At the Bottom of Everything(58)

There’s no point, really, in ranking my nights according to their unpleasantness, but that one in Akki’s dining room deserves some sort of special mention. Without getting too much into it, I’ll just say that among the chicken’s many other qualities, it cured me of my constipation. I spent a couple of pitch-black hours racing between my bed and the fields, squatting and praying in the dark, thinking that this time, finally, I had to have emptied myself of everything that could possibly have been inside me. Degradation, like awkwardness, can be gotten used to.

Also there was the half-dream I kept falling into, like a second bed, that I was still at the Batras’, looking not for Thomas but for a doorway out, creeping around behind the furniture, trying not to be noticed.

And one other thing happened that night, which I’d say was another dream except that I was, by that point, past any hope of sleeping. It had to have been at least four in the morning, because the darkness outside had started to turn gray. I was lying there feeling empty and steamrollered, my eyes blurrily cracked open, when I noticed Gita standing next to me; my first thought was that she’d been sent to wake me up. No. She removed her sari like someone stepping out of a bathrobe and slid silently into bed beside me. I was so bewildered that I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move. Her skin was as smooth and cold as marble. She didn’t acknowledge me. She lay there as still as a mummy. And then, some number of airless minutes later, she was crying, a high, breathy sort of crying, as if she were suppressing a series of sneezes. “Gita?” I whispered. But as quickly and quietly as she’d gotten into the bed, she was out of it, clutching her clothes to her stomach and hurrying back out through the doorway.

The sun, when it came up, didn’t so much rise as appear, like a blazing grapefruit, directly in the window. Shima was up, moving gingerly around the kitchen, rubbing what looked like ashes onto our dishes from the night before. She nodded good morning to me as I climbed out of bed. Akki was already in the field; the hacking sound I’d been hearing since dawn was him, working his way along between two rows, hunched and swinging a tool like the grim reaper’s. The brick shed really wasn’t so far from the house at all. Gita was in the corner of the field, looking conspicuously away from me, attaching something to a rhino-sized cow.

I’d just eaten breakfast, which is to say nibbled at a piece of round dry bread, when the monk came into the house from the backyard. He was, I was fairly sure, the lead singer from the night before. He was dark, with small eyes that made him look as if he were always just about to smile, and he had the thinnest of pubescent mustaches on his upper lip. He bowed at me again, staying on his feet this time. He was wearing his same robe and a pair of sandals that seemed to be made of tires and twine. He came up to about my chin. Akki, who’d followed the monk into the house, stood beaming in the doorway, sweating, dirt streaked across his forehead. He looked at the monk, looked at me, and apparently unable to contain himself any longer, he rushed over and pressed a pointer finger between my eyebrows, as if he were affixing a stamp to an envelope. He took me by the shoulders, beholding me, seeming seriously to consider kissing me. “We will be remembering you always.”





[Excerpted from Meeting the Timelessness: The Teachings of Sri Prabhakara, as Transmitted to His Disciples. For Free Distribution Only.]

A questioner from Germany asks: Is the proper teaching that we are to be mindful of every action always? Because it is often my experience that when I am trying to be most mindful, that is when my mind wanders the farthest.





Sri Prabhakara: Who is telling you, must be mindful? You are trying to control how is the state of your mind, of course you will find much suffering, much confusion. Do you see flowers? [gestures toward altar] Is flower thinking, being mindful, being mindful?





Q: Then the proper understanding pertains to effort? In making too much effort, I have been hindering myself?





P: In saying too much “I,” have been hindering yourself. In coming to me, thinking there is “I” who will make you understand this and that. That is where hindering begins …





I should make clear that even under ideal circumstances, I’m no hiker. It makes my knees hurt, it makes my back sweat; I associate it with bad food, bad sleep, bad company. I’ve had terrible fights with girlfriends over my refusal to spend weekends camping. I’ve sulked my way through two-mile gravel-paved meanders.

So, as the monk and I set out through Akki’s fields, between rows of something that looked like tobacco, then into a thicket of hilly woods, I kept repeating to myself: hiking is walking, hiking is walking. It was every bit as hot in the woods as it had been in the fields, and there were birds and bugs and frogs making trilly noises at every depth. There were more trees and tall grasses and bushes and vines than you could possibly count; the path looked days, or possibly hours, from being overgrown completely. You could see fallen trees turning back into mush almost in real time; there were mushrooms like orange tuning knobs along every trunk.