At the Bottom of Everything(55)

At the uphill end of the road (the road literally just came to a stop, the dirt seeming to look out at the fields and the scrub and say, You know what, forget it) I found a general store, the first clearly open building I’d encountered. There was no door. The floor was covered in flattened cardboard boxes, and the shelves had so little (a tin of biscuits, a box of powdered soap) that the arrangements seemed more artistic than commercial. “English?” I said to the teenage girl who was leaning on the counter, making careful marks in a notebook that looked at least as old as she was. She shook her head. “Akshay?” I said. Again she shook her head, but after I’d bought a baby-food-sized jar of something that looked like mango jelly (she took a good two minutes to record our transaction in her notebook), she surprised me by leading me out of the store and walking a few steps ahead of me all the way down to the other end of the road, back to the terrace with the old woman and the little girl. She pointed to the house and made a sound that bore almost no resemblance to the way I’d been pronouncing Akshay; when I thanked her she just waggled her head and made a palms-up here-you-are gesture, as if she were introducing me to my brand-new washer/dryer.

By that point the little girl, who seemed to be five or six, had cheered up. She’d picked up a long stick with which, seemingly for my benefit, she kept poking a black dog that was trying to sleep, or die, against one of the house’s outer walls. The girl would look at me, poke the dog, look at me, then burst into exaggerated, maybe teasing laughter, while her grandmother, now fiddling with a clothespin, shook her head disappointedly.

In his email Raymond had said that Guruji’s disciples lived at Akshay’s house, and that one of them would take me to the cave where Thomas was doing his retreat. My only question, by that point, was whether this was maliciously untrue or accidentally untrue. I was reconciled to resting somewhere to eat my jelly, then getting back on a bus and devoting what was left of my energy to finding and confronting Raymond. I was, in that moment, tired enough that I was ready to treat a seven-hour trip across India like a walk back from checking the mailbox.

But, mostly so as not to just stand there being silently stared at by the grandmother, I pulled Raymond’s note from my pocket. Explain that you’re bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, he’d written. This may cause a bit of confusion but simply get on with it and don’t flinch. I looked at the grandmother, cleared my throat, pointed at my chest, and pronounced each syllable with a hopeless little question mark attached, feeling very much like someone saying “open sesame” to a garage door. I could, for all I knew, have been telling her to please poison me; I could have been telling her I’d come from the city to eat her family. But she rose slowly to her feet (she turned out to be not much taller standing than sitting), bowed her head, and waved for me to follow her into the house. Open sesame. (She also shouted something at the little girl that sent her scrambling up the road as if someone were shooting at her feet.)

Inside she called something out toward the backyard, then got involved in making tea, which entailed lighting a burner with a long match and stuffing leaves into a rusty mesh ball. Either my eyes were now joining my list of misbehaving body parts, or this was the darkest habitation I’d ever seen. There were thick brown walls, low ceilings, windows as high and small as in a prison cell. In the main room, where she’d directed me to a chair against a wall, there were three beds (two of which were actually tables piled with blankets) and a scattering of plastic chairs. She set the teacup on the chair next to me, then stood expectantly with her hands together. I took a sip that amounted to not much more than a lip-touch. She made drink-up-drink-up gestures with her hands and grinned. I nodded and made what I hoped were appreciative noises.

At some point a man walked in from the backyard, tying the sash on his long shirt and pajama pants outfit; he was short and about the same age as the grandmother. “Welcome, welcome, so much welcome,” he said, shaking my hand. “I am? Akki.” He had the kind of barrel chest and thick white hair I associate with kings and billionaires. “My wife, who you are meeting? Shima. Our son? Very dead, very sadly dead. He is sorry you will not meet him. Stabbed. Very much bad business.”

He called something toward another room, and a young woman shuffled in; she couldn’t have much been much older than me, and she moved with the cautiousness of someone trying not to break through the surface of a frozen pond. Akki pressed her against his side. “The wife of my son. Gita. Very much beautiful. Very, very welcome to meet you.” She didn’t look very welcome to meet me. She hardly looked at me at all. She had gold bangles on her wrists and a daub of the same red on her forehead as the grandmother’s. She nodded in my general direction, then hurried back to whatever room she’d come from.