The Seeker Read online

  As the thunderstorms and blizzards resumed in the fall, the yogis began to make their way down from their caves. To prepare for them, Max built two additional rooms in the guesthouse and added new pipes to draw water from the Ganges. As his money dwindled, he planted and began harvesting crops from the small patch of flat land outside the guesthouse before the snow blanketed everything. Instinctively, he sowed cabbages, cauliflower, turnips, vegetables he knew would break through the cold, rocky earth. His hands, the plow, his body, the earth, his sickle, all seemed one, a living organism coexisting in silent harmony with the peerless mountains that turned from gold to orange, then orange to purple in the soft light of the fall sun. The crops grew, flat, slanted, and twisted, yet bearing precious fruit that allowed him to serve more food to his guests.

  Early in winter, more yogis came down to ask him for help to meet their special needs before the winter snowstorms cut access to the guesthouse. The Dudhadari Baba who lived only on milk wanted more cartons of milk. The Naga Babas, their long, matted dreadlocks indicating the length of their penance, sought wild herbs to strengthen their necks. Other yogis wanted more food, comfort, shelter. Max worked all day, giving everything he could, and was so absorbed in one activity or the other that he often forgot to sleep. When he did rest, it was never for more than an hour or two. He didn’t seem to need sleep anymore. His body worked but his mind was still, content, forming no new impressions, holding on to nothing. The void within him was growing. He fell more and more silent.

  Late one winter day, the Khareshwari, Standing Baba limped into the guesthouse. The wooden swing he rested his arms in while standing had rotted. He wanted to continue his austerity in the plains. Max held his hand and guided him down the steep, slippery mountain one step at a time. When the terrain turned particularly treacherous, he tied himself by a rope to the Baba’s frail frame, dragging him across the crevasses so he didn’t have to balance on his weakened legs. The Baba thanked him with moist eyes when they reached the village.

  “For many years, I have been afraid to make this walk down,” he said. He touched Max’s hands. “You have done much good here.”

  Max’s heart leapt and expanded, occupying the space between them.

  “You are not even from here,” said the Baba. “What is your name? Where do you come from?”

  Max opened his mouth. For a moment, he couldn’t remember his name. He concentrated.

  “Max,” he said weakly.

  The Baba’s eyes softened. “Your palms are bloody from pulling the rope. Come with me. I’ll apply some herbs to them,” he said.

  Max stared at the shimmering redness on his hands. He felt nothing.

  “Please come,” said the Baba.

  Max shook his head. “My wounds heal easily,” he said.

  The Baba stared at him. “As you wish,” he said. He raised his hand and put it on Max’s head. “My blessings are all I have to give for your goodness.”

  Max folded his hands and floated down the bare path to Gangotri village, feeling the earth below his feet again. No, his actions were neither good nor bad. They were like those of the rhododendron and pine trees on the mountains that were his home, which flowered without thinking, then withered away without clinging, helpless to act as they were.

  In the village, he walked into the small post office and wrote a letter to Sophia.

  “Dear Sophia. I hope you are well,” he began.

  Involuntarily, her image appeared before his eyes. She was heavier than before but she was smiling, dimples forming at the corners of her lips.

  “I’m happy here,” he wrote, then stopped. What he felt wasn’t happiness. It was something else. His old self that had sought happiness had melted, replaced by just a deep, expanding stillness that was completely empty yet strangely filled with life, energy, and bliss.

  He put his pen’s nib to the paper. The words before him blurred, the paper appeared to float. Shimmering vibrations went up and down his spine.

  “I send you love,” he finished.

  Max signed and posted the letter to his old address. Warm, fluid boundary-less love radiated from his heart, enveloping Sophia and every being in the world.

  38

  The guesthouse emptied again late in the winter. Max felt no different in the lull than he had in the midst of activity. Once more, blizzards and avalanches struck. The guesthouse rattled and shook in the wind and the snow just as it had the previous year, the cyclical ebb and flow of nature. Max spent the days fixing roofs and unblocking pipes to keep the place ready for the next season.

  Early one afternoon, amid a thick snowfall, a tall, lean man in a uniform entered the guesthouse. He folded his hands.

  “I’m in the Indian army, sir,” he said

  The sickle-shaped scar on his forehead glistened.

  Max stared at him. “Viveka?” he asked.

  The man raised his eyebrows.

  “You look like someone I know,” said Max. “Please sit.”

  The army officer sat on the chair next to the fireplace. Max served him tea and sat opposite him on the rug on the floor.

  “A foreigner died in the mountains, sir,” said the officer. “The American embassy contacted the Delhi government to find the body. I tell you, sir, our government has no money for the living but these foreign embassies have dollars even for dead people. Anyway sir, if I can pinpoint a location, the Harsil army camp will send a helicopter to evacuate him. Can you help me look for him?”

  Max nodded. “Which part of the mountain?”

  “He told people he was going to Gomukh three weeks ago,” he said. “With so many glaciers slipping, I don’t think he would have made it that far.”

  “I will go,” said Max.

  “I can come with you,” said the man.

  “There is no need. The trail is dangerous from here on,” said Max. “Was he hiking?”

  “Hiking, meditating, racketeering, who knows, sir? These foreigners think the Himalayas are a joke like the Alps or something. They don’t realize that there aren’t landmarks or signposts here. Every patch looks the same,” he said. He coughed and lowered his eyes. “Not all of them, of course, sir. You yogis are different. Superhuman. Like God more than men, sir.”

  Like God more than men, sir.

  The words came out of the man’s mouth but they were Viveka’s words. Max’s eyes clouded. Something stirred deep within him. He was falling, slipping into a swirling mist.

  “How old are you, sir?” asked the man. “I thought you would be sixty or seventy when the villagers told me you knew everything about the mountains. But you look very young.”

  Max’s throat went dry. Past and present were jumbling, merging into each other. One moment, he was on a concrete street looking at a food cart’s tin roof, another on a mountain in front of a wooden house with a tin roof, now floating in an infinite black timelessness. He held the corners of the rug.

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Your body has adapted to the mountains, sir,” said the man.

  The body adapts anywhere, sir.

  Max looked closely at the man. Was he a ghost, an apparition? The man set his tea cup on the floor. His hand, which had been holding the cup, exploded into tiny, radiating speckles of yellow light. The light spread to the cup, then to the wooden floor, turning the floor into a stream of glowing particles. Max gasped. He looked up. There was no one. Just one golden light. Everything had dissolved into it.

  I have seen the unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrow-less and deathless face-to-face.

  Indeed, sir, indeed you have.

  Max blinked. The man’s face came into focus again, hazy and shimmering.

  “I will find the hiker,” said Max.

  “Thank you, sir. I will come back again tomorrow,” said the man. “Perhaps you will be kind enough to share some of your teachings with me also then, sir.”

  Millions of thoughts and ideas, a whole universe of voices, came alive within Max. Deep within him, a
whisper arose.

  “I don’t teach anything, Mahadeva,” said Max. “I just live here. You alone decide what you want and understand what you get. For me, yoga is both my path and my goal.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  These weren’t his words, they were Ramakrishna’s. But they had come from within him. They had existed in that moment. Max exhaled slowly.

  “I will go now,” said Max.

  He left the guesthouse.

  Max crossed glaciers that had slipped on the path, treading lightly on their slanting slopes. He walked up the familiar trail, past the cliff that bent into the stream which led to his cave, further up beyond the yellow-green shoots and the pine trees that had provided him food and fire. As he walked, his heart filled up with love, almost choking him. The emptiness expanded. A wave of warmth filled the void. Soon, the warmth was a continuous column of bliss. His spine was fluid, vibrating. Involuntary tears fell from his eyes.

  Max reached Gomukh just after sunset. The air was alive with smells, the snow covered with faint footprints. Down a slope he slid, reaching a rock covering a small, natural cave. Max stooped inside.

  He stared at his own dead body in the moonlight.

  Blue, crumpled, and curled up like a fetus.

  Love, radiant and white, enveloped Max.

  Friend, you didn’t have to try so hard.

  The supreme stillness was always within him. The ice was cold, the fire burnt, the water quenched. He was That.

  Max stared at himself.

  A hand moved.

  A wave rippled within Max.

  A head of brown hair lifted.

  Max broke out of his trance.

  A man lay on the wet floor, pressing his hands between his armpits. His blue face was covered in a thin layer of ice. He breathed heavily in short, frosted puffs.

  “My ears hurt,” he said, blue-black lips moving slowly.

  He lifted his pale, white eyes.

  “My jeep is heated. Can you take me to my jeep?”

  Max was breaking again, dissolving, merging into the man, into the gray stone wall of the cave behind him, the shaking icy, mud floor below them. Max. Max. He concentrated, holding on to himself.

  The world assembled again.

  Max lay down next to the man on the floor and enveloped the man’s cold, wet body. He focused on his own navel and raised his body heat easily, transferring it to the man until he felt the man blazing. Higher and higher he went until the heat reached the fingers and toes of the man, warming them, thawing them, making them come alive once again. Max stood up, feeling just a faint sliver of pain in his belly.

  “Come,” he said.

  Weightless and floating, he held the man by his hand and stepped out of the cave. He stood behind the man, guiding him up the snow to the path leading down to Bhojbasa.

  Back at the guesthouse, Max wrapped the man in blankets and built a fire next to him. The man mumbled a weak thank you. Max stood up and walked to the window. He traced a faint stream of white light from the moon to the tip of a mountain peak. The light radiated within him, cooling him, making him still, complete.

  “Who are you, brother?”

  The sun’s rays streamed through the window. Max was bathed in its warm light. He turned around. The man was sitting up next to the fire, shivering, his hands tucked into his armpits.

  “You’ve been standing by the window for hours. Your body shines. Who are you?”

  The man’s face blurred. His body became the orange glow of the fire.

  “You built that fire without lighting a match. You brought me back to life. Are you God, a messiah? Does such a thing even exist?”

  The fire shifted, shook, melted away. Everything moved within Max.

  I am the seeker, the act of seeking, and the one who is sought.

  “What’s happening, brother? Your lips don’t move but I can hear your words.”

  I am the field and the knower of the field.

  “Brother . . . ”

  A cry. A rustling river. An ocean of black. Bliss, pure bliss.

  Suffering alone exists, none who suffer. The deed there is, but no doer thereof. The Path there is, but none who travel it.

  There was just the One and no other.

  He had reached the end of his yoga.

  tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe vasthānam

  Then, the seer dwells in His own true splendor.

  Acknowledgements

  This isn’t a book as much as a result of five years of my life trying to walk on the path of yoga. I stumbled and struggled often to reach the point where I became just a channel for this story to tell itself. Through all of this, my wife, Kerry, believed in me even when I lost faith in myself, and this book wouldn’t exist without her exceptional creative and spiritual inputs. This book is as much hers as mine.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. B.K.S. Iyengar, Swami Sivananda, and Mr. S.N. Goenka, spiritual icons I’ve never met but whose soul-stirring words have spoken to me as if they were living, breathing guides standing beside me.

  My mother’s lifelong interest in the Bhagavad Gita and my father’s unwavering commitment to yoga had a profound impact on my decision to take a year off from work to deepen my meditation practice. Much of this novel was written in that year.

  Kerry and I met a lot of wonderful people on the road, many of whose journeys merged into Max’s journey. My special thanks to Dhanakosa Buddhist Retreat Center in Scotland; Dhamma Atala and Dhammalaya Vipassana centers in Italy and Kohlapur respectively; the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta ashram in Madurai; Aranya and its patron Varun Sood in Goa; Obras and its patrons, Caroline and Ludger in Portugal; Monal Guesthouse and its patrons, Deepinder and Poonam in Uttarkashi; and Spiros and Ursula in Greece for their generosity in hosting us.

  My in-laws, Joan and Michael Monaghan, made our year away from home easier by giving their big-hearted, unconditional support as they always do.

  My colleagues, Lisa Mann, Sanjay Khosla, Gina Schenk, Julie Donahue, Deanie Elsner, Doug Weekes, Bharat Puri, and Xavier Boza will always be special to me for making exception after exception to allow me to bring my full self into corporate America. Such big people, all of them!

  If the characters and settings in the book feel authentic, I give much credit to Jonathan Kozol’s compassionate, deeply observed books on the Bronx projects, Jeff Hobbs’ The Short and Tragic life of Robert Peace, and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here. I can also not overstate the deep effect of the Buddha’s quest as captured in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Karen Armstrong’s Buddha, and Arundhati Subramaniam’s The Book of Buddha, on my writing—and my life.

  The book wouldn’t have been published without my agent, Mollie Glick. She’s the rare deal, a mainstream agent supporting off-the-beaten-path voices.

  Jake Morrissey, my incredibly competent editor at Riverhead, gave me an equivalent of a two-year MFA with his unrelenting but compassionate edits through the course of the book. I’ll always be grateful to him for treating this book as if it were his own and helping me get to the real heart of the story I wanted to tell.

  Chiki Sarkar’s warm, exuberant support lifted me up during the lowest points of writing this book, something I’ll always treasure. The book is so much stronger for her thoughtful edits.

  Sarah Cypher, Marlene Adelstein, Shatarupa Ghoshal, Anshuman Acharya, Hriday Sarat, Trupti Rustagi, Saurabh Nanda, Rachael Belfon, Samir Mishra, Milee Ashwarya, Anna Ghosh, and close friends and family, thank you for your deep, thoughtful inputs at various stages of the book to give it the shape it has taken today.

  Ayush Pant—what a powerhouse presence to enter this book at a late stage! I’ll be watching from the sidelines as you go from strength to strength with Aurelius marketing and give wings to many authors’ efforts. Thank you for believing in the book as you did.

  My appreciation also for Chetan Syal from Aurelius; Mohan and Varsha from Paradigm Shift; Shruti Katoch, Caroline Newbery, Gavin Morris, and Chetan Kishore at Penguin India; John
and Masako Mamus, Melissa Chang, and Mike Ricca—such a responsive team that sets the bar for creative excellence and passionate execution.

  And a final word for my small family—Kerry, Leela, and Coconut—for filling my heart with joy and sharing with me a love that knows no bondage or attachment, the love of a yogi.

  THE BEGINNING

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