At the Bottom of Everything(54)
There was never a chance of Thomas not going to the cave. Running into me in Noida, being dragged to the hotel; all that, for him, was like having lint brushed from his costume as he headed toward the stage. He’d written himself directions, down to every last bus transfer and switchback. He’d made his way to the cave without a guide, with less struggle and complication than I would have thought possible for even the most capable local, let alone a half-crazy, starving foreigner. Maybe at some point in the past couple of years he’d developed a leather-soled native deftness; maybe he was just so desperate to get on with his enlightenment or his rebirth or whatever it was that it wouldn’t have made a difference whether the cave was on a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean.
All of this is to say, I don’t know exactly how or why, after the relative ease of getting there, he got into trouble. It may have been that by the time he found the cave, having traveled by train and bus for a day and then walked for a day after that, he was delirious with exhaustion. Or it may have been that, in the dark, he just got lost; maybe he got turned around and ended up crawling in deeper when he thought he was crawling out. Again: almost all of this is speculation.
About my own troubles, which started well before I found the cave, I can be much clearer.
Raymond responded to my email within a couple of hours, sounding somewhere between chastened and indignant; his note reminded me of the instructions for a scavenger hunt. First I needed to get to a city called Nainital (a surprisingly easy train ride, another set of town squares and city gates and auto-rickshaw drivers sleeping with newspapers shading their faces). And from there I needed to take a bus, which turned out to mean a couple of buses, thirtyish miles (most of them across a landscape so scrubby and bare that it made the whole problem of human overpopulation seem incomprehensible) to a tiny village in the Kumaon Valley near a city called Mukteshwar.
Throughout the trip I was performing a kind of triage on myself. To my running list of ailments I’d added a burning pain in the right side of my neck (which meant that to turn my head I needed to turn my entire body, like the Tin Man), a possibly infected blister on my left heel, and constipation paired with such vile gas that at each new occurrence I’d pause for a second, watery eyed, in miserable wonder that my body, or any body, was capable of such horrors. I did my best, on the bus, to linger at a level of sleep just deep enough to refresh me and just shallow enough so I wouldn’t lose track of my bag. By four thirty that afternoon, when we pulled onto a dusty shoulder that was apparently as close as we were going to come to a bus station, I’d finished an entire liter of water, and I needed to pee so badly that the pain in my bladder had, in a weird sort of mercy, eclipsed every other sensation in my body.
The village ended up being not much more than a cluster of mud-brick houses. It was the sort of place that a long-sought mobster or Nazi might disappear to in order to reinvent himself as a bearded eccentric. In all four directions there were shaggy green mountains, carved in some places into terraced crops that looked like staircases. I didn’t know if it was the off-season or if this was just a part of India that existed in a permanent state of heat-stunned emptiness. The town consisted of one main unpaved street, down which very few people walked, carrying much-reused plastic bags of things like tangled fishing line and dried reeds. All the dogs in town (there were at least a couple of dogs for every person) seemed to be either pregnant or sick or both. A group of boys kicked a plastic jug against a low, crumbling wall.
Raymond had told me to find a house belonging to someone named Akshay, so I spent my first hour in the village wandering up and down the road, farting toxically, peering stiffly into each of the dark little houses to see if I could find someone to talk to. In one building a man was sleeping on a cot with a woven blanket spread over his face. In another there seemed to be nothing but rusting engines. On the terrace in front of one house an old woman sat sorting dried beans on a towel while a shirtless little girl chased a rooster in circles around her.
“Akshay?” I said to her. “English? Akshay? I’m looking for Akshay’s house?”
The woman had a daub of red on her forehead, and such deep wrinkles in her neck that their depths were a different color from the rest of her. She gave me an interested look, as if I were a squirrel that had happened to stop in front of her, but she didn’t give any indication of understanding me; the girl now looked in danger of crying, possibly at the sight/smell of me. I apologized vaguely and moved along. In the road, even though the sun was starting to go down, I kept getting that hand-over-a-grill feeling of imminent combustion. The rooster was now screaming in a way that the skin on the back of my neck interpreted, each time, as an emergency. I was starting to wonder if just this, the endless heat-stricken search, was my punishment. Maybe Thomas and I were like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, only for us the chase wasn’t funny, and we’d both end up as sun-bleached bones at the foot of a cactus.