Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (17 page)

The night before his departure he slept rather uneasily. Before awakening he had a dream: he is on his way, but at the last minute remembers that he has left his hat at home. He returns, hastily opens his wardrobe, and finds his father sitting in it, naked. He closes the wardrobe just as hastily, pretending not to have noticed anything. I will have to make do without my hat, is the last thought he wakes with, as he runs in his dream out onto the sidewalk.

The plane trip still had European features. The stewardesses, although dressed in saris, spoke perfect English. The tiny drink bottles, practically unspillable, were strange, but in a Western way. From the moment he stepped onto the hot Indian soil, though, he found himself in another world. The last word he could read was the EXIT at the airport gate.

A train bore him through the night like a time machine, carrying him back into childhood illiteracy. All the schools he had passed through, his doctorate, two higher qualifications, all for naught. He did not understand a word; the station signs said nothing to him.

In the middle of the night, in a light half-sleep, he heard a piercing cry. The compartment emptied out, a host of people trundled down the corridor, and the train stopped in the thick, exotic darkness. He had no idea what had happened. An accident? A crime? Was his life in danger? He sat, forgotten, in the empty compartment, his heart thudding in his head, and large mosquitoes, whining ampules of his blood, criss-crossed the stifling space.

Suddenly the train started again and the compartment filled. He never found out what had happened. This day was the first in more than fifteen years that he could not give himself even a single point.

(Fifteen years before, in a rebellious “dark night of the soul,” he had drunk himself practically into oblivion. He had been rejected quite roughly by a girl, a weak shadow of a durga in the still childish face of an exemplary student. He felt so awful he could have died. From that moment on he never drank and had never been rejected.)

The letter he had received from India bore the signature of the center's director, his guru. The signature was large, labored, and full of decorative strokes; it betrayed a lack of familiarity with western penmanship. Underneath it was a stamp:
Swami Devananda
Paramahamsa, Chief of Yoga Centre.
Paramahamsa means “Highest Soul” and it is an honorific title, a registered trademark for complete enlightenment.

With the letter came a flier containing a short biography of the swami. He was sixty-nine and since twenty-two had performed “multiples miracles.” At the top was his likeness, but the colors had run astrally together, so that the swami's face, just as in his dream, was merely a cipher, fertile in its mysteriousness.

After more than thirty hours' travel, he finally arrived in the full sun of midday. Thirsty, dirty, the t-shirt he had put on that morning at the train station already dripping with sweat, but there, at last.

A taxi took him around the city's perimeter and rode for a long while down dusty roads. Then it stopped, the driver pointed majestically — we are here! — and the pilgrim was standing on the threshold of the ashram.

He was too tired to feel surprise. Just a certain dull wonder that the ashram looked like a modern apartment building in Prague. Four floors, a bare rectangle, peeling paint. Two elevators, one out of order. Everywhere English signs and arrows:
Meditation Hall, Club, Rooms.

At the reception office a bespectacled Indian woman took his passport. She looked him over and picked up the telephone. As she spoke into the receiver in breakneck Hindi, she began to gesture for him to leave the room. Confused, he obeyed, made his exit, and found himself in a corridor.

A tiny, lively Indian man came running down the dark hallway crosshatched with sunlight from the narrow windows. As he trotted past the sharp bands of light, he seemed like a runner leaping hurdles. He could have been twenty-five, thirty at the most. He wore a saffron robe and a green knit ski-hat.

“My name is Swami Garudananda,” he said to the visitor in English, his eyes suggestive of a clever monkey. He had a strong
Indian accent, but put out his hand like a European. “At the moment, I run the Yoga Centre for Swami Devananda, who travels and will be gone for half a year. I am infinitely happy that you are here. How long I expect you!”

There are times when fate turns gradually around on its axis to show us a different projection against the backdrop, another shadow of the same shape. Now was such a time.

He was still too worn out to notice the bitter freshness of disappointment. In the way that a fabric's bright colors fade over time, he slowly realized that his guru was not there. He had come in the off-season. He had jeopardized a department fifteen years in the making with a risky replacement of dubious quality, so he could put his closely guarded spirituality into the hands of this little boy, some sort of vice-guru, this square root of his secret hopes. With that fascinating inexactitude that marks the fulfillment of prophecies and yearnings, he had reached the threshold of his goal: the initial sentence had been uttered.

“A problem is developed,” the Indian continued as he scurried through the building. “A compatriot of yours — a Serb woman — causes a certain problem. Unfortunately she speaks only Serbian. You surely will understand her.”

He let the factual mistake pass, for he did not want his first contact with his Teacher — even such a spurious one as this — to be a correction or qualification. Calling the Czech lands part of Serbia (or vice versa) was a mistake commonly made even by foreigners considerably closer to both countries.

“She reveres our guru, Swami Devananda, and has fallen into a state of trance. Undoubtedly she struck a rapport with him. Of course she does not take nourishment.”

“Is she drinking?” he asked mechanically, as he would have done at the clinic.

“No.”

“How long has it been?”

“It is the fourth day, as far as we know. She does not eat, drink, or sleep. She is broken all contact with the outside world. She is in rapport only with the Swami-ji. In all probability she now approaches the state of liberation.”

He smiled at his guest with the sincere smile of a wily boy, like those who had run alongside the train, hands outstretched, and kept smiling even when they were given nothing.

“And how can I help you?”

“We would be grateful if you would examine her. If you would tell us, as a doctor, to what extent her health is at risk,” the Indian answered cautiously. So he knew. That four days without taking liquids, especially in this oppressive heat, could start an irreversible process. The Serb was most probably a wild psychotic. He could not count on psychopharmaceuticals being available here.

“We will await your opinion before deciding,” Garudananda said. “You are a psychiatrist, after all, true?”

The door at the end of the hallway opened. A psychiatrist — that he was.

He found himself in a darkened chamber filled with furniture he could as of yet only sense. His sight slowly adjusted to the darkness. Then, in the corner of the room, he spotted a bulky female form on rumpled blankets.

He approached her with the natural shyness of a newcomer, but he immediately realized she was not aware of him at all. She was sitting bent forward, her corpulent back limp and rounded, slowly swaying. Between their swollen lids, her eyes stared fixedly at the wall, pinned to which was a picture of Devananda in a wreath of wilting flowers. It was probably the same one as on the flyer, but a technologically better reproduction. The Serb had fastened the unmoving pupils of her eyes on him, mumbling monotonously without rest.

He was aware that they were expecting something from him. Three steps behind him stood the small swami and another man in an orange robe, who had appeared out of nowhere.

“Hello!” he said softly in Czech, although he knew full well that the woman was not tuned in. Both men probably thought he had said something in Serbian. It made absolutely no difference. He had seen people in this state before and even a hammer blow wouldn't have brought the Serb out of it.

“Ma'am,” he continued in Czech, “I'm a doctor and I want to help you.”

He felt like a charlatan, but he had no idea what else to do. He took the woman's wrist and checked her pulse. This merely transferred his deception from word to deed, because at this point what could her pulse possibly tell him?

The Serb was not a durga, quite the opposite. She was a fat, ordinary woman with home-dyed hair, whose gray roots gave the impression that she was close to sixty and had been here over two months. She was the sort who in villages gets called “auntie” or, somewhat disparagingly, “mother.” Only that deliriously happy expression lifted her above the most everyday everydayness.

The hand he had been holding for too long seemed not to belong to the rest of the Serb woman's body, nor to her soul. When he carefully let it go, it slipped back gently along her side and then rose ethereally, as if it were weightless, landing back on her lap.

“Has anyone tried giving her fluids?” he said aloud.

“They were offered to her, of course, but as you can see, she doesn't show the least interest,” the second man responded in noticeably cleaner English. In fact, a glass of water was standing in front of the Serb. Suddenly he felt a sharp thirst. His last drink had been that morning at the train station: the dregs of tea in his thermos.