At the Bottom of Everything(38)
“Adam? Raymond Broughton. In we go; you sit in back, please. Just shove my stick off the side. Drive, drive, drive.”
Raymond was British; he looked to be about eighty, and he seemed to have dressed for a safari weeks or months ago and then not bothered to change. Stray feathers of white hair flapped from the sides of his head; his glasses made his eyes look like things preserved in jars. We were going straight to Guruji’s home, apparently. Raymond couldn’t have given me the address over email, of course. There were people who would very much like to know where Sri Prabhakara laid his head, as I must have known. The government was terribly frightened of him, terribly frightened, ever since the campaign in ‘84. Whether I ended up speaking to Guruji would of course depend on how he happened to be feeling just then, and there was quite a good chance, unfortunately, that he might not be feeling well at all. Sometimes these notions did overtake him; his ambitions were greater than his health. Was I staying at the Continental? That was the only place Raymond ever allowed guests to stay, because at all the rest of the hotels in central Delhi you were assured of being robbed, either by bandits or by the room rates. Was I familiar with Guruji’s forty-four precepts and twelve injunctions?
While he talked he rummaged through my plastic bag and pulled out the chocolate bar, which he unwrapped and began to eat. “Dreadful for my teeth, really, but vital for the rest of me.” Whenever our auto-rickshaw stopped or even slowed down, he slapped the back of the driver’s seat and barked, “Chalo! Chalo! Chalo!” pointing in the direction of an alleged gap in the traffic. “They benefit from a bit of force, you know. Wonderful people but absolutely complacent.”
We drove along a wide, dusty road through a part of town that looked something like Embassy Row in D.C., past trees with seedpods like brown leather baseballs. Guruji’s building turned out to be half an hour from the hotel, in a neighborhood that looked like an American suburb, if that suburb had been fending off an invasion. All the lawns were Wizard of Oz green and newly mowed, and at the base of every driveway, in front of a wall topped with chicken wire or broken glass, stood a bored-looking security guard in a blue uniform.
At the end of a cul-de-sac, in front of a beige three-story building, Raymond leaped out and rushed past the guard without so much as a nod. Outside the door he directed me to speak very quietly (“Guruji may well have reconsidered, you understand”) and then led me up into an apartment no bigger, but much cleaner, than the barsati. All the curtains were drawn, so it was dark inside; the floorboards were buckled and loose, the doorframes seemed to tilt. There was a low dresser covered in incense holders (hence the sweet, slightly sickening smell in the air) and, above it, a wall covered in mismatched framed photos of men who looked very much as if they might have been called Sri. There was a beatific dark-skinned man with wavy Jesus hair gazing upward; a wizened homunculus of a man seated cross-legged in an orange robe; a white-bearded man laughing and tilting his head.
Raymond was the kind of person whose whisper is just as loud, and maybe more piercing, than his ordinary speaking voice. “I’m just going to step in and see how he’s doing, if you’ll excuse me.”
As a little kid I’d gone with my mom on a few visits to a dying great-aunt in Connecticut, and the feeling in Guruji’s apartment—the hush and stillness—brought those awkward afternoons back. That and maybe the closed bedroom door, behind which I could hear murmuring voices now, not just Raymond’s, and some sort of low staticky chatter.
After long enough that I wondered if I’d been forgotten, and whether I’d remember how to get back to the main road to catch an auto-rickshaw, Raymond cracked open the door and hissed, “Come now, please. Shoes off.”
I’m not exactly sure how I would have pictured a spiritual guru’s bedroom (maybe a buckwheat mat, a hanging gong), but it wasn’t like this. An enormous bed with four dark carved posts as tall as the ceiling; overlapping Oriental rugs; gauzy curtains; a dozen burning candles scattered over brass tables and dark wooden dressers. A founding father could have died in this room. The air was like miso soup; the chatter turned out to be coming from a black-and-white TV with a broken antenna, tuned to a soap opera set in a hospital.
Sitting in a tall, carved chair right next to the bed was a man who must have been the doctor; he had John Lennon glasses and a dark mustache and an actual white doctor’s jacket. He looked down at his feet like someone who wished he could be elsewhere or, barring that, invisible. Standing behind him, slowly flapping a woven fan in the direction of the bed, was a woman I took to be a nurse; she wore something multilayered and a white face mask, and seemed determined not to look at me.