The Yoga of Max's Discontent (14 page)

A
pril gave way to a sweltering May, and Max began to understand why Hari had left. The sun burned the land as if it were just a few feet off the ground, not millions of miles away. The monsoon that was expected in early May never showed up. Crops withered. New seed refused to bear fruit. The earth turned harder than concrete and broke into little dry pieces.

The three of them kept up their daily routine in the beginning, but the prospect of physical hunger soon overcame spiritual hunger. They eliminated the afternoon asana class and worked longer in the fields, spreading out to farm softer land, breaking the earth with axes and the backs of plows. Eggplants and drumsticks required more water, so they planted only millet. Only a few of the new millet plants broke through the ground. They
lavished them with fertilizers. Still the crops languished, for they lacked the most crucial ingredient of all: water.

The hand pump dried up. Max helped Ramakrishna drill the bore well supplying the pump deeper. Both of them continued to drill every day until the drill stem cut through their torn, callused palms and their heads spun in the heat. After days of continuous effort, they would be rewarded with a small trickle. They poured three-quarters of it on the field and stored the remaining for drinking. With little water available for anything else, they roasted millet and the last of the eggplant and drumsticks directly over a wood fire. They rationed their drinking water to three glasses a day. None of them had bathed or washed their clothes since the water dried a month ago.

The rain remained elusive through June. Max knew he would break soon. Only once before when he was seven years old had he experienced this helpless hunger. It was in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash, when his mother could find few cleaning jobs and their savings had run out completely. But they had managed to fill their stomachs with mac and cheese and apple juice in soup kitchens every night. Here all they had was the meager rations they produced. Max felt dizzy and disoriented all day. The skin on his face, neck, and back cracked and peeled. His mouth dried up. He didn't have a drop of saliva left to moisten his lips. Every day he stared longer and longer at the wooden gate that separated the ashram from freedom. Any minute now, he would walk out. He was free. He'd come back later when the sun didn't beat so hard and the thin stream of water coming out of a hundred-foot-deep well didn't feel like a miracle. But he would look at Shakti working in the fields with a determined look on her mud-streaked face and he would be
ashamed at his softness. She was like his mother. Sturdy, determined, relentless. Again and again the same image of his mother would come to his mind. Her face gaunt and colorless, her torso bent with pain, and her legs swollen with lymphedema, yet shuffling around on her crutches in his apartment, insisting on cooking Sophia and him a Thanksgiving dinner just days before she died. Max could transcend his body's limitations too. The constant hankering for food, water, and other petty comfort tied him to the physical plane, obstructing the path to transcendence. He could overcome it.

•   •   •

MID-JUNE. STILL NO SIGN
of the monsoon that had been expected six weeks before. The eggplant died. The drumstick crop shriveled but still yielded a little. They reduced their food to two cups of roasted millet and a small serving of dry drumsticks a day. Max lost weight rapidly. He made more holes in his belt with the awl-like tool they used in the fields.

One day he stopped pumping his stomach in the middle of the afternoon pranayama.

He wasn't sweating as he usually did in the afternoons. Fuck. He was so dehydrated he didn't even sweat a drop anymore. Ramakrishna and Shakti were thrusting their abdomens in and out. Did they realize they were in the middle of a drought? They couldn't burn energy like this. It was dangerous. He couldn't be part of this madness anymore. He lay back down on his mat and didn't do the rest of the pranayama or any of the asanas.

The next day Shakti stopped as well.

Max stared at her thin body in the fields that day. Was she trying to keep up with him? But he was trying to keep up with
her. They would both kill themselves like that. That night he didn't come out for meditation. He lay still on his bed just as his exhausted body told him to. When he went to the bathroom, he saw that Shakti's mat was empty as well. Max came back and slept. He saw his mother with a crumbling cookie in her pale, bony fingers. Sophia stretching out her hand to offer him the melting candy. Swirling, spinning blackness.

One day this will all come back to you, Max.

Max awoke with a start. His throat choked. Keisha, black eyes brimming with tears outside the clinic in Tarrytown. He had forced her to ride up the Metro North with him so that no one would see them. Just as he had pressured her to abort their child. His chest filled up. Max hadn't wanted to be a father at seventeen like all the other guys in the projects. He had wanted to go to college so his mother's sacrifices didn't go to waste. The mud walls of the hut closed in on him. Max covered his eyes with his hands and tried not to cry and lose water.

You did what you had to, Max, but one day this will all come back to you.

She was right. It had come back. This was his penance for destroying Keisha's life. She had grown up in a strict religious family. They hadn't told anyone about the pregnancy or the abortion, but her guilt had likely made her run away from home.
Was she even alive?
Max couldn't stop the tears anymore. Keisha was so bright, so beautiful. She could've run with the drug lords, with their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes and worldly talk. All the girls wanted them for boyfriends. Instead, she had dated a poor white kid who was trying desperately to be cooler than he was. He didn't even have to front with her. She had seen how much he enjoyed math and chemistry and had encouraged him
to study. Where would he be without her? Yet he'd turned away from her the moment he got into college. How different her life would have turned out if he hadn't entered it. The pain he had caused was coming back. He had to bear it. He turned over and pressed his aching stomach against the hard bed.

•   •   •

NOT A DROP
of rain fell in the next two weeks. The rain was now eight weeks late. Their well water all but disappeared. Even the millet dried up. They cut their food intake further. Max passed the week in a hazy stupor. He woke up with a dull pain in his head every day and did a little pranayama to fill his empty stomach with breath. His guts hurt from severe constipation. He worked listlessly in the fields, feeling nothing—not heat, not exhaustion, not even pain when the millet stalks cut deep grooves in his dry skin, just hunger.

For the rest of the day, he lay on his bed, caked in sweat and mud, images of eighteen-year-old Keisha's sharp, shining face filling his mind, stopping him from walking toward the gate.

•   •   •

“ANY DAY NOW
it will come,” said Ramakrishna, looking skyward at the flaming sun after completing their spare lunch in the tenth week of the drought on a day when silence broke. “It always comes. Sometimes early, sometimes delayed, but rain comes.”

He looked so unfazed, so oblivious, that Max couldn't take it any longer.

“I have money,” he said in a raspy voice he almost didn't recognize. His dry, cracked lips hurt when he spoke. “We can get food and water.”

Ramakrishna shook his head. “I am your host. I cannot accept anything from you. And whatever we have is enough for us.”

The hunger roared within Max. He opened his mouth to protest but faltered as Keisha's small, slim body clouded his eyes again. He looked away. Shakti was picking the last of the millet seeds delicately from her plate. A lump formed in Max's throat. He coughed. “It's not enough for me,” he said evenly.

“My doors are always open for you. Might it be easier for you if you come back after a few months?” said Ramakrishna.

Max felt his face redden. He stared at his blistered toes on the burning red mud and breathed slowly. “It's just food. Why does it matter where it comes from?” he said.

Ramakrishna was shaking his head even before he had completed his sentence. “No, no, that is the way it has to be. And we do have enough to live. Fasting is good. It gives the digestive organs a rest. It cleanses the system of toxins. You develop patience and self-control. One who conquers hunger conquers all the senses. Nothing binds him to the material plane then.”

“But this isn't fasting,” said Max. “We are starving.”

“All I can offer you is my share. Please have that from tomorrow,” said Ramakrishna.

He got up and wiped his plate with dried, burned leaves and left it at its usual place outside the hut.

Max stared into Shakti's sunken eyes. “I'm going to leave,” he wanted to say. He knew if he capitulated, she would too. Shakti wiped off a strand of dry hair from her face and looked away. Hot wind stung his eyes. She must be working through her own past as well. He wouldn't get in her way. All his life, he had made easy choices. Now no longer. Max wiped his plate dry and left.

•   •   •

FROM THAT DAY,
Ramakrishna ate only half a cup of millet a day.

Max apologized and requested him to have more.

“No, no, your talk was good. I was getting lazy from habit. I have lived on much less before,” he said.

•   •   •

ANOTHER WEEK PASSED.
Max began to worry more and more about Shakti. She had lost at least twenty pounds in the last two months. Her face had lost its color. Her red hair looked dull and her eyes bloodshot.

One day she didn't wear her glasses and stumbled through the fields as if she were sleepwalking. Max had never seen her remove her glasses before. She didn't wear them again the next day. Her swollen eyes popped out of her sunken face. Twice she stopped and adjusted her glasses. Only there was nothing to adjust. Her thin fingers moved up and down her eyes weakly. Max started to panic. It took all his strength to restrain himself from talking to her.

Later that afternoon, he woke up from a thick sleep to hear Ramakrishna and Shakti arguing in the courtyard. Max walked out of his hut. Ramakrishna was shaking his head. Shakti's expressions grew more and more animated. A tear trickled down her face. He had never seen Shakti cry. She must be asking for more food and Ramakrishna was refusing as always. Didn't he know her by now? She was too proud to break silence and ask for more unless she needed it to live.

Enough. This had gone on too long. The tight knot of Keisha's images loosened. He'd never forgive himself if something happened to Shakti. It was time to tap into the emergency rations they'd been storing away. No matter how meager the crop they produced daily, Ramakrishna had put a portion away for later. It made perfect sense. If the rain didn't come in another week, the dry land would turn to cement. Thus far, hunger had been tough to bear. Another week and it would be the difference between life and death. Shakti had likely reached that point. What kind of a saint was Ramakrishna if he couldn't see that?

Shakti went inside her hut. Max walked over to Ramakrishna.

“Shakti looks really sick. We should use the emergency rations,” said Max.

Ramakrishna looked puzzled.

“The supplies in storage,” said Max with rising impatience. He went to the kitchen hut next to Ramakrishna's. “This,” he said, pointing to the four brown sacks, two with millet, one each with eggplant and drumsticks.

Ramakrishna shook his head. “No, no, no. This is for the village. We will give it to them when the tractor comes next.”

Days of hunger and deprivation rose in Max like an angry force. He coughed to clear his throat. “No, you can't do that,” said Max. “Shakti is dying.”

“I think I told you in the beginning, whatever we produce, we give half to the village,” said Ramakrishna.

Max felt an urgent physical need to lift Ramakrishna by the collar of his long Indian kurta, force him against the wall of the hut, and shake the idiocy out of him. He backed away a step. He couldn't trust himself not to lift his hand.

“No, I helped farm too. We can't give our food away,” said
Max, shaking. Tears stung his eyes. “We can't help anyone if we can't help ourselves. This is madness.”

Ramakrishna's eyes didn't waver. His face had lost none of its luster in the days of deprivation. “This is how it has to be,” said Ramakrishna. He turned around.

Max could no longer restrain himself. He grabbed him by his shoulders. “She is dying, don't you understand?” he said, shaking him. “Shakti could die. We can't let her die. Please.”

“Don't be crazy, Max. I am fine.”

Max turned around.

“Your glasses?” he said weakly.

“A screw comes loose,” she said.

“You were asking him for food?” he said.

“Not for myself,” she said.

She was having the same discussion with Ramakrishna as he had just had. Max took his hands off Ramakrishna's shoulders.

Shakti turned to Ramakrishna. “Can we cook now?”

“I'm . . . I'm sorry,” said Max.

“Not at all,” said Ramakrishna. He paused. “I know this is difficult, but what we have is enough.”

•   •   •

THEY ATE THEIR
scant meal in Ramakrishna's hut, tucked away from the blazing sun.

“I want to leave,” said Shakti at the end of the meal.

Ramakrishna nodded. “A tractor will come on the third day from today. You can leave then.”

No tractor had come for the last month, probably because the village was enduring the same drought. But they didn't ask how he was sure one would come in three days. They just knew it would.

Max hesitated. “I will leave too,” he said.

“I understand. My door will always be open should either of you want to come back,” said Ramakrishna.