But I wasn’t, at least for a while, doing too badly, and it took me a while to realize that this was because of how little I was carrying. On my summer camp Appalachian Trail hikes I’d carried, in addition to my idiotically bulky frame backpack, a sleeping bag, a Therm-a-Rest, a raincoat, a camping chair, clothes, water, some share of the group’s food, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting. You’d put down your backpack at the end of one of those days and feel, for a few minutes, that same weird weightless propulsion as when you step onto a moving walkway at the airport.
But now, thanks to my lack of foresight and to the relative emptiness of the village general store, I had:
(1) blue JanSport backpack, containing:
(4) miniature bags of Ritz-esque crackers
(2) liters of water
(1) red Mini Maglite, stocked with (2) ominously brandless AA batteries
(1) dirty sweatshirt
(1) box of not-very-adhesive Band-Aids
(1) composition notebook, and
(2) ballpoint pens courtesy of the Noida Radisson.
One reason the inadequacy of my provisions may not have been shriekingly obvious to me from the beginning was because, compared with my monk/guide, I was traveling with my own personal storage caravan. There may have been things I wasn’t aware of tucked into the folds of his robe, but I’m fairly certain that all he had, as he scampered off ahead of me, were his sandals and, attached to a knotted string over his shoulder, a little enclosed bowl (which contained, I saw later, about half a meal’s worth of lentils).
I hadn’t learned his name; to myself I called him Ranjiv, because he looked vaguely like a Ranjiv I’d gone to elementary school with. It seemed as unlikely that I’d learn his actual name, or that we’d have any sort of conversation, as that one of the birds cooing above me would fly down and ask how I was doing. He seemed to see me as an unusually large and helpless pink baby. He stopped to help me over a creek; he held back a thorny branch; he gestured for me to sit at a point when I happened to be feeling especially dire. I kept thinking I detected, behind the solicitousness, a kind of suppressed amusement in him. Did a fourteen-year-old Indian monk have friends? Go to school? Where was his family? Why had they let him get involved with Sri Prabhakara? He was, to me, an opaque little container of hypercompetence; his presence was the only thing that gave me any confidence that this hike wouldn’t end with me eaten by a tiger or dead of heatstroke.
The hike divided into two basic phases. There was the this-is-a-much-longer-hike-than-I’d-like-to-be-on-but-I’m-basically-OK phase, which lasted from the time we left the house in the morning until sometime late that afternoon, when the path ended and we stopped to eat on a shale ledge overlooking what I’m pretty sure was Akki’s village (Ranjiv wouldn’t touch my crackers, and before he ate any of his lentils he insisted on bowing to me again). Up to that point my biggest immediate concerns were the heat and the blister on my heel, which had started leaving overlapping crusty bloodstains on the back of my sock and which was proving basically impossible to bandage. I couldn’t ask, of course, but I’d decided, based on Ranjiv’s calm and the fact that he didn’t have even a canteen with him, that we couldn’t have more than another hour or two to go; I thought, as we stood up and brushed ourselves off, that that might have been our farewell meal before we turned the corner and saw the cave. Instead, right after that commenced the this-is-the-hardest-physical-thing-I’ve-ever-done-and-I-might-die phase, which started when Ranjiv darted to a lookout at the top of a boulder, then gestured for me to follow him around to a clump of thorny vines that, so far as I could tell, we were the first people ever to disturb. This was a plateau at the top of the little mountain we’d been climbing all day, and it couldn’t have been more than a half mile across, but it felt like crossing a continent. Why couldn’t we go around the thorns? What we were doing felt, in terms of efficiency, like going from one room to the next by eating through the wall. I was wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt, so there was no shortage of skin for these thorns to find their way into. Except “thorns” may not be exactly right, because thorns you can snap off or, if they happen to get you, pluck out; these were more like hairs, stinging little cactus-fuzz hairs that covered the entire surfaces of these woody vines. For the seven hundredth time I wondered: How the hell had Thomas managed this? I’d seen tears come to his eyes when someone clipped his heels with a shopping cart.
To distract myself, and to keep from screaming, I decided that what I needed to do was play a game. Very few hiking games, it turns out, are designed to be played by one person. Not I Spy. Not that game where you say you’re Alice and you’re from Albuquerque and you like to eat apples. The only one I could think of how to play, unfortunately, was Sudden Death. Which is basically Twenty Questions, except that the answer always has to be someone who died unexpectedly. JFK. A passenger on the Titanic. Bambi’s mother. So what I did, since of course I couldn’t play in the traditional way, was to pick a person (Ritchie Valens) and then see how many questions it would have taken me to guess, if I hadn’t already known.