After the evening discourse the students come forward to ask questions. Some of the students. The servers remain in meditation, waiting for the metta. It’s been a long day. I won’t open my eyes until he is gone, until the metta is over. A queue of students has formed, to bring their questions. The men to Mr Harper, the women to Mi Nu. Those who have questions. The others have gone. The others have stumbled exhausted to bed. Queuing, the questioners kneel. They bring their cushions to the front and kneel one by one before their teacher.
‘Every time I switch from anapana to vipassana a terrible headache explodes inside me. Is it normal?’
‘I don’t understand how there can be no self if there is reincarnation. What is it that gets reincarnated?’
‘What is paññā? Why is it so important?’
‘What can I do to keep my back straight? I keep hunching up.’
‘Why aren’t we allowed to go out of the grounds for a walk? I need to move.’
I can hear the women muttering their questions in low voices. Mostly it’s the same people every evening. There are people who ask questions and people who don’t. Perhaps they want to draw attention to themselves, like kids sucking up to Teacher. I can hear the women’s voices. Sometimes the men’s. The men are louder.
‘If there is no self, how can there be morality, how can there be punishment?’
I can’t hear Mi Nu’s replies. Sometimes I wonder if she does reply. Perhaps she just bows her head, invites them to look at her. I can hear Harper, though. He’s embarrassingly loud. You can’t help but hear. He drowns Mi Nu out.
‘What is reincarnated is the accumulated karma, the accumulated sankharas, at the moment of death. Not a self, not a personality.’
‘Morality is a natural unfolding of cause and effect. An unskilful action produces suffering as surely as a cartwheel leaves a track in the dust.’
I know the answers before he says them. The questions are always the same. The answers are taken from The Dasgupta Manual for Teachers. One of the course managers showed me. There is a manual and the leaders have to learn it by heart so that every teacher at every Dasgupta Institute all over the world can always give the same answer, the best answer, to the same questions that the students will always ask. It is hard to think of a new question, hard to say anything that might force Harper to think for himself. I wonder if my diarist will come forward and ask: Wouldn’t you like to do the discourse yourself, Mr Harper? Wouldn’t you like to become a guru yourself and the hell with Dasgupta? Suddenly I’m tempted. There seem to be a lot of students in the queue tonight. I can feel it when the queue is long. I’m tempted to open my eyes, to see if he is there.
A woman is speaking in a posh voice: ‘I start exploring my body and everything goes fine until I get to my chest and then I lose it. I can never go any further down than my chest. Something blocks me. I end up starting again and again and again, as if the rest of my body were numb.’
I strain for Mi Nu’s reply. I wonder if she also uses the answers from the manual. Her voice is low and follows a strange cadence, like a mewing, or a gurgling. Anicchaaaah. I hear the word in her weird pronunciation anicchaaaah, anicchaaaah. I’m so tempted now. What would be the sense of going to Mi Nu and asking a question that she could answer from the manual? At that point why not give us the manual to read? Why don’t they post a pdf online so you can read it before you get here? I see myself opening my eyes to try to read her lips, to see the expression on her face when she replies. I’m sure her face is full of compassion, but impassive too, in that Asian way, caring and uncaring, loving and indifferent. I see myself opening my eyes but I don’t open them. It’s strange sitting here wondering if the urge to open my eyes will overcome the order not to, the order to keep my eyes closed until all the students have gone. I sit here wondering, wondering, observing my closed eyes on the brink of opening, but still closed.
I ADORE YOUR HAZEL EYES, BETH.
I kept that text for months.
Will I open my eyes, or won’t I? Will the entity called Beth Marriot, a body made up of subatomic particles, kalapas, constantly in flux, constantly changing, open her eyes, its eyes, or won’t she, won’t it?
I don’t know.
Or will someone else open my eyes? Another Beth. The Beth who is about to be. This second. This second. This, this, this, this. A man bathes in a river every morning — discourse day five — without realizing it is actually a different river. Yesterday’s water is gone. Without realising he is a different man every time. Arising and passing away. Every atom of the body every second. Will my eyes be opened? Will they be my eyes when they are? The same eyes Jonathan adored? Perhaps my diarist is in the queue. Perhaps he isn’t. I have a pain in my back now. It is a knife stabbed between my shoulder blades. It’s not a problem. It’s nothing beside the urge to open my eyes. Why? There must be some question that lies beyond all questions. Who is it decides when my eyes open? Is that it? A question that would make her stop and think, think for herself. How can I be like you, Mi Nu? Is that it? How can my eyes be your eyes, open when yours open, close when yours close? How can I become as pure as you are, as safe as you are? How can I make time pass without passing? If I hear a question from the men’s side and I’m sure it’s him, I’ll open my eyes. Yes, I will. But why? Surely that would be just the time to keep them shut. There will be no story with GH. I’ve decided that. Anyway, how can you know it’s him if you’ve never heard his voice? For a split second I’m back in his room, the moment when his face came out from his pullover: a bony, intelligent, manly face. He’s astonished, he’s amused. What will his voice be like? I’m listening for the men’s questions over the women’s. I’m listening for the voice of the man I will have no story with.
‘What do I do if there’s a part of the body I can never feel? The top of my head, for example. I can’t find any sensation there at all. Or my ankles, or my neck.’
‘Just concentrate on the area for about a minute,’ Harper will say. ‘Don’t try to force the feeling. Don’t be impatient. Wait a minute and move on. One day the sensation will come. There is sensation on every inch of the body at every moment. It’s just that your mind isn’t sufficiently concentrated. Keep working. Be patient.’
His voice has a confiding sound, which must be completely fake when you think he’s repeating this stuff from memory.