Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 4: Villages and Tribes

VILLAGES AND TRIBES

The morning of our first visit to a village, our group had many questions about the local scene. The Indian man who would translate came to the morning meditation and discussion session. Through him, we learned that the Maoist revolutionaries in his area go door to door. "Who is your exploiter?" they ask and they write down the answer. If that person's name appears a certain number of times, they then go and talk to him. "Stop doing this or that," they say. If the person won't change his behavior, they come back and kill him. It's apparently that simple. 

And in this land of class and caste warfare, the other side is just as brutal. The big land owners still often force people to work their estates. A couple of strong arm types show up in the village and say, "Time to go to work." If you say you have other things to do that day or other plans for your life, you are apt to get your arm broken or worse. For a member of a lower caste to become involved in political activity is often to risk life. Poor families have no recourse to the police, who are more often than not bought and paid for by the wealthy.

A Harijan village might attack or be attacked by a village of a different caste. Some castes have private armies. Legitimate political officials exploit these differences, as do Maoist factions that have allied themselves with dacoit, or outlaw, groups. Jesse James meets Chairman Mao.

"What is the caste of the village we will visit?" someone asked.

The village we would visit, the village from which I had heard the explosive singing my first night at the Institute, was mixed. There were milking caste people there. Goat and sheep keeping caste people. And, off by themselves at one side of the village, Harijans, “untouchables.”

Kabir and our interpreter led us across the fence and irrigation ditch bordering the Institute's property and to a footpath along the dikes between paddy fields. We wandered out in a long, straggly line, Kabir and the interpreter out ahead and Thomas and I next, with the others behind. A walk in the country. Thomas and I, impatient with the pace and seeing the village in a clump of trees ahead, went out in front.  

This insured us a good seat when Kabir led us through the muddy village of dogs and low, brick houses to the sewing room, where the twenty-some women of the project waited for us. They had spread a couple of clean, floral cotton bed spreads (Pier 1 Imports, anyone?) over our half of the floor and set three colors of marigolds in water in a shallow stainless steel bowl on the floor.

I took off my shoes and entered first. All the women moved to one side of the room and stood up. They put their hands together and namasted and we all stood very formally as the other Westerners came into the room. Again we all namasted, then sat down. To start off, because Kabir said many of the young ones like the idea of meditation, we sat in silence for a while, watching our breathing.

We began asking them questions about their lives through our interpreter. One of the brick walls was unfinished and little kids, other women and men crowded around there to watch and listen the way people in India always seem to crowd in to watch and listen.

We learned that the village of 2000 people is made up of about 200 households. Women from all three castes—Harijans, members of the milking and the sheep-keeping castes—were in the room. About 75 to 100 people in the village can read and write.

"Do you have a school here?" asked one of the Westerners.

"Gee ha! Oh, yes," came a proud chorus. Then out of the brief silence that followed this answer, from one young woman with a quick smile at the very back of the room, "But the master doesn't come."

"Does he still get paid?"

"Gee ha," came the chorus. Everybody laughed, the Westerners in confusion and disbelief, the women and the crowds of men and children nearly bursting into the room in nervous embarrassment.

There were small open spaces between some of the bricks, ventilation holes, and at some places the wall did not reach all the way to the rafters. More ventilation. Eyes peered through each of these openings, tiny fingers through some. Encouraged by the laughter in the room, little boys pushed dirt and debris through some of these holes so that it fell in our hair. When we jumped and shook the dirt off our heads, there came giggling and the sound of scampering feet from the other side of the wall—then more dirt.  Loud Al hated this, and each time they targeted him he'd jump up and yell, "Oh!  Damn! What next?!" Even the women we were trying to interview thought this funny and swayed and leaned on one another laughing each time it happened. Al, unamused, finally stood with his back against the holes in the wall. "I'll probably get a knife in the back now," he said.

Alice, the social worker with all the laundry, then began pumping the village women with questions. They liked her.

"Are you married?" they wanted to know.

She pointed to her husband, who stood apart from even those nearby in the doorway. "He is my husband," she said, and for a long moment afterwards there was silence as the women openly assessed him.

Then one woman asked what the age difference was between them. It seemed great.

"Oh, he's really just a little boy inside," joked Alice uncomfortably and everyone broke out laughing.

Bruce, however, did not smile.

"We heard," said one of the village women, "that you don't stay married. Is that true?"

About ten of us tried to answer all at once. A complicated answer. And incomprehensible.

Audrey chirped out of a British B-movie, "Do your husbands beat you?"

"Gee ha," came the answering chorus.

"What do you do about it?" Audrey demanded.

They shrugged, embarrassed. Some giggled and talked among themselves. Then the brave one with the quick smile asked, "Do your husbands beat you?"

"Yes, yes," came the chorus from the Western women. Lots of nervous laughter. "Gee ha!"

"What do you do about it?" the brave one demanded.

Audrey shook her fist, ready to storm the Winter Palace. "We beat them back!" she yelled, and the room exploded in cheers and more laughter. She shook her fists at them. "That's what you need to do! Beat them back! And then leave them! Don't stay married if they beat you!"

She had won them over. The men standing in the doorway, the exposed wife beaters, shifted nervously. They and we Western men, suspected wife beaters, were out of the conversation now. We could sit and listen to the women, but nothing we said would be picked up on, nothing we asked would be answered. Only the male interpreter could take part. Finally, even he was discarded as the village women led their Western counterparts outside to look at the sewing machine they were learning to use in order to earn and save a little money. For the moment at least, they had transcended the language barrier.

……………

As on most mornings, Kabir led the group in ten minutes of watching our breathing the next day. After our minds had stabilized, stopped wandering, or after he assumed we had begun to get an inkling of what stabilization would be like, he suggested that we visualize our family members sitting around us in the room. Mother and father on either side of us. Brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles around. Then, starting with ourselves, we were to wish that we and they were well in body and mind, happy, and free from suffering and ill will. Bodhicitta. We did this for some time, expanding out from ourselves and our family members to friends, imagining all our friends in their many situations. Then he guided us to a visualization of the strangers we see as we go about our lives. Wishing them well in body and mind.   

"Imagine, too, that the people you met in the village yesterday are also sitting around you and your family and friends."

I saw the young woman with the quick smile. The little boys throwing dirt and debris through the ventilation holes onto our heads. The sheepish men standing around watching their wives talk to these Westerners about beatings.

The strain was great. My arms and legs wanted to jitter off my torso, but I kept bringing myself back to the center and starting over again with the visualizations.

After that, he moved us on to people for whom we have an aversion, enemies, people we hate. "Take a long time," he said, but he didn't give me nearly long enough. 

Some of those people or their representatives were in the room. The English mother and son and Alice:  The privileged who might have stood for my favored New York cousins or for the Bucks County people who professed kindness but could give none to my family. My heart went out in hatred. They would destroy me if it didn't.

"Then, starting with yourself," said Kabir, "send out white lights of warmth and compassion to each. Take time. Dedicate the merits so that all other beings will be well and happy and free from suffering and ill will. And that they will find lasting peace."

My reaction? Yes, I did feel something for the sweet people we had met the previous day. And I missed my family and friends. But the exercise worked only until we got to the white light.  Either that was too fancy for my straight taste or extending the visualization was too difficult. At any rate, my mind left the meditation at that point. Why waste the effort when I knew I couldn't extend my wishes to everyone?

In the afternoon meditation, we practiced letting go of thoughts. Only watch the breath. Let everything else go. Bring your mind back to the breath. The frightened, angry little man who stands on my shoulder and screams into my ear, screamed louder.

"Meditate on death,” he yelled. “That’s powerful stuff!" Then, frightened, he shifted to charm, pretending to be a bright school boy. "When you get back to Varanasi again, meditate as you watch a burning body. You'll make a lot of progress that way."  He was off to the races. “Sit on your passport pouch. Don't mind if a crowd gathers round you, as it most probably will. Just think about death and impermanence.” Boy, can I make plans!  Or maybe a better way of saying it is "live in the future." I'm good at the past, too, but the imagined future is my favorite. The meditation got lost in the big, junk-filled house of my imagination, a house of locked doors and angry voices.

……………

No one I asked in Buddha Gaya was sure of the best way for me to do my friend Ani-la's offering. How was I to make the offering of the bazooka-sized candle or the other material she had sent along: the smaller, sawed-off candle, the rupee notes to buy bananas, apples, oranges, and rice, and the kata, or prayer scarf? I had no idea.

I'd have to do what I should probably have done in the first place: go to the Tibetan Sakya monastery, which is situated, I discovered, in back of the Harijan village near the Stupa. A monk at Sakya Centre back in Rajpur, outside Dehra Dun, had suggested that if I had any problems in Buddha Gaya that I should go and find his friend at the Sakya monastery.

"He knows everything about Buddha Gaya," the monk had told me. "Everything. You just go to him. I think he is the monk in charge now. He's my very best friend in all the world. All you have to do is go and he will explain. He knows everything. Everything!"

So one afternoon I rode my rented bicycle back the rutted dirt path through the Harijan village and walked it through the gates of the Sakya monastery. Some Indian workmen were laying brick on the second floor of a building under construction to the right. A stout monk stood watching them from the shade of a pipal tree. He turned and, without changing his expression or saying a word, watched me approach. 

 "I'm looking for the monk who is the best friend of the scripture master at Sakya Centre," I heard myself saying. I didn't know the scripture master's name either.

He frowned. "Who?"

"The scripture master at Sakya Centre. A nice man." I wanted to say a funny guy. "With long sideburns. A monk."

He shook his head and squinted. "You are looking for the scripture master?"

"No, no. The scripture master at Sakya Centre says his best friend in the world is a monk here," I tried. "Maybe the head monk."

"The head monk?"

I wasn't sure what to say. "Are you the best friend of the scripture master?"

This had gotten embarrassing.

"Lama Lekshey?"

"No. He's in charge there. I mean the monk who teaches the boys their scriptures. A funny guy. Always has a good story."

"Lama Lekshey and I are very close. We were at Sakya College together. This scripture master, he's a small monk?"

"Yes, with long sideburns, and very talkative."

He was nodding, beginning to smile as he continued to study my face. I could tell that he knew now who I meant and that even thinking of this character amused him.

"This fellow," I smiled, "has an opinion about everything. Very funny and talkative."

"Yes." His large stomach jiggled as he laughed silently.

"Really nice guy," I said. "He told me his best friend was the head monk here and that if I had questions about Buddha Gaya I should come and find him."

"The head monk?" he repeated. "That would be me. I'm here alone."

"Oh." Again, I didn't know what I should say, so I simply launched into an explanation of the problems I was having with Ani-la's offering, explaining the big candle and the little candle and the kata.

"Ah, no problem," he said when I'd finished. "I'll show you how to do it. We can do it tonight. We'll make the offering in the temple and then take the bigger of the candles around to the Diamond Throne. We'll give a little money to the guards so they don't remove the candle and then you'll go in there and tend it each day. No problem."

But there was a problem: I couldn't make the offering that night. I still had my meditation group at the Root Institute, meaning that there would be a good bit of time when I would not be able to tend the candle for Ani-la. So I put Lama Tsega, the stout monk at the Sakya monastery, off for a day or two.

"Oh, okay," he thought out loud. "Maybe that's not such a bad thing. That will give us time to talk about it before we actually do the offering."

Which sounded right to me. We agreed that I would visit the next afternoon to nail things down more firmly and to talk some more. I rode my bicycle back out through the village and up the hill to the bazaar, then through the crowds in front of the main Tibetan temple and monastery to the tent restaurants. 

I went to the Cafe Om for a bowl of mashed potatoes and a couple of fried eggs and, as I stepped into the kitchen to order, found four monks doing a puja. Tsering sat on the dirt floor chopping cabbage with a huge knife, her legs spread on either side of a heavy board.

"What's going on, Tsering?" I asked. "What's with the monks?"

"We probably go in a day or two. End of season."

I didn't want to think about Buddha Gaya without Cafe Om. "As long as you stay open," I said, "I'll keep coming twice a day to eat." 

I meant it. Though it fell short of some of the other tent restaurants, it was somehow still the best place to sit and eat. They didn't have a stereo system with Tracy Chapman and Bob Marley tapes like some of the other tents; the food was good but not always great; they didn't serve momo, which is a lot of trouble to fix.  Still, though. I liked going there.

I put in my order and went and sat down. In a little while Tsering herself brought the food out and, without saying anything, distracted and looking around the empty tent restlessly, sat down with me. There would be other places to eat after Tsering's was gone—the Madras with its South Indian dosas, the Tibetan tent place with the great steamed momo and the Bob Marley tape they put on each time they saw me walk in the door—but there would be no place where I felt so at home as the Cafe Om when Tsering, always tired and distracted and often no great conversationalist, came out and sat down with me.

 "You know this Lama Tsega at the Sakya temple?" I asked.

 "Oh, sure. Yes, yes. So what?"

 "He's a good guy, is he?"

 She watched me fish-eyed. "Oh, sure. Yes, yes." 

 "Yes, I think so," I told her, feeling a vague need to reassure her that I meant nothing disparaging by my question.        

 I had begun to like Buddha Gaya as no other place I'd been. This Lama Tsega fellow would work out, I felt sure, and everything else fit during those days. So I ate in a sort of elation, thinking that Lama Tsega and I would make Ani-la's offering at night, the best time at the temple. When I finished eating and pulled the rupee notes from my pocket, Tsering did not have proper change.

   "Stay open. You can give it to me tomorrow."

 She smiled wryly.

 I rode my bike out through the bazaar again and coasted to the gates of the Stupa, past the rows of beggars, and parked. Then I went inside to sit by the tank and watch the birds. There was still an hour of light left, and I felt as though my biggest responsibility in Buddha Gaya, Ani-la's offering, was now under control.

 The paddy birds around the tank were like old men in brown trench coats, with skinny legs and hands in pockets. But when they opened their wings and flew over the water, you saw these lovely white wings and this so graceful flight. They transformed themselves back and forth. Yes, I thought watching that and thinking about all that was beginning to happen, this is a good place to be right now.

I walked my bicycle out past the beggars and then to the top of the hill where the sellers of candles and cheap Buddha statues and shoddy nylon travel bags stood chatting with one another along the iron fence separating the bazaar from the Stupa grounds. As I stood on the left peddle of the bike and began coasting down the other side of the hill, weaving through people and around stopped rickshaws and pony tongas and just as I lifted my right leg over the seat, I had my strange sensation again. A middle-aged Tibetan man standing behind a table piled high with sweaters watched me and smiled openly, amused apparently. A rickshaw wallah in clean t-shirt torn at the shoulder squatted to attach the nozzle of a bicycle pump to the intake valve of his front tire. Pale evening sunlight through the treetops dappled the road surface my bike drifted toward. It was all unusually familiar and I knew that, at least once, I had been right there in that instant before in a dream. Not deja vu. I was not reliving the moment. Far from my mid-life troubles and close to what mattered most, I was living it, having only dreamed it before.

Lama Tsega had been playing badminton in the monastery courtyard right before I arrived. Staring intently at the two badminton racquets he held as we talked, he led me inside. At the door to his room, as he slipped out of his flip flops, he said, "You can keep yours on," looking at my Nikes.

I took them off anyhow. "That's okay," I said. "Ihave to keep in practice."

He smiled and led me into the cool room, motioning me to a chair by the desk as he himself sat on the bed. As a second thought, he opened the window behind him, which inadvertently let in a light straight at my eyes. The upper half of Lama Tsega's face became a silhouette. I squinted as we spoke.

"I'll make you tea," he said suddenly and got up. Soon he rocketed out of the room and I was left with that foolish feeling we get when we are visiting a new place and are left by ourselves. We want to be on our very best behavior anyway, but now suddenly we feel as if the absent host is watching us through a peephole or a two-way mirror. I did my best to behave while he was gone, entertaining myself by noting the Mickey and Minnie Mouse decals on the metal wardrobe, the books in English, Chinese, and Tibetan on the bookcase, and generally the order and neatness of his rather eclectic belongings. A hard shell suitcase with a Billboard decal on the top waited neatly at the end of the bed. I knew from our conversation in the courtyard that he left Buddha Gaya in the hot season. Sometimes he went to Singapore or Malaysia to raise funds. Other times he went to South India, where it was hot "but not as hot." I took in what I could, folded, unfolded, and refolded my legs, and—once, to my chagrin—heard myself speaking out loud. It was happening more and more and people were starting to notice. Traveling alone will do that to you.

Lama Tsega finally reappeared with a tall glass of milk tea and then disappeared again. I tried hard not to think silly thoughts about magical lamas giving sly tests. He came back soon enough with his own glass, put some cookies on a plate, and sat down. "Get some biscuits," he muttered as he shuffled across the room. Then with a bright smile, "These are good cookies."

"Ah, an Americanism: 'cookies,'" I shot back and he seemed to delight in calling them cookies instead of biscuits thereafter.

"You would like to do the offering in a couple of days?" he asked.

"Yes, but I need to know a little about the ceremony. I don't understand Tibetan."

No problem. He'd explain. He would read the King's Prayer, which "covers everything," and I, because I would not understand the words, would wish for my prayers and that prayer to be the same and to help all sentient beings. "This is the shortcut," he said. "Just wish for enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, that's all. Then everything will be good." It occurred to me that this was the message of all Tibetan Buddhism and that there was maybe no good reason for coming all the way to India to hear it. Somebody could have written it on the back of a postcard and sent it to me for less trouble and money. But there I was.

And Lama Tsega let me know that I would be welcome to visit him and talk about Buddhism. "We can sit out in the garden in the sun," he said. 

"I'd like that," I told him. "I've only had the most basic teaching, the Four Foundations, like that."

"Oh, the Four Foundations! Very important, especially for Westerners because you have to purify yourself to build a good foundation for the study of Buddhism. Many Westerners coming here study the Four Foundations and do 100,000 prostrations in Buddha Gaya. It takes two or three months if you are in good physical condition. It's no problem. Your body looks like it is in good enough shape."

Somehow I got the feeling that the Four Foundations he was talking about were different from the ones I meant.

"Ah," I said, "now when I say the Four Foundations, I mean the Reminders: Precious Human Birth, Death and Impermanence, Cause and Effect, and The Flaws of Samsara. That, the Six Paramitas, and watching my breath."

"Oh, yes. I see," he mused. "That's different."

But we could talk about all of that. In the meantime, I was to let him know when I was ready to do the offering and we would meet at the temple at 5:30 or so some evening and do it. I was to buy rice and fruit and walk it around the Stupa at least three times. It all sounded great to me. At last I had a guide for the offering and a teacher who wanted to take me on. A teacher at last.

"Just tell me when," he smiled.

The rest of my stay seemed set.

"But you have to remember," he added, as if reading my thoughts, "that I'm helping you with this as a friend. It's my duty, but I'm not really your teacher. We seem to like each other as friends, and that is the way we can approach it. We have some kind of karmic connection."

Ah, well. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I guess I still wasn't ready.

……………

"What is home?" asked Thomas after two-and-a-half years traveling. "I don't even know where that is anymore."

 "'Home'," I quoted from Frost, "'is where when you have to go there they have to take you in.'"

 Audrey and Thomas almost fell off their seats at the picnic table. Both looked at me with admiring eyes, and so it broke my heart to have to tell them I'd just quoted from Robert Frost. 

 Ani Susie, who was ordained with Michael and a bunch of other Westerners in Katmandu, said nothing. Neither did Dan the Englishman, another longtime traveler. But both chewed their breakfasts with care, listening and obviously ready to enter in.

 "I don't know," said Audrey, "but in the last month or so I've really been ready to go home."

"I am going home soon," said Thomas. "I want to go now. But I don't know what's going to happen because I still see home the way it was before I left and, of course, everything has changed now."

Audrey considered this. Her blonde head tilted. "Yeah. I really wonder because, like, you know. . . Has anybody else gone home?"

Dan had. "It was awful," he said.

"Ummm," said Audret. "Ahhh. Really? Like, why?"

 "For the first month or so everything is great. You really love it, but then you just get depressed. You aren't special anymore. You realize all your friends have been to the pub 5,000 times while you were off doing that many different things. And nobody cares, so you just want to leave again and go back to Asia, which is what I did."

 Ani Susie had also gone home. "I've gone home three times in the last five years," she said, "and it's been okay. But it was only for holidays. To see the new baby, that sort of thing. I didn't start looking for an apartment or a job and try to set up a new life. That would have been difficult. Oh, the first time I did start to do that. My father was sick, and we all thought that this was it, that he was going to die. So I just assumed that I had to stay and that my traveling days were over. I started looking for an apartment and a job, but he got better and I realized that I didn't have to stay, that I could leave again. I didn't have to stay. That was a big realization."

Dan mused, "I find that my only friends left at home are friends who have traveled or who are traveling."

"But how," I asked, "do you manage to keep in touch with those people?"

"I don't."     

"And why would you need to?" asked Audrey.

"It's not important," said Ani Susie. "You see them when you see them, that's all."

But how, I wondered, do you feel connected?

"Why would it be important?" asked Ani Susie. "It's not important. You see people and sit down and talk. Pick up where you left off. You keep running into each other in all your lives."

I felt a bit as if the longtime travelers thought I was whining. Were we playing Buddhist one-upmanship? Past lives? Future lives? She swallowed that stuff whole?

"One good thing to do when you get sick of being at home," said Dan as an afterthought, "is to move to a neighboring country, where you will be looked at as different and special again."

Thomas had listened closely but still said nothing.

"At home," said Audrey, "I wasn't the only blond head in a sea of dark Japanese heads. I wasn't unique at all."

"I've been away so long," said Thomas thoughtfully, "that it would be easier to keep traveling than to go home. With other travelers, strangers really, I feel as if I belong. At home, I don't know. But I have to at least try it."

He was looking at me as he spoke.

……………

In the afternoon a couple days later, we walked through the fields in a completely different direction. 

"This village," Kabir had told us, "is all Harijan. You might smell alcohol being brewed. They have some real problems there, and many of the women go to the Stupa to beg while the men get drunk."

We walked strung out single file along the mud dikes again. Eventually we stepped over some sort of drainage ditch of thick, dark muck and straggled between clay houses that seemed to rise out of the dirt yards where hairy, black and white pigs rooted untended. 

This is the village where longtime traveler Rick started a school with money he collects when he goes home to California each year. It is also the village of the Sakya monastery. Rick came along with us. As we entered the mud huts and dirt street, children ran out and took his hands, crowded around him, while the adults, skinny men in dhotis and women squatting in doorways with basins of soaking laundry, watched our progress.

"HOWW R-YOU TWO-DAY?" Rick would ask the children as they joined him.

"I AM WELL. HOWW R YOU?" they answered.

"I AMM WELLL," he answered.

Another would run up and grab hold of his hand.

"HOWW R-YOU TWO-DAY?" he'd repeat, and if the child seemed to have trouble, he'd prod, "R-YOU WELL?"

I thought this rather moronic, actually, as when he tried to engage field workers in philosophical conversation. “THEY ARE SWIM-MING IN THEE SEA OF SAMSARA.”

But when we got to the house where we would be asking questions of a group of women, another side showed itself. We sat on string beds outside the house, across a creek or sewage ditch near the Sakya monastery. A small boy came and sat next to me to watch the proceedings. There were three or four of us from the meditation course on this one bed, so when the child came he had to squeeze in between me and another person.

"How are you?" he asked me.

"I am well," I told him, expecting that this was likely going to be the extent of our conversation. I put my hand on his shoulder and he in turn took my other hand in both of his.

"From which place do you come?" he asked. My goodness, the standard Indian conversation opener.

"I am from the United States," I said.

"The United Estates?" he asked.

"Yes, the USA."

"USA." Then, pointing at my shirt, "Your shirt is green."

I nodded, smiling and surprised. Now my arm was around him and I was patting him on the back. He was about eight years old. My heart went out to him as if giving sympathy to itself.

"Your pants are white."

"Very good. Where did you learn English?"

He pointed to Rick. "The school," he said.

So not so moronic. Speaking English is an advantage, even if you'll never have the money to buy a "good" job. It gives you access to people with money. I learned that he knew his English numbers and that he indeed could make himself understood. He had studied English for almost two years now in the tent school. It was a start that might give him some hope.  

Certainly there is little hope to go around in this village. The people who met with us were friendly, but they were also hard-bitten and resigned. There were three women and the male teacher from Rick's school, but only one of the women spoke. She and the other two seemed mildly curious about us, but answered warily. 

"What do you do during the hot season?" someone asked the village women before us.

"What can we do?" answered the spokeswoman in a flat voice. Her eyes glanced over us quickly, then looked off at a tree to our left. Her manner said she couldn't quite believe our ignorance. "We eat little. We sit and we sleep."

"What do you do when there is nothing left to eat?"

"What can we do? We just sit and we sleep." Then she regained some of her polite tone and explained, "We wait for there to be work."

Someone bold asked, "What do you think you can do to make your lives better?"

When the question was translated, all three women looked at each other and laughed. One of the two women who had not spoken leaned forward and looked at us and said something. Then she leaned back and smiled sardonically. The translator didn't want to tell us what she'd said, but we insisted.

"How many hot seasons have you lived in Bodh Gaya?" she had asked.

I found after a time that I didn't want to listen to them or to my fellow dharma bums. The women thought we were funny and ignorant; the Westerners asking questions thought they would figure out the village. The little boy who had glommed onto me led me away through the village. He held onto my hand and led me first to a pond with large brown and white ducks swimming through the lotus pads and trash on its surface, then to a place where a man with a wheel made clay shingles.

The boy’s father was dead, as mine had been when I was eight. Like me, he had three sisters and two brothers. I wondered what he would do with his anger. I wondered, for both our sakes, what one could do with one's anger.