Maya (7 page)

Several years before we met, Shri Anantacharya had accepted a respectable position in the federal bureaucracy and moved, along with his wife and ten children, from their home in Madras to what was for them the alien society of northern India. He was a gracious host, an articulate, highly educated scholar who had, before turning to government work, published several studies of Sanskrit drama and poetry. The move north was simply another step away from his old life as a Sanskrit pundit. What was most important now was to see that his children did not lose touch with their roots.

Through the years he had preserved his love of the traditional literature despite the financial demands that made it necessary for him to sit in front of an anonymous desk, day after day, surrounded by stacks of forms and rows of other desks, peons scurrying back and forth on pointless errands, fans turning slowly over the whole unhappy collection of broken-down file cabinets, murky glasses of chai, and drawer upon drawer overflowing with the ubiquitous rubber stamp. All the while Shri Anantacharya recited to himself verses from the Sanskrit classics he had memorized as a child.

One evening a week or so after the encounter with Margaret Billings, when my Sanskrit lesson was finished, I fell into a long conversation with my teacher's eldest son, Krishna. Anantacharya had excused himself and retired to a back room, leaving the two of us to finish our chai and namkin. As it so happened, arrangements were being made for Krishna's upcoming wedding. He was to be married to a woman whom he had never met, a woman selected for him by his parents.

Before coming to India I had known about arranged marriages, but I had not realized how common this practice is, or precisely what it means that the vast majority of Hindu weddings are engineered by the parents of the bride and groom. A desirable candidate is located—in the old days by consultation with village elders, more recently through an ad in the personal section of the newspaper. Once an initial contact is established, background checks are then made through a discreet process of inquiry. At some point an astrologer is consulted in order to compare the charts of the prospective bride and groom and to assess their chances for a successful marriage. Finally, if everything appears to be in order, all four parents hammer out the contractual details of dowry, wedding expenses, and any other potential transfers of material wealth.

“So it is,” Krishna assured me in his polished South Indian English, “that we shall have the greatest possible opportunity for a happy life together.”

He was astounded at the willingness of Westerners to plunge into marriage simply on the strength of feelings, feelings that were little more than sublimated lust. How could we possibly be so foolhardy as to hope to support the responsibility for our future together—for our children and ourselves—on such an unstable foundation? Where did we derive such unwarranted confidence in our emotions? The ultimate proof of our immaturity in this matter, the kernel of ignorance that lay at the center of it all, was our peculiar conviction that love was possible outside of marriage. Here Krishna's voice became resolute.

“Outside of marriage there is only passion, and passion is not to be mistaken for love. Love is built on commitment to one's dharma—one's sacred duty—and not on personal desire. One's dharma is much greater than the personal desires of a man and a woman. The circumstances of life determine to whom we must surrender.” His eyes dropped for a moment; his voice softened. “But the person to whom we surrender is only of secondary importance, for in truth, we are surrendering to our dharma.”

I mulled this over.

“Mr. Stanley,” he began again, “why do you suppose we Hindus marry?”

“Sons?” I suggested hesitantly, then quickly retracted my answer. “Children, I mean.”

“Besides that.” He smiled. “What other reason could there be, for the man and the woman?”

Once again I deliberated for a time and finally admitted I was stumped.

“Marriage,” he said, without the slightest trace of condescension, and with a confidence that I would have given anything to share, “is the seed of love, and the soil where that seed can plant its roots. Only then will it come to flower in children.” On this point he was adamant. “Without the
saptapadi
, the seven steps, love is impossible. Each of these steps is a vow, and these vows are the foundation of love, not only between a man and a woman, but between man and God as well. One needn't follow the Hindu system, but there must be a vow. And once made, it can never be broken. I think that Americans find this very difficult to understand and accept.”

I knew I should just be quiet and listen, but I had to ask. “And what if one is miserable after taking those seven steps? After making the marriage vows? What happens then? Are a Hindu husband and wife always happy together? Do they never argue? Do they never fight and abuse each other? Do they never, ever regret these vows?”

Krishna reflected for a moment before answering. “It is a risk.”

“But we're human,” I insisted. I was determined to press my case. “We can never know what will happen, even tomorrow. What good is it to pretend otherwise?”

“There is no question of pretending,” he replied. “One resolves to act then lives on the strength of that resolution. It may fail—one may fail to fulfill one's dharma—but there is no other path to love. There is no mystery, Mr. Stanley. Love is not about getting what we want. Love is about how we live with what we are given.”

This was not the sort of thing I wanted to hear.

A handful of letters had come from Judith since my return to Delhi. She wrote of her job as a secretary in some god-forsaken office. She sent a sketch, with a description attached, of a piece she was struggling to complete—an intricate maze of gears and sprockets sprouting like tulips from the carcass of a wrecked car. She was still at it, poking around scrap-metal yards in her rusted Toyota pickup, scavenging bits of jetsam for her creations. But lately she had achieved some recognition. She wrote that her work had been included in a show and a few pieces had attracted the attention of a prominent critic. For years I had watched this process from a distance, secretly envious of her dedication to the task, her relentless labor to give birth to these brutal iron children, blue and orange sparks from the acetylene torch crackling off her welder's mask as she hunched over her work like some crazy shaman rescuing yet another lost soul from the land of the dead. Her letters described the life she was living without
me. Our separation was becoming a given, though neither of us knew what the future would bring.

Sometime in November, weeks after I had begun to anticipate such a letter and even to shape my response, she wrote of a “tired anger.” She would not be coming to India. I immediately sat down and composed a dramatic pledge of eternal, undying love. I did my best to convince her that this separation was itself an element of our relationship. “We have to see that what is happening now belongs to our marriage just as much as the time we spent together.” In some perverse way, I actually believed this. A few days later I wrote to her that my letters were like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “You need to assemble them, if you can, into some larger picture, in order to understand me as I am now, as I've become.” But I knew that the metaphor was inadequate; it disguised the tenuous complexity of our situation, for both of us were changing far too quickly to communicate through the mail. The feel of the envelope as it slid from my fingers signaled the first leg of a long journey that could only end in loss.

One day not long after Thanksgiving, I went out and got my hair cut short. Back in my room I looked in the mirror and was shocked with the sudden recognition of my unconscious motivation, the pitiful, childish defiance that lay behind my trip to the barber. Years before, Judith and I had argued absurdly over the length of my hair. She wanted me to let it grow long, down over my shoulders; I wanted it short. In the end I had provoked her by asserting my right to decide for myself how I should look. The result was my “prisoner of war” haircut, as she called it. She could barely wait for it to grow long again. “Only God could love you for yourself,” she said afterward, quoting Yeats, “and not your yellow hair.”

Undeniably, I had learned something from Judith's example. She encouraged me to go through the motions and repeat my lines. But I was never convincing in the role of husband. My love was stained with the conviction that all of it was nothing more than a peculiar form of living theater. And still, it was true: Judith made me yearn to love. I longed to commit to her, and to the world, in her superbly romantic way, but always I failed. I dismembered her warm, human affection and replaced it with sadness and pain and fear.

And now, in India, everywhere I looked I gathered more evidence that there truly was something wrong with the world, something fundamentally amiss. Life was a continually deferred promise of happiness, a lie that no one dared expose simply because the alternative seemed worse.

It was early December, as I recall, and I was browsing the stacks at the American Library when I stumbled upon Ernest Becker's
The Denial of Death
; it had only recently been published. Leafing through the pages, my eye fell on the following passage:

As a child growing up in the American Midwest, the woods and streams and fields had always been, for me, a place of comfort. At an age when my friends were staying after school to play team sports, I treasured the solitude and silence of the small, forested area near my suburban home. I couldn't comprehend why anyone would want to stay at school longer than necessary when he was free to roam outdoors, away from teachers and coaches and all the exhausting social games. The smell of damp earth in the early spring, the crackling of leaves under my feet in late October: this was my refuge.

As an undergraduate I hiked and backpacked in the Smokey Mountains, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies. Later on, after Judith and I were
married, we went together on camping expeditions. All my life I had turned to nature in order to escape the drudgery and nonsense of human society. It had never occurred to me that nature could be viewed as a “nightmare spectacular.” Becker's words opened up a new and unsettling perspective.

I passed the remainder of that afternoon and the next few days moving from one troubling book to another, from one bibliography to the next, following a trail of words that led like breadcrumbs ever deeper into the dark recesses of the natural world. I read of murder and cannibalism among lions, hyenas, and a seemingly endless number of other vertebrate species, many of which routinely organize in warring packs, maiming and killing their enemy's young and battling each other to the death. But what I found most distressing were the unspeakable horrors of the insect world. There was Fabre's Sphinx Wasp, capable of performing “the most delicate and exacting nerve operation on its grasshopper prey,” immobilizing the insect's legs so that it can be sealed up alive in a darkened chamber with an egg deposited on its stomach. The egg releases a tiny larva, which begins, shortly after birth, to feed on the paralyzed grasshopper, chewing methodically into the living body of its host, avoiding essential organs, preserving the life of its benefactor for as long as possible. Ammophila wasps substitute a caterpillar for the grasshopper, leaving several eggs instead of one, so that the soft, living body of their victim writhes and squirms as it is eaten alive.

This was a natural world far removed from the bucolic scenery of my childhood experience. But as an adult, how could I have remained so terribly naïve? It now seemed to me that I had been living, all these years, in a Disney film, some fantastically romanticized world that had nothing at all to do with the merciless truths of nature. It was all there in the title of Becker's book:
Denial of Death
. Why had no one ever pointed this out to me until now? Why had no one forced me to look?

There is a Sanskrit phrase describing the teaching of the Buddha as
yatha bhutam darshanam
, “seeing things as they are.” In Chicago I had studied Buddhism in the context of my graduate work in Indian religion and philosophy; but early on I had decided to specialize in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. Chicago was now far away; decisions I had made there no longer seemed quite so important. After reading Becker I decided to take another look at what we had learned in those classes and seminars on Buddhism. I began by reviewing the basic doctrines in the Pali canon. Pali is the classical language of Theravada Buddhism, the form of Buddhism
practiced in Thailand, where Mickey had lived as a monk. This was where I turned for a fresh look at the most fundamental of all Buddhist teachings, the so-called four noble truths.