Maya (13 page)

Then Margaret mumbled, “If Stanley was having such a hard time with the smoke . . .” She eyed the Dunhill in Penny's hand and her voice trailed off. She obviously decided it would be best not to press the issue.

“We were just preparing to leave,” Penny said, standing up briskly from behind the desk. I took her cue and got to my feet. I saw that my chair
had fallen over backward on the floor, so I went over, picked it up, and returned it to its original place.

“Yes, please excuse us, Mr. Singh. We really had no right to enter your office like this.” I glanced at the desk. “Just talking.” I picked up my glass. Then, as an afterthought, I set it down and hauled out the handkerchief again, giving my nose another blast for good measure.

“We'll be off now,” Penny said. She took her glass and led the way to the door. As she passed Margaret she turned and addressed her politely. “I'm glad to have had the opportunity to meet you, Dr. Billings. And you too, Professor Davis. I hope your time in India is most fruitful.” She paused for a moment in front of Mr. Singh. “Thank you so much for entertaining us this evening. It was delightful.” I nodded to everyone and followed her through the door. The whole time Davis hadn't once opened his trap.

We ditched our glasses in the lounge and headed for the door and out into the courtyard, where I grabbed my bicycle and rolled it through the front gate, past the guard who was sipping a cup of chai. Penny hopped sidesaddle onto the flat rack in back, her sari bunched up around her legs, and we fled into the darkness, careening drunkenly through the streets of New Delhi, horny as rutting elephants and immersed in a nonstop laughing jag that surged up in our relief at having escaped more or less unscathed.

It had rained, and the pavement shimmered under the streetlights. Fires from late-night chai shops flickered in pockets of darkness. We glided close by a cow, and Penny reached out, letting her fingers bounce gently over its ribs and along the length of its rough, angular body. Inside a small Hanuman temple a group of old men huddled in a tight circle singing bhajans. They swayed together under woolen shawls and blankets, absorbed in the sound of the harmonium and an ecstatic rhythm of drums and brass finger-cymbals.

Back in my room we tore off our clothes and fucked like animals, grunting and slobbering on my narrow, ascetic bed until we collapsed into each other's arms. During the night I awoke, still mildly drunk, and listened to her soft breathing. The scent of patchouli mingled with the smell of sweat and sex.

The next morning I came back from bathing and found Miss Penelope Ainsworth sitting naked on the bed, her legs crossed, brushing her hair out in smooth, even strokes so that it hung thick and heavy over her
shoulders and down across her breasts. It was a tableau, a female archetype impressed so vividly on my mind and heart that she seemed for one moment less a living woman than a living memory—of someone, of some part of myself—that I had lost a long, long time before.

10

P
ENNY WAS ON THE ROAD
again a few days later, but she returned to visit me in Delhi several times during my last four months in the city. She was going back to England that summer, and we both knew the time we had together was short. She very quickly became my second real companion in India, after Mick, whom I hadn't seen since leaving Agra.

Penny was ambitious, determined to succeed in the cutthroat world of professional academics, a trait that I found more than a bit troubling. Any concerns I had were overruled—at least for the time being—by my fascination with her enthusiasm for India. She was full of life, a woman completely at ease and in love with the chaos of South Asia. In her company I began, for the first time, to take real pleasure in the wealth of sounds and colors, smells, tastes, and textures that were part of everyday life here.

Together we shared one small pleasure after another: a pyramid of bright oranges stacked high on a rickety wooden cart; the glitter of bangles and heavy silver bracelets on the wrists of the village women; the ghostly, feline cry of peacocks at dusk. She made me stop and notice the way a camel's lips flop up and down as he walks; I extolled to her the charms of the water buffalo with its inquisitive brow, its seductive lashes and sad, glittering eyes. Once, as we sat drinking chai in a neighborhood near Jamma Masjid, she leaned forward over the low table, gasped, and held my arm. Outside the shop a Shaivite ascetic sat bareback astride a white stallion, the reins in one hand, an iron trident clasped in the other. I have no idea why this Hindu holy man was in Old Delhi—much less astride a horse. With his sleek muscles and the dark, wild force of his beard and dreadlocks writhing down over his shoulders, he emerged from the crowded streets of this Muslim neighborhood like some mad Sufi vision of God.

On another afternoon toward the end of February, while browsing outside a used paperback book shop in Khan Market, we were assaulted with the blare of brass instruments, a cacophonous, metallic jumble of sound, a
musical freak fathered on India by the ghost of the British Imperial Army: five gaunt figures trussed up in faded military-style coats of red and gold. Heads, hands, and bare feet wrapped in gauze, ragged stumps of fingers and toes. Three dented trumpets. The tortured whine of a clarinet. The thump of a base drum, its torn head bearing the insignia of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Leper's Band.

For me, our time together was a respite, an opportunity to recover my strength. Exploring Penny's body was like renewing an old friendship. I adored simply being in her presence, inhaling her perfume, brushing against her as we talked and wandered through the city. And yet I could not forget the bicycle on the high wire. I was intensely aware of the emotions she inspired, of my growing attachment to her, and of the danger this presented for the tenuous equilibrium I had just begun to discover in India. When she invited me one afternoon to the embassy for lunch and imported English lager, I excused myself after an hour or so and went back alone to my books and meditation. The clown could not trust this newfound happiness, and therefore he could not really be happy.

Nor could I stop thinking of my lost wife. I talked with Penny about everything that had happened before coming to India, of my indiscretion and of Judith's response, of our letters—even of our recent conversation on the phone and the growing distance between us. She told me of her own past. There was someone in London, awaiting her return. He posted long narratives of his life there without her. I saw the envelopes, thick with desire, like the faces of the young men who congregated outside the movie theaters in Connaught Place.

In February, two weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday, I received a letter from Judith, the first since our conversation on the phone. “I've been thinking about this a lot,” she wrote, “and I simply don't feel that we will be able to get back together. I think it would be best if we divorced as soon as possible.”

It is well known that Kierkegaard was the first to make a clear distinction between fear and dread. Fear, he wrote, is always focused on something, while dread finds no specific target. Dread is a fear of no thing in particular. But this no thing in particular—as Kierkegaard cleverly pointed out—is not “a nothing with which the individual has nothing to do.” On the contrary, to dread is to be anxious about one's identity, which is a very personal nothing. To dread is to be troubled about the fragility of
that sad little circus clown, the ego; to dread is to worry that one's sense of self may, without warning, slip quietly back below the surface of what is referred to in the first chapter of Genesis as “the deep.”

Among the bas-relief carvings on the outer gate of the stupa at Amaravati—one of the most ancient of all Buddhist archeological sites—there is a depiction of the Bodhi tree, its branches sheltering an unoccupied throne. This is where the Buddha should be sitting, but the artist has rendered only a tree surrounded by a group of figures, the demons of Mara attacking an empty throne. This is the throne of memory and imagination, of desire and fear. This is the throne of the exalted ego, and—as the Buddha saw, and we are clearly meant to see—its occupant is missing.

No Buddha.

No self.

Where is the prince who wanted so desperately to find a solution to the problem of suffering? Where is the prince who left behind his wife and small child and nearly starved himself to death while engaged in ascetic practices? Where is he now? The anonymous artist who worked at Amaravati understood that apart from the throne there is nothing to be seen or told.

In the interests of full disclosure, this is as good a time as any to acknowledge my stake in this story. As narrator, I sustain a deeply ambiguous relationship with my protagonist. Stanley and his world are nothing more than a construct, a pastiche of memory and imagination: fiction on a grand scale. His story, though, is indispensible. Stanley Harrington, sitting disconsolately on the vinyl couch in the Fulbright lounge in New Delhi, all those long years ago, a letter from his estranged wife resting open in his weary hands, his head bowed, eyes misting, heart filled with dread. It's essential to get the details of his story right, for the events of his life define the empty throne where I cannot be found; they give form to my absence.

After the initial shock of reading Judith's words, I dried my eyes with the back of one hand and made my exit, brushing past a newly arrived fellow obviously interested in conversation. For the next hour or so—long enough to peddle through the traffic back to my room and prepare a cup of chai—I was fine. Confident even, in a manner of speaking. It seemed as if the fates were conspiring to accomplish something important that I might not otherwise have found the will to do. Ironically, I felt something of what my Sanskrit teacher's son, Krishna, had talked about, the strength
that flows from affirming the necessary. I even began to imagine that I could make out, in all of this, the obscure outlines of my own quirky Dharma.

By early evening such fantasies waned and this first wave of courage washed ashore, leaving me high and dry on a polluted beach, surrounded by the familiar detritus of my customary anxiety and loneliness. Judith's words, as I read them over again for perhaps the hundredth time, threw me into an agony of doubt. Unable to sleep, I penned the first of many subsequent confessionals, none of which I ever actually sent.

The letter had barely been written when I fell into a string of elaborate visions of what would ensue if I actually left India and returned. The visions quickly turned sour. Should I force the issue? Would she be able to go through with the divorce if I confronted her? It wasn't difficult to imagine the whole dismal sequence of events as they would
unfold: the airport in New Delhi, boarding the plane for Chicago, the grueling flight, the train from O'Hare, standing outside her door, beaten down with exhaustion and fear, one hand gripping my shabby canvas bag. Punching the buzzer. For all I knew she and Bruce would be upstairs together. I should call first, from the airport. We had been separated for seven months now. For the past seven months she had been sleeping with him. They're a couple.

The scene in Chicago that I imagined made Harold Pinter's plays look like a demonstration of faith in life's basic goodness. She would be drinking. I would say anything, promise her anything. She would be forced to decide between me and Bruce. She wouldn't believe a word I said. Why should she? Before it was over we would flay each other on the rack of our anger. Why put us through this when I was not convinced that we could ever live happily together? How could we care for each other so much and still fail so miserably? Was this love?

I came full circle in my imagination and resolved not to go back to Chicago, then changed my mind repeatedly in the days and weeks that followed. There are passages in my journal where I started out headed one way, changed my mind before reaching the end of a single paragraph, and turned a complete about face—without realizing what I had done.

I realized that I had never once been able to tell Judith that I loved her and to know in my heart that it was true.