Rishikesh, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, was made famous by the Beatles in 1968. Some decades later, soon after the birth of my first son, I travelled there on my own. I wish to ‘find myself’, I told my wife. Her parting words were prescient. “You can find yourself anywhere. You don’t need to travel to the mountains.” She was right indeed. But let me tell you about my trip to the mountain – a trip in every sense of the word.
On reaching Rishikesh, I walked along the Ganges until the teeming crowds thinned and then disappeared. I was alone with the sound of the gushing river and the trill of birds. A Himalayan langur, an aureole of silky white hair around its coal black face, bared its teeth at me from a tree. A primordial chill of fear surged through my spine. The mellow evening sun shone furtively through the lush foliage. I swam in the fast flowing river, soon exhausting myself. I then lay down on a flat rock, until my mind was empty of thoughts. I did not know where I was going to stay the night, but strangely, I did not care.
As I soaked up the evening sun, I noticed the ochre robes of a guru up on the mountain. His hut, built on an impossible slope, overlooked the river. On an impulse, I walked up and asked the guru if he would accommodate me for a few days.
“Have you run away from your family?” He had obviously known others who took the ascetic route out of family responsibilities.
“Yes, for a few days.” I was candid.
The guru showed me to a small room with a ringside view of the river. The cool breeze kissed the trees, carrying the fragrance of pine and Deodar cedar into my room. I spent most of the next couple of days contemplating the river, waking at dawn, and sleeping at dusk. The guru respected my preference for silence over conversation. He left me alone. One afternoon, three days later, he tapped me on the shoulder.
“I will show you a better place.’ he said. “It’s ideal for meditation.”
He took me down the mountain to a little cave on the riverbank. The only furniture inside was a rough cement platform, the size of a single mattress. We had to crawl around on our hands and knees due to the low ceiling. The guru presented me with a yellow cloth, approximately a meter wide and a few metres long. He then gave me a Rudraksh[1] seed strung on a cotton thread and asked me to wear it around my neck. Discarding my city clothes, I draped the yellow cloth around my waist. My cave was only a few feet away from the roiling river. I felt a part of it. A huge boulder in the middle interrupted its flow; water sprayed upwards painting the air with dancing rainbows. As the sun set, its golden-orange glow imbued the river with a sensuous, almost ethereal beauty.
When darkness fell, I lay down to rest. Some moonlight filtered in through the entrance. The rugged contours of the cave gradually became visible as my eyes got used to the dim light. Drifting off to sleep I felt at peace with myself and the world. I was excited by my experiments with spirituality and believed I was beginning to understand another dimension of happiness. I reflected on the eastern tradition of seeing worldly attachments as the causation of misery. The austere life appealed to me, and I was glad to be rid of my urban appurtenances.
Suddenly, there appeared, on the ceiling just above my head, a giant spider. It was almost as big as a rat – hairy legs, hairier body and twitching whiskers – a tarantula. The spider had come to carry me away to the netherworld. Why couldn’t I stay home like a normal father of a new-born? What was I doing in this bloody cave? I panicked silently without moving a hair.
Then I remembered the words of the mystic philosopher Ramana Maharshi from a book I was reading on the bus. “God is present everywhere, in animate and inanimate objects”. I looked at the tarantula armed with this piece of wisdom. Momentarily suspending my atheistic cynicism, I saw God in its hairy body. I observed the protruding rocks around it and listened to the sound of the Ganges with an intensity I did not know I possessed. It occurred to me that perhaps God permeated everything around me. I reasoned that the spider that was about to devour me, the swollen full moon that looked as if it would drop into the river, and the river itself, were all the same: manifestations of the Divine. My fear dissolved. As if on cue, the spider walked away and disappeared into the crannies of the cave.
Encouraged by the previous night’s experience, I decided to intensify my quest. I turned frugal, reducing my intake to one meal a day, comprising fruits and a few chapatis that I collected from the local temples and gurudwaras. I observed the bustle of Rishikesh with a detached calmness unperturbed by the external chaos. Walking about in town and standing in the food line with mendicants were lessons in humility. The trait of humility is fundamental to one’s spiritual salvation (I had read somewhere), just as learning the alphabet is to one’s literary development.
Dressed only in the yellow cloth, chest bare except for a solitary bead, barefooted, I became invisible to the world. Shopkeepers acknowledged my presence only when the last of their customers were served. I maintained a decorous equanimity, drawing on my spiritual reserves not to protest at such indignities. My ego took a massive blow, but in compensation, I had insight into the frailty of human interaction that was based on appearance rather than substance. I also realised that one can only transcend one’s ego by destroying it or at least, diminishing it. I began to see myself less subjectively and treated every social encounter as another tentative step towards my goal of self-discovery. I was proud of my journey and the progress I thought I was making. Thinking about it now, I was substituting one type of ego for another.
The weeks passed. Every morning I woke up at sunrise to swim in the icy water and spent most of the morning meditating under a tree on the riverbank. I spent hours sitting still and cross-legged on an elevated slab of granite. The pain in my ankles, excruciating in the beginning, gradually disappeared. There was no doubt in my mind that nirvana was imminent. The tree under which I sat, I believed, was my very own Bodhi tree. Like the Buddha, I too would soon attain moksha, liberation from the eternal cycle of birth and death. My face, I believed, reflected an inner peace. I was fast approaching the altar of wisdom, the denouement of my self-finding drama.
One evening, engrossed in deep meditation under my tree, I noticed in the periphery of my vision, a beautiful young woman. She had not seen me. Presumably thinking herself to be alone, she began removing her saree. Without warning, I lost my composure. I watched her undress, open mouthed. Naked except for an underskirt, she dived into the river and swam with languidly elegant strokes. Her long black hair floated around her. Her firm breasts glistened as the cold water formed tiny bubbles on her skin. The curves of her body, her clinging wet skirt and the chocolate brown areolas on her nipples completely vanquished my tranquillity. My exalted state of mind imploded and went on a rampage like a thousand monkeys let loose in a banana market. The yellow cloth around my waist struggled to contain my excitement. I had fallen right off the enlightenment tree and knew I could not climb back up again.
As suddenly as she had appeared, the woman vanished. I did not waste any time. Climbing down from my rock, I said goodbye to the guru and took the next bus home. In trying to find myself, I was found out. I realised then that I had a long way to go to attain enlightenment and longer still to become a responsible family man. To this day I wonder who the woman was. Was she human, or an avatar dispatched to test my spiritual fortitude?
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