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  maya

  IT IS 1975 AND INDIA IS IN TURMOIL.

  American Stanley Harrington arrives to study Sanskrit philosophy and escape his failing marriage. When he finds himself witness to a violent accident, he begins to question his grip on reality.

  Maya introduces us to an entertaining cast of hippies, expats, and Indians of all walks of life. From a hermit hiding in the Himalayan jungle since the days of the British Raj, to an accountant at the Bank of India with a passion for Sanskrit poetry, to the last in a line of brahman scholars, Stanley’s path ultimately leads him to a Tibetan yogi, who enlists the American’s help in translating a mysterious ancient text.

  Maya, literally “illusion,” is an extended meditation on the unraveling of identity. Filled with rich observations and arresting reflections, it mines the porous border between memory and imagination.

  “Rich and evocative.”

  —DINTY W. MOORE, AUTHOR OF THE MINDFUL WRITER

  “I’ve been waiting for someone to write a contemporary ‘quest for enlightenment’ novel, but I didn’t expect it to be this good.”

  —DAVID R. LOY, AUTHOR OF MONEY, SEX, WAR, KARMA

  “This absorbing and compelling novel feels as intimate as a memoir—possibly even one’s own.”

  —KATE WHEELER, AUTHOR OF WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED

  C. W. HUNTINGTON, JR., translates and interprets classical Sanskrit and Tibetan texts and is a professor at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He is the author The Emptiness of Emptiness. This is his first novel.

  For Liz

  Māyā, (f.) art, wisdom, extraordinary or supernatural power, illusion, unreality, deception, fraud, trick, sorcery, witchcraft, magic.

  —MONIER-WILLIAMS, Sanskrit-English Dictionary

  What prevents you from knowing yourself as all and beyond all is the mind based on memory. It has power over you as long as you trust it.

  —NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  BEGINNING SOMETIME after 1962, when Allen Ginsberg made his legendary pilgrimage to India, the city of Banaras became the home for a sizeable community of expatriates bound together not only by their shared fascination with South Asian culture but also by the fact that they represented an alien presence in a society that had historically reacted to outsiders with distinct ambiguity. It was, in many ways, a magical time, the temporary conjunction of unstable forces. In 1984, after the assassination of his mother, Rajiv Gandhi enacted much stricter visa regulations, ostensibly in an attempt to regulate the entry of foreigners supporting Sikh terrorists in the Punjab. Since then, the Westerner in India is much more likely to be either a tourist or a professional whose time there is precisely circumscribed, either in its duration or its purpose.

  Things have changed a great deal since the days when young people from Europe and North America journeyed overland on the Magic Bus through Baghdad, Tehran, and Kabul, eventually settling in the mountains outside Manali or Dharamsala, or among the twisting alleyways of Banaras, where we could live out solipsistic fantasies of worldly or spiritual power without any fear of being ridiculed or called to account for ourselves by family and friends left behind.

  I have never understood whether we remained in India during those years because we were afflicted with the spiritual malaise of our own time and place, or if our unquenchable thirst for South Asian philosophy, religion, music, and art were engendered by the force of the local environment. Whatever the case, expatriates living in Banaras during the sixties and seventies were mlecchas, foreigners occupying the no man’s land that was neither Western in any recognizable form nor truly Asian. We took possession of India’s ancient culture and made it our own, as if by right of birth. At the same time, Indian family life, her feudal politics, and above all the complex hierarchy of social relationships known as caste, were for us so remote as to be virtually nonexistent.

  No one, however, could avoid the omnipresent poverty. One had, at the very least, to chew and swallow one’s chapati in company with the shrunken frames and hollow eyes of human beings and animals that roamed the Holy City like a silent army of hungry ghosts. One was compelled to bear witness. How each of us accomplished this disheartening task was, in some sense, a matter of style.

  The joys of everyday life are not easily dismissed, even though they come bracketed in sorrow. And yet, the constant vacillation between pain and pleasure can wear thin. At one time or another everyone dreams of escape. This is the record of such a dream.

  1

  I WOKE TO THE TOUCH of her fingers moving up the inside of my thigh. She was leaning over me, the sheets thrown back, one arm tucked under my shoulder, her breasts resting heavily against my bare chest. For a moment I thought it was Judith. Then I turned—drifted really, still half asleep, my eyes closed—and pulled her closer, not caring. I felt her lips brush my ear, her breath, her mouth pressed against mine, the long muscle of her tongue . . .

  What the fuck am I doing?

  But it was obviously too late for such a question.

  And anyway, I already knew the answer, only too well: You wanted out. That’s why you didn’t care then—not enough, anyway—and that’s why you’re here, now, alone.

  I leaned over and pressed my forehead against the oval glass, straining to see, my eyes burning from lack of sleep. Shadowy wisps of gray streaked by the window against a background of formless light. My jaw swiveled side to side and I felt my ears pop. The metal body of the Boeing 747 shuddered, rolling the sweep of its wings ever so slightly, first one way, then the other, as Pan Am flight 101 from Chicago, via London and Tehran, descended on the Indo-Gangetic plain through a dense morning fog. The haze lifted only moments before the plane’s wheels squealed against the concrete runway. We taxied to a stop a good hundred yards from the main terminal.

  In those days at Palam Airport in New Delhi, no enclosed walkways connected aircraft to the terminal; passengers had to disembark down a flight of stairs directly onto the tarmac. While I waited, packed into the aisle with what seemed like one enormous extended Indian family, everyone wrestling with their carry-on luggage and yelling to each other in Hindi, the door of the plane was ceremoniously unbolted and drawn back like an iron gate opening directly onto the vast temple of South Asia. An invisible, viscous odor poured into the cabin, enveloping me in its spell: sandalwood and shit, mango, jasmine, and diesel exhaust, valerian and turmeric and smoking patties of dried cow dung, chili and asafetida, tamarind, musk, saffron and coriander, burning tires and burning human flesh and hair, cumin seeds sizzling in mustard oil, rotting vegetables and dried urine, ginger and anise and holy basil—leaves of Tulsi—sacred to the great god Vishnu. T
his potent, beatific fragrance was the traveler’s first encounter with the subcontinent, one that lodged itself in my memory with a peculiar force. To this day, I have only to open any old edition of a Sanskrit text published in India, bury my nose deep among the pages, and I am poised, all over again, at the doorway of Pan Am flight 101, about to step down the stairs.

  I landed in the early morning of June 26, 1975, approximately six hours before Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s terse announcement was broadcast to the nation over All India Radio: “The president has declared a state of emergency. There is no need to panic.” By the time I got through airport customs, the police had already been deployed throughout New Delhi and across the country, making precautionary arrests of Gandhi’s political opponents, many of them future leaders of the Janata Party, whom she had labeled “dupes of foreign governments and ideas hostile to India.”

  The Fulbright office dispatched a wonderfully round, black Ambassador car to meet me at the airport and bring me to the Lodi Hotel, where I checked in and went straight to my room. The heavy drapes were drawn and an air-conditioner droned in the darkness. Everything smelled vaguely of mildew. A bucket and tap in the bathroom sat next to the twin-footpads of the Indian toilet. I ladled cold water over my naked body with a plastic cup, toweled myself dry, and collapsed onto the bed. I vaguely recall ordering some food that was brought to the room, but my next distinct memory is waking to a ringing phone and the almost unintelligible Indian accent of the desk clerk asking me to hold for a call.

  Indira Gandhi was deeply paranoid of the CIA, and it was not the ideal moment for an American scholar to arrive in India. No one knew what was coming next. The Fulbright people took all of this very seriously; they wanted me away from the capital, where I might inadvertently get swept up in the erupting protests. I had planned to spend my first few months studying Hindi with a tutor at Delhi University, but arrangements had been hastily made to shift my operations to the Central Hindi Institute in Agra—the Kendriya Hindi Sansthan—an arm of the Ministry of Education intended “to facilitate such courses as are conducive to the development and propagation of Hindi as an all-India language as envisaged in article 351 of the constitution.” There I would attend classes with non-Hindi speaking students from various locales around India and a handful of other foreigners. The person on the phone said they would send a car within the hour.

  “Please wait near the front of the hotel, Mr. Harrington.”

  Less than twenty-four hours in India, and things had already taken on a life of their own.

  I quickly rinsed off again, got dressed, and ate a small breakfast—an omelet, toast and jam, and a pot of tea delivered to my room on a silver tray by a waiter in a knee-length white linen tunic, scarlet sash, and turban. Moments later I was outside the hotel lobby, cowering in a patch of shade, waiting for the car to arrive. The heat was suffocating, the air so dry it was impossible to sweat. High overhead, iridescent, jet-black birds circled and dipped against a cloudless sky, calling out to each other in a desolate, throaty snarl that struck me as utterly foreign until I realized, with a start, that it was nothing but a flock of crows.

  2

  MAHMUD, MY CHAUFFEUR for the trip from Delhi to Agra, was a polite young Muslim who spoke no English. Though I had memorized a great deal of Hindi grammar and vocabulary in my classes at Chicago, I could barely manage to get a word out of my mouth. For the first hour or so, the two of us struggled to communicate in a variety of creative ways until we gave up and I retreated into a corner of the Ambassador’s back seat, peering out the window as rural India presented itself to me for the first time. On either side of the road, hard red earth dotted by scrub brush and gnarly, parched trees stretched to the horizon. Now and again we passed a cluster of earthen houses hunkered down around a single ancient tree, where oxen and water buffalo rested in the shade. A woman in a sari moved languidly along the narrow pathway that led to an open well, a polished brass vessel balanced on her head.

  About halfway to Agra we stopped briefly in the small town of Hodal. While Mahmud bought chai, I sat on a wooden bench under a great banyan tree with roots dropping all around me like stalactites. He returned with a steaming clay cup the size of a shot glass, smelling of cardamom and black pepper, and offered it to me with a smile and one of his narrow, hand-rolled cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but I accepted his gift. As we sat together in silence, puffing on our bidis and sipping tea, a camel plodded along the road slowly lifting and dropping its spongy feet. On its back rested a colossal burden of emerald sugarcane stalks. A man wearing only a loincloth straddled the beast’s neck. He waved to us from his perch.

  We entered Agra in the early evening and the city of the Taj crowded around us, engulfing the Ambassador in a tumult of bicycles and rickshaws. Monkeys ran like squirrels along the edge of the rooftops. Humpbacked cows wandered everywhere, grazing on refuse.

  Until that moment, all I had known about Agra came from history books. Tucked in the backseat, examining the details of life outside the car, I felt the pages of those books filling in the unseen dimensions of the street around us. Sikandar Lodi, one of the sultans of Delhi, founded the city in 1506, but its ancient past is, as they say, shrouded in the mists of time. The Lodi dynasty was conquered by Babur in 1526, and from then on Agra was governed by a succession of Mughal rulers, the most famous of which is Shah Jahan. In the middle of the seventeenth century, he built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved wife, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child. As the shah grieved, artisans were recruited from Bukhara, Syria, and Persia. Marble was quarried in Rajasthan, turquoise transported from Tibet, crystal from China. From Sri Lanka came sapphire, from Afghanistan lapis lazuli, carnelian from Arabia. Over a thousand elephants and twenty times that many workers contributed their labor to the construction of the Taj—a monument to matrimonial devotion, and a monumental reproach to those of us who have not loved so well.

  For a short time, Agra was the capital of what was likely the greatest empire of its day. Then the center of political power shifted north, and the city began its inevitable descent into obscurity. It took centuries, though, to make the transformation from a cultural metropolis to the hard-edged working-class city it was when our car, horn blaring, pushed its way into the narrow streets through a haze of exhaust and of smoke from the smoldering dung over which the city’s denizens were preparing their evening meals.

  Our path eventually led to an obviously affluent neighborhood. Rows of one-story stucco houses lined the unpaved street where pigs and feral dogs scavenged among heaps of garbage. Mahmud stopped the car in front of a brick wall bristling with the jagged edges of broken bottles that had been upended and driven, neck down, into a layer of mortar. He took my bag from the trunk and walked with me through an ornate iron gate into a small courtyard. We said goodbye to each other—Mahmud bowed slightly and saluted, then turned and walked back through the gate. I watched him start the car and drive away.

  The Fulbright office had arranged for accommodations with two other students from the institute: Ajay, a government employee from Madras, and Alain, a postdoc from the Sorbonne doing research in Political Science. There was a chaukidar—a sort of guard—who appeared to come with the house. He dressed in wrinkled khaki and passed most of every day lounging by the gate, sipping chai and smoking. One morning on my way out to class I found him on his hands and knees, just outside our front door, carefully spreading a spoonful of sugar on the porch. When I asked him, summoning my best Hindi, what he was doing, he told me he was feeding the ants. It apparently had something to do with a vow he had made to a local deity.

  A few days after my arrival I met Mickey, a twenty-two-year-old from South Boston. Raised Catholic, he had taken robes in Thailand and lived as a Buddhist monk before drifting to India, where he’d been for almost two years now. I was on my way to purchase an aerogramme, and there he was, just outside the post office, fiddling with the rusty lock on his bike. Lanky and muscular, with tawny, short hair, hi
s clear blue eyes the color of the Indian sky. He looked up at me and dusted off his hands. “Hey man, you got a bidi?” Just as if we were old friends. His white kurta-pajama gleamed in the morning sunlight, its creases neatly pressed.

  I was attracted to Mickey immediately. He appeared totally self-contained, profoundly comfortable in India. His Hindi was fluent, and he seemed to be expert in living on almost nothing. We hit it off right away, in part because of a shared interest in meditation. He had a room on the second floor of a crumbling red sandstone building, the men’s dormitory for Agra College, where he was studying Mughal miniature painting and vocal music. My memories of his room are infested with the whining of mosquitoes that feasted with impunity on our sweating bodies as we sat motionless, legs crossed, on the floor. Everything Mick owned fit neatly on one shelf of his almari, and those belongings included neither a mosquito net nor a fan. It irritated me that he appeared so oblivious to the insects and the heat.

  One evening, he managed to fall asleep with his legs wrapped in a full lotus posture. Who knows how long he was sitting there, silently dozing, before gradually folding, little by little, until he toppled forward, his forehead descending in a graceful arc directly onto the point crowning the brass Buddha in his makeshift altar. My attention was so intently focused on the mosquitoes that I literally bounced in terror at his cry. For days afterward he had an ugly wound just over his third eye.

  I had some idea that to do anything to escape the droves of mosquitoes would amount to an admission of weakness. If Mick could deal with the discomfort, so could I. Having only been in India a short time, I was just beginning to discover the limits of my willingness to do without the amenities of life in the West. For a middle-class American graduate student who had become rather proud of his sparse material existence, life in India presented a series of increasingly uncomfortable challenges.