At the Bottom of Everything (23 page)

There’s no point, really, in ranking my nights according to their unpleasantness, but that one in Akki’s dining room deserves some sort of special mention. Without getting too much into it, I’ll just say that among the chicken’s many other qualities, it cured me of my constipation. I spent a couple of pitch-black hours racing between my bed and the fields, squatting and praying in the dark, thinking that this time, finally, I had to have emptied myself of everything that could possibly have been inside me. Degradation, like awkwardness, can be gotten used to.

Also there was the half-dream I kept falling into, like a second bed, that I was still at the Batras’, looking not for Thomas but for a doorway out, creeping around behind the furniture, trying not to be noticed.

And one other thing happened that night, which I’d say was another dream except that I was, by that point, past any hope of sleeping. It had to have been at least four in the morning, because the darkness outside had started to turn gray. I was lying there feeling empty and steamrollered, my eyes blurrily cracked open, when I noticed Gita standing next to me; my first thought was that she’d been sent to wake me up. No. She removed her sari like someone stepping out of a bathrobe and slid silently into bed beside me. I was so bewildered that I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. Her skin was as smooth and cold as marble. She didn’t acknowledge me.
She lay there as still as a mummy. And then, some number of airless minutes later, she was crying, a high, breathy sort of crying, as if she were suppressing a series of sneezes. “Gita?” I whispered. But as quickly and quietly as she’d gotten into the bed, she was out of it, clutching her clothes to her stomach and hurrying back out through the doorway.

The sun, when it came up, didn’t so much rise as appear, like a blazing grapefruit, directly in the window. Shima was up, moving gingerly around the kitchen, rubbing what looked like ashes onto our dishes from the night before. She nodded
good morning
to me as I climbed out of bed. Akki was already in the field; the hacking sound I’d been hearing since dawn was him, working his way along between two rows, hunched and swinging a tool like the grim reaper’s. The brick shed really wasn’t so far from the house at all. Gita was in the corner of the field, looking conspicuously away from me, attaching something to a rhino-sized cow.

I’d just eaten breakfast, which is to say nibbled at a piece of round dry bread, when the monk came into the house from the backyard. He was, I was fairly sure, the lead singer from the night before. He was dark, with small eyes that made him look as if he were always just about to smile, and he had the thinnest of pubescent mustaches on his upper lip. He bowed at me again, staying on his feet this time. He was wearing his same robe and a pair of sandals that seemed to be made of tires and twine. He came up to about my chin. Akki, who’d followed the monk into the house, stood beaming in the doorway, sweating, dirt streaked across his forehead. He looked at the monk, looked at me, and apparently unable to contain himself any longer, he rushed over and pressed a pointer finger between my eyebrows, as if he were affixing a stamp to an envelope. He took me by the shoulders, beholding me, seeming seriously to consider kissing me. “We will be remembering you always.”

[Excerpted from
Meeting the Timelessness: The Teachings of Sri Prabhakara
, as Transmitted to His Disciples. For Free Distribution Only.]

I should make clear that even under ideal circumstances, I’m no hiker. It makes my knees hurt, it makes my back sweat; I associate it with bad food, bad sleep, bad company. I’ve had terrible fights with girlfriends over my refusal to spend weekends camping. I’ve sulked my way through two-mile gravel-paved meanders.

So, as the monk and I set out through Akki’s fields, between rows of something that looked like tobacco, then into a thicket of hilly woods, I kept repeating to myself: hiking is walking, hiking is walking. It was every bit as hot in the woods as it had been in the fields, and there were birds and bugs and frogs making trilly noises at every depth. There were more trees and tall grasses and bushes and vines than you could possibly count; the path looked days, or possibly hours, from being overgrown completely. You could see fallen trees turning back into mush almost in real time; there were mushrooms like orange tuning knobs along every trunk.

But I wasn’t, at least for a while, doing too badly, and it took me a while to realize that this was because of how little I was carrying. On my summer camp Appalachian Trail hikes I’d carried, in addition to my idiotically bulky frame
backpack, a sleeping bag, a Therm-a-Rest, a raincoat, a camping chair, clothes, water, some share of the group’s food, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting. You’d put down your backpack at the end of one of those days and feel, for a few minutes, that same weird weightless propulsion as when you step onto a moving walkway at the airport.

But now, thanks to my lack of foresight and to the relative emptiness of the village general store, I had:

One reason the inadequacy of my provisions may not have been shriekingly obvious to me from the beginning was because, compared with my monk/guide, I was traveling with my own personal storage caravan. There may have been things I wasn’t aware of tucked into the folds of his robe, but I’m fairly certain that all he had, as he scampered off ahead of me, were his sandals and, attached to a knotted string over his shoulder, a little enclosed bowl (which contained, I saw later, about half a meal’s worth of lentils).

I hadn’t learned his name; to myself I called him Ranjiv,
because he looked vaguely like a Ranjiv I’d gone to elementary school with. It seemed as unlikely that I’d learn his actual name, or that we’d have any sort of conversation, as that one of the birds cooing above me would fly down and ask how I was doing. He seemed to see me as an unusually large and helpless pink baby. He stopped to help me over a creek; he held back a thorny branch; he gestured for me to sit at a point when I happened to be feeling especially dire. I kept thinking I detected, behind the solicitousness, a kind of suppressed amusement in him. Did a fourteen-year-old Indian monk have friends? Go to school? Where was his family? Why had they let him get involved with Sri Prabhakara? He was, to me, an opaque little container of hypercompetence; his presence was the only thing that gave me any confidence that this hike wouldn’t end with me eaten by a tiger or dead of heatstroke.

The hike divided into two basic phases. There was the
this-is-a-much-longer-hike-than-I’d-like-to-be-on-but-I’m-basically-OK
phase, which lasted from the time we left the house in the morning until sometime late that afternoon, when the path ended and we stopped to eat on a shale ledge overlooking what I’m pretty sure was Akki’s village (Ranjiv wouldn’t touch my crackers, and before he ate any of his lentils he insisted on bowing to me again). Up to that point my biggest immediate concerns were the heat and the blister on my heel, which had started leaving overlapping crusty bloodstains on the back of my sock and which was proving basically impossible to bandage. I couldn’t ask, of course, but I’d decided, based on Ranjiv’s calm and the fact that he didn’t have even a canteen with him, that we couldn’t have more than another hour or two to go; I thought, as we stood up and brushed ourselves off, that that might have been our farewell meal before we turned the corner and saw the cave. Instead, right after that commenced the
this-is-the-hardest-physical-thing-I’ve-ever-done-and-I-might-die
phase, which started when Ranjiv darted to a lookout at the top of a boulder, then gestured for me to follow him around to a clump of thorny vines that, so far as I
could tell, we were the first people ever to disturb. This was a plateau at the top of the little mountain we’d been climbing all day, and it couldn’t have been more than a half mile across, but it felt like crossing a continent. Why couldn’t we go around the thorns? What we were doing felt, in terms of efficiency, like going from one room to the next by eating through the wall. I was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt, so there was no shortage of skin for these thorns to find their way into. Except “thorns” may not be exactly right, because thorns you can snap off or, if they happen to get you, pluck out; these were more like hairs, stinging little cactus-fuzz hairs that covered the entire surfaces of these woody vines. For the seven hundredth time I wondered: How the hell had Thomas managed this? I’d seen tears come to his eyes when someone clipped his heels with a shopping cart.

To distract myself, and to keep from screaming, I decided that what I needed to do was play a game. Very few hiking games, it turns out, are designed to be played by one person. Not I Spy. Not that game where you say you’re Alice and you’re from Albuquerque and you like to eat apples. The only one I could think of how to play, unfortunately, was Sudden Death. Which is basically Twenty Questions, except that the answer always has to be someone who died unexpectedly. JFK. A passenger on the
Titanic
. Bambi’s mother. So what I did, since of course I couldn’t play in the traditional way, was to pick a person (Ritchie Valens) and then see how many questions it would have taken me to guess, if I hadn’t already known.

At some point I discovered that the thorns hurt less on the backs of my arms than on the fronts.

Were you real?

And that the worst was getting them in the cheeks; that needed to be avoided if at all possible.

Were you famous?

And that if I stepped very high, while simultaneously
keeping my arms in boxer-protecting-his-face mode, I could let my knees take the worst of it.

Did you die in the last five years?

Maybe hopping; hopping might actually be better.

Was your death bloody?

We’d now made it to the shady side of the mountain, which, along with my sweat-soaked shirt, meant that I wasn’t hot for the first time in days. But this seemed to be the hour of the late afternoon (and I would rather it have been fifteen degrees hotter) during which India’s versions of horseflies come out. Or maybe it was something in our smells, our particular level of filthiness, that drew them. The only time I saw Ranjiv look anything other than totally composed was when he was slapping at a pair that were tag-teaming his neck. They were the size and weight of sugar cubes; they made frantic, helicopter-circling noises as they hovered by your ears; they stung with deep, epidural sorts of needles. I spent those entire couple of hours fondling the thought of their extinction like a prisoner plotting his revenge.

And they wouldn’t, I don’t think, have been quite so hard to deter except that I needed both hands to cling to the long grass as we made our way down the hillside. This hill seemed, and may even have been, slightly steeper than an average peaked rooftop. And this was a rooftop that happened to be covered in a shiny,
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
sort of grass, all combed downward so as to facilitate maximum slippage. It’s such an unfamiliar feeling, for someone who takes elevators and orders takeout and confines his exertion to softly padded weight machines, to be flexing your muscles
desperately
, and for hours. Something about the angle at which I was crouching kept making my left thigh seize up in little walnut clusters of pain. The fingers on both my hands were cut up and stinging where I’d been clutching at roots. My veins were hard as shoelaces. At one point, just when I thought I’d developed a reliable grab-and-shimmy method, a handful of roots
gave way and I did a thing I’d never done before in waking life: I tumbled freely and helplessly. For what couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds I was without resistance, without a notion of where I’d end up. I came to a stop maybe fifteen feet below our little non-path, my feet higher than my head, my entire body sunk in wet grass. Something had torn a strip of skin from my thigh. I’d crushed everything in my backpack. This wasn’t the first but it was probably the most serious of the moments in which I thought:
I give up
. I didn’t know exactly what giving up would have entailed (lying there until horseflies had stung me to death; rolling down the hill until I was carried away in the river), but I couldn’t imagine that it could be any worse than going on. If there had been anyone to tell me that it was all right, I would have cried; for the first time in India, maybe for the first time in years, I longed for the presence of my mom.