The Seeker Read online

  Indeed, sir, the yogis don’t want any contact with people.

  Max thought of Viveka quietly wiping the snow from the roof of his cart and Ramakrishna’s silent face from the morning. He also would have to find peace within himself.

  17

  Max awoke sweating for the fifth night in a row. His heart clutched. Another nightmare. A dark-skinned man electrocuting himself by climbing up an electric pole on the corner of a busy street. His face turning grayish blue. His flesh burning. People screaming as his rigid body fell to the ground. It was like the first night. In that dream, a young man with closely cropped hair had set himself on fire. Max’s ears still rang from the screams of people surrounding the man. On the second night, a group of women in black headgear wept around a dead body. The next night was less gruesome. A thin, old man sat in front of a television in a dark house and ate from a cracked bowl of rice, smiling eerily. A horrifying image each night, all different but each tugging at his heart, making him cry out in pain and grief. Yet he was also just a little distant from the people he saw—unlike the Scottish Catholic priest, the woman looking skyward and the amulet-kissing man he had seen during his near fatal hike up the Himalayas. These people weren’t him in past lives. They were familiar yet separate from him. Was he remembering forgotten images from the gang wars in the projects because his meditation had deepened?

  On the first day of the ten-day cycle, he had sat still and meditated on the infinite consciousness within just as Shakti had suggested. But it hadn’t worked. His mind still wandered easily. The object of concentration was just . . . too infinite. He needed something tangible to concentrate on. Perhaps a symbol of the infinite, he reasoned and focused in his mind on the image of the Buddha, the man who claimed to have crossed the boundary from the finite to infinite. The Buddha’s contented eyes and inward-looking gaze occupied his attention. He didn’t cross and uncross his legs, stoop forward or bend backwards. Soon Max’s mind migrated from the man to his qualities. He now concentrated on the Buddha’s blazing determination instead and felt inspired after every meditation. Something clicked. It was as if he was becoming a small part of what he was meditating on. And as his meditation became more certain, his asana practice evolved too.

  That day, the sixth in the cycle, during asanas, he felt a sudden urge to bend his knees during Sirsasana, the headstand. He bent his knees but instead of coming down, he arched his back and slowly brought his legs behind his back. Lowering his feet further, he touched the back of his head with his toes. A satisfying stream of blood rushed to his spine. He removed his wrists from the ground and caught hold of his big toes. He remained in that pose for a few seconds when he was struck by the impossibility of his whole body bent backwards in a circle supported only by his head. God, he would break his spine. He was crushing his neck. He was choking. His eyes watered. He panicked. He pulled his feet up in a rush, flailed and fell—into the able hands of Ramakrishna.

  “Relax, breathe, relax,” said Ramakrishna.

  He glided Max down gently.

  “Push your chest out,” said Ramakrishna.

  Max thrust his chest forward and exhaled. He opened his eyes. His spine tingled. His head buzzed. The world felt fresh, different, alive. Both Hari and Shakti were staring at him.

  “What is that?” mouthed grim-faced Shakti, who hadn’t acknowledged his presence with as much as a nod since the silence started.

  “Sirsa Padasana, touching your head with your feet,” said Ramakrishna. “One of the toughest poses in the eighty-four classic asanas. Excellent for strengthening the spine, but do not attempt on your own yet. Please ask me to help you if you want to try.”

  Neither Shakti nor Hari wanted to try. Nor did Max when he realized what he had just done.

  Two days later, something similar happened when he was in Salabhasana, the locust or grasshopper pose. He lay face down with his hands clasped under his stomach, chin touching the floor, eyes looking ahead, legs hoisted up, feeling none of the lingering back pain he had experienced in the initial classes, when some impulse made him kick his legs up higher. Without instruction, he pulled them higher and higher until they were vertically above his head and just the top of his chest lay on his upper arms. It didn’t feel comfortable so he arched his legs further back and brought them down so his heels rested in front of his face. He straightened his knees. His chest lifted from his arms. He stared incredulously as he was inverted into a circle once again. From the corner of his eye, he saw Shakti and Hari stand up and watch him.

  Lift up your legs. Now. His spine would snap any moment. But it didn’t. He was shocked by how natural the position felt. Until he started to choke. His chest was exploding. He lifted his legs in a rush when Ramakrishna stopped him.

  “Go back,” said Ramakrishna.

  Max pulled his legs back in front of his face. He was staring at his heels again.

  “Hold,” said Ramakrishna. “Circulate the breath, don’t exhale.”

  Max lay upturned for a minute, maybe more, following Ramakrishna’s instruction, feeling the fresh oxygen reach the depth of his abdomen. His panic subsided. He could do this for longer. He closed his eyes.

  “Now exhale and come up,” said Ramakrishna.

  Max released his breath slowly. He lifted his legs back, softly touching the ground without thuds or crashes. His body shook with energy. A stream of warm air flowed from his pelvis to the top of his head and back down to his pelvis. His head buzzed. The world was his to take. He could do anything. He breathed deeply to calm down.

  Hari and Shakti broke into spontaneous applause. Ramakrishna smiled broadly.

  “Viparita Salabhasana, the inverse of the locust,” he said. “The ancient yogis derived all asanas from nature. The grasshopper has the strongest abdomen among insects, hence the pose. Do the Salabhasana regularly for abdominal strength but try the inverse only if your flexibility is exceptional.”

  Max didn’t think his flexibility was exceptional. He struggled with basic poses like sitting forward bends and half-spinal twists that Hari and Shakti did with immaculate grace. How had he known these advanced poses that Ramakrishna hadn’t taught and he’d never seen? Please, not past lives again. No matter the science, the whole idea of reincarnation was still too much of a cliché. A hippie came to India, did some backward bends and started seeing events from his past life. But something else was happening, something physical was changing in him. His body pulsed with energy after the bandhas. He didn’t sweat buckets in pranayama as he used to just a week ago. He worked for hours in the burning sun, softening and breaking each piece of hard earth as it were alive, a physical foe, but slept only two or three hours every night. For the rest of the night, he was awake, reading books other travelers had left behind on yoga, spiritual searches, Buddhism and Zen—and of course, sweating from his inexplicable nightmares.

  Max didn’t sleep at all the night before silence broke. One moment, he was meditating in the courtyard, the next moment someone was shaking him. He looked up at Ramakrishna.

  “Do you want to join us for asana class today, Mahadeva?”

  “Now?” said Max, surprised.

  Ramakrishna smiled. “Same time every morning.”

  Max skipped a breath. It couldn’t be morning. He had just sat down to meditate. He saw Hari and Shakti sit on their yoga mats. Had he really meditated the whole night? Nine hours straight from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m.? He couldn’t sit cross-legged for that long, let alone meditate. It must be his body’s subconscious response to avoid the nightmares.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  His mouth was dry. He wet his mouth with the saliva.

  Back in his hut for a change of clothes, he felt no tiredness, no watering of eyes, no nervous energy pulsing through him. He had none of the effects of sleepless nights back home. It was as if he hadn’t needed sleep at all.

  Max remained distracted through asana class that day. When silence broke at the end of class, he was surprised he didn’t want to go to tow
n. The idea of talking to Shakti, checking the Internet, hearing from Sophia, getting new information from the world, overwhelmed him.

  “Hurry, get ready,” said Shakti, laughing. “Tractor comes anytime.”

  Max hesitated. His body quivered from the morning asanas. He just wanted to be alone, silent, still. A hollow fear arose in his gut. What was happening to him? The nightmares, the sleeplessness, this desire to keep silent after nine days of silence, it wasn’t normal. Too much, too quick. He had to get away from this bubble.

  “Yes, coming,” said Max.

  They followed the same steps—the tractor, the walk through the same unending orange land in the same heat. Max talked, laughed, tried to feel like himself, but his thoughts were occupied by his heels in front of his eyes in Viparita Salabhasana.

  He checked his email again. A note from Sophia marked Urgent. He opened it immediately.

  “I need to know you are safe. Just tell me you are still in India and have not wandered off to Tunisia . . . this has gone on too long, Maxi.”

  Puzzled, he opened another message from Andre.

  “Sophia is worried u r in Tunisia because u always wanted 2 go to Africa again. I told her even u r not so stupid. Write back Ace. ”

  Similar messages from Keith and Tina, his friends from Harvard.

  What was happening in Tunisia? He couldn’t load New York Times, CNN or Yahoo so he asked the shopkeeper for the name of the national newspaper. The Times of India website loaded slowly. The cover page came up amid a hundred pop-up ads.

  A smiling photograph of a Middle Eastern man with closely cropped hair. Another picture of women wearing black headgear walking on a street.

  Max scanned the headlines, a distant, vacant chill rising in him.

  ‘Hundreds of people protest in Tunisia’s streets’. ‘Ben Ali threatens strict action against demonstrators’. ‘Another man electrocutes himself in Sidi Bouzid’.

  He opened the links mechanically. Brown faces shouting in protest, policemen in black fatigues with rifles in their hands, a jeep overturned, a burnt man on a hospital bed, another man’s grayish-blue, electrocuted body.

  He had seen every image before.

  They were the people from his dreams.

  Day 9 of the civilian rebellion in Tunisia. The revolution had begun the same day his nightmares had.

  Max rubbed his face. His skin had gone cold.

  “Very sad in Africa, saahab. But good, also. You wait and see, same thing will happen in India,” said the shopkeeper.

  Max contracted his abdomen and exhaled deeply. Numbly, he wrote back to Sophia and Andre.

  ‘I’m in a small Indian village and nowhere near Tunisia. This place is a million times safer than New York so don’t worry for a second.’

  Again, he went back to the Times of India website and studied the chronology of the protests. No, he couldn’t have read about it before. There was no inkling of an uprising in Tunisia until a fruit seller burnt himself in front of a government building. Max knew absolutely nothing about Tunisia and its politics. He couldn’t even locate Tunisia on a map. What was happening?

  “My mother tells me about Tunisia. She is worried. She doesn’t know India and Tunisia are in different continents.”

  Shakti was standing behind him, watching the screen.

  Her smile disappeared. “You look white like ghost,” she said. She bent down. “You have friends and family in Tunisia?”

  Max shook his head. His throat was dry. It was just simple déjà vu, wasn’t it? Nothing to be alarmed about. Right?

  “The pictures are hard to see,” said Shakti.

  Max turned around. “Pictures, Shakti? I saw the whole thing. I felt it,” he said. “I smelled the man’s burning flesh. I heard the women shouting in the street. I saw a man electrocute himself. And I saw other things that aren’t in the newspaper. A man eating his dinner, smiling when he saw an overturned jeep on TV. A teacher writing the electrocuted man’s name on a school blackboard.”

  “What do you mean you see it, feel it?” she said.

  He stood up, wanting to be alone again. “I don’t know. I’ve not been myself for a few days,” he said.

  They walked down the narrow mud road.

  “I have seen those people in my sleep every night since it began,” he said.

  “Your sleep?”

  “In my dreams,” he said. It sounded strange. “They were the same people, I’m sure.”

  She stared at him. “So it happens to you. I do not know anyone who experiences it directly.”

  He stopped. “Experiences what, Shakti? What happened?” he said.

  “You see scorcio, like . . . a glimpse of single universal energy we talk about,” she said. “You merge into it for a moment and see biggest wave on its surface.”

  Max wiped the sweat off his face. It couldn’t be. It was too . . . too new-agey.

  They walked again, passing the snack shop. Shakti wanted a Pepsi. The thought of sweet drinks, salty snacks, any processed food made his stomach churn. What was happening to him? He forced himself to buy and gulp down a Pepsi. They walked back to the village.

  The only way he could have merged into this single universal energy that connected all beings—assuming it even existed—was through meditating on it. And that was impossible. He was a novice; he couldn’t even contemplate the infinite. He was still using the Buddha’s image as a surrogate, and even that kept slipping from his mind as it digressed to other, un-spiritual, thoughts, like a presentation he had screwed up at work, fucking Anna, his guilt over Keisha, and his mother’s gray, dying face.

  “Have you ever had such dreams?” said Max when he calmed down.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t dream much,” she said.

  Max sensed something, probably her disappointment at not having a similar experience, unpleasant as it was.

  “It means your meditation is working,” he said. “Only people whose minds are not at rest dream, right?”

  Shakti shrugged and kept silent for the rest of the walk back.

  “Very hot,” she said on the tractor and covered her face with her white handkerchief.

  Max understood now why Ramakrishna insisted on silence. He had made Shakti question her own practice by opening his big mouth. A part of him wanted to apologize but a larger part of him just wanted to be silent forever. Strange things were happening. He needed to go deeper, to their source.

  Shakti removed the cloth from her face. Her usually animated eyes were quiet. Max’s heart broke. All day, he had been chattering about his progress in this or that.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I’m just insensitive,” he said.

  The tractor arrived at the ashram.

  “No, I am sorry. I am small,” she said on their walk to the huts. “I work hard but nothing like this ever happens to me.”

  “If it’s any help, it was no fun to smell rotting, burning flesh.”

  “It sounds more fun than my sleep,” she said and smiled. “I want to see dead people too.”

  Max laughed. They said goodbye. She went to her hut and he entered his. Hari was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back ramrod straight against the mud wall on his side, meditating with the usual silent, determined look on his face. He opened his eyes as Max gingerly walked past him.

  “I’m sorry,” said Max. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “No, no, I was thinking of going to sleep anyway.” Hari uncrossed his legs and got up from the floor. “I hope you had a good day in the village.”

  “I guess,” said Max, suddenly understanding Hari’s decision never to leave the ashram in a way he hadn’t before. “I don’t think I’ll go again. All these unnecessary sights, sounds, information, the phone, the Internet, it just unsettles you. ”

  “This dewdrop world is just a dewdrop. And yet. And yet.”

  “Sorry?”

  “A Buddhist poem,” said Hari. “The world pulls
you in despite its incompleteness.”

  “You seem to be resisting the pull quite well,” said Max.

  Hari went to his bed. “So you think,” he said. “I have a three-year-old son back home in Egypt. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of him.”

  Max’s heart welled up on seeing Hari’s moist green eyes.

  “Sleep well,” said Hari, pulling his bed sheet over his large frame.

  “Thank you.” Max went to his side of the hut and lay down on his bed for a minute, then sat up erect and meditated. Max was lucky. Nothing bound him to the world he had left behind. He would give it all he had.

  18

  Max banished all doubt and surrendered himself more fully to every part of the day from then on. He didn’t have more prophetic dreams but he changed in smaller, more meaningful ways. One day, he didn’t suck in his breath while pouring cold water on himself during his daily bucket shower, now reduced to half a bucket. The next day he removed the cloth he put on his head in the fields. His scalp burnt but he felt nothing. That night, he stopped applying Odomos, the mosquito repellent cream that Shakti had given him after his malaria pills finished. The mosquitoes ravaged him but it didn’t matter. The following day, he didn’t curl his fingers on the scorching yoga mat to avoid the stinging, burning sensation on his fingertips. His fingers and toes baked in the heat, turning pink and blistered, causing pain to his body, but his mind remained unaffected. It was as if the part of his brain that processed discomfort and pain as bad had receded; it was still there, just not as active anymore. Something similar happened with most things that had once bothered him: the frogs that danced in front of the squat toilet, the squat toilet itself, the gray-black snake that slithered in and out of the huts from time to time, Hari’s loud snoring at night, the specks inside the water drum. He still saw them, felt them, but the part of his mind that judged those sights and sounds as inconvenient or unpleasant was quiet.