The Yoga of Max's Discontent (23 page)

T
he guesthouse emptied again late in the winter. Max felt no different in the lull than he had in the midst of activity. Once more, blizzards and avalanches struck. The guesthouse rattled and shook in the wind and the snow just as it had the previous year, the cyclical ebb and flow of nature. Max spent the days fixing roofs and unblocking pipes to keep the place ready for the next season.

•   •   •

EARLY ONE AFTERNOON
amid a thick snowfall, a tall, lean man in a uniform entered the guesthouse. He folded his hands.

“I'm in the Indian army, sir,” he said.

The sickle-shaped scar on his forehead glistened.

Max stared at him. “Viveka?” he asked.

The man raised his eyebrows.

“You look like someone I know,” said Max. “Please sit.”

The army officer sat on the chair next to the fireplace. Max served him tea and sat opposite him on the rug on the floor.

“A foreigner died in the mountains, sir,” said the officer. “The American embassy contacted the Delhi government to find the body. I tell you, sir, our government has no money for the living, but these foreign embassies have dollars for dead people. Anyway, sir, if I can pinpoint a location, the Harsil army camp will send a helicopter to evacuate him. Can you help me look for him?”

Max nodded. “Which part of the mountain?”

“He told people he was going to Gomukh three weeks ago,” he said. “With so many glaciers slipping, I don't think he would have made it that far.”

“I will go,” said Max.

“I can come with you,” said the man.

“There is no need. The trail is dangerous from here up,” said Max. “Was he hiking?”

“Hiking, meditating, racketeering, who knows, sir? These foreigners think the Himalayas are a joke, like the Alps or something. They don't realize that there aren't landmarks or signposts here. Every patch looks the same,” he said. He coughed and lowered his eyes. “Not all of them, of course, sir. You yogis are different. Superhuman. Like God more than men, sir.”

Like God more than men, sir.

The words came out of the man's mouth, but they were
Viveka's words. Max's eyes clouded. Something stirred deep within him. He was falling, slipping into a swirling mist.

“How old are you, sir?” asked the man. “I thought you would be sixty or seventy when the villagers told me you knew everything about the mountains. But you look very young.”

Max's throat went dry. Past and present were jumbling, merging into one. One moment he was on a concrete street looking at a food cart's tin roof, another on a mountain in front of a wooden house with a tin roof, now floating in an infinite black timelessness. He held the corners of the rug.

“I'm not sure,” he said.

“Your body has adapted to the mountains, sir,” said the man.

The body adapts anywhere, sir.

Max looked closely at the man. Was he a ghost, an apparition? The man set his teacup on the floor. His hand, which had been holding the cup, exploded into tiny, radiating speckles of yellow light. The light spread to the cup, then to the wooden floor, turning the floor into a stream of glowing particles. Max gasped
.
He looked up. There was no one. Just one golden light. Everything had dissolved into it.

I have seen the unborn, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrowless, and deathless face-to-face.

Indeed, sir, indeed you have.

Max blinked. The man's face came into focus again, hazy and shimmering.

“I will find the hiker,” said Max.

“Thank you, sir. I will come back again tomorrow,” said the man. “Perhaps you will be kind enough to share some of your teachings with me also then, sir.”

Millions of thoughts and ideas, a whole universe of voices, came alive within Max. Deep within him, a whisper arose. “I don't teach anything, Mahadeva,” said Max. “I just live here. So you alone decide what you want and understand what you get. For me, yoga is both my path and my goal.”

“Sorry, sir?”

These weren't his words, they were Ramakrishna's. But they had come from within him. They had existed in that moment. Max exhaled slowly.

“I will go now,” said Max.

He left the guesthouse.

•   •   •

MAX CROSSED GLACIERS
that had slipped on the path, treading lightly on their slanting slopes. He walked up the familiar trail, past the cliff that bent into the stream leading to his cave, farther up beyond the yellow-green shoots and the pine trees that had provided him food and fire. As he walked, his heart filled up with love, almost choking him. The emptiness expanded. A wave of warmth filled the void. Soon the warmth was a continuous column of bliss. His spine was fluid, vibrating. Tears fell involuntarily from his eyes.

Max reached Gomukh just after sunset. The air was alive with smells, the snow covered with faint footprints. Down a slope he slid, reaching a rock covering a small natural cave. Max stooped inside.

He stared at his own dead body in the moonlight.

Blue, crumpled, and curled up like a fetus.

Love, radiant and white, enveloped Max.

Friend, you didn't have to try so hard.

The supreme stillness was always within him. The ice was cold, the fire burned, the water quenched. He was That.

Max stared at himself.

•   •   •

A HAND MOVED.

A wave rippled within Max.

A head of brown hair lifted.

Max broke out of his trance.

A man lay on the wet floor pressing his hands between his armpits. His blue face was covered in a thin layer of ice. He breathed heavily in short, frosted puffs.

“My ears hurt,” he said, blue-black lips moving slowly. He lifted his pale, white eyes. “My jeep is heated. Can you take me to my jeep?”

Max was breaking again, dissolving, merging into the man, into the gray stone wall of the cave behind him, the shaking icy, mud floor below them. Max. Max. He concentrated, holding on to himself.

The world assembled again.

Max lay down next to the man on the floor and enveloped the man's cold, wet body. He focused on his own navel and raised his body heat easily, transferring it to the man until he felt the man blazing. Higher and higher he went until the heat reached the fingers and toes of the man, warming them, thawing them, making them come alive once again. Max stood up, feeling just a faint sliver of pain in his belly.

“Come,” he said.

Weightless and floating, he held the man by his hand and
stepped out of the cave. He stood behind the man, guiding him up the snow to the path leading down to Bhojbasa.

•   •   •

BACK AT THE GUESTHOUSE,
Max wrapped the man in blankets and built a fire next to him. The man mumbled a weak thank-you. Max stood up and walked to the window. He traced a faint stream of white light from the moon to the tip of a mountain peak. The light radiated within him, cooling him, making him still, complete.

•   •   •

“WHO ARE YOU, BROTHER?”

The sun's rays streamed through the window. Max was bathed in its warm light. He turned around. The man was sitting up next to the fire, shivering, his hands tucked into his armpits.

“You've been standing by the window for hours. Your body shines. Who are you?”

The man's face blurred. His body became the orange glow of the fire.

“You built that fire without lighting a match. You brought me back to life. Are you God, a messiah? Does such a thing even exist?”

The fire shifted, shook, melted away. Everything moved within Max.

I am the seeker, the act of seeking, and the one who is sought.

“What's happening, brother? Your lips don't move, but I can hear your words.”

I am the field and the knower of the field.

“Brother . . .”

A cry. A rustling river. An ocean of black. Bliss, pure bliss.

Suffering alone exists, none who suffer. The deed there is, but no doer thereof. The Path there is, but none who travel it.

There was just the One and no other.

•   •   •

HE HAD REACHED
the end of his yoga
.

Tadā dra
u
svarūpe vasthānam.

Then the seer dwells in His own true
splendor.

This isn't a book as much as a result of five years of my life trying to walk on the path of yoga. I stumbled and struggled often to reach the point where I became just a channel for this story to tell itself. Through all of this, my wife, Kerry, believed in me even when I lost faith in myself, and this book wouldn't exist without her exceptional creative and spiritual inputs. This book is as much hers as mine.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. B. K. S. Iyengar, Swami Sivananda, and Mr. S. N. Goenka, spiritual icons I've never met but whose soul-stirring words have spoken to me as if they were living, breathing guides standing beside me.

My mother's lifelong interest in the
Bhagavad Gita
and my father's unwavering commitment to yoga had a profound impact
on my decision to take a year off from work to deepen my meditation practice. Much of this novel was written in that year.

Kerry and I met many wonderful people on the road, a lot of whose journeys merged into Max's journey. My special thanks to Dhanakosa Buddhist Retreat Center in Scotland; Dhamma Atala and Dhammalaya Vipassana centers in Italy and Kohlapur, respectively; the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta ashram in Madurai; Aranya and its patron Varun Sood in Goa; Obras and its patrons, Caroline, and Ludger in Portugal; Monal Guest House and its patrons, Deepinder, and Poonam in Uttarkashi; and Spiros and Ursula in Greece for their generosity in hosting us.

My in-laws, Joan and Michael Monaghan, made our year away from home easier by giving their bighearted, unconditional support, as they always do.

My colleagues Lisa Mann, Sanjay Khosla, Gina Schenk, Julie Donahue, Deanie Elsner, Doug Weekes, Bharat Puri, and Xavier Boza will always be special to me for making exception after exception to allow me to bring my full self into corporate America. Such big people, all of them!

If the characters and settings in the book feel authentic, I give much credit to Jonathan Kozol's compassionate, deeply observed books on the Bronx projects, Jeff Hobbs's
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace
, and Alex Kotlowitz's
There Are No Children Here
. I can also not overstate the deep effect of the Buddha's quest as captured in Herman Hesse's
Siddhartha
, Karen Armstrong's
Buddha
, and Arundhati Subramaniam's
The Book of Buddha
on my writing—and my life.

The book wouldn't have been published without my agent, Mollie Glick. She's the rare deal, a mainstream agent supporting off-the-beaten-path voices.

Jake Morrissey, my incredibly competent editor at Riverhead, gave me an equivalent of a two-year MFA with his unrelenting but compassionate edits through the course of the book. I'll always be grateful to him for treating this book as if it were his own and helping me get to the real heart of the story I wanted to tell.

Chiki Sarkar's warm, exuberant support lifted me up during the lowest points of writing this book, something I'll always treasure. The book is so much stronger for her thoughtful edits.

Sarah Cypher, Marlene Adelstein, Shatarupa Ghoshal, Anshuman Acharya, Hriday Sarat, Trupti Rustagi, Saurabh Nanda, Rachael Belfon, Anna Ghosh, and close friends and family, thank you for your thoughtful input at various stages of the book to give it the shape it has taken today.

Ayush Pant—what a powerhouse presence to enter this book at a late stage! I'll be watching from the sidelines as you go from strength to strength with Aurelius marketing and give wings to many authors' efforts. Thank you for believing in the book as you did.

My appreciation also for Chetan Syal, John and Masako Mamus, Melissa Chang, and Mike Ricca—such a responsive team that sets the bar for creative excellence and passionate execution.

And a final word for my small family—Kerry, Leela, and Coconut—for filling my heart with joy and sharing with me a love that knows no bondage or attachment, the love of a
yogi.