I am in Mysore. I want to be here because it has been inhabited, I understand, as long as any place on earth. It is the size of New England, which seems almost nonexistent to me now. Are we really all under the same sky?
Good roads. Hotels with formal gardens and fountains. Palaces across the river. But I am looking for animals and trees, not temples. Let me see if there is any majesty inside me.
The next two pages were in Sanskrit, followed by a page in English.
Village life. Get me out of here. I see the same sweet women filling water jugs at the central fountain and the men, once again with their simple dignity as they move with the buffalo and the plows. Thousands of years old. The huts are skimpier than I am used to, and all the beds are outside. I never used to look at something and visualize catastrophe at the same time. But all I can think of is monsoon. Son of a bitch. In Benares I thought I was testing India. The sky opened; the tables turned. India tested me.
After a few more pages of Sanskrit, she came upon:
I walk fast but keep hearing shouts of “Khedda! Khedda!” and eventually follow throngs—in India there are only throngs—hoping they will lead me out of the more civilized parts of Mysore.
Now it’s becoming clear to me what Sesh meant when he explained why the monks go off by themselves. He compared it to an artist during the act of creation. Stopping life to produce life. The artist who will give up all else when involved in creation. I’ve seen men give up food, sex, money, all because of a picture they have to paint. What feeds them is the love of the object and the desire to see it born. Stopping life to produce life. And in the center, the plan toward perfection. The work.
Janice’s fingers flipped through the clipped weeks and months, through prayers and comments and observations, pausing now and again to read an entry that particularly caught her interest.
I walk every day. In order to watch life happen. What I want to see is process, rather than the changes once they’ve happened.
I don’t seek beliefs or religion or divine inspiration here. I seek the quality of silence. I must hear that part of myself that is the most quiet. It is the bridge of my past, present, and future—offering the potential to make past, present, and future all one.
And later:
The birth of a wild elephant baby. A circle is formed around the mother made up of all the members of the herd who face outward to ward off danger. The leader circles around, inspecting, guarding.
Circles. Ritualistic circles. Cycles. The freedom here to watch night and day happen. To watch myself happen. The cycles that I am. I look inside myself and cannot find where I start or stop for there is motion. I think that’s good. And yet, with no ends or beginnings, there is a center in me. Me, me, me, me, me! I’m connecting that funny center in ME to all I’m perceiving outside of ME. INFINITY. INDIA. INSIDE. All these words begin with IN.
IN
CARNATION.
The barely legible script swam before Janice’s vision, and she shut her eyes to rest them. She could hear, in the stillness of the apartment, the whir of the refrigerator and felt an overwhelming despair as she contemplated the coming day. For a long time she sat unmoving, listening for some sound of Bill’s presence upstairs, but could hear nothing. She glanced down at the open diary and, with a nagging conscience, riffled through its remaining pages. There was so much left to read, so many words, so many years of wanderings and thoughts. Pausing at a page toward the end of the diary, she read:
My walnut skin turns white. An icicle hardens on the tip of my nose. I breathe out warm air, and my nose tickles as the icicle melts. Something changes. Something remains. I laugh, and in my giggle there is a roar. Do I sound cocky? That’s the thing with awareness. It just turns into greater awareness. Truth constructs truth.
Tabe Asi, Himalayas
. How that confused me when I first heard it. In Bengali, “good-bye,” but literally, “then I come.” Nothing ends. Everything evolves.
India, my friend, my lover, my teacher, I leave you. Yet, we shall always hold hands. Prana, “breath of life” as they named you, within my pulse is the melody you sang that first day. I can open my eyes and close them. It is the same thing. A sense of what I am and all that I have learned, that energy we all share, I can now embrace and set into worthy action.
Soon my physical environment will be very different. But I shall still have the height of the sun to strive for. What is necessary is to connect all daily activity to my ultimate purpose.
To know, to love, to do.
That is the potent gift of life.
And the very final entry, written in pen and in a bolder hand:
Today, I am in Dharmsala. In a week I shall be in New York. I shall trade my
kata
for a business suit, put on shoes of leather, and move in the panic of cars and subways. Ham and eggs will be my breakfast and not the
moo-moo
I have become accustomed to. After seven years, a strange and frightening prospect. Yet I leave with a mind that hopes and a heart that leaps, for soon I shall be privileged to take the final step in my quest for truth, a step so Godlike as to be granted to only saints and deities. For given the knowledge and the faith and the belief I now possess, I must set my life’s course on a trajectory that will intercept the progress of my daughter’s soul. I must discover its abode and offer myself to its service, to pray and do good works in atonement for the lacks and errors of the past.
Janice shut the diary.
Outside, the January wind whistled shrilly and knifed in through the window cracks, bringing a chill to the room and causing her to shiver.
Words kept tumbling about in her head in random bursts. Hoover’s words, repeated from close and distant corridors of memory.
… to know, to love, to do—I must intercept … my daughter’s soul.…
He had come to their door to offer himself to the service of his daughter’s soul—to pray for it and do good works for it—and they had him thrown into jail.
“Your daughter’s health is an illusion. As long as her body shelters a soul that is unprepared to accept its Karmic responsibilities of earth life, there can be no health, not for the body of Ivy or the soul of Audrey Rose. Both are in peril!”
He had warned them, fully and correctly, and they had had him locked up in a cell.
“We must form a bond … a bond that is so tight and so filled with all the love you have, and all the love that I have, that we can carefully mend her, patch her—so that Audrey Rose’s soul may be put to rest once again.…”
He had offered them the only possible solution, and they had rejected it, had him put behind bars, and were now striving to make it permanent.
“We are all part of this child. We have all had to do with the making of her, and only we can help her.…”
He was right. They were all part of her. All had to do with her making, and now only they, together, could help her.
It was the only way.
If Ivy was to live.
It was just nearing daybreak when he arrived at Foley Square. He had asked the cabdriver to let him off at Fourteenth Street and had been walking for the past hour and a half. He had stopped once briefly in one of those small, bad-smelling all-night hole-in-the-wall eateries for a cup of coffee, which he drank without sugar or cream—not his usual habit—but a necessary act of self-mortification in this, his hour of grief.