose in him. Was he unraveling after his mother’s death, becoming just another privileged white fucker with rich people’s problems? Max remembered the strange feeling he’d had last night that he’d heard Viveka’s words before, sometime, somewhere within the depths of his heart. He tried to dismiss all doubt and tore through the web pages as though scrutinizing a prospect company’s noisy balance sheet, deciding whether to invest in it or not.

A German lawyer’s blog caught his attention. She had survived unscathed a car crash that had killed her husband and three children. Her quest for life’s answers had led her to India. It seemed you didn’t even have to throw a stone to find a spiritual teacher in India. Just bending to pick up one would make you collide into some guru or the other, all of whom eventually demanded money, gifts, and sometimes even sex. Disappointed, she had given up on her search for a teacher and began studying ancient Eastern doctrines in solitude when she ran into a South American man high up in a guesthouse in the Himalayas. The man’s teachings gave her journey the focus it lacked until then. Her calm, unblinking account was a welcome departure from the breathless, wide-eyed ‘Dude, I found some enlightenment in India’ stories he’d come across. Max searched for more information about the South American.

Slowly, a picture emerged from the handful of blogs that mentioned him. Once a successful doctor in Brazil, he had left everything to become a yogi in the Himalayas. Some said he was twenty-five. Others said he looked twenty-five but was actually more than one hundred years old. That he had penetrated the mysteries of consciousness and the material body and reversed the process of aging. The Brazilian taught a method of yoga and meditation that allowed one to go deep within the recesses of one’s own mind and reach a perfect condition beyond good and evil, birth and death, the end of suffering as it were. Max’s heart stirred. Again, the words sounded strangely familiar, as if he’d heard them before. But when? He barely knew anything about yoga and meditation. The rational part of him still didn’t know what to make of this mystical mumbo-jumbo. And yet, he felt compelled to find exactly where the Brazilian yogi lived.

An Australian blogger had last seen him in a cave high up in the Garwhal Himalayas. Max emailed him, the German lawyer, and the other bloggers who had mentioned the Brazilian, asking to call or meet them to discuss the Doctor and their own journeys. He didn’t know where they would meet. They were German, Israeli, Slovenian, Indian, from everywhere, and they seemed like seekers, never still, always on the move. They could be anywhere. And well, so could he.

A shadow appeared on his laptop.

Max looked up, startled.

“Are you done?” said Sarah.

Max shook his head.

She frowned. “Can I see where you are?”

Max pulled up the Excel file. He turned the screen toward her and walked her through his half-baked analysis.

Sarah’s face dropped. “This isn’t enough. We need more for Tom.”

Max saw the concern rise in her pale face. His pulse quickened. She wasn’t the one who’d watched over her shoulder all her life in fear that a stray bullet would paralyze her or worried each day that the junkies sleeping under the dark stairwell of her apartment building would rape her little sister. His questions could never be hers. He couldn’t live her life anymore.

“You’re usually . . . Can we please get the fuck on it now?” she said. “We have to get it together by noon.”

Max shook his head. “I can’t. I have to leave,” he said.

“Time waste. You must not have come now,” said the man sitting next to Max on the floor of the train’s open doorway.

Max smiled. This was the hundredth time he’d heard that in the last day—on the flight from London to New Delhi, in the rickshaw ride from the Delhi airport to the train station, on the railway platform and now on the five-hour train journey to Haridwar, the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. This was his first time in India; he had traveled outside the US only once before, to Kilimanjaro in East Africa, but enough Indian images had seeped into popular culture so that nothing was completely unexpected. Stray dogs and cows blended with the riot of motorists on the roads so he hardly noticed them after the initial surprise. The constant honking of car horns wasn’t anymore overwhelming than the ambulance sirens in Manhattan. And New Delhi with its shiny new highways and faceless skyscrapers appeared far wealthier than the South Bronx with its burnt, abandoned buildings. Even the street hustlers gently whispering bargains on marijuana and prostitutes were like boy scouts in comparison to the pimps and crack fiends back home. There were unexpected sights—a man riding a motorcycle with a sixty-foot ladder tied behind him, a marriage procession in the middle of a highway, colorful billboards of film actors with big barreled machine guns in their hands and fake blood gushing from head wounds yet not a hair out of place—but thus far the only true surprise was the Indian people’s unabashed curiosity. He tried to relax and enjoy the barrage of questions thrown his way and not take offense to people’s swift judgment on his travel plans.

“Very wrong decision. You must come back in May,” said the man.

The train stuttered in the thick evening fog. A bearded man with a bucket in his hand appeared from the white mist outside. He rushed toward the moving train and thrust one naked foot in the space between Max and his companion.

“What . . .” said Max, jerking back.

The bearded man grabbed the train’s door and pulled himself inside the train, his bucket flying behind him. Salted peanuts rained on Max’s head. A peanut vendor. He flashed Max an apologetic smile and began hawking his wares inside the train.

Max’s companion in the doorway of the vestibule didn’t seem to notice the interruption.

“Are you listening,
bhai
?” he said. “Himalayas closed in winters.”

Max turned to him. “How can the mountains be closed? They’re always there, right?” he said.

“No, no,” said the man, shaking his professorial face so hard that Max worried his glasses would fall off the train. “What I mean is roads are all blocked. Big storms. Forget getting to Uttarkashi even, definitely not further up.”

If that were the case, coming to the Himalayas in December had indeed been a waste of time. From the train station in Haridwar, Max intended to go up to Uttarkashi, a seven-hour journey by road, then take a bus to Gangotri, the origin of the Ganges river, another six hours north, followed by a ten-mile trek up the mountains to Bhojbasa near the Ganges’ source glacier where a lone guesthouse served holy men living in the Himalayan caves. The Brazilian doctor had last been seen in a cave near the guesthouse.

Max hadn’t accounted for the roads being blocked but he had planned well for the trek to the guesthouse. Within a week of quitting his job, he had said goodbye to Sophia, taken care of his apartment and finances, gotten an Indian visa, and flown to New Delhi via London so he could reach the Himalayas before the winter peaked in early January. In his backpack, he had his best cold-weather hiking gear: woolen base layers, insulated down pants, two thick sweaters, one synthetic jacket, one hard shell jacket with a hood, two pairs of gloves and hats, four pairs of woolen socks, and multiple hand and toe warmers, enough to survive in much lower temperatures than the -10 degree Fahrenheit expected in the upper Himalayas. And somehow, he didn’t feel cold here in Northern India despite his compass gauge hovering just above zero in the train’s open doorway. Of course, this had less to do with his resilience and more to do with the heat generated by a few hundred people packed in a train compartment meant for fifty. On a mission to strip his life off the softness and comfort he’d been spoilt by back home, Max had chosen the cheapest compartment in the train. He’d been lucky to get a spot by the doorway. People were sitting hunched on suitcases, lying on luggage racks, even squatting atop the wash basin outside the bathroom, anywhere they could find an inch of space. The return journey wouldn’t be pleasant if the roads were indeed closed.

Max’s companion must have sensed he was throwing a wet blanket over his travel plans.

“If God wants, you will find a way.”

“Amen,” said Max.

“Christian?” asked the man.

Max smiled. You’d have to know someone for months before you asked that question back home. “I grew up as one,” he said. “Now I don’t know who I am. Perhaps that’s why I came to India.”

“Good, good,” said the man. “If you want to find
bahut kuch kar sakte ho
here . . .
idhar
. . . you must . . .”

Max seized the moment. “Can you teach me some Hindi? I have a guidebook but I don’t think I have the pronunciations right.”

The man’s face lit up. “You must know Hindi in India. Absolutely must. No problem, I can teach you important words quick.”

And just like that, while the train stuttered and stopped in the thick winter fog, Max got an impromptu lesson in Hindi pronunciation. Outside the train, India beyond the gleaming metropolis revealed itself. Half-naked kids huddling around small fires, people entering tiny mud huts with gaping holes, deformed beggars shivering on dirt roads, starving, wasting cows languishing next to the train tracks—suffering everywhere in the land that promised salvation from it.

“
Dhanyawaad
. I can’t thank you enough,” said Max as the train reached Haridwar station six hours later than its expected arrival time.

“No problem. Train took so much time. You have become Premchand,” said the man. “You know Munshi Premchand? World-famous Hindi poet?”

Max laughed. His heart warmed. They shook hands.

“Be careful to go up in Himalayas. Winter weather very very dangerous,” said the man.

Max nodded, touched by his kindness. He had planned to make his way up to Uttarkashi that day but it felt foolhardy to be driven up the icy roads now that it was past 10 p.m. and pitch-black outside. He said goodbye to the man and took a bus from the train station to Rishikesh, the neighboring town which served as the springboard for journeys into the upper Himalayas. Once there, he ignored the solicitations for rooms and transport and entered the first shabby hotel he saw. He negotiated the room rate down to Rs 300, six dollars a night. A 400 percent discount from the owner’s initial quote of Rs 1500; he ran numbers in his head from habit as he walked up the slippery concrete stairs to the room on the second floor.

The high of negotiating a bargain with his newly acquired Hindi skills vanished on entering the room. Even six dollars was too high a price for the damp-smelling room. A lone bulb dangled from the chipped ceiling. The narrow bed would have been small for a man half his size and next to it was a four-foot-tall cupboard, every inch of it covered in dust. Exhausted, Max changed into his warm underwear and lay down spread-eagled on the pink bed sheet. He covered himself with thick blankets and stared blankly at the two brown geckos playing with each other on the faded wall in front of him. He switched off the light.

God, what had he done?

His parents had grown up in wooden shacks outside a farm in Corfu, the children of day laborers. If his uncle, a waiter in a Philadelphia diner, hadn’t pulled them into the US, Max would’ve been a peasant in Greece. How casually he had walked out on everything his parents had moved to a new country for. So determinedly his mother had dragged Sophia and him to Manhattan on Sundays so they could see educated, well-bred people living in doormen buildings and eating in candle-lit restaurants from the outside, and aspire to a better life.

Max’s throat tightened. He saw his mother, yellow shirt, green ribbon in her brown hair, her face turning red with humiliation whenever their welfare case worker showed up to inspect their refrigerator and closets to make sure they were broke. Now he would be on welfare too. A wave of panic surged in him. Unlike his colleagues at work, he didn’t have a daddy who played golf with fellow hedge-fund titans in a country club. No one stood between him and destitution. Jesus, he was fucked. He had to take the next flight back.

So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow and death, then there must be something that is unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless, immortal as it were.

Max forced himself to think of the naked, shivering children on the roadside. Viveka’s serene, sure face had promised answers. He would find them.

Max closed his eyes again, trying to empty his mind of thoughts.

A scream.

Max jumped out of the bed, banging his knee against the cupboard. He cried out in pain.

Another scream.

Max looked around wildly.

Loud, toneless music filled the night.

Max’s breathing returned to normal. Someone was tuning a large radio on the other side of the paper-thin wall behind his head. It was 2 a.m. He had slept only a couple of hours. The radio screamed again. Max went back to bed. He removed the pillowcase and rolled it up in a ball, stuffing it in his right ear while sleeping on his left side. The radio made a squeaky, gravelly sound now. Max turned to his right side, the pillowcase in his left ear. Then again.

He couldn’t get back to sleep.

What was wrong with him? He had slept easily through gunshots all his life. This was nothing. Max threw the pillowcase away and continued tossing and turning, the sound crawling up his spine, not getting a wink despite being awake for more than forty hours. Eventually, the sound ceased or perhaps his mind stopped focusing on it. He buried his face in the damp bed.

Don’t go so soon after Mom, please.

Max opened his eyes. Sophia had pleaded with him to stay a little longer in New York. He hadn’t even pretended to consider. Instead, he had resented her for being too busy counseling addicts in Brooklyn to visit their mother in the hospital. His kid sister. For years, he had sat up next to Sophia’s crib, driving away the rats that darted out of the peeling walls, when his mother went to work. Why had he been so cruel to her?

Stop.

Max got up from the bed. Sleep was impossible. 3 a.m. The morning was still some hours away but he had to get on with his journey. Max went down the stairs, out into the cold Himalayan air, his heavy backpack straining against his tired shoulders.

He walked through the dark, empty streets of Rishikesh unsure where he was going, just wanting to stop the restless chatter in his mind. Each street looked the same in the blackness. Shuttered mom-and-pop stores, cobbled roads littered with fruit pulp and rotten food remains, stray dogs shivering on the pavements, and the air heavy with the smell of cow dung. Following a lone street light, he turned into an alley. The air felt colder, fresher. Max followed the sound of running water. The river Ganges shimmered in the light of the funeral pyres burning on its banks. He walked toward the river, past the blackened, charred human bodies burning on the pyres. Kneeling down, he splashed cold water on his face, ready for a fresh start.

Someone touched his back.

Max whipped around.

A stark naked yogi, his entire body covered in a thin layer of white ash, black eyes blazing, stood in front of him.

“Come, foreigner, I will show you God.”

Max skipped a breath.

The yogi stretched out a closed fist.

“You came from Europe to find guru,” he said in a thick accent. “I am your guru.”

He uncrossed his long fingers to reveal a black slimy mass. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.

“Take your guru’s first offering,” he said, holding Max’s wrist with his other hand.

There was a touch of white in the black. Jesus, a tooth. Black flesh.
Burned human remains.

Max pulled his hand away and walked past the yogi.

“Wait. You have to give your guru a donation,” the yogi called behind him.

Max moved faster up the street, retracing his steps to the bus stand next to the hotel.

Three bearded yogis, white paint on their faces and fierce red marks between their eyes, sat on a street corner warming their hands over a fire.

Max’s heart clutched. What had he gotten himself into?
Relax.
He was in the foothills of the Himalayas, the home of the holy Ganges. The area near the river would be filled with men of god. Max breathed slowly. The yogis weren’t naked or covered in ash. Yellow robes and bright marigold garlands covered their lean bodies.

“Do you want guru?” called out one of them and took a large drag from the bong in his hand.

Max shook his head.

“Take us to Europe with you,” said another, coiling his long gray hair into a knot. “Cheap gurus outsourced from India.”

The others laughed so much they started coughing.

Max would have to get used to this mocking. Nothing separated him from the throngs of Western hippies searching for themselves in the Himalayas. His Harvard degree, his Wall Street experience, wouldn’t give him a leg up this ladder. Nothing would—except his will.

Max walked quickly back to the bus station next to the hostel. He knocked on the glass window of the dusty booth at the station entrance. A woman trussed up in blankets sprang up from the floor. Her hair was disheveled from sleep. She raised her eyebrows.

“Uttarkashi bus?” asked Max without much hope.

“At 5 a.m.” She shivered in her thin khaki uniform. “Last bus this season.”

Max’s heart lifted. A sign. Pointing to what, he didn’t know, but at that point he’d take anything.