Tantrika (16 page)

The monks had found a friend of the man's son. “He is a Sherpa,” the man told us. Some men arrived to carry the body. Isabelle and I walked with them. We were stunned to see them take the Sherpa's body into a dusty storeroom below the balcony on which the Dalai Lama had preached. Indian tea crates were scattered about. Some orange rope had been thrown idly on the ground. The room was littered with old butter cans and was filled with the smell of
ghee,
butter fat used for cooking. The Sherpa's son appeared. He was a young man in a pinstriped jacket and pants. Though the pinstripes didn't match, he had dressed up for this important last day of the initiation. I told him, “Your father died with Shanti.”
Shanti
means “peace” in Sanskrit.

The Sherpa's son knelt next to his father and wept. From the storeroom, they carried the body of the Sherpa on a
chador,
a sheet, up to the
balcony on which the press had jammed to watch the Dalai Lama and moved his body into a room at the end. They passed a now-orderly line of people waiting to see the mandala. Thin maroon cushions and chadors lay strewn in the courtyard. Monks trickled inside the Sherpa's room to chant prayers. His son walked in. Isabelle's and my job was done.

I came downstairs. The masses had left. A boy lay on the dusty floor. A man in an open-collar shirt leaned over him with a stethoscope while a bushy-haired, bearded man watched. The man with the stethoscope was Dr. Tsetan Dorji Sadutshang, the chief medical officer at the Tibetan Delek Hospital outside Dharamsala, and part of the Dalai Lama's entourage. The boy had just had his second seizure of the day. Still, the boy's uncle, the bushy-haired man, wanted to carry him to the mandala.

“Maybe it will cure him,” he said hopefully.

The doctor knew about the Sherpa who'd just died. The doctor said Buddhists leave bodies alone after death to lie peacefully so that consciousness can escape from all areas. “Westerners want to move so quickly. In Buddhism, we believe you leave the body to rest, to give time for
namshe,
consciousness, to leave the body.”

I wondered if Isabelle and I shouldn't have pushed to have a respectful place for the Sherpa, considering the room of
ghee
where the monks took his body. The sky as a ceiling certainly would have been a better place for his son to find his father. The Sherpa's death gave me my greatest lessons at the Kalachakra. I saw little compassion expressed as monks and Tibetans literally ran over each other in their rush to see the supposedly magical mandala.

“Only 40 percent of the people know why they are here,” the doctor told me. “The others are here for trade.

“Do they come to eat or because of devotion?” he asked.

To me, the stampede to the mandala was just another reflection of folks chasing superstition. The Tibetan doctor stood over the boy's curled body and reflected on the Kalachakra ceremony. “So many come just to see the mandala. They think they are going to get enlightenment from the mandala. That is why Lamaji said that deity worship is not important. You must live compassionately.”

The doctor didn't shrug off the importance of the boy seeing the mandala. “By seeing the mandala he may gain some merits. It's a very auspicious mandala.”

The gray-haired uncle bundled the boy into a red shawl. The boy's pants were dusty from the day's two seizures. Dust and noise were all around us. Thin mattresses lay adrift, cluttering the courtyard. Monks on the way to the mandala passed out nuts and yelled, “C'mon. C'mon. Move quickly.”

They nudged the uncle with his nephew on his back to move quickly. I looked at the boy to see if he was moved by the spiritual powers of the mandala.

He was fast asleep.

D
ARKNESS DESCENDED
upon us on a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, hundreds of miles off India's southeastern shoreline.

Lucy, Esther, and I had traveled from one of India's highest peaks to its farthest island outpost, so far from India we were just a skip away from Thailand. We were searching for a personal abandonment that we hadn't found in the daily teaching schedule and initiation rituals in the Himalayas. Esther and Lucy were discussing eggs with the hotel manager at the government lodge where we were resting for the night in the city of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman Nicobar chain of three hundred richly forested tropical islands. We were going to take the sunrise ferry thirty miles northeast of Port Blair to a tiny spot called Havelock Island. On an airport shuttle bus ride in Chennai, an Australian businessman had pointed us to the island. “Beach Number 7. Nothing like it.”

“We'd like three boiled eggs please for breakfast to take with us,” Esther told the manager.

“That's not possible. You'll have to have four boiled eggs.”

“Why? I don't understand.”

“That's the rule.”

“Why?”

He finally said, “It's government. Eggs can only be made in pairs.”

Lucy stared at him. “So basically the government is saying that we have to have four eggs?”

“Yes.”

“I know. You make four eggs. We take three eggs and you keep one egg.”

“No.”

We boarded our ferry with four hard-boiled eggs, a reminder of the rigidity of culture here. The native people were all indigenous tribals not ethnically part of India. Marco Polo was one of the first Western visitors here. A Maratha admiral, Kanhoji Angre, fought the British off these islands until his death in 1729. After that, the islands became known as
kala pani
in India, or black water, because those who came here hardly ever returned. The British annexed them in the nineteenth century and turned them into a prison colony for the freedom fighters who were battling for India's independence from the British. They began construction of a circular jail in the last decade of the nineteenth century on Port Blair and finally finished construction in 1908. Many of the inmates were executed, only sometimes after a trial. Lucy, Esther, and I passed the jail in a drive across Port Blair, but these two cousin-sisters, born of a British mother, carrying British passports and peppering their conversations with British vernacular, had no interest in seeing this vestige of colonial power. We didn't have any plan except to find Beach Number 7. I fancied Lucy, Esther, and me as modern-day female Marco Polos, venturing into a place where few Indians even went.

Our fourth egg went to a ravenous litter of puppies that whimpered outside our door at Dolphin Yatri Niwas Complex, cottages by the sea on Havelock Island.

Havelock Island covers sixty-two square miles with bullfrogs that were the melody of the night. Bengali settlers inhabited the northern third of the island, since the rest was filled with tropical forest. Each village had a number. The boat docked at the jetty at Number 1. We spent our first night at a government lodge. A bus could have taken us to Beach Number 7, but we set out on foot, the bus bouncing past us with newlywed Indian couples inside. We discovered on this island an ease in walking not found in the urban centers, where we had to deflect stares and Eve teasing. The three of us together were a shakti force emboldened by our fearlessness and our free spirits.

Children whose names I couldn't distinguish because they were so long bounded out of their houses and yelled to us with the little English they'd picked up from travelers before us. “Hellow! What is your name?” Women with teeth missing smiled at us. We walked past coconut groves
and sparkling fluorescent green fields sunk in water. Two water buffalo submerged in water allowed me to understand why these animals earned their names. We passed chai shops, turning right to go to Beach Number 7. The back of my left knee ached from this six-mile walk, but my breath went deep into my belly from the sheer purity of the moment.

Lucy strode with an efficiency and silence that gave her an aura. I asked her, “What do you get from India?”

“The answer would be quite a monologue.”

“We have the time before we find Beach Number 7.”

“To me, India is grounding. The person I'm with is important, not the place. It isn't a special spirituality or sentimentality about India that affects me. I don't like to believe in sentimentality. But India is like the mother earth. In India, it is just about being. It is about existence.”

A warm wind kissed our cheeks. We slowed to share the road with a passing bus labeled “Shivashakthi,” with locals inside who were jostled whenever the bus hit one of the many potholes of muddy water dotting the tarred road. It swept by on its rounds many times during our walk. Mopeds whizzed by.

Locals called Beach Number 7 “Radhanagar.” Radha was the favored consort to Lord Krishna, the god I grew. I grew up thinking of him as the playboy of Hindu gods. He cavorted with
gopis,
goatherders, stealing their clothes while they bathed along riverbanks, loving each one of them passionately but lavishing his greatest attention on a goddess named Radha. We approached the beach that bears her name and saw a stunning sight: the waves of the Bay of Bengal crashing against the sands.

Lucy and I looked at each other. “Let's go!”

We skipped into the waters, drenching our clothes but relishing the coolness against our skin, a pure expression of Tantric sensuality. I felt a lack of inhibition I'd never felt in India. These waters, once known as symbols of imprisonment, were a healing experience of freedom for me. Off the beach sat a tropical forest of trees. Like three fearless
dakinis,
we slipped into the forest at dusk. The trees towered over us. Darkness descended. Anything could happen. We saw a light.

“Hello! Hello!”

“Hello!” The answer came.

A beaming man greeted us and guided us into a large kitchen where a wood stove blazed. We were at the Jungle Resort at Beach Number 7 with posh huts and tree houses. The cook pulled a delicious impossibility of a birthday cake out of a mud stove for the owner's sister. Kittens tumbled over each other. It was a beautiful place in spirit and in nature.

We retraced our steps, a flashlight our spotlight upon our new world. Bullfrogs along the side of the road sang like a choir of tenors. The Jungle Resort manager drove by on a scooter and offered us a ride, along with a friend, also on a scooter. Lucy and I jumped on the back of the friend's Bajaj Classic. Esther jumped onto the manager's bike. The leaves above cast occasional shadows in the moonlight. The headlight captured the monsoon raindrops, but to me they were diamonds showering from the heavens upon us. “That's your father sending those to us,” I yelled to Lucy, over the sound of the engine. “He is telling us that we're doing the right thing. He supports us.”

“That's beautiful,” she whispered, behind me.

“This is why we came here,” I said to Lucy. “This is India. You keep going and going for one beautiful moment.”

Beach Number 7 and Havelock Island gave us a freedom I didn't know could be enjoyed in the land of my birth. Maybe it was the spirit of an island people free in a place that used to shackle prisoners. Residents said Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lived here without the divide found on the subcontinent, intermarrying and worshiping together at the shrines of saints. We moved to the Jungle Resort, throwing ourselves every day into the Bay of Bengal's waters, the beach ours alone except for occasional local fishermen who walked by without disturbing us. A female dog with a limp kept us company. Lucy and Esther plunged fearlessly into the waves. I followed them a little more cautiously, my fear of water still holding me back, in a brown Lily of France bra and Gap underwear made see-through by the warm waters. We were like Radhas without need of any Krishna.

One evening I sat with Lucy and Esther on the porch off our hut, my white robe half open to my silky bra and bare skin, a candle flickering in a seashell we had plucked off the beach. Inside, our home was beautiful, with turquoise saris as curtains, bells jingling at the bottom. The ceiling
towered like a cone, wood beams gathering in the middle. On the porch, we talked about sex, sensuality, power, love. I remembered an Indian man we had seen the day before with his arm around his wife's shoulder. He told us he was reading
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
for the second time. It made me wonder about the day when a man would have his arm around me like that.

In this adventure, we also became Durga, the fierce powerful goddess who rides a tiger. Our tiger happened to be TVS scooters we rented on the island, and I hadn't yet learned about Durga's power.

Lucy couldn't get her scooter started. A boy came over to help her. He showed her that she hadn't turned the ignition key on. She was edgy with him. She realized later that, unlike many others in India, he was in fact just coming over to help her. We skirted past fields of rice paddies. I felt powerful and independent.

As we sat on the dock, Esther befriended a drunken man who invited us to his house to visit his wife, Maya, and their children. Our Jungle Resort host told us the man had three young daughters and a son. He spent his money on alcohol, while his wife kept the family together. We rode our scooters to road's edge and walked through overgrown grass to reach the house made with a special mix of cow dung, mud, and water. It had a smooth, well-swept look, beautiful in its simplicity.

Maya was a beautiful woman, slim and smooth skinned with a sari wrapped elegantly around her. She crouched over a stove, making dinner in the house's main room. A doorway to the right led to the house's only other room, where the two eldest girls studied by the light of a kerosene lantern. I sat beside them to help them with their homework. All the clothes the children owned hung from a string stretched over the bed and family
mandir,
sitting in the corner. The youngest girl scampered about the rooms dressed only in underwear like bloomers and a smile.

Maya confirmed Esther's instincts about her. “I knew she'd be remarkable,” she said, gazing at her admiringly. Much later, I discovered
maya
meant “illusion” in Hindi. In this Maya's life, it seemed, there was a clear reality to her existence. She showed us the singular strength of a woman poised against adversity.

On our porch, we imagined disappearing here to write, draw, and create, but our ancestral village was beckoning us. And for that, we had to return to the mainland.

We ventured to Pondicherry, a former French colony settled in the early eighteenth century, a bouncy car ride from Chennai across the border from into the state of Tamil Nadu. It proved that India could be run well. The streets were clean. Couples held hands. Women rode bikes. The Aurobindo Ashram was founded in 1926, named after a spiritual leader, Sri Aurobindo, who drew Westerners as well as Indians, including a woman who became his partner, Mother Meera. She ruled here until her death in 1973 at the age of ninety-seven. I wondered if Sri Aurobindo and Mother Meera shared the special union of Shiva and Shakti found in the god and goddess. He was a man. She was a woman. I could find no mention of a romance between them. Both were widely respected in India, and the idea would be blasphemous to some, but I came from the Jerry Springer talk show culture of America and wondered about that which was unsaid.

A sweet smell of jasmine lingered in the air at the Aurobindo Ashram on Marine Street. A woman bent down in front of a portrait of the Mother and showed her tall son how to pay homage to the Mother by touching the space below her feet. I loved watching belief in India. We were waiting for a relative of Nandi Uncle in Delhi. The relative's mother had done the unorthodox, leaving Delhi to settle in Pondicherry with her children as a disciple of Mother Meera. Her husband later joined her. Their daughter, Aster Patel, arrived and, looking at Esther, Lucy, and me as we stood before her in the reception area, said, “You have beautiful eyes. You are a Shakti fortress.”

We knew what she meant because we knew the power we felt together. When we hit the road in England once, to land at a surfing beach town called Newquay, an Australian surfer traveling with his buddies watched us as we laughed and enjoyed ourselves along a bar. “I want some of whatever you girls are on,” he said to us, thinking we were tripping on Ecstasy or some other mind-altering drug. We weren't on anything but the high of adventure.

This place carried the name of the man who inspired it, Sri Aurobindo, but it felt as if the Mother ruled it today. Her image was everywhere. One
night at the ashram, I met a longhaired Indian who offered to teach me how to ride a motorcycle on his Enfield Bullet. We sat at a restaurant beside the sea, the waves crashing the rock as he sang a mantra dedicated to goddesses. I considered his offer. I remembered my friend Tom Petzinger who wrote a book about the airline industry. When I suggested working on the book with him, he said he preferred to do the work alone. “Amelia Earhart flew alone,” he told me. She, of course, crashed, never to be seen again, but I thought he was right. And I thought of Durga on her tiger. “Durga didn't ride with anyone on her tiger,” I told this weirdo, fleeing to make my 10:30
P.M
. curfew at the ashram guest house where Lucy and Esther were tucked into bed behind room number 13, marked “Inspiration” on the door. I knew this was a path I ultimately had to travel alone.

On this trip, I was beginning to learn the stresses that men endure when they are economic shelters for others. I'd considered myself a host for Esther and Lucy on this trip, making train reservations, paying bills, making room reservations. I kept my thoughts to myself because I didn't want to taint our adventure with mundane problems, but I worried about money as I lay my head to rest at night.