At the Bottom of Everything (22 page)

At the uphill end of the road (the road literally just came to a stop, the dirt seeming to look out at the fields and the scrub and say,
You know what, forget it
) I found a general store, the first clearly open building I’d encountered. There was no door. The floor was covered in flattened cardboard boxes, and the shelves had so little (a tin of biscuits, a box of powdered soap) that the arrangements seemed more artistic than commercial. “English?” I said to the teenage girl who was leaning on the counter, making careful marks in a notebook that looked at least as old as she was. She shook her head. “Akshay?” I said. Again she shook her head, but after I’d bought a baby-food-sized jar of something that looked like mango jelly (she took a good two minutes to record our transaction in her notebook), she surprised me by leading me out of the store and walking a few steps ahead of me all the way down to the other end of the road, back to the terrace with the old woman and the little girl. She pointed to the house and made a sound that bore almost no resemblance to the way I’d been pronouncing Akshay; when I thanked her she just waggled her head and made a palms-up here-you-are gesture, as if she were introducing me to my brand-new washer/dryer.

By that point the little girl, who seemed to be five or six, had cheered up. She’d picked up a long stick with which, seemingly for my benefit, she kept poking a black dog that was trying to sleep, or die, against one of the house’s outer walls. The girl would look at me, poke the dog, look at me, then burst into exaggerated, maybe teasing laughter, while her grandmother, now fiddling with a clothespin, shook her head disappointedly.

In his email Raymond had said that Guruji’s disciples lived at Akshay’s house, and that one of them would take me to the cave where Thomas was doing his retreat. My only question, by that point, was whether this was maliciously untrue
or accidentally untrue. I was reconciled to resting somewhere to eat my jelly, then getting back on a bus and devoting what was left of my energy to finding and confronting Raymond. I was, in that moment, tired enough that I was ready to treat a seven-hour trip across India like a walk back from checking the mailbox.

But, mostly so as not to just stand there being silently stared at by the grandmother, I pulled Raymond’s note from my pocket. Explain that you’re
bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta
, he’d written. This may cause a bit of confusion but simply get on with it and don’t flinch. I looked at the grandmother, cleared my throat, pointed at my chest, and pronounced each syllable with a hopeless little question mark attached, feeling very much like someone saying “
open sesame
” to a garage door. I could, for all I knew, have been telling her to please poison me; I could have been telling her I’d come from the city to eat her family. But she rose slowly to her feet (she turned out to be not much taller standing than sitting), bowed her head, and waved for me to follow her into the house. Open sesame. (She also shouted something at the little girl that sent her scrambling up the road as if someone were shooting at her feet.)

Inside she called something out toward the backyard, then got involved in making tea, which entailed lighting a burner with a long match and stuffing leaves into a rusty mesh ball. Either my eyes were now joining my list of misbehaving body parts, or this was the darkest habitation I’d ever seen. There were thick brown walls, low ceilings, windows as high and small as in a prison cell. In the main room, where she’d directed me to a chair against a wall, there were three beds (two of which were actually tables piled with blankets) and a scattering of plastic chairs. She set the teacup on the chair next to me, then stood expectantly with her hands together. I took a sip that amounted to not much more than a lip-touch. She made drink-up-drink-up gestures with her hands and grinned. I nodded and made what I hoped were appreciative noises.

At some point a man walked in from the backyard, tying the sash on his long shirt and pajama pants outfit; he was short and about the same age as the grandmother. “Welcome, welcome, so much welcome,” he said, shaking my hand. “I am? Akki.” He had the kind of barrel chest and thick white hair I associate with kings and billionaires. “My wife, who you are meeting? Shima. Our son? Very dead, very sadly dead. He is sorry you will not meet him. Stabbed. Very much bad business.”

He called something toward another room, and a young woman shuffled in; she couldn’t have much been much older than me, and she moved with the cautiousness of someone trying not to break through the surface of a frozen pond. Akki pressed her against his side. “The wife of my son. Gita. Very much beautiful. Very, very welcome to meet you.” She didn’t look very welcome to meet me. She hardly looked at me at all. She had gold bangles on her wrists and a daub of the same red on her forehead as the grandmother’s. She nodded in my general direction, then hurried back to whatever room she’d come from.

“We are hearing not to be expecting you,” Akki said. “This, you understand—” He gestured apologetically (I think) at the room, at the lack of special arrangements. I made a
pshaw
sort of noise and, in desperation, took a worrisomely sour gulp of tea.

“You are coming to us from miles and miles away,” Akki said. “My English, I offer apologies. So many, many apologies.” He moved his chair so he could sit facing me directly. “
Bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta
, very wonderful. Most wonderful. Telling me. You are a rich man? Important city man?”

No, no, a very unimportant man, I tried to explain. Unless you couldn’t be a
bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta
without being an important man, in which case, yes, very important, extremely important, from the biggest city of all. I sipped more tea.

The grandmother, Shima, had gone off into the backyard and now she came back in carrying a chicken, which she set
to work hacking apart on the tabletop; it took me a surprising number of minutes to connect what she was doing with the sudden absence of rooster crows.

Two things happened then, which, along with its getting dark outside, seemed to mark the tilting of the evening from one phase into another. First, the little girl came back from her errand, which had apparently been to buy two giant bottles of something label-less and golden. And second, as Shima went around the room lighting the lanterns, I began to notice a set of dark shapes gathering by the door where I’d come in. At first I counted three people, then four, then five, all lingering on the porch like carolers. “Do they want to come inside?” I said.

“They are hoping you give them numbers!” Akki said. “Many, many people, not very much educated. Someone say
savakabodhisatta
, they start to think of lottery. Start to think of magic.” Then, to them, he said something that sounded like a grudging acknowledgment. One by one, bowing and cringing, they stepped inside and took their places against the wall. Were these the people who were supposed to lead me to the cave? They were mostly men, a few of them with mustaches; sometimes they whispered to each other, but mostly they just stood and watched as I served myself chicken bits and a purplish lentil stew. They looked as if they could have been waiting for a bus, or waiting to be called into a police lineup. By the time I’d finished my plate, which is to say picked at what meat I could discern in the half-dark, there were at least seven of them watching us.

“You are very much not feeling fear,” Akki said. “Very much calm, very much preparing, many, many accomplishments. The final night for many, many things.”

I made a noise of general agreement and wiped my hands against my shorts. The food was painfully, eye-reddeningly spicy, and the only way I could outrace the pain was by eating more and faster. Shima and Gita and the granddaughter had joined us, perched on chairs at a slight distance from the table;
Gita looked down at her lap and ate only with the fingertips of her left hand, as birdlike as it was possible to be while eating stew without utensils; her daughter stood waiting to climb onto her lap. You’d think this might have been among the more awkward meals I’d ever eaten, but I was fairly well inured to awkwardness by that point, plus I’d resolved that a
bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta
, at least as I interpreted the role, wasn’t really given to chattering.

Also, there was the alcohol. At some point it became impossible to keep track of how much I’d had, because Akki, like an overeager waiter, poured a refill (we drank from orange plastic mugs) every time I drank so much as an inch.
“Tulleho! Tulleho!”
If I had to guess I’d say it was whiskey, or maybe gin, but really what it tasted of most strongly was flammability. By the end of the meal I’d noticed that the doorways, formerly very stable, were wobbling whenever I moved my head. One of the wall-lingerers, a pipe-cleaner-thin man in a white undershirt, seemed, each time I looked at him, to be mouthing a message to me, but I couldn’t keep him still enough to decipher it. The possibility of vomiting appeared on the horizon, like a distant ship popping into view. I know I knocked over my mug at some point and I remember thinking, as the grandmother pressed a towel against the puddle and Akki apologized,
That’s probably for the best
.

It was after dinner, in Akki’s long whiskey-sipping giggling period, that I first noticed the singing coming from the backyard. It could have been going on all throughout dinner; I was having, by then, to keep a fairly vigilant watch on the table to keep the room from spinning. Akki had been in the middle of telling me a story about Gita’s family (she’d gone to put her daughter to bed as soon as the meal was finished); she was, from what I understood, very lonely, much too shy to find a new father for her little daughter. There were other threads in the story too, things I couldn’t quite follow, to do with corrupt judges, shady land deals. As I say, I wasn’t at my best.

And anyway, the singing: it was a single voice, probably
female; going just by the melody I’d guess it was a song about waiting for a loved one to return from sea; it sounded like something you’d sing as you sat watching the plum blossoms wither. Either Akki noticed me noticing it or he noticed it himself. He stood up and lifted the lantern from the table; the men against the wall seemed to take this as their cue to huddle together by the door, as if they might need to run. “Come,” Akki said. “Now we will see. They are as family to me. Very, very sad, when my son is dying. Lots of crying, much too much crying. They make happiness again.”

The yard wasn’t really so much a yard as it was a pen of dirt, leading out into an endless field. Except that I couldn’t see details beyond Akki’s lantern light, and what I could see, including the stars and the moon, seemed to be turning in a kaleidoscope. There’s something about rural darkness, even or especially when you’re drunk; it feels bottomless; it makes you feel like you’re floating in the ocean. The lone voice had become a handful of voices now, a droning harmony, coming from somewhere that seemed to get farther away as we approached it. I tripped over a clod of broken-up ground and Akki put his arm around me, half affectionate, half stabilizing. He led me to the edge of the field, where there was a brick shed so basic it could have been drawn by a preschooler. The singing was coming directly from inside; if I’d lain my hands on the walls I would have felt a humming. Practically tiptoeing, Akki led me around to the shed’s cutout door:
Look
.

And there they were, the disciples who’d brought Akki happiness after his son died, the people who were, I realized as soon as I saw them, my only hope of getting to the cave. Raymond had been telling the truth. They were all boys, and they couldn’t, I didn’t think, have been much older than thirteen or fourteen. They wore simple robes, something like orange togas, and had identically shaved heads. The singing seemed to come not so much from them as through them. One of them, the one I’d thought was a woman, would sing something that must have meant:
Must I, oh must I, wait forever?
And the other three would answer:
Yes, yes, you must wait forever
.

They sat, the four of them, perfectly still, kneeling on the bare ground in what had been complete dark, singing with their heads tilted slightly toward the ground. It felt like coming upon a cluster of unicorns at a watering hole. In college, in a music appreciation class, the professor had once played us a recording of what she said was the last Italian castrato, this now ancient man, shriveled and broken, singing with the voice of an angelic little girl. That was, I’d always thought, the eeriest, most unworldly music I’d ever hear. Wrong.

Akki and I stood there until the song was done (I’m guessing it was at least a few minutes, because I had time to notice the rolled-up straw mats in the corner of the shed and the wood-framed photo, against the wall, of what must have been a much-younger Sri Prabhakara). Then, as soon as they were finished, all four boys, who I wouldn’t have thought were aware of us, opened their eyes, turned to face us, to face me, and bowed until their foreheads were against the ground. I don’t think the feeling of being wrongly prostrated to is something that most people get to, or have to, experience in their lives; I was lucky to be unsteady enough not to feel the full bizarreness of it.

They sat back upright and closed their eyes, and Akki, looking as if he’d just pulled off the world’s most remarkable magic trick, led me staggering back toward the house. Was it possible that I smelled as strongly of alcohol as he did? Were those tears on his cheeks or was it sweat?

“Are they going to take me to the cave?” I said.

“Tomorrow, yes, yes, yes, tomorrow you will make
puja
. Now to resting. Now to sleep.”

Someone had made up a bed for me, complete with a folded set of pajamas, while we were out in the backyard, and it looked, in that moment, as welcoming as a bath. It was right by the wall where we’d just eaten dinner, with a lantern tucked into the window nook above. The pajamas would have
fit two of me, even with the drawstring pulled tight. I blew out the lantern and lay there listening to what sounded like a large animal just outside the back door, breathing and chewing. The room was warm but I wanted the protection of the blankets on me; either they or I or both of us smelled sweet and gamy. I tried, because exhaustion and the ability to fall asleep had parted company, to count the places I’d slept in India, but I kept losing track, having to double back. Under my mountain of blankets I turned onto one side and then the other, my back and then my front. I felt as if a plate-sized Alka-Seltzer were dissolving in my stomach.