We reach the inner fence: as far as anyone is allowed to go.
At this distance, I can really see him. His quality of nonmotion is startling. His head doesn’t move. His arms, hands, don’t move. Nothing moves. His chest does not constrict/expand with breathing. He could be dead. He could be carved from the same wood as the tree. He is thinner than in the photos; that is, his one exposed arm is thinner. Thinner but not emaciated. He still has good muscle tone. Dust is on everything. His dusty hair has grown past the tip of his nose. His hair is like a helmet. He wears a sleeveless brown garment. His hands are in one of the mudras in which the Buddha’s hands are traditionally depicted. He is absolutely beautifuclass="underline" beautiful as the central part of this crèche-like, timeless vignette, beautiful in his devotion. I feel a stab of something for him. Allegiance? Pity? Urge-to-Protect? My heart rate is going through the roof.
The gray-haired lama, off to my right, drops, does three quick prostrations: a Buddhist sign of respect, a way of reminding oneself of the illuminated nature of all beings, performed in the presence of spiritually advanced beings in whom this illuminated nature is readily apparent.
The lama begins his second prostration. Me too, I mutter, and down I go. Dropping, I think I glimpse the boy’s hand move. Is he signaling me? Does he recognize, in me, something special? Has he been, you know, kind of waiting for me? In the midst of my final prostration, I realize: His hand didn’t move, dumb ass. It was wishful thinking. It was ego, nimrod: The boy doesn’t move for seven months but can’t help but move when George arrives, since George is George and has always been George, something very George-special?
My face is flushed from the prostrations and the effort of neurotic self-flagellation.
The gray-haired lama takes off at a fast walk, circumambulating the boy clockwise on a path that runs on this side of the inner fence.
The young monk says something to Subel, who tells me it’s time to take my photo. My photo? I have a camera but don’t want to risk disturbing the boy with the digital shutter sound. Plus, I don’t know how to turn off the flash, so I will be, at close range, taking a flash photo directly into the boy’s sight line, the one thing explicitly prohibited by that sign back there.
“You have to,” Subel says. “That’s how they know you’re a journalist.”
I hold up my notebook. Maybe I could just take some notes?
“They’re simple people, man,” he says. “You have to take a photo.”
I set the camera to video mode (no flash involved), pan back and forth across the strangely beautiful Enclosure, zoom in on the boy.
It’s one thing to imagine seven months of nonmotion, but to see, in person, even ten minutes of such utter nonmotion is stunning. I think, Has he really been sitting like that since May? May? All through the London bombings, the Cairo bombings, the unmasking of Deep Throat, Katrina, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Lynndie England trial, the Bali bombing, the Kashmir earthquake, the Paris riots, the White Sox World Series victory, the NYC transit strike, through every thought and purchase and self-recrimination of the entire Christmas season?
Suddenly, the question of his not eating seems almost beside the point.
The young monk says that if we like, we may now do a circumambulation. Meaning: Time’s up.
We start off, the young monk accompanying us.
His name, he says, is Prem.
WHAT WE LEARN FROM PREM
Prem grew up with the boy; they’re distant cousins, but he characterizes them as “more friends than relatives.” They became monks at the same time, just after fourth grade. A couple of years ago, they traveled together to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, for a ten-day Buddhist ceremony being led by a renowned teacher from Dehra Dun, India. There the boy was invited to undertake a three-year retreat at this lama’s monastery.
But after one year, the boy left the monastery—fled is the verb Prem uses — with just the clothes on his back. Prem doesn’t know why. Nobody does. The boy came home briefly, vanished again, after a dream in which a god appeared to him and told him that if he didn’t leave home he would die. His distraught family found him under this tree, rarely speaking, refusing food. The family and the villagers were mortified, embarrassed, demanded he stop. He was teased, poked with sticks, tempted with food, but still refused to eat. Three months into his meditation, he called for Prem, asked him to manage the site, minimize the noise. Prem is now his main attendant, here every day from early morning until dusk.
“Who is inside the Enclosure with him at night?” I ask.
“Nobody,” Prem says.
Prem shows us an area just inside the fence where, per the boy’s request, Prem performs Buddhist rituals: a puja table, incense pots, texts.
It was just here, he tells us, that the first snake, crawling in, got stuck under the fence. The monks assisting at the time couldn’t kill it, for religious reasons, and were struggling inefficiently to free it. Finally, the boy got up from his meditation, walked over, and freed the snake. As he did so, the snake lunged up and bit him.
“What kind of snake was it?” I ask, trying to be journalistic.
“It was…a big jungle snake,” Subel translates.
“Ah,” I say.
The snakes, Prem says, were “arrows” sent by older lamas, jealous because they’d practiced all their lives and hadn’t attained this level of realization.
I ask about the boy’s meditation practice. What exactly is he doing? Does Prem know?
Prem hesitates, says something to Subel in a softer voice.
“His belief is, this boy is God,” Subel says. “God has come to earth in the form of this boy.”
I look at Prem. He looks at me. In his eyes, I see that he knows this statement sounds a little wacky. I try, with my eyes, to communicate my basic acceptance of the possibility.
We have a moment.
Does the boy ever move or adjust his posture?
Prem smiles for the first time, laughs even. The sense is: Ha, very funny, believe me, he never moves. People accuse us all the time, he says. They say, This is not a boy, it is a statue, a dummy, something carved from clay.
What was the boy like as a cousin, as a friend?
A good boy. Very sweet-hearted. Never cursed. Did not drink alcohol or eat meat.
He would always smile first, then speak.
A BRIEF CHAT WITH THE MAN
Back near the Shoe Corral, we talk with the Village Guy. He seems frazzled, overworked, cognizant of the fact that anybody with a lick of sense would suspect him and the Committee of being at the heart of any hoax, anxious to address such concerns in a straightforward way. He reminds me of one of my down-to-earth Chicago uncles, if one of my Chicago uncles suddenly found himself neglecting everything else in his life to tend to a miracle. His attitude seems to be: Why should I lie? You think I’m enjoying this? You want to take over? So far the Committee has collected approximately 445,000 rupees (about $6,500). A portion of this is used for site maintenance and the small salaries of eighteen volunteers; the rest is being held in a bank for the boy.
Something occurs to me: It’s one thing to, from afar, project a scheming, greedy group of villagers in a faraway land, but when you actually get to the land, you see that, before they were scheming, they had intact, in-place lives, lives that did not involve scheming. They were fathers, husbands, grandfathers, keepers-of-backyard-gardens, local merchants. They had reputations. For someone to risk these preexisting lives (lives which are, in this case, small, impoverished, precarious) would take a considerable level of forethought, risk, and diabolical organization. Imagine that first meeting: Okay, so what we’ll do is get a kid to pretend to be meditating and not eating, then sneak him food and water and get the word out internationally, and before long — bingo — we’ve got six grand in the bank! Everyone in agreement? Ready? Let’s go!