I had been assigned to clean-up. I hadn’t meant to come. Evening discourse is not obligatory for servers. Vipassana day means nothing to us. Walking between the rows of cushions, I was looking for him. I know where he sits now. Middle of the row towards the back. No doubt he was looking for me. Soon I would feel the pressure of his eyes and he of mine. My weak eyes. There. I can just make him out, in the blur and shuffle. All day his eyes have been asking me why I was in his room, what exactly I read in his diary. And I have a hundred questions to ask. What is Susie giving up that is so important? Why doesn’t he leave his wife, if he hates her so much? So everything has changed. There is a disturbance in the Metta Hall. It isn’t a refuge any more.
‘It’s pretty odd you staying so long at the Dasgupta,’ Rob said, during clean-up. He was sweeping the kitchen. I was wiping the work surfaces. I hadn’t talked to Rob before. He’s burly, jowly, with small, bright, protruding eyes. In his thirties. No chin. We were working silently. Perhaps he was observing an attitude of segregation. Then he came and started sweeping round my feet, so I asked him what he did, ‘in the real world. For a living?’
He stopped sweeping. ‘Clown,’ he said. He laughed. ‘No, really.’ He clowned for sick children in hospitals. He put on red noses and giant shoes, one green one yellow. ‘Cancer wards mainly,’ he said, ‘and leukaemia.’
‘God, how sad!’
‘Not as sad as you’d think. They’re always glad you’ve come. They always have a giggle.’
‘But I mean …’ I wished now I had kept the Noble Silence. ‘It’s very brave of you.’
‘Not at all.’ His smile seemed to be challenging me. There’s a quiet meatiness about him, completely different from Paul or Vikram. ‘Kids find it easier than adults,’ he said. ‘They’re more in tune with life, with their bodies.’
‘Find what easier?’
He hesitated. ‘Dying, I suppose.’
I bent down and started to drag out the saucepans and colanders from one of the lower shelves. There was quite a clatter. He leaned on his broom.
‘So what do you do, Beth?’
It was filthy at the back behind the pans. But on even days we go to meet aversions. On odd days we bless the things we like, bless them, not crave them, bless them and let them go. On even days we embrace the things that bother us, we accept them completely, even if we can’t bless them. I’ve always hated everything dirty and sticky and old, places where old shit has stuck. Places that smell.
‘You must do something,’ he said.
‘I clean shelves, n’est-ce pas?’
‘I said, “What do you do?” not “What are you doing now?”’
When I went on wiping, he told me, ‘Actually, I don’t think that shelf’s part of the regular clean-up. We never use those things.’
He went back to his sweeping, between the sinks and the bratt pan. There were peelings, rice grains. Rob is conscientious, but without the zeal Ines has. He’s a sprout, I thought. Rob’s a stout Brussels sprout.
He stopped again and said: ‘You know, it’s odd your being so long at the Dasgupta, Beth.’
I said nothing. My damp cloth went to meet the filth.
‘You’ve been here quite a while, haven’t you?’
I don’t answer this question.
‘But you’re not really a Dasgupta person. You know what I mean? Like Livia. Or Paul.’
He swept the mess into a pile.
‘You don’t have that look on your face.’
Now he began with the hand brush and dustpan.
‘Ever thought of clowning?’ he asked. ‘I reckon you’d be good. It was pretty funny how you came out with the chicken-sandwich line.’
I stood up and asked if he’d mind finishing clean-up on his own so I could hear the discourse this evening. I particularly liked the day-four discourse, I told him. There was the story of Krsa Gautami.
‘Maybe I’m more of a Dasgupta person than you think,’ I said.
I took off my apron, hurried through the female dining hall and stopped at the loos to pee. It was pure nervousness. Nothing came. When I pushed into the hall, Harper was dimming the lights. But it didn’t stop me seeing my diarist. GH hadn’t found a space against the wall. He was cross-legged, on his mat. His head was turned towards the female side, looking for me.
‘Men will always look at you, Beth. Always.’
‘But what use is it, Jonnie, if the only person I want isn’t willing to fight for me? What use is it?’
Look away. Fix your eyes on Mi Nu.
The servers never sit against the wall. We mustn’t. We sit still in our regular places as if the long, dull discourse were a normal meditation session. Straight-backed as tombstones. A little cemetery of servers in three neat rows. Dead still. Dead pure. In this way we give the new students an example. Of what? Focus, concentration, other-worldliness? Or are we showing off? Was the Buddha showing off when he sat for days under a tree? Watch how still I can sit, how long I can sit. It’s hard to stop pride creeping in. Kristin and Marcia were in their places. I stepped over my cushion and sat between them.
With the lights dimmed the video is bright. Dasgupta glows in a white suit on a plush red chair, pretty well a throne. It must have been hot when they recorded day four. Sweat trickles down his chubby cheeks. His face glistens. He pats himself with a white handkerchief. I settled myself and closed my eyes. ‘Day four is over,’ the voice began. He left a pause. Dasgupta loves pauses. ‘You have six more days to work.’ Even without looking I knew he was smiling and nodding, as he scanned the crowd.
He talked about the students’ first vipassana experience. ‘For the first three days you took refuge in the breath crossing your lips — anapana meditation. You were safe there, safe from your frenetic monkey minds, which you tethered to your breathing, safe from your bodies, which you kept in the background. But in vipassana meditation we go out to explore the full gamut of physical sensations. This is the field of paññā, the field of understanding, right understanding. This is the way to liberation. Now we use the concentration we have built up in anapana to go out and find sensation on every inch of the body, to meet experience, real physical experience, and to know it as it is. As it is. Not as we would wish it to be. As it is.
‘This is a tremendous adventure, my friends. Sometimes pleasant, of course. Sometimes we can find very pleasant, subtle, flowing sensations in our hands, our foreheads, our chests. Then immediately we grow attached to them. We don’t want to move on. Why should I move on, Mr Dasgupta, when I am feeling such pleasant sensations in my hands, like electricity, like warm water flowing over me? This is what I came to meditation for, after all, pleasant sensations. Very nice. Thank you so much, Mr Dasgupta, for your wonderful technique. It is making me so happy. No, no, nothing doing, my friends. That way you will only generate new sankharas of craving. Deep, deep sankharas that will multiply your misery. However pleasant a sensation is we must move on.