“I don’t know,” Dwight said, not replying to a question but summing up every doubt in his head.
“In India we have answers. Real answers. That is Indian strength. It is our spiritual heritage. Never ‘I don’t know.’ Always ‘I can know.’”
“I wish I did.”
“It was my late father’s lesson to me, dear man, when he set off on his journey to be holy. A lack of holiness impedes enlightenment.”
It was the voice Shah used in the boardroom when he was speaking to the wholesalers—the plastic fabricators, the rubber people, the textile men. He was the wordiest man Dwight had ever met, but he could also be blunt, with his lawyer’s love of precision. He was that way now. He was saying, “Excess of karmic particles.”
“I’m listening,” Dwight said.
“Process we call nirjara. I have mentioned this to you in connection with my late father. Cessation of passionate action.”
“I think I know what that means.”
“Also fasting.” Shah splayed his fingers and enumerated. “Eating properly. Solitude. Mortification. Meditation. Study. Atonement.” He tugged at his thumb. “Renunciation of ego.”
The list could have seemed intimidating and demanding, but because it was different from anything he’d known, and a new thought, Dwight found it restful to contemplate.
“You will see,” Shah said, pointing ahead.
The land was hillier, emptier, with mountains showing in the distance like low clouds. What farms they saw, hacked into the hillsides, were even smaller than the ones they’d passed earlier. The corrugations of newly plowed gardens lay against the slopes. Farther on, a scene of almost biblical simplicity: women drawing water at a well, one with a clay pot on her shoulder, in an orange sari, and another woman heading up a dusty path in thin sandals, a flock of goats bleating at her.
“You see? We are leaving the world behind,” Shah said. “Soon we will be in Mahabaleshwar.”
It was twilight when they got to the edge of the town. Dwight could make out more hills beyond these, and in the car’s headlights, people walking in the road, boys in white shirts, men in dhotis. He expected the car to stop now that they were in the town, but the driver kept going, past the lighted shops and into the darkness of the winding road, toward the solitude of the overhanging forest.
“Pratapgarh,” Shah said, tapping the car window. And after a few minutes, “Mahuli.”
He spoke in Hindi to the driver, who began to brake and then turned into a long driveway that rocked the car.
“We have arrived.”
No lights, no sign of a building, just a dark place on an even darker road. And when they got out of the car the air was cool and damp. All that Dwight saw was the sky thickening with night, pierced by scattered pinholes of stars.
“I can’t see anything.” Yet the shadows were perfumed with incense.
“Tomorrow you will see everything.”
Preceded by a flame, a woman appeared, holding a platter on which an oil lamp flickered. She rotated the flame under Dwight’s chin, as Indru and Padmini had done, and marked his forehead with paste.
“Welcome,” she said.
Without thinking, merely reacting to her, Dwight fell to his knees and touched her feet in a single fluid movement, and while he knelt with his head bowed, tears of gratitude and relief blurred his vision.
Shah made no sound, and yet—how was this?—Dwight could tell that the man approved, that he was delighted and proud of him.
“What did you just say?” Dwight asked as he got to his feet, hearing Shah speak to a man in a white robe who seemed to materialize behind the woman with the flaming platter.
“I told him, ‘Swamiji, this man has brought you a gift.’”
Dwight brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. “What are you talking about?”
Now the light from the trunk of the car was illuminating a tall gateway he had not seen before, yet had passed through. The driver was directing a young man to lift it—the Indian chain of command: a driver was not a carrier.
“The rice. A full ton of it.”
“I didn’t do that,” Dwight said.
“Collecting the money in America was the easy part. Buying it was simple. The hard business was shifting it. The paperwork, the supervision, the permits and signatures. So it is your gift.”
Dwight had resented his unpaid work in dealing with the rice shipment; he had even suspected Shah of fobbing off this chore onto him to keep him away from the visiting Harvard team. He now saw the design in the whole effort. He could take credit: it hadn’t been easy.
“Swamiji is thanking you,” Shah said.
“Who is he?”
“He too is a passage maker,” Shah said. The old man was still speaking. “He is inviting us to eat. But before we go in to take some food, he must ask you to give him your mobile phone.”
“Glad to get rid of it.” He rummaged in his pockets.
“All electronic devices,” Shah said.
Dwight handed over his cell phone, then his BlackBerry.
“He is asking if you have a computer.”
“Laptop’s in my briefcase.”
“Shall I put it in my safekeeping?” Shah said.
“Go ahead.”
“As you saw, I too am a passage maker.”
Dwight felt lighter, out of touch, relaxed. Nothing would ring or buzz; nothing would interrupt him. He followed the two men to the dining area, feeling happy.
They ate from clay bowls, by candlelight, in a cool clean room, seated on mats.
“Swami says again he is grateful for the rice,” Shah said. “He is asking if you are Christian.”
“I spent a lot of time in church when I was a boy,” Dwight said.
The old man and Shah spoke awhile in Hindi, and then Shah said, “He is complimenting you. He knows Jesus Christ. Jesus, who said, ‘If you want to be perfect, go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven.’”
“That’s nice,” Dwight said, feeling that he was hearing it for the first time.
“My late father did so,” Shah said.
Now the old man was speaking—a shock to hear him speaking English.
“There was something that Jesus did not say.”
“What did Jesus leave out?”
“He did not describe world of ego—fleeting world.”
“I thought he did.”
“Not at all,” the old man said.
Shah was beaming, the flames lighting his face. Dwight waited for more.
“What is the world?” The old man gestured toward the door—toward Mumbai, Dwight guessed, where his own memories were so painful. “It is almost nothing, do you not agree?”
Dwight said, “It was something to me.”
“But do you sincerely want to leave it behind?”
“Very much.”
“That will not be hard if your heart is right.”
“What is it then?” Dwight asked, and realized, hearing the reverence in his tone, that he had become a student, an initiate. He had surrendered his will, and was happy.
“It is a falling star,” the old man said. “It is a bubble in a stream. A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun. A flash of lightning in a summer cloud.”
Dwight was too moved to speak. He blinked—tears maybe, or maybe he was overcome by the perfume in the incense that thickened the air.
“A phantom in a dream,” the old man said. “Why are you rising, sir?”
Dwight did not answer. He knelt and bowed his head and touched the old man’s feet, feeling a surge of energy in his fingers that jolted his wrists and stiffened his arms.