At the Bottom of Everything(34)

Except for the rice that first night, all he ever seemed to eat were the little paper bowls of lentil mush the Hindu temple ladled out once a day in Shiva Mandir, but he was coming back to life. A splotchy red wound/rash he’d had on his neck and shoulder was clearing. His eyes were getting brighter. They finally started getting bits of a slightly more coherent story out of him: from D.C.; in India for six months; looking for an old friend; sleeping outside because he didn’t like being alone.

Mostly he listened. He could be kind of scarily attentive, actually, sipping tea from his Thermos, staring. He started sitting in on the post-dinner meditations sometimes, folded and still on a cushion in the corner of the room. He became like the apartment’s mascot, an actual wanderer whose strangeness lit up the rest of them. When he wasn’t meditating, he was either staring out the front window, trying to feed pieces of Ready Brek to the little black birds, or typing furiously on other people’s computers (he was always appearing next to your partition and asking, in a voice so quiet you almost couldn’t hear it, if he could borrow yours).

He started going to Guruji’s Sunday-evening discourses, sometimes staying at the center all night afterward. He walked barefoot through the market where he’d almost died, patting children and goats on the head, chewing salty-sticky squash seeds that you could buy wrapped in newspaper for five rupees. Every June Guruji gave a six-week series of introductions to the practice, and this happened to be when Thomas had come into the picture.

Practice? Discourses? At this point, the people I was talking to became hard to pin down. Not, I didn’t think, out of any sense of secrecy; it was more just the weirdness of explaining to an outsider something absolutely fundamental. See, there’s this thing humans do every night where they lie down and close their eyes and just sort of wait for strange visions to come …

Anyway, here’s what I got: Sri Prabhakara was a spiritual mini-celebrity who’d somehow cultivated, over the past couple of decades, a group of foreigners who bought his pamphlet-looking books, listened to his crappily recorded talks, and, if they were especially devoted, flew to Delhi and spent a few months living in one of the barsati apartments near his center. Once they were there they’d go on retreats and take classes on his precepts and do the sort of work (scrubbing toilets, sweeping stairs) that interns and cult members are best at. Guruji was uneducated, a former shopkeeper, and he wasn’t associated with any particular religion or group; he was an all-purpose expert in suffering, the self, the veils beyond the veils, etc. When he was young he’d been taught by Sri Something-or-Other, who’d been taught by an even holier Sri Something-or-Other, and so on and so on back to the beginning of time.

Thomas had apparently revealed himself, over the course of those six weeks, as being especially adept (is it weird that I felt a flicker of jealousy at first hearing this?). Guruji had taken an interest in him from the first time they’d talked, and by the end of June (when we were exchanging emails and I was doing data entry not much more interesting than toilet scrubbing), Thomas was meditating more than anyone in the apartment. He’d spend whole days cross-legged on his corner of the roof, or walking slow lines back and forth along the railing. At some point he’d shaved his head; he’d memorized the precepts; he’d tied the red string around his wrist that was the symbol for having given yourself over to the practice. And after just a couple of months—less time than anyone had ever heard of it taking—Guruji had declared Thomas ready for the retreats that were, apparently, something like final exams. First a day alone in the center (the center, which I walked past on my second night, looked like a low-on-funding public library). Then a couple of days of fasting in the forest. Then another couple of days of walking along the bank of the Yamuna while contemplating death. Then finally, if each of those had gone well (not the usual course of events, apparently), a week in a cave in the Kumaon Hills, where Sri Prabhakara and the various Sris before him had all achieved their enlightenments.

Thomas still wasn’t anything like normal looking by the time he started on his retreats; if you’d passed him on the street you would have thought he was homeless and/or starving. But compared to how he’d looked before, he could have been in Men’s Health. He must have gained ten or fifteen pounds since moving into the barsati, and he’d taken to wearing a pair of baby-blue pajamas that one of the girls had lent him, so at least his clothes weren’t rags. He did the day at the center, the nights in the forest, and the walk by the river all without a problem, but then in July, just when he was about to go off to the cave (he’d been training himself for the dark by sitting between retreats in the supply closet), he’d disappeared.