Absence

I haven’t been around lately. This took me a long time to write.

Recently, I’ve had seizures.When I started having them, I decided: these are not seizures. I do not accept them. Guess what? They didn’t go away. On some level, I still find this baffling (and on another level, I find my bafflement amusing and irritating). As if the force of my will ought to be enough to make reality what I wish it were.

Look, I wanted to be healed, not inconvenienced. Healing is something I can do in the evenings. In my spare time. I will learn lessons, grow as a person, etc. etc., and apply those lessons to the life I have. I will be the same, just better. More. I will know the world, be in it, exert myself upon it. And I will be healed. I will know my worth.

All evidence to the contrary, this is what I believed. This is what I believed before. And I believed: if I believe something hard enough, it simply will be so. I didn’t believe this in any organized or coherent way. I believed it even though I knew it was silly. I marched forward toward my goals, shoving this belief before me like a snowplow. It worked. I was, in most of the way these things are measured, becoming successful.

I believed that my worth could be measured by evidence of my presence in the world. Articles. Grades. Conferences. Projects. My Klout Score. These things told me: I am here. As I’ve withdrawn from the world, as I am disconnected from my own memories, I wonder about my worth. Urban told me that once I said: I don’t feel like a real person.

My seizures are not dramatic. It’s almost like passing out or blanking out. These are called “Absence Seizures.” Seizures are one of the side effects of my Traumatic Brain Injury. Having spent the last 8 months absent from life as I know it, these interludes just take me deeper into absenteeism.

I know it sounds alarming but I am ok and we are dealing with it. I get some symptoms just prior to a seizure (metallic taste in mouth, hands & feet go numb, sounds fade in & out) so I am able to sit down or lay down before it happens. My neurologist thinks they are triggered by lack of sleep and overstimulation, which is not unusual for someone with a Traumatic Brain Injury. We have adjusted my medications so I’m sleeping regularly, and have not had any reoccurrence. If they continue, we will do more tests and consider anti-seizure medication, but we don’t think it will be necessary. I also had an EEG (and after washing my hair three times, I still have the gunk on my scalp to prove it), which showed damage to parts of the left side of my brain. It made me angry to find this out. I feel obscurely betrayed by my own brain.

source: http://iyashisource.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/WHEN-THE-BRAIN-STARTS-TO-FALL-APART.jpg

I am being careful of my safety, and only go out to see the horses or take baths and stuff when Urban is around.

Going out to visit the horses was one thing I could do on my own. It is hard to lose this small independence. It is hard to accept this reality.

All this could mean nothing in terms of my long-term recovery. I am improving overall. Most recovery from TBI happens in the first 18 months after the injury. I’m about 8 months in. As inconvenient as it is, I am healing. I’ve had some very difficult times. My life before was lived with engagement. I felt connected to the wider world. I felt influential.

I try to focus on the positive (I can read again!) and understand that the negative (I don’t remember anything I read!) will improve with time. The seizures are scary. I was pretty freaked out about it, but talking with my doctor has helped me calm down and understand that we have the ability to control them. I just have to be sure I am sleeping on a regular schedule and not overtaxing my brain.

The irony of this is not lost on me. I’ve spent my adult life staying up late in order to overtax my brain. Showing up was never enough for me, I always strived to be present: in my own life, in my relationships, in the larger world. Being present was a requirement for exerting control. I had already come a long way to understanding that my drive for control was not always a healthy thing. Having gotten that far, I learn what it’s like not to show up at all. I learn to be absent.

I try not to define my value by imagining a return to what I was (but I do anyway, see above). I have had to admit that I will not pick up where I left off. This is not an interlude. This is radical healing. My old way of living is over. Rather than thinking: someday I will be able to…whatever…again, and there will be value in that, I want to know the value of this absent life, withdrawn from the world. There is a lot going on in this silence. I perceive and experience the world, and myself (as if those are not the same), differently. Time and memory do not march in lock-step. There is no here and there in time. My narrative does not flow, it skips like a smooth rock on still water, glancing in as moments. I exert little influence. Things flow over, around, through me. Events leap out, then vanish. Unfixed. I feel sort of postmodern.

I am at the mercy of my brain. Here’s the thing: I always was. I just didn’t believe it. It didn’t inconvenience me, so I had no reason to think of it. Now I know: how ever far I traveled, however much I ever did, all life, all reality, is lived and known through my mind. Whether I show up or not. In the shallows or in the depths. There is no measurement of my value. Wherever I am: there is life. It’s all I’m worth. All I can know is my self, my ever changing self. It will be enough when I will it to be so.

Riding Home

From the gate of your mother’s house, you could swing up on a horse, clop down a few quiet streets, cross the river and then there was nothing but packed dirt roads good for a gallop, tiny temples perched on mountainsides, villagers gathering firewood and grasses, miles and miles of rice paddy. You would come around a hill and see the paddy rising in terraces from the valley floor, marching ponderously up the slopes, shrinking as they go.

These hills are as big as some mountain ranges. They are foothills only compared to the sweep of the snowpeaks that float behind them: The Himalaya. When you saw the mountains you would finally feel that the city was behind you. It’s not that you could relax: things here require your full attention.  But something in you eased, a little.

You would follow broad forest paths through the hills then take goat tracks that clung to the mountain and shed pebbles into steep drop offs as you rode by, going too fast on an unpredictable horse. You would pass through villages, and tiny old ladies would call to you from the fields. They would ask you to have chai and chapattis (flatbread) with them. You would sigh, because it meant dismounting, which meant remounting. The mare would stand steady and quiet while you held her, and walk like an angel when you took a village kid up in the saddle for a quick pony ride, but when it was time for you to mount up she basically tried to kill you. If she knocked you down, she would then trample you. You had to vault up quickly, hauling her head around to the right so she didn’t give you a bite on the ass to hurry you into the saddle. She was sinewy, tough, and quick as a snake.

You get to know the villagers. You help haul firewood, you carry packages and messages between the scattered settlements. You are given chai and admonitions. They joke and call you “Kalki didi,” after the last incarnation of Vishnu who will come to end the world, riding a pale horse. It is better than what they call you in the city.

You mount up (quickly), turn your body toward home and the horse beneath you follows and carries you at the same time. You ride her like a current. You go home in the dusk to the sound of temple bells and prayer call. Cows are coming home, plodding and lowing. 

Many years later you read a book by a woman returning to India after an absence and she describes this time of day and what haunts you is her line “the air was dust and jasmine.” Haunts, because you read her words and you feel warm dusty air and breathe in jasmine. You hear hoof beats. 

*  *  *  *  *

You have been gone for 10 years now, and these memories are even older than that. Now you come back, and there’s an airport with a glass elevator. There are luggage trolleys, a gift shop. You get in a Toyota and the driver takes a back way home because Rahul Gandhi is speaking at the Parade Ground and there are crowds. You remember when his grandmother was assassinated and there were riots and killings. You remember when his father was assassinated, too. You were in the States by then, and you remember thinking: that bloody country. You think about this as you take the back way home. You are excited to be here. You know it’s going to be different. You’re ok with that.

The roads you take are packed with vehicles: trucks, cars, putt-putts, scooters. Everything has an engine. Traffic is both lumbering and nimble. Car horns sound, not in complaint but orientation: a wolf howl, saying: I am here. I am here. You swerve and bully your way through. You parry and dodge.

The roadsides are packed with stalls and carts selling: pyramids and piles of oranges, apples, red winter carrots, potatoes, T-shirts, shoes, and everwhere everywhere plastic plastic plastic: buckets and bags and baskets and toys. There are no sidewalks and no parking lots, the traffic and the bicycle guys and the pedestrians come together with the inevitable and irresistible force of the sea meeting the land. Road verges foam like surf. Everyone is in motion but nobody gives ground. Pedestrians in jeans and dhotis, leather jackets and shawls, weave and thread through moving and parked vehicles and talk on their phones. A dog sits down and has a good scratch. Everyone goes around him, not even looking down. The dog trots off.

Behind the pedestrians and the carts are the shops. Steel shutters on cement block and plaster buildings, built to last. They are streaked and mottled with black monsoon stains. Above are apartments and homes, washing hung out to dry, kids hanging off crumbling railings. The buildings are solid, the doors and windows square and steady. Everything else: doors, curtain rods, shutters, is askew. The city is festooned with electric wires, a snarled canopy of current. A festival of lights.

Amid this are shanty tarps and tin roofs. You have no idea if the rickety shack you are looking at is a shop, a home, or both. These structures look fragile but seem to have stood for a thousand years. Here and there a massive tree survives, propping up the world.

You pass by a man squatting on the ground, his head tilted back. There is another man behind him, holding a straight razor to his throat. Only after they vanish in the dust of your wake do you figure it out: a barber, shaving a customer on the side of the road.

The road is curvier now, you take disorienting turns onto side streets with less activity and fewer crowds. It is still wall-to-wall buildings but the noise has lessened. Now and then you catch a glimpse of the hilltops: a familiar confluence of peaks catches your eye. You ask the driver what the massive cement building under construction on your left is, and he says they are building an IT park and call centers. You feel a sense of dread. The road curves left, right, left again. You look around, crane backwards, look up at the hills, look at the city surrounding you and think: no. No. It’s not. But the next curve is a sharp one to the right and you are descending towards the riverbed and then you have to acknowledge that you know where you are.

These are your dirt tracks, your goat paths. These are the fields where you helped gather grass for winter forage. There, where the IT center is rising: that was the maze of camelthorn bushes with their small, bright flowers and vicious thorns that left your calves bloody when the damn horse swerved into them. This rusty steel bridge, this is the shallow curve of the levee over the riverbed, hard packed dirt with a good sight line so it was safe to canter. 

Beyond the next curve, finally. This, here, is the straight open stretch where you could leave off the battle and let her run, full and true at a gallop, nothing between you, nothing holding you back, nothing before you but the hills. You had to remember to slow down before the next rise and look for rare but lethal trucks barreling over the hill: you could never hear them over the reverb of hoofbeats, the wind in your mount’s lungs and your own. The beating of your hearts drowned out the world. 

This is your refuge: built upon, populated, grimy. Strewn with trash. Crumbling as though it has been like this for a thousand years. As if there were never anything else here at all.

*  *  *  *  *

Some days later, you walk down to the Ganga during arti, the evening prayers to the sacred river. You have to stop at the market first, to buy offerings: little leaf-boats are piled with marigolds. A rose makes a scarlet ruffle amid the orange petals. There is a rough clay dish with a hunk of camphor to light, and two graceful incense sticks leaning out at an angle. The whole thing is about the size of a soup bowl. Although you are in a hurry, you raise the leaf-boat up to examine the construction. It is woven together by the fragile stems. Nothing more.

Priests are waving towering oil lamps at the river, and chants are broadcast on loudspeaker. There is a crowd milling around the priests and their dramatic accouterments but the verges are peaceful. Most people are carrying garlands of marigolds and roses, or little boats like yours. People spread out into clumps, then groups, then families. Some young guys strut around. The beach is rocky and the water is swift. It is not the color of any North American water you have ever seen. Not clear blue, this, but jade and opaque. You have journeyed to the source of this water, high in the Himalaya. There, it is white as milk.

You all huddle around and try to light the lumps of camphor in your flower boats. It takes some doing, what with the wind tearing down from the hills.

You take your shoes and socks off and wade in. It is cold. Offerings buck and scurry past. Rocks shift under your feet and the current urges you downriver. You stub your toe, plant your feet. You offer prayers for others, but when you light your own you don’t have anything to pray for. Everything seems ridiculous. Well, I carried it this far, you think, lowering the bright cup towards the water, so, here…just, take it. 

It is dark now. The flame of your offering mingles with the reflections of electric lights. The priests are wrapping up their ritual. For now, their voices cannot reach you. Take it away, you think again. The river rushes on, ignoring you. The river rushes on, unchanging. Because of this, you will never be the same.

 

Chai & Thanksgiving

 *You can read this as “A Hindu-American’s Thanksgiving” at The Huffington Post Religion blog. Please leave a comment if you like (or don’t like!) my article.*

A Night at the Temple

Concerts. Kirtan. Vodou ceremonies. I don’t care, as long as there’s music.

My body is caught in the current that flows over and from 18,000 people screaming along to Tool. I had a bad day, but that’s gone now. When the music starts, the music is everything. It both brings me completely into, and totally out of, myself.

50,000 people fall silent at the opening chords to The Smashing Pumpkins “Disarm.” We are sitting on a hill on Harriet Island, back when Lollapalooza was a tour. 10,000 people chant ancient hymns on the huge ghat steps leading down to the river in Varanasi. The whole city is lit by oil lamps on this sacred night. The State Theater is packed for the Black Crowes. We have balcony seats. I will talk about this night for the rest of my life, but right now, my whole world is Chris Robinson, on stage, wailing and dancing barefoot on a Persian rug. Over the course of two hours, 1400 people at the (old) Guthrie slowly lean forward more and more and more until we are all perched on the edge of our seats, breathless, as Ali Akbar Khan first caresses, then strums then totally fucking shreds on the sarod. All these experiences were distinct, but they are all the same.

Music usually raises a fierce joy, but there have been grueling times I endure only because music protects me, insulates me, wraps around me, and keeps the world out. Sometime the only thing that keeps me from being alone is a song that express what I am unable to articulate. Music lets me know that I am not the only one to feel something; it both helps me feel it more keenly and to overcome it: with music, the only way out is through. Sometimes I think that in buffering me from the reality around me, the music somehow absorbed it. So when I hear that song again, a little of that reality leaks out.

Music has always been something that frees me. At First Avenue, 200 people dance to P-Funk. George Clinton swings his multi-colored hair in a circle and yells “Are we LIVIN?” We roar back an affirmative: yes, we are livin. 100 people on a River boat chugging along the Mississippi jump up and down in unison to Michael Franti telling us to “throw your hands up high, ‘cause you never know how long you’re gonna live till you die.” The boat is shaking. 40 people crammed in an unfinished room at The New Orleans Healing Center groove to the Afro-Jazz rhythm of Kora Konnection from Senegal. There is no room to dance. A dozen people dressed in white do have room to dance around the center pole of a Vodou temple, as the drums call the Spirits. I am barefoot on the sand, under the stars, listening to music played by gypsies. We are deep in the desert of India, and I dance with my oldest friend.

Live music is best, but my everyday life has had a variable soundtrack coming from the radio, records, tapes, CDs and now our ever expanding digital collection. I love discovering new music, but I treasure the old stuff too. It can take me back to moments, places, people I have not seen in twenty years. The beat kicks in and suddenly I am there again, the memory stored in the music.

My husband and I, and most of our friends, slamdance to Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod” in the ballroom at a Marriot: he is wearing a tux, I am in my ivory silk wedding gown. We are grinning, young, drunk. I plug my headphones in and listen to Guns and Roses. Axl Rose is the only other human being who might be as pissed off as I am right now. I am in a car with my three best friends when  Prince comes on the radio. We crank it up, pull over on the freeway, and dance. We laugh like loons, and hug each other. My mom puts on a Peter Tosh record and we move to the sound of the Caribbean. Outside, the Minneapolis streets fill with snow. I must have been about six years old.

This is the story of my life. Then, now, always.

Bands I have seen live (as well as I can remember): 
Pixies, Beck, John Mooney, Smashing Pumpkins, Twilight Singers, Tori Amos, Ministry, Dead Can Dance, Flock of Seagulls, PJ Harvey, Bela Fleck, Ani DiFranco, Stanton Moore, Beastie Boys,  Sade, Black Crowes, Blink 182, Fall Out Boy, Sean Johnson and Wild Lotus, Panic! At The Disco, Gypsy Kings, The Decemberists, INXS, Beck, Billy Idol,The Killers, Liz Phair, Gypsy Kings, Modest Mouse, NIN, Roxy Music, Rage Against the Machine, They Might Be Giants, The Black Keys, Tool, Jewel, Ravi Shankar, Trombone Shorty, Jimmy Eat World, Aerosmith, Trip Shakespeare, Lenny Kravitz, Burning Spear, Alice in Chains, Ziggy Marley, The Breeders, Ali Akbar Khan, Babes in Toyland, Tracy Chapman, Michael Franti.

I would see every single one of those bands again, with the exception of Lenny Kravitz, who was so surly and wooden that he has the distinction of being the one artist who managed to make me dislike his music, which I previously liked, after seeing him live. Maybe he was having a bad day. But come on, man, you’re opening for Aerosmith. Have some humility.

Bands I hope to see:
MIA, Primus, Santigold, Lady Gaga, White Stripes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Rolling Stones, Snow Patrol, U2, Gaslight Anthem, Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, Muse, Gutter Twins, Wolfmother, Rob Zombie, Vampire Weekend, The Strokes, Ozzy, Sleigh Bells, Prince, ZZ Top, Marilyn Manson, B.B. King,  Pink, Godsmack, The Cure, Atmosphere, Black Eyed Peas, Arctic Monkeys.

Bands I wish I could have seen:
Ramones, Queen, Johnny Cash, Joy Division, GNR, Led Zep, Patsy Kline, The Clash, The Beatles, Nirvana, Bob Marley, The Doors, Peter Tosh, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix. The thought that I will never see Jimi Hendrix live in concert sometimes depresses me.

I almost didn’t go to the last show we had tickets for (Modest Mouse at the Orpheum) because I felt crappy. I have endometriosis, which results in chronic pain. I’m not in pain all the time, but when I am, I’d rather be curled up on the couch at home. But I wanted to go, so, fuck it, I went. There was a great crowd, everyone on their feet, screaming, cheering, singing along to the music. I look around at the wonderful cross-section of goateed, pierced, vintage-clothes-wearing Minnesota geekdom, and think: these are my people! At first I just stand there, sort of bouncing, listening to the show. But music comes in my ears and out my hips, so pretty soon I am swaying and grooving. Tentatively. Pelvic pain and pelvic motion do not go together. But after awhile, the music just…takes me, and I stop caring. I dance. I stop feeling anything besides the music. I stop being anything besides the music.

When the music gets going the beat comes up through the floor and pounds through the air, pulsing my sternum like another heartbeat. Everyone is moving, jumping up and down or swaying in place. I feel the life coursing through me, those around me, the universe. There is no difference. How can there be? We share a heart.

Svaha~I make this offering

*Here is another one from the archives, circa 2000.

I am not this, consumed by flame; I am not that, washed in water;
I am not that which drew air, nor am I that which walked upon the earth.
I am the earth, I am the air and I am the water.
I am the fire.
All that which is impermanent, I leave behind.
Svaha svaha, svaha, it is no more mine.

My father is dead. I watched it happen, as he performed his own funeral service on the banks of the Ganges. I have heard that Sanskrit phrase, svaha, it is no more mine, over and over again, my entire life. It is said with every offering given on the altar, into a consecrated fire or sacred river. In my family, it is said with humor and resignation, over opportunities or items lost. Our mental shrug, Oh, well, its gone.

That ceremony transformed my father, my Tata, into something else: a Swami, beyond definitions of family, gender, religion. He began a journey away from of me and mine, and sought a life of service. Swamis were not a mystery to me; I grew up with Baba, a guru who initiated me into our tradition when I was six years old. I felt lucky, even as a kid, to know him. He made a family of everyone who needed one. He made the world magical.

When I was nineteen, my dad, struggling with diabetes and a heart condition, was given a last chance by the doctors: a triple by-pass. This was back in the days when heart surgery was a thing of fear and miracles. In the voice that lulled me to sleep as a child with countless guided relaxations (oh, how I relished being able to make him yell when I was a teenager!) he told me that his life was coming to an end, one way or another. He wished to survive, but if he did, it would not be as it was. It was time. He would begin the process of transition towards Swamihood. My mother would care for him after surgery. They would live together as brother and sister for a time. They would part eventually, husband and wife no longer. Not divorce, he stressed, as though I didn’t know. He would renounce his former life, his family. Our father was leaving us for God.

It seemed natural that this was happening. When he said that he would need his children’s formal blessing, I was startled, as if he was asking our permission to stay out late. I must have talked about it with my siblings, my friends, but I have no recollection. I don’t remember feeling rejected or abandoned. It was actually kind of exciting, as if he had won The Nobel Prize or something. Tata was ours, but never only ours. We always shared him with so much, his books, his disciples and his mission. Much was shared with us in return.

Watching him chant his own funeral prayers was another thing. His familiar voice rising and falling, rising and falling as he sang the ancient hymns. I remember sitting in the mild mountain sun, catching my brother’s eye, and thinking, our father is dying.

I am grateful for the Swami who rose from that pyre, although it took awhile to sort things out. What do I call him? (settled on “Tata Swami”) How do I introduce myself? I can’t say “I’m his daughter” anymore, can I? Or can I? There were a few awkward years where no-one was sure how to behave, what was acceptable. This was new territory for all of us. I avoided him.

My relationship with Swami Veda is very different now, but that’s to be expected, I’m not a teenager anymore. I got over my joy of being able to make him raise his voice. Instead I have found pride, solace and inspiration in watching him become. My father had always been a teacher, but a Swami is something more. And he has become more to me than a father. I look forward to the few times a year that I see him, long nights when we sit up and talk. We have an ongoing debate: Are things as they always have been or does the world really change? We argue but also laugh a lot. He still loves to tell jokes, most of them based on awful and elaborate multi-lingual puns. Through Swami Veda, I have finally gotten to know my dad.

No matter what paths I walk, they are extensions of an ancient tradition. I believe the teachings of the mountain sages, teachings repeated in the Bible, Koran, Torah. Teachings spoken by priests and shamans and druids, wisdom based on experience of living: Know thyself. Let go of what limits you. Respect others. Swami Veda has brought that to countless people. He has acquired the weighty title of Maha-mandalashvar, a Swami among Swamis. He has been responsible for bringing the leaders of Buddhism and Hinduism together for the first time in twenty-three centuries, to be the first ambassador of Hinduism in China in I don’t know how long. I may only see him a few times a year, but when I am really in trouble, it’s his phone that rings in the night, where ever he is. When I sit down to meditate, it is his voice in my head…relaaax your shoulders…breathe deeply, slooowly, smoooothly. The echo of the father I let go.

I don’t think it will be so easy to let Swami Veda go, which is ironic.

Not today or tomorrow, not in the next six months, but, holy or not, he is going to die, to make that final life change. I have seen it, under the mountain sun. This time, I am afraid. When Baba died, I knew there was no-one who could replace him; but we had Swami Veda. I had Swami Veda. When he is gone, who is left? Who will be there for me?

And I find when I ask that question, I have trouble meeting my own eyes; for who is left is looking back at me. You skirt around it in your own way; for me it comes down, bluntly, to selfishness. I want mine, my life, my choices, my freedom. I wanted my father. I want the illusion of owning my life…even if I know it’s an illusion. But I am a child of our tradition; I am my father’s daughter. The voice in my head has become my own.

There is no “one” who will take over, who will be Our Father. Who will be mine.

It is exhausting to fight your own truth; I imagine it must be a great relief to finally, totally, just be yourself. I understand why traditions of self-knowledge are not so popular. Revelation can be very disruptive. Compassion is hard work. Surrender takes some getting used to. Our voices are useless if we don’t share them.

I grow tired of the bondage of mine. I know I am not this that walks, breathes, which someday will be washed and burned. I hope that I will have the strength to look at this life I have hoarded so selfishly and be able to someday say, with relief, svaha, it is no more mine. And then live it.

All Who Wander

I wrote this in bits and pieces between 1999 and 2002. Usually when I read something I wrote a long time ago, I wince. It always seems slightly foolish, poorly written and melodramatic; I have to resist the urge to rewrite it completely.

Although I think the writing holds up pretty well, this one was especially hard to read: not only was it was written during a time of particular melodrama and deep personal uncertainty, but the newborn puppies mentioned at the end are long grown, and gone.

These days I’m trying to have some compassion for my younger self, drama and all, and let her speak for herself.

* * *

I set forth into the mysterious, crumbling beast of the city just as the morning haze is dispersing under the sun. Delhi awakens: flower-sellers set out bright baskets of marigolds and roses; shawl-muffled taxi drivers huddle around small fires, steam rising from strong brewed cups of chai; diesel belching trucks careen along deserted streets. The buildings are dingy in the rising light, caked with decades of soot. There is no bustle to detract from the filth. Refuse is everywhere, the atmosphere nearly post-apocalyptic. My taxi stops at a light and I look out the window at  worshippers traipsing into a 15^th century temple with an AT&T ad painted on the side. It is all so…Indian; for a moment it looks alien, a dirty leftover country, and I have a fierce and sudden desire for the clean, predictable lines of the West.

I wonder what I am doing back here, why the tide of my heart draws me, again and again to return to the country I fought to leave for so long. I hated India when I was dragged here by my parents, and spent my years tense and snarling like a dog on too short a tether, straining for release, for home, for America. At what point did the meaning of home slide in my mind from the west to the east? The irony of it sits uneasily on me; I suspect that returning to America gave me the luxury to feel unfulfilled.

The taxi drops me at the faded sign for Lodi Gardens. Once a glittering example of Mughal decadence, the sprawling, unsafe acres are now overgrown with wild vines and towering Eucalyptus trees, their bark as white and smooth as bones. I creep along a narrow maze of trails through walls of brambles. It is just after the monsoon; nature is riotous, lush and green. I relax as the smell of city fades into the overpowering scents of jasmine and magnolia.

I have not explored these acres for nearly eighteen years, but memory leads me to a decaying pavilion standing amid scattered stones and slumped column fragments. I clamber around the ruined walls, picking my way through refuse and broken marble screens, and finally settle myself on a cool, pockmarked block of sandstone. I have a partial view of a Frangipani tree, waxy golden blossoms weighing the delicate branches nearly to the ground.

I survey my surroundings cautiously, wondering if I really have sat here before, if this view moves me with its beauty or if some chord of memory resonates, too low to be heard by my conscious mind. When we arrived in India, I was ten years old, and saw these gardens from the hotel where we passed the first hazy, crazy days. My father took us for walks in these gardens, droning about history and culture while I straggled behind in sullen confusion. The gardens were maintained then, and I had to struggle against their beauty.

The sun has climbed higher, straggling rays waver through the canopy to illuminate the journal laying open in my lap. I have not written anything. Suddenly, I become aware of the haunting notes of a bamboo flute drifting over the abandoned gardens. Startled by the sound of the mountains here in the metropolis, and relieved to be rescued from the accusing glare of blank paper, I scramble down to begin a mostly aimless search through convoluted undergrowth for the source of this melody.

I burst into a grassy expanse of a small clearing; there, squatting under the spreading limbs of a Sal tree, sits the elusive flute player – an old, wizened, saffron-clad sadhu, one of India’s wandering sages. His matted dreads hang down his back, forehead anointed with rune symbols, begging bowl at his side, bare feet look hard as cracked earth…eyes closed as he draws fantastic music into the air. I hover, fascinated and afraid of intruding.

He looks up after a moment, and regards me without surprise. “Sister,” he speaks in oddly accented Hindi, “look, I have come upon a brother who is without his family. Come and sit, that we may send him out of this life with comfort.” For the first time I notice, laying on the ground, breathing in harsh panting gulps, a half-bald, filthy stray dog. The sadhu reaches over and caresses the  animal’s sore-ridden flank. “Sit.” The old man speaks again, dark eyes snapping, “He has no family, Sister, and he is afraid.”

There is no way I am going to touch that animal. I open my mouth, but everything I consider sounds too petty, so I sink down to the dog’s side. The sadhu shuts his eyes and keeps playing. We sit as time passes around us, the music from the scarred bamboo lifts and trembles. Green parakeets wing through the trees, luminous streaks against dark foliage. I fell utterly disconnected from myself, yet painfully aware. Life ebbs slowly from the shivering dog who has somehow ended up in my lap, and as I look at him, this nameless animal of the streets, I feel a sense of vertigo. I am spinning away from myself, into myself, and I realize what this is to me, a dying dog in my arms, and I am taken, unwillingly, to memory.

* * *

Ruby was my first. First love, first death.

When we finally settled into our small town in the mountains, I began to fight bitterly with my parents over many unremembered things, but oh, I wanted a dog, needed one, as only lonely children can. My festering dislike of India had only grown with time, especially when I, the outspoken, sociable one, was unable to find much common ground with other children. My parents eventually relented, and I procured an unlikely companion: a 70 pound, military bred and trained Doberman Pinscher, the legendary Ruby Tuesday. She personified my rage: stubborn, protective and unpredictable.

We went nearly everywhere together, into the ancient hills, through the bustling bazaars. It was in the market that I often felt I had a glimpse of Ruby’s world, amid the varied and overpowering scents, I felt a kinship with her madly twitching nose.

It was not until after I had escaped India, finally, that she died of poisoned meat thrown over the wall by neighborhood thugs. I got the call from my mother in the middle of the night, waking in a cramped studio apartment next to my first lover. Like my rage, Ruby had been forgotten, buried deep. When I heard how she died, convulsing and vomiting blood, my anger overtook me and I realized how quietly things sink below the surface of life.

I had something of India taken away from me, and I wanted it back. I wanted to return to my wandering in the hills, easy in the saddle and my big, disreputable dog at my side. I wanted back eerie pine forests that filtered light into gloom, the impossible neon green of young rice paddy, and the serene sweep of the high Himalaya rising white and cool beyond the hills. As I sat sobbing on the edge of my bed in Minneapolis, I wanted, desperately, to have come home for her, just once more. The idea of her dying, waiting for me, was overwhelming. As I cried alone after my boyfriend rolled back over into irritable sleep, I realized the truth of every cliché about dogs. Ruby and I had been each other’s; in a way that only India had borne witness to, only India could understand.

I am back now. She is still gone.

The dog trembles once, spasmodically, and finishes dying.

I gingerly push the filthy carcass from my lap, thinking about fleas and communicable disease, and face the holy man’s shrewd face. He creaks to his feet and motions me to follow.

We wind our way through a corridor dressed with bold red slashes of hibiscus, talking about nonsense – Delhi traffic, crime, politics. I am in a daze and unable to contribute much. I cannot place the cadence of his speech, although it seems very familiar. I imagine he must be from some remote village with some dying dialect, perhaps raised by a family of priests, learning chants under the ancient pillared pavilion of a Banyan tree. I ask him where he from, and his native language.

He turns to me with a mischievous look, and says, in crisp, precise, unmistakably Oxford English, “I was raised to speak the Queen’s own, little sister.”

I gape. He ignores my stammered questions and explains that he was born in England, of Indian parents, educated at Oxford and practiced law. He never married, and he tells me, with an emphatic shake of dreadlocks, that every year seemed greyer than the last. He realized that he was living a life he hated. He sold everything, bought a one-way ticket to India, and has been wandering the sub-continent for the last fifteen years. The clipped accents of England emerging from this spiritual hobo totally disorients me.

“I was rich and comfortable, but ill at ease. I felt a lack without knowing what I longed for.” He speaks gently, as if to soothe a frightened animal.

I am still unable to speak, and only stare after him as he touches my head in blessing and dismissal. He moves off into the deep green shadows, empty begging bowl at his side.

* * *

It is a long time later, and halfway around the world that I find the image of the old sadhu reoccurring in my mind. Another dog is lying in my lap, breath rattling. Kalia is five, and has lived with me as long; she is in labor. Her usually sleek form is obscured with the bulk of pregnancy, her sides ripple with contractions. Her usually calm eyes are round and startled, as if she has no idea what is happening. I am exhilarated and terrified for her. It is a messy business, the bringing in of life, but with surprisingly little fuss, Kalia delivers nine wet, squirming Doberman puppies.

In a rare moment of accord, my husband and I sit next to the new family, proud as any grandparents. Urban glances over and gives me a wide, uncomplicated grin. I forgive him everything, for a moment.

So much has happened between us since I sat in the lush Indian garden, taking part in an experience that I think I have understood. We are on the brink of disaster, he and I, my mind spirals outward to the future, which has stopped being about us, and started being about me. India pulls me again, and I find myself looking at him and wondering what I am doing back here in America.

I have told Urban the tale of my strange encounter, read to him from my scarred old journal. When he looks thoughtful and says, “I understand.” I look at him with furious contempt, thinking, you couldn’t possibly.

* * *

Kalia looks very dark against the white walls of the waiting room, her attention focused completely on the plastic laundry basket full of puppies. They are three days old, blind and mostly ignorant of the world beyond their mother, who submits patiently to the prodding examination of the vet. There is something wrong with her, and I have forgotten India for the time being.

When the vet says “Lymphoma.” my hostility to Urban is also forgotten, and we reach for each other. Kalia, unconcerned, snoozes on the floor between us, nose pointed at her future.

I take her for a walk later, leaving the husband and the puppies to their own devices at home. The light has a peculiar bright cast, like deep water. Brilliant colours have bled the green from the leaves. The air feels alert with autumn. I climb around the crumbling, shabby cliffs of Minnehaha Park, slipping and scrambling against the rough, wild bark of oaks and maple. There are a few late wildflowers clinging through the season. I do not know their names. I wish Urban were here, and I long for the simple comfort of his presence.

This is our favorite place. My family used to come down here with a raucous band of neighborhood kids, chaos on the move. Urban and I have been coming here since we started going out, but this is my first walk by the creek since my return from India.

We come to the place where creek meets river. I haul myself up the twisted roots of trees, exposed by tenacious erosion and unreliable sand. The roots are over ten feet tall and look fantastic, otherworldly, as if the trees were in the process of humping themselves elsewhere. I am pleased with my perch. These trees have been here a long time, and the rate at which the sand has worn away from the roots has happily coincided with my growth. They are one structure I remember from childhood that has remained in proportion. Kalia cranes her head up and wags her stumpy tail uncertainly. When I pull out my journal, she huffs and trots off in disgust.

I have been scribbling for some time when I feel a sudden, familiar, dislocation, and look up, confused. For a moment, I swear I hear it, the deep notes of a flute, then I realize it is only my mind, memory plucking a note that resonates through me. I take a breath and look around, at this sweeping part of the world where I have lived, left, returned; at my dog, unfettered and flying across the beach; at the page open in my lap and the names of the two pups we are keeping, names chosen before we knew of Kalia’s dwindling days: Dagaz, the rune for the peak and turn of the cycle, and Asha, hope. I am drawn back to the image of an unlikely holy man, and of midwifeing a death in the garden of my childhood.

For the first time, I begin to understand.