©
All poems
and stories
© 1988,
1989, 1990,
1998 by
Advaeta.
All rights
reserved.
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"I've never been in this part of Benares before," Pete said. As our eyes adjusted to the dimness, we looked around us at the walls of our jail cell.
The walls were definitely drab -- it would not be too much to say, bleak. Except down at the far end, next to the latrine, where someone had attempted a mural. I could distinguish a soaring eagle amid a clutter of soiled imagery. I made a mental note to examine it more closely later -- not doubting that I would have plenty of time.
The beds were raised concrete rectangles, each like a classical sarcophagus, though red in color -- and of course minus the bas-reliefs. They stretched away from us in two rows, one down either side of the room. The red finish that these beds shared with the floor had once been smooth -- intended for easy sluicing, I supposed -- but now was badly flaking.
One or two of our prison mates were sitting up to have a look at us. As I looked back at them, the impression I got of their rib cages did not encourage me as to our prospects here. Between those spare figures and their beds were the same scratchy wool blankets that we carried under our arms. Ours were now filling the air with disinfectant -- probably not a bad thing.
I looked over my shoulder with a question as to which way to go. The guard made some minimal wave of his hand, as much as to say, any of those elegant couches not already snatched up could be ours.
I occupied one as likely as any, I supposed, and watched over my toes as Pete, across the aisle, gave detailed attention to arranging his piece of wiry wool on his stony bed, and finally lay down.
"Why, these people to right and left of me are sleeping like babies," he said. "This can't be a bad place if they're so happy here."
"Did I say it was a bad place?" I answered. "How did you pick up such a thought as that? In fact, I was just thinking, what a flawlessly-executed interior! Such economy of design! And moreover, we're perfectly safe here from tigers. I just wonder if they'll give me my guitar back."
"What would you sing? 'Here we are in the Tijuana jail'?"
"Don't make me homesick."
It had been a long day. Not that they had tortured us in a calculated way -- the torture had been in having to repeat our stories, our pleas of impetuous youth, countless times, never knowing if this time they were falling on the right ears, competent to take a lenient view; not daring to ask that question for fear of blowing our cover of innocence and sincerity and contrition. At first we had hoped that they were delaying our flight and might actually let us go. Only hours after the fact did I learn, while pulling out my stops of angelic innocence before a uniformed man who turned out to be just an inquisitive airport official, that our flight was long gone. Anyway, we were exhausted. After recovering our spirits as best we could with our talk, we fell unconscious. Even when roused a few times by mosquito bites, I quickly fell back asleep.
I woke again and it was light. I could see Pete beyond the end of my toes. He was still sleeping. I decided to feign sleep for some time more, feeling shy alone to acquaint myself with our fellow prisoners. Pete had a lot of charm that he could put to use in situations like this. Actually, he liked many strange kinds of people.
They provide, for prisoners, short pants and pajama shirts of coarse white cloth. When Pete finally woke up, it was to confront one such suit a few inches from his face. Dark skinny arms and dark wrinkled legs protruded from the suit. Next Pete took in a face, with wrinkles and gray stubble and a flat nose, rising above the V of the shirt, and looking at him with curiosity. This man had been waiting there for quite some time. On Pete opening his eyes, the person crossed his arms but continued unabashed to look.
"Keys?" the man seemed to be saying.
"What?" said Pete.
"Keys?"
Pete got irritated now. "If I had the keys, do you think I'd still be here?" he said.
Several other prisoners, perhaps more mannerly than the old man, had been holding back but now came forward with alacrity to surround Pete. A big man with a bald head, also crossing his arms, spoke.
"Case," he said. "He means case. What is your case?"
"Ganja," Pete said. This did not seem to surprise anyone. One or two of the men even began to lose interest. No doubt they had been looking for something more sensational to quicken momentarily the tenor of their jail lives. "We allegedly were about to board an outgoing flight with a kilo each."
"Where you kept it?"
"In the sweets," Pete said. "Under. Allegedly." Indian milk sweets, flavored with cardamom and other things, were usually packed in layers, the layers separated by waxed paper. The previous day Pete and I had handed out more than two hundred of these dainties to dozens of uncomplaining street urchins in Benares, to make room for our own load. From the transit lounge in Kathmandu we would fly on to a nice summer in Europe, then home just when we would be running out of money.
"Swee-eets!" the man said with a loud snort. "They will always check up the sweets. Don't you know? They will always check up the sweets."
"I won't put it in the sweets again."
"No! Never put it in the sweets again. They will always check up the sweets."
The door rattled. We were let out into the yard -- smooth dirt with a tree at one end shading a long trough of water. From our pockets we fished our toothbrushes, conceded to us out of our luggage by the prison authorities the night before, and we lined up at a water tap.
Line up at the water tap, then line up at one of the latrines, then crowd in along the water trough, seemed to be the routine here. At the water trough, kneeling and borrowing a plastic mug and scooping madly, scrubbing with some grainy gray soap, you could take a bath -- a small cloth given us with our prison shorts and shirts the night before, wrapped around the waist, served to preserve modesty during this process.
"Hey!" a prisoner yelled at me, jerking my hand out of the trough. I had made the mistake of dipping the soap directly into the water.
For breakfast, another line -- with your dented aluminum plate, like a battered hubcap found along the road -- and you get a handful of chickpeas, wet and chewable, but with no sign of a sprout. Apparently they had only been soaked overnight. Pete had started coming down with diarrhea even before we had left for the airport -- I didn't know how he would fare with this food.
Our block was just one big room, holding at the time say twenty prisoners -- a bit less than capacity. All the other blocks around the big yard were the same design, except one, which seemed to be divided into small cells. Until six in the evening, as I learned, we would be free to use the yard or even to visit from one block to another. But after orienting myself somewhat, I drifted back to our block. I lay down for a minute, then got up to examine that mural -- that ambitious vision of some inmate, whether of the past or the present I did not know, which had attracted my attention the night before.
The eagle which I had first noticed trailed a cliché of a broken chain from one foot, and soared aloft over a huge building: and that building was interesting. The front left corner of it was clearly our present prison, with a guard tower. In a slow arc toward the rear, the building metamorphosed into one hemisphere of India's Parliament House, with the red, white and green flying overhead. The right rear corner was Delhi's Red Fort from the Muslim period, and the right front looked like a bank and flew a British flag.
The eye of the escaping eagle featured a multi-pointed white star. Overdone, I thought, as a sparkle of happiness. But then I hadn't been in jail very long. The eagle flew toward a heroic figure, waiting with outstretched palm, in the upper left corner of the painting. Shiva, Krishna, Vishnu? They all looked practically the same to me.
A slightly-built little man had appeared at my side. Distracted from the painting, I found myself looking down on the sparse white hair of his head. He looked at the mural steadily for some time before turning his earnest black eyes up to me.
"He died of tuberculosis," the little man said. "The artist. He died five months ago. He learned meditation, he did this" -- a gesture towards the mural -- "in about two weeks of great effort, then he died."
The man pointed to the eagle, then to the hero in the upper left, waiting with right hand open. "You see where the eagle is flying. He isn't just escaping into the blue.
"You can know this figure by his weapon." He pointed to the trident propped against the man's chest. "Trishula was the weapon of Lord Shiva. Shiva loved animals and all helpless creatures. He would always give them protection whenever they came to him."
I did not remember this man from the comradely group with whom we had arisen in the morning. Perhaps he had wandered in from another cell block. Like a few other of the prisoners, he wore his own clothes, dhoti and kurta, threadbare but clean.
His Indianized British phrases were carefully pronounced. He reminded me of a history professor I had once had, a soul with a passion for accuracy.
"Shiva is a god?" I asked him.
"No, no, he has only been demoted to a god by the popular mind. In fact, he was a great spiritualist and guru. People repeat his spiritual sayings every day, just like breathing, not knowing that they came from him. Varttamanesu vartteta, for example. 'Live in the present. All your expressions must be based on the present tense.' "
This appealed to me, because I also used to tell people frequently, "Live in the present." And while I wasn't ready to accept that Shiva or anyone else had copyrighted the idea, certainly not in Sanskrit, I did begin to feel a certain warmth for that bizarre figure.
"When did he live?" I said.
"Seven thousand years ago."
I was startled. I didn't believe it, but I had no proof it wasn't true.
I turned to look again at the old man who was telling me these things. "Might I ask what you're in here for?" I asked.
The man chuckled and looked at me with an affection as though we were old army buddies. He patted my arm. "My friend," he said, "you will have to ask Indira Gandhi that question. I don't know."
"What does Indira Gandhi have to do with it?"
"We are under Emergency. You don't know?"
"I know. I came here once before. Emergency was declared just as I was leaving. That was about a year ago. So it means you're with some opposition group?"
"Her conscience is such that she sees opposition even where there is no opposition," he said. "And why are you here?"
"Ganja," I said.
He literally turned up his nose. My old professor again, never hesitating to be judgmental, yet with no particular malice about it. "You sell it or only use it?" he said.
"Mostly just use it."
"You have been given a human body. Why will you treat it like this?"
A real dogmatist, I decided. Upper-class Indians had a view on this topic inherited from time immemorial, and they weren't about to change it.
"Are you sure you know everything about ganja?" I said.
Have you ever tried it?"
"Direct experience is not the only way of knowing about something," he said. "There are two other ways also. I know what I'm saying through both these ways. One way is inference. I've seen people who smoked ganja for a long time. To do anything or even think about anything they had to hold their heads with both hands."
"Yeah? And what's the third way of knowing something?"
"The third way is authority. Not authority in the usual sense. We usually say, 'Doctor Amuk is an authority on nuclear energy.' Yet we still may doubt what Doctor Amuk says. But suppose a case where doubt never arises in your mind."
"Such as?"
"Look, let me tell you a story. The first time I met my guru he started to scold me fiercely. He said, 'Why did you do it?' I said, 'What did I do?' He continued to scold me. 'You cowardly rascal,' and so on. Finally he said, 'Why did you take that bribe?' It was true. Five years before I had taken a bribe, not because I wanted the money, but because I was afraid to offend the person. I was still feeling some guilt about it. But no one could have known. My guru, though, sees the past, present and future of everyone. Do you believe that?"
"Well, I believe that's possible for a person to do. I don't know about this particular case. But if I met him I would know."
"Just by meeting him?"
"By meeting him and looking in his eyes."
"Yes, that's right. But then your eyes also have to be quite okay."
The man's name was Deshapriya. He had been inside since the Emergency was declared, and under the terms of the Emergency Act, he could expect to be there indefinitely. Nonetheless, he was confident that he would get out. "Indira Gandhi can't last," he asserted. Before jail he had been a bureaucrat for Indian Railways.
I told him that Pete was sick. "I will give him some homeopathic medicine," he said. "It will cure him. And he should apply for Division. You also should apply."
I asked him to explain. It turned out that the Division prisoners were those occupying the special cell block I had noticed that morning. Years ago it had been for Europeans. Besides a cell apiece, prisoners there got better food, they got a mosquito net, and they got a chemical toilet. A little boy prisoner was assigned to come and empty the toilet every morning. To qualify you needed only to prove that you came from an aristocratic background: the corollary to such a background, it seemed, being that ordinary prison life -- that which was ordinary prison life for ordinary people -- would for you be cruel and unusual. Deshapriya's own application had been turned down, but he seemed to think that being Western would constitute for Pete and me a prima facie case. "Even a tradition here," he said jokingly.
"I was going to contact the US consul anyway," I said. "Maybe he can help with this. I'm sure as far as other things, he'll say there's nothing he can do."
We retained a lawyer. For openers the man made one thing clear -- a figure. Five thousand rupees. The authorities had given us a receipt for the four hundred dollars they had found on us the previous day. At twelve and a half rupees to the dollar, we had to wonder if some communication was going on. Anyway, we would now land in Europe with nothing -- assuming we even got out while our tickets were still valid.
On the bright side, the US Consulate in Delhi agreed to send a vice-consul to see us. At this, our Division status was assured. Not even waiting for the man's arrival, in sort of an extraordinary session and unprecedented flurry of paper, we were settled in to our new accommodations.
The herald of our consul's visit was a young trustee with a bad leg. He came on a limping run into the yard one afternoon, yelling for Pete and me. We were ushered past the blackened wood desks of the prison office into a room we had not seen before. The room was big, it had light and air, and a little dust; in the middle, two old red velvet sofas, possibly from the British Raj, faced each other across a small table. Two matching chairs at the ends made a box-like arrangement of it. On the table was a cup of tea, of which the consul had sipped only a little bit. Probably he was missing his coffee. He stood up to shake hands. Middle-aged, burdened, and nervous, just about summed him up. We sat on the sofa opposite.
"So," he said, "you seem to be in a bit of, let's say, hot water."
"Yeah," Pete replied. Had we been innocent, this would have been our opening to say so. But we had nothing to say. Pete was more concerned than anything else, I think, just to make the guy feel at ease. Pete was like that. Personally I feel that these bureaucratic types need to be shaken up a bit. I felt like having a little fun with the guy. But then I figured, well, he had after all come a long way to see us.
"The proceedings of your case itself are I'm afraid something that I can't interfere with," the man was saying. "I've brought a list of lawyers with me, but I'm not allowed to recommend any of them, it's just a list. None of them live in Benares, and anyway I understand you've already engaged a lawyer."
"Yeah," Pete said. "Not that we know too much about him."
"Getting him just seemed to be part of the flow," I said. His name was Shantidas Krishnan, and we liked the name, so we signed him up."
The consul frowned and touched his teacup and crossed his legs to absorb this. "It's good to have a local man," he said. "No doubt everything will work out for the best. All I'm allowed to do in any case is provide this list -- please keep it in case there are any second thoughts. Now, regarding legal fees, and any problem you might have related to legal fees -- of course the Consulate can't help you directly. I understand you have already paid this man his initial fee?"
"Initial fee?" Pete said. "We thought that was it."
"I see. Well, I hope so. That may be it if things go friction-free, as it were. But if there are any delays, any extra court appearances -- not at all unlikely -- you can be sure he'll ask for more."
"We're completely flat now," I said.
"Yes, well, as I said, the Consulate can of course not provide any direct financial help. But if you would like to contact any relatives or friends in the States, we can send a cable to Washington and they'll try to phone your people from there."
"Thanks," I said. "I guess it doesn't really feel like the move to make right now. Later on, if the situation is different, the energy to do that might also be different."
"I see," the consul said. He reached for his teacup again. He took a sip.
We sat in silence for a moment. I had a sudden urge to jump up and lead the whole group in "God Bless America." But thinking of Pete and his sensibilities I decided against it.
"Well, I have to go now," the consul said. "We'll keep fully informed in Delhi of all developments in your case, and if there's anything we can do, don't hesitate -- "
"It was beautiful of you to come," Pete said.
We all got up. I felt suddenly unwilling to leave that nice room, even though Pete and I had not been served tea.
In jail, such a visit counts as big excitement. Some of our personal things had been returned to us on about our third day, including whatever books we had. But except for a few chapters of one Castaneda book, I had already finished everything in our limited stock.
One afternoon, Pete and I were both in his room sitting on his cot. On the wall opposite us was a baby house-lizard, hardly an inch long, with a head much too big for its body.
"Have you seen my pet lizard?" Pete said. "That's Bonzo, my pet lizard."
"Bonzo, huh?"
"Here Bonzo! Here Bonzo!" Pete said.
"I don't think he's coming."
At this Pete frowned. His expression suggested that maybe Bonzo was beginning to incur his wrath. However, he deigned to give Bonzo another chance.
"Sit, Bonzo, sit."
"He's not sitting either."
"God damn it, Bonzo!" Pete leapt off the cot and smacked the edge of his fist against the wall an inch behind Bonzo. "Make a fool of me in front of my friends!" Bonzo scuttled, though without panic, as if even at his tender age he had already seen strange things in this jail, a few feet ahead.
"You know, sometimes people are judged by the pets they own. Why don't you get a more intelligent pet?"
"He's intelligent. He's just not especially obedient."
Pete decided to scout the other cell blocks to see if anyone had any books in English.
"Hey!" he said when he came back. "There's actually a library here! It just closed, but you can go there tomorrow. From one to five in the afternoon."
"No kidding! Some of the books are English?"
"Ninety percent of the books are English. And next in line comes Latin. I was going to borrow Principia Mathematica for you, but they said to come back tomorrow. There's hardly anything there in Hindi."
"What do they have in English?"
"Bestsellers. But the most recent of them is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Definitely no new acquisitions since Independence. I guess that's when they stopped getting Western prisoners here."
There was also a recreation room which featured a harmonium, some wooden flutes and some tablas. When I had asked for my guitar, they had refused to let me have it in my own cell. They would release it to this room if I wished, they said. But I declined.
Deshapriya advised us, "You see, jail teaches us that the objects we usually look to for our pleasure are not really reliable. Books, cinema, tasty food, traveling so many places, etcetera. Even if we get those objects, we sometimes grow tired of them, isn't it? After five or six chocolates, if we eat another chocolate, we feel boring. The senses lose their capacity to enjoy, and then how are we to find happiness? Yet really speaking, the objects of pleasure did not give us the happiness. The objects were merely keys to the happiness. They momentarily unlocked the happiness that is always inside us. Do you follow? That happiness we call atman. In English, 'soul.' "
"So if I'm not happy, that means I have no soul?"
"You have, everyone has. But your mind due to entrenched habit, time immemorial habit, of looking outward for objects of pleasure, has placed a layer of confusion over your soul."
We tried meditating. Deshapriya himself meditated about six hours a day. But whenever I would try it, one of two things would happen. One, I would be assaulted by visions of all the places I really wanted to be. In particular, inside one attic room with cobalt-blue window frames, with magnolia branches rustling on the pane, batiks on the wall, a chess set, Lazy Lady and her watercolors, a joint to stop time, and a cup of Greek coffee with honey -- and I would just be frustrated.
And other times all the culture shock I had had in recent years in India and other places would rush back at me, only more intense. Many times I remembered my first experience of Howrah train station. If any hell existed, I thought, now I had found it. I seemed to see endless hordes of dehumanized faces, racked with every known fear, pierced with every physical agony of tooth, stomach and cranial nerve. These victims pushed and grimaced and clawed among themselves in the perpetual dimness, struggling toward whatever little modicum of air and light and decent food held itself distantly before them at journey's end. Some among this multitude even found themselves in the condition of having to beg from the others. For them there was no journey's end. This wasteland of urine and train soot and bidi smoke -- harsher than cigarettes -- was their home and their sustenance.
India was not like the States of that time, with its patented hidden poverty. Wherever the Indian well-to-do go, the poor are always right there. At first I didn't see how middle-class Indians could so spend their money and enjoy, oblivious to the poor at their elbows. I would see families eating to their hearts' content inside an air-conditioned sweet shop, a security man and a glass door separating them from the sidewalk. The guard's uniform might be shabby, but he was still a couple of shades better off than the pavement families huddling around the columns of the same shopping arcade. They had never eaten such things. They would scrounge a tiny coin or two from the father of the family as the family passed by. Would my own family, I used to wonder, be able to eat with the same insensitivity?
Perhaps we would not at first. We might even go without our wonted sweet input the first time we encountered such a situation, or we might take our rasagollas home to enjoy in private. But if we once realized that milieu to be the permanent condition, wouldn't we soon harden ourselves to it, rather than sacrifice our lifestyle?
Pete liked meditation better. He said that among other things he was able to forget the pain in his intestines. Among other things.
Deshapriya had mentioned that when he felt the time to be right, he would teach us a more advanced form of meditation. After a month or so Pete went to him to request further instruction. Deshapriya said, "What lesson of meditation I teach you is important, no doubt, but the lesson is not the only thing. Still more important is that for any form of meditation to have its effect, you must be doing service to others. This will dissolve the little worries about yourself that prevent good concentration."
"There's not much I can do here," Pete said. "I help the other prisoners out if I can, but there's not much I can do."
"Spiritual service is the most important service of all," Deshapriya said. "You can convince them to learn meditation."
The prisoner with the best English was a young guy who had started serving his sentence -- life for murder -- just before we arrived. He had been a schoolteacher. He explained to us that he could expect to be released in some ceremonial amnesty after twenty years. He was quite depressed. He liked to sing, not very tunefully, and we had taught him a few English songs.
Pete convinced him to learn meditation from Deshapriya, and he really looked much brighter just after learning. This made Pete feel good. Deshapriya taught Pete his new lesson of meditation.
Then Deshapriya made an outrageous request.
"You can do something that will help my own meditation very much. This is also a spiritual service. I think you will not refuse, because no one else is here taking care of the spiritual needs of these prisoners. If my meditation is strong, I can do more for them."
Deshapriya explained confidentially to Pete and me that his own form of meditation required him, at least occasionally, to meditate in the blackest part of the night, in the hours after midnight. And on these occasions, he said, he needed to have with him two human skulls! He explained that he used them in some way to heighten the atmosphere.
This was all getting so weird, that I admit I began to wonder if he was asking us to donate our own skulls! Or worse, to somehow lend them to him for the evening's observances! But what he actually had in mind at first seemed as impossible.
He reminded us that when our vice-consul had come to see us, we had been allowed to use that special visiting room. In that room, he said, though the outside window was barred, the bars were far apart. Deshapriya had a friend outside who could come at the right moment and pass two skulls between the bars. One of us would receive them while the other engaged the attention of the consul.
"And then what?"
"Then you cross the room to the inside window. That window opens onto the delivery yard, where the vegetables among other things are unloaded. I cook for myself, so I am allowed to go there every day to collect my vegetables. I am always seen there bringing my shopping bag."
"It requires a lot of timing."
"We are the masters of time, so we can also master timing."
We could certainly think of nothing to say to that, and anyway Pete was obviously attracted to the idea. He had been feeling the need of some kind of excitement there in jail. He was that kind of person. In spite of being half wasted from his continual diarrhea, he still had energy relative to the place he found himself in.
I asked Deshapriya to allow us to think it over. Once alone with Pete, I asked him if he was really ready to rip off a day of the vice-consul's time like this. Though I had felt some desire to tease the guy, this was a bit more serious. The vice-consul was a decent person, basically.
"Oh, he'll probably send some junior person this time. And if he himself does take time away from his usual neo-colonial activities, isn't that all to the good? It will just mean that someone somewhere is less exploited.
"And another thing you've got to remember. Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer would have loved it."
Of course, he knew my loyalties. I had to agree with him.
In the event, it was the vice-consul himself who came again. We had sent a message to him pleading a need to discuss with him our jail conditions. In fact, we were being treated indulgently by the guards and there was only one thing to complain about. But that thing was important, at least for Pete, and we built it up to be a case of life or death. It was the water. It was clear that Pete would never get over his diarrhea if he could not get boiled water. The jail doctor had agreed, but it was up to us to arrange it. The jail superintendent gave his imprimatur, but there the matter ended. We were at the mercy of the cook. He gave us water impassively the first day, grudgingly the next, and thereafter made it clear that he was fed up.
"You take your job very seriously," Pete was saying to the consul. "I know it's not an easy trip here from Delhi."
It was my cue to get up and begin to pace, as though overloaded with nervous energy. I was to move about in a widening path, and look for an opportunity to step behind the consul's couch and head for the window. I had already said what I could from my side about Pete's condition.
Pete went on with his sweet talk. And the consul was starting to become quite fatherly. "You know, I got caught myself one night," the consul said. "Siphoning gas from the cars at another fraternity house. The old Oklahoma credit card. Lucky I didn't get a police record for that one."
I moved over to the outside window and carefully drew the curtain. Expecting to see someone like Deshapriya, I was taken aback at the ragged man crouched under the window, who now turned his face up. Of course there was a certain logic in it. A respectably-dressed person could not wait inconspicuously outside a jail window; but a marginalized peasant, sinking temporarily from exhaustion, would merit no notice at all. Nevertheless the man was visibly nervous about his task: with a forced grin he thrust two objects, that is, two bundles, two somethings wrapped in dirty cloth like his own, simultaneously through the bars. The things were not heavy, not light, in colorless cotton; even in disguise they exuded their nothingness. But it entered my mind to wonder if at some time in life those two people had known each other.
It was only at that moment that I really started to worry about being caught. What am I doing here, I thought -- tiptoeing across this anachronistic English sitting room, tucked away inside an Indian jail, with two human skulls in my hands? How, if called upon, would I explain myself to this orderly-minded consul of ours, or to the jail authorities?
Fortunately, Pete did his job very well. As I crossed the room behind the consul, Pete slid, casually, from that end of his couch nearest the window I was moving towards, to that end nearest the window I was leaving -- and managed to hold the consul's gaze a steady 180 degrees away from me, like the shadow of a sundial away from the sun.
But when I parted the curtains of the inside window, Deshapriya was nowhere in sight. Something had gone wrong. Rakhesh was there, however. Rakhesh was the little boy who emptied our toilets in the morning. We used to give him our sugar, of which we got extra rations: one reason being our "caste," and another, believe it or not, being Pete's medical condition. Surprised though he was, Rakhesh took the two bundles when I handed them to him. A burlap sack overflowing with the day's usual fresh-from-the-market decaying vegetables leaned against the wall. I gestured frantically at Rakhesh to thrust the bundles deep into that sack. I was half surprised when he understood.
As soon as possible we got free of the consul and the momentary ceremoniousness of the jail authorities. They were standing ready to shake all our hands and see the consul off with their broad smiles, but at the consul's request -- hopefully to talk about the water -- the Superintendent followed him back into the sitting room. We headed straight for Deshapriya's cell block. But Deshapriya popped out at us suddenly from somewhere -- he had obviously been waiting anxiously, after solving whatever problem had delayed him -- and scanned our faces. I told him what had happened. He started immediately towards the delivery area, his worn shopping bag in his hand. But hardly had he taken two steps when we saw the cook coming towards us.
A ponderous individual with thick, rough skin, Mohan was inside due to his desire to become wealthy. Being rather dim-witted and having none of the advantages that would enable him to pursue wealth as a politician, he had decided to pursue it as a dacoit. He had believed unapologetically that if others should have some of the good things in life, he should also. He now bore a heavy sack over his shoulder and was headed toward the kitchen. We let him proceed.
As the cook passed, a stout, sleepy guard pointed his officious stick at the bag. "Bandh gobhi," Mohan said, "cabbages." The guard gave a perfunctory pat at the bag with one hand, then waved his stick regally with the other, granting safe passage to the wet burlap and its lumpy load. Mohan proceeded toward the kitchen, and Pete, Deshapriya and I followed, Deshapriya making an elaborate show of examining the clouds above and the pebbles below, as if, No, we were not concerned about that burlap sack or anything else in the world.
"When he gets to the kitchen," Pete suggested, "we'll tell him he's being called to the prison office. Then you can quickly get your goodies."
"Hmm, yes . . ." said Deshapriya. "Let's see."
Mohan entered the kitchen door, the three of us hard on his heels. He slid the burlap sack onto the floor in one corner. Then he immediately grabbed the bottom corners of the sack and jerked them up. Cabbages rolled out on the concrete floor. One of them rattled loudly as it rolled. It was a skull.
The other skull came to rest in the same vicinity, its mouth still covered by some of its dingy wrapping, giving it a shy appearance. Its more extroverted companion, posing unabashed on the floor, had retained a lot of its teeth, and seemed to be grinning. What comedy team did they remind me of? I thought.
Mohan let out a strangled sound and froze like some natural history exhibit, his mouth open. Deshapriya calmly picked up his two new acquisitions and plopped them into his shopping bag, adding an eggplant and a couple of carrots on top, and we followed him out the door. If he wasn't going to say anything to the cook, or even look him in the eye before making his departure, no need for us to do so either.
"A superstitious person like that will be afraid to say anything," Deshapriya told us once out in the yard. "They know only that I am a tantric. They have heard many bogeyman stories about black tantrics and think that all tantrics are of that kind. So nothing to worry about concerning him."
A few days later I entered Deshapriya's cell at a time when all his cellmates were out. Now, I'm sure it wasn't just due to the new toys that we had helped him get; perhaps he had been meditating all night. Anyway he looked especially shiny at that moment.
He was standing, and when he saw me he faced me in a very formal posture, with his feet together, and waved. But it wasn't exactly a wave -- it was as if his hand was dancing.
Either there was some high beauty in that gesture, or somehow with it he had simply thrown a handful of beauty into my head -- I don't know which. I immediately went back to my own cot and sat and began to meditate as he had taught me. For the first time in jail I felt really happy. I was even crying. And I wanted intensely to meet that guru he was always talking about, though I didn't even know the person's name. At that moment I just thought of him as Shiva.
After that incident I never missed the chance to be with Deshapriya. Of course I was always hoping that he would repeat that trick he had done. He never did repeat it, but his endless supply of stories about his guru, at least, was a flow of milk and honey that I would run to hungrily every day.
We appeared in court twice in the course of the next month. By this time I also had diarrhea. And Pete's had become quite severe. Blood was coming out. Over his objections, the prison doctor was keeping him in the hospital.
So I would visit him there. The room was high-ceilinged and dimly lit. It reminded me of church. In the late afternoon the other patients would mostly lower their dingy mosquito nets, and lie each under his own little dome, alone thinking I suppose about supper, and then about God knows what until sleep came. One faint light bulb hung from the ceiling of the big room by a ten-foot electric cord. I had to leave by six and be locked up.
Actually I would spend time there more for the sake of my morale than for Pete's. I would get quite uptight if I didn't have the chance to speak English for a long time, and I mean my kind of English, not just any kind. I would put my feet up on the edge of his bed where the mosquitoes couldn't sneak up on me, and ramble on about all kinds of things.
"I've been thinking about Robin," I was saying one day. "I often think about Robin. You know who she was?"
"Did I meet her?" Pete said. "I can't remember all your old girlfriends."
"Actually, she wasn't my girlfriend at all. She was the girlfriend of Gary Snyder, the poet. Or maybe she was completely fictitious for him. Anyway, he wrote several poems about her. They are poems from a point of view later in his life, and he had a problem of not being able to forget her. I used to read those poems very often. So often, that now when I start thinking of people like that that I actually did know, I think I remember Robin also."
"Well, that helps bear out something Deshapriya said the other day."
"What did he say?"
"I was explaining to him about Western therapies where people try to remember their childhood traumas, etcetera. Deshapriya said that such therapies might be useful in some cases. But then his final word was, 'Strictly speaking, ever to think about the past is a waste of time.' "
"That's pretty strict, all right."
"Maybe. But I think that experience of yours is just an extreme case of memories in general. Do they have anything to do with what actually happened to us? Or are they just the chosen form of entertainment of some minds."
Subhash came in to say hi to Pete. Subhash was the schoolteacher murder convict whom Pete had interested in meditation, and he used to come frequently now that Pete was in the hospital. I went back to my cell early. I wanted to meditate.
Our cell block had been built like the Tower of London: inside it was very quiet. Soon my mind grew still. Lazy Lady was there, hovering around, but as my mind quietened more and more, my picture of her lost the flickering, airy quality of a thought and became solid, like a piece of furniture. Now I could grasp that piece of furniture, then carefully push it to one side. It might still be there in my peripheral vision, but it did not disturb the center of my mental plate. There in the center I decided I would put God.
God cannot be pictured, I knew, but I will just assume He's there.
He was there. He had brought me to this jail for this meeting. My mantra sang softly in the background. I felt at that moment that there was no place on earth I'd rather be.
Then, within a few days, Deshapriya told us to prepare to leave. "You will be deported," he said. "Your tickets are about to expire, and they don't know how much trouble they may have, with Pete's condition getting worse. Your case will simply be withdrawn."
As much confidence as we had in his inside knowledge of the workings of that place, still we held our breaths until a couple of days later when the news came down officially. They were to take us to the airport early the next morning.
Pete and I started on a small round of good-byes to other prisoners, but as soon as we reached Subhash's cell block the joy of freedom that we were feeling got very much clouded. Subhash was in solitary, they told us, and a new case might be brought against him.
As usual six people were talking at once in as many versions of English. Finally we were able to get a clear version of what had happened. It revolved around Rakhesh. Rakhesh was considered pagal, mad, and no doubt he was, though it often seemed to us that there was some method in it as well. His problem was an anti-authoritarian streak. All very healthy, if you ask me, but he couldn't keep it under the lid. He was good at making fools of the guards, but also good at getting beaten. That part of him was truly crazy. I don't know what he saw in beatings. The other prisoners called him lathikhor -- meaning he liked the lathi, the stick. Subhash had defended him against one of the guards in some situation, and now Subhash was in solitary.
It was time for lockup. I was restless all night. On the one hand I was anxious to get out, and fearful of all the things that might happen to hinder our release. On the other hand I was resentful that this Subhash thing had happened to spoil the clean triumph of going free. A bout of intestinal distress that night did not help matters.
In the morning Pete was at my window. Sometimes he was able to get out of the hospital before the rest of us were unlocked. "You go," he said. "I can't leave Subhash in this position. I'm sure Subhash was remembering an example I used one time. I was explaining the tantric understanding of ahimsa -- that it's all right to fight if the motivation is not to hurt someone. I said it's right to defend an underdog who's being beaten. I couldn't meditate at all last night, thinking about leaving at this point."
"They won't give you any choice about leaving."
"They can't put me on the plane kicking and screaming, can they?"
Pete was beyond reasoning. Some chemical reaction going on all night had created this crystal in him, and that was that. He argued that he might actually be able to persuade the jail authorities about the case, etc., etc.
Deshapriya had always said that meditation would make life harder in some ways. And the fact is that I had just about decided in my mind to join Pete in this madness. Madness is not such a bad thing, really. And getting out would probably not be as wonderful as I imagined it, I heard a voice telling me -- what ever is?
The guard came to unlock me, and with him was a trustee messenger from the office -- and Deshapriya, come to see us off. The messenger took a breath and leaned back, pleased with his role as our herald angel. "Hereby ordered to collect all personal belongings and proceed immediately to office for release," he recited according to formula.
Pete started to explain to Deshapriya about his decision. But Deshapriya just laughed. "No, no, you must go," he said. "Don't worry about Subhash."
Pete was indignant. "What do you mean?" he said. "Just because the man is a convict, do you think his life isn't worth something?"
"Slowly, slowly," Deshapriya said. He always said "slowly, slowly" when he meant "softly, softly." "You see, there is no need to worry for Subhash. That guard he pushed down, you see, belongs to the Congress-S Party. They were just looking for some excuse to fire that man. The prison administration here is all Congress-I, as is the state government and of course the national government. The guard used to make complaints about the way this prison was being run. They considered him a troublemaker."
Pete may have been a bit disappointed at losing his noble cause. But I think he felt relieved also. I know for sure I did.
"Any luggage, sir?" the woman asked at the check-in.
"Yes, our packs."
This time they did not contain any ganja. Travel light, I thought, always travel light.
"Out the right windows you can see Mount Everest." Pete and I forgot the pain in our guts and clambered over to the right aisle. We crouched down, and from there could see a pure white sierra beyond the green valley, and distinguish the highest peak. There was no haze, no pollution, between us and the green of the valley, or between us and the mountains. It was as if the world had just been made.
"Your attention please. The fasten-seatbelts sign has just been switched on."
What goes up must come down, I thought. Or maybe it's that there's an oscillation to this world, a wave. The universe began with a wave, according to Deshapriya, and that wave was still there. "You can hear it. Make your mind very concentrated."
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