The Yoga of Max's Discontent Read online

  “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 thoughts, unspiritual thoughts such as a presentation he had screwed up at work, fucking Anna, his guilt about Keisha, and his mother’s 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. She smiled. “I want to see dead people too.”

  Max laughed. They said good-bye. 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 walked gingerly 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 the bedsheet over his large frame.

  “Thank you.” Max went to his side of the hut and lay 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.

  From then on, Max banished all doubt and surrendered himself more fully to every part of the day. 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 in 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 burned but he felt nothing. That night he stopped applying Odomos, the insect 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 up 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 leaving his mind unaffected. It was as if the part of his brain that processed discomfort and pain as bad had receded into a distance, still there but not as active anymore. Something similar happened with most things that once bothered him: the frogs that danced in front of the squat toilet and even 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.

  This in turn made his asana practice stronger. He didn’t judge which pose he liked, which he disliked, which he could do well, which he couldn’t do well. He didn’t want Ramakrishna to hurry up with the spinal twists or hold the headstand longer. As a result, he observed Ramakrishna more closely and made minor adjustments that galvanized the flow of energy in his body. His body became fluid, malleable, and more receptive to Ramakrishna’s instructions. If only his mind would do the same.

  Often he would wake up in the middle of his night with his heart beating wildly. “My life, my life,” he would repeat to himself. Those images again. Sophia, three years old, brown head, curly hair, and cute lisp saving a piece of Werther’s candy their mother’s employer had got from Germany for him when he returned from school by holding it in her mouth. Her outstretched hands and dimpled smile. The small gooey candy dripping with her saliva. Staying up all night to tutor her so she’d get into Trinity too. His mother’s eyes widening when he handed her their tickets for Greece from his first real paycheck as an intern at a hedge fund. The pride on his mother’s face when she walked into his doorman building in Manhattan for the first time. Andre’s first time out in a wheelchair after three months of lying in a hospital bed. They had taken him straight to see the bright, shiny Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Tears of joy had rolled down his cheeks. Max’s throat would tighten. What was he seeking? He’d been happy before. Couldn’t he surround himself with friends and family the way the world did and be happy again? Life was meant to be lived, suffering to be experienced, not run away from. He was being brainwashed into joining a cult.

  His anxiety would spiral the next day, coming to a head in the hour-long break they had between lunch and the afternoon asana class. With no work to distract him, his mind would spin doomsday scenarios. He’d be broke and unemployable soon; he was squandering his most productive years; all this wasn’t real life; he’d regret this time forever. He remembered himself studying all night in a corner of the living room, obsessed with nailing the SATs while the world crumbled around him—the stock market crash, his mother’s being out of a job, losing welfare, nights when they went to bed hungry, the terrifying prospect of homelessness, crack entering the projects, his friend Pitbull’s throat slit in a gang fight, Andre’s going to jail, waves of arson in the neighborhood. Nothing had come in the way of getting a perfect SAT score. Where had that Max gone? Why had he dropped out of the world he had worked so hard to get into? So his thoughts would swirl until pranayama began. Then he regulated his breathing, his mind calmed, and his body fel
t connected to the universal energy again. He didn’t fear suffering. He wasn’t craving happiness. He was seeking something quite different . . . completeness. The way out of the predictable rhythm of birth and death. Joy, grief, anger, guilt, love, passion—he had experienced everything in events past and lives before. A perfect state existed beyond all of these, and he would reach it. It was the law of nature. The eagle had flapped its wings high, experienced everything the world had to offer. Now it was time to bring the wings down, go inward, complete its journey. Max would push through another day.

  • • •

  DAYS PASSED, a month, then more. Max went to town only when he wanted to be with Shakti. Otherwise he felt more and more repelled by the sights of living and the sounds of commerce. Emails from home left him indifferent, even a little sad. Sophia wasn’t enjoying substance-abuse counseling anymore. Addiction seemed endless, and what she was doing wasn’t making a dent. She was trying to figure out what to do next. Jason, a friend from work, didn’t like the increased government financial regulations after the recession and was planning to join a technology start-up. Keith and Tina were planning to buy a house in New Jersey to have more space after the baby came. Everyone wanted a different life but in a narrow realm. Did they ever feel dissatisfied with the same ebbs and flows that billions had experienced before them and billions would experience after?

  Yes, of course everyone did, Shakti would say in one of their rare trips out. Who hasn’t had that strange feeling of something indefinable still missing from one’s grasp even in moments of great achievement? The evolutionary journey from animal to man is one of higher and higher self-awareness. At its peak, man realizes that his mind is always vaguely discontented and is crying for something beyond the world of people, objects, and achievements. Only then begins the journey of involution, of seeking completion within. Until that awakening dawned, he would keep repeating the cycle of seeking, desiring, fulfilling some of his desires, not being able to fulfill others, all the while feeling that familiar gnawing incompleteness. Max didn’t know if he had experienced any deep awakening. All he knew was that he felt more and more alienated from his life back home. He had left New York in December. It was April now, and nothing was pulling him back.

  • • •

  ONE EVENING, while meditating in the courtyard, Max had an overpowering urge to speak to Hari. He opened his eyes. Hari was absent from his usual position on the mat next to him. Max was surprised. Hari never skipped evening meditation. Max closed his eyes. Hari’s sharp green eyes and rugged, handsome face filled his mind. He opened his eyes again. Still no Hari. Max fidgeted through the remaining hour. He paused in front of the partition sheet when he went back to the hut. No sound. Hari must be sleeping. The hotter it got every day, the more exhausting working in the fields became. Max wouldn’t disturb him.

  Max walked back to his own side of the hut. He tossed and turned. After an hour, he lifted the dividing sheet and entered Hari’s section.

  Hari was sitting on his bed, staring at the wall.

  “Hari?”

  He turned toward Max. His green eyes glowed in the lamp’s light. “Mahadeva, you know?” he said softly.

  Max was surprised he had broken the silence. There were still three days to go in that ten-day cycle, and Hari seldom spoke even on their days off.

  “Know what?” said Max.

  “I’m leaving later tonight. The tractor will come around midnight,” he said. “It should have been here by now. You have a watch, don’t you? What time is it now?”

  “Twelve-fifteen,” said Max, without turning around to get the watch buried somewhere deep in his backpack.

  Twelve-seventeen, to be precise. Though during meditation he remained suspended in timelessness for longer and longer, he had developed an acute sense of physical time in every other part of the day. He didn’t care about the time, but he always knew it. Down to the minute. A recent phenomenon he couldn’t explain. It was scary. He had thought of asking Ramakrishna for an explanation when he had first noticed it. But he had pictured the saint’s smile and his eyes shining with the words he’d likely repeat from the first time they had sat together in his hut: many things will happen here, some hard for the rational mind to understand. They are signs pointing toward the path, not the path itself. Don’t be distracted. Thus, Max accepted it as a by-product of his improved concentration and didn’t dwell much on it.

  “He must be running late,” said Hari.

  “Are you leaving for good?” said Max.

  “I don’t know, but I won’t come back for a while,” said Hari.

  Despite his newly acquired distance from his emotions, Max felt a pang of sadness. He liked Hari in spite of the fact that they didn’t talk much. His quiet competence in the fields inspired Max. Outside the fields, Hari’s kindness shone through in small gestures, such as his waiting for Max outside the bathroom when Max was struck with the stomach flu and always shining a flashlight if Max came back late from meditation and he was awake.

  Max shook Hari’s hand. “I will miss you. Thank you for your kindness.”

  “I will also. Sharing the space with you has been easy. It’s seldom so effortless. People have many complaints when they first come,” said Hari.

  “Why are you leaving?” asked Max.

  Hari shifted in the bed.

  “You don’t have to say,” said Max.

  “I’m not ready for the summer here,” said Hari, his green eyes dropping. “I tried before, but I couldn’t do it. This time I worked much harder to prepare, so I thought it would be different. But I can feel in my gut that I’m still not ready. And now with everything Shakti told me about what’s happening in the Middle East, my heart is not here. I worry for my son even though I know he’s happier with his mother in her big family than he can ever be with me. I have to make myself much tougher before I come back again.”

  Max wondered why the strapping film actor, who beat the hard earth into submission in real life and likely beat villains on film, needed more toughening. He wondered what happened in summer. The heat would get worse, of course, but he’d always seen Hari perfectly composed, even as the hot winter had given way to a burning spring.

  “Why?”

  “Summers are tough here. You will see,” said Hari. He paused. “But you’ll get through them. You are meant to be here.”

  They heard the dull engine of the tractor arrive outside.

  “I hope you’ll come back soon,” said Max.

  Hari got up from the bed. “I hope so too. It gets harder each time,” he said. He picked up his backpack. “My father wants me to run our family business back home in Egypt, which I’ve avoided for many years. My son’s mother wants me to be close by. They’re both right, of course. It’s hard to explain why I keep coming here to them—and to myself.”

  They walked out of the hut.

  “Did Ramakrishna tell you why I was leaving?” asked Hari in a hushed whisper in the courtyard. “I requested that he not share it with you or Shakti so I didn’t worry you.”

  Max shook his head. “He didn’t say anything.”

  “How did you know I was leaving then?”

  “I didn’t. Just a coincidence,” said Max.

  Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. He had known Hari was leaving. He had sensed it, felt it deep within his bones, the same way he had felt the need to flip over his pillow three days ago. A rusty red scorpion with open pincers had fallen out of the pillowcase. Max had lifted it on a piece of paper and thrown it outside the ashram boundary without fuss.

  “Stick to it. You’ll do much,” said Hari.

  Max walked with him to the tractor. Hari got on it. The driver put it in gear, and without looking back or uttering a sound, Hari drove off into the darkness.

  19.

  April gave way to a sweltering May, and Max began to understand why Hari had left.
The sun burned the land as if it were just a few feet off the ground, not millions of miles away. The monsoon that was expected in early May never showed up. Crops withered. New seed refused to bear fruit. The earth turned harder than concrete and broke into little dry pieces.

  The three of them kept up their daily routine in the beginning, but the prospect of physical hunger soon overcame spiritual hunger. They eliminated the afternoon asana class and worked longer in the fields, spreading out to farm softer land, breaking the earth with axes and the backs of plows. Eggplants and drumsticks required more water, so they planted only millet. Only a few of the new millet plants broke through the ground. They lavished them with fertilizers. Still the crops languished, for they lacked the most crucial ingredient of all: water.

  The hand pump dried up. Max helped Ramakrishna drill the bore well supplying the pump deeper. Both of them continued to drill every day until the drill stem cut through their torn, callused palms and their heads spun in the heat. After days of continuous effort, they would be rewarded with a small trickle. They poured three-quarters of it on the field and stored the remaining for drinking. With little water available for anything else, they roasted millet and the last of the eggplant and drumsticks directly over a wood fire. They rationed their drinking water to three glasses a day. None of them had bathed or washed their clothes since the water dried a month ago.

  The rain remained elusive through June. Max knew he would break soon. Only once before when he was seven years old had he experienced this helpless hunger. It was in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash, when his mother could find few cleaning jobs and their savings had run out completely. But they had managed to fill their stomachs with mac and cheese and apple juice in soup kitchens every night. Here all they had was the meager rations they produced. Max felt dizzy and disoriented all day. The skin on his face, neck, and back cracked and peeled. His mouth dried up. He didn’t have a drop of saliva left to moisten his lips. Every day he stared longer and longer at the wooden gate that separated the ashram from freedom. Any minute now, he would walk out. He was free. He’d come back later when the sun didn’t beat so hard and the thin stream of water coming out of a hundred-foot-deep well didn’t feel like a miracle. But he would look at Shakti working in the fields with a determined look on her mud-streaked face and he would be ashamed at his softness. She was like his mother. Sturdy, determined, relentless. Again and again the same image of his mother would come to his mind. Her face gaunt and colorless, her torso bent with pain, and her legs swollen with lymphedema, yet shuffling around on her crutches in his apartment, insisting on cooking Sophia and him a Thanksgiving dinner just days before she died. Max could transcend his body’s limitations too. The constant hankering for food, water, and other petty comfort tied him to the physical plane, obstructing the path to transcendence. He could overcome it.