Liesl Schwabe

Ten Rupees a Kilo

Waiting for lunch one afternoon, I dragged a blue wooden bench and an uneven table out back, to eat my thali under the bright, cloudless sky. It was early February, 1999, and I was living in Bodhgaya, India, where the Buddha found enlightenment 2,500 years earlier and where I was about to find myself pregnant and alone at age twenty-three.

In the hazy middle distance sat the mountain, the one camel hump against the otherwise dusty plains dotted with coconut palms and Sal trees. The mountain was where the Buddha meditated for years before becoming the Buddha, denying himself food and sleep, as was then expected of a renunciant, until he came down to the river to bathe. A young woman named Sujata found him, weak and skeletal, and fed him milk rice. Fortified, he denounced rigid asceticism, deeming it as dangerous as the lazy luxury in which he’d lived as a prince. Discovering the necessity – and the potential – of the Middle Way, he then crossed the river to sit under the Bodhi tree a kilometer downstream from where I was then sitting behind Gautum’s restaurant in the sun.

Though the river still ran fast and high during the summer rains, in the winter, the riverbed was dry and cracked, where men squatted in the early morning to do their business. And that year, after a long time of speculation, there was a new bridge. But although orange goods carriers and red Mahindra tractors rumbled across it from time to time, there was nowhere to go, it seemed, once they crossed. No road continuing on the other side.

I was by myself that afternoon, as I almost always was during those weeks I did not yet know were the fulcrum between the first part of my life and everything that came after. But what seemed to have crystallized itself that day was a palpable, if subtle, contentment with my solitude. A contentment that, within days, I would mourn. But at the time, pinching up tufts of soggy spinach with roti, scraping sour dahi off the stainless-steel tray, I knew only that the winter fog had lifted. That the mountain was visible again.

And so, I was surprised when an agonized shriek tore through the quiet. Wheeling around on the bench, I watched as a massive, wild boar shot out from around a corner. Every part of her, from her snout to her ears to her short back legs, was thick and hairy and covered in grime. Two long rows of full, heavy teats hung along her enormous belly, flopping like a burden. Three feet at the shoulder and running for her life, she was heading toward the bridge.

A throng of farmers followed, their bare feet pounding in the dust. Dressed in knotted lungis, flat, plaid cotton tied into skirts above their knees, the men held hatchets, hoes, and rocks and hollered as they ran.

Out back of a different restaurant, two doors down, another foreigner, a middle-aged white woman, in a long purple skirt and a broad purple hat, was also startled away from her book or her lunch or the blue, paper aerogram she might have been writing. Though I hadn’t noticed her at first, then I saw her stand, blocking the sun with her palm, staring as the farmers surrounded the boar and began pelting it with rocks. I watched as she put her hands on her purple hat and started to scream, too.

*

“Death is not a single thing,” Allen Ginsberg wrote during his 1963 visit to Bodhgaya, before going on to list his physical discomforts, including scabies and pink eye. While Ginsberg might have been comforting himself, the line could also reflect his understanding of the impermanence and interdependence that form the foundation for all Buddhist thought. The yearning to better understand these truths, in the place where the Buddha himself realized them, has drawn people to Bodhgaya for the last two and a half thousand years.

And yet, during his lifetime, the Buddha barely mentioned the prospect of pilgrimage. He issued no mandates or explicit instructions. Not long before the Buddha died, though, he told his attendant that for the “faithful,” making the trip to Bodh Gaya would “arouse emotion.” But which emotion, he didn’t specify. Almost like a dare, his words seem to promise nothing and everything.

In between nothing and everything and ostensibly studying Tibetan Buddhism, I was, in the jargon of the devout, “doing my prostrations,” laying my body flat and standing back up again, one thousand times a day, or more, in the shadow of the Mahabodhi Temple. Ngondro, the traditional Tibetan preliminary practices, required taking refuge, which required 111,111 prostrations. In theory, I was going to stay in Bodhgaya until I was done. I kept count with stones, then penciled a hash mark in my notebook after every hundred. I envisioned the refuge tree to which I bowed in my mind, in the shade of the real Bodhi tree, with its fluttering heart-shaped leaves, near which I practiced, and I repeated the syllables in Tibetan, the shape of the refuge prayer by then familiar and sweet in my mouth. But despite all that bowing, the certainty with which I appeared to supplicate myself belied the real reason I remained in Bodhgaya, namely that I had no idea who or how or where else to be.

To say that the Protestant work ethic of my Ohio upbringing was so pervasive as to be atmospheric would be an understatement. As anyone who grows up enmeshed in any myth knows, it’s not just that the ideals surround, from the outside in, but also that they are embodied and internalized, personal and pointed. In my case, I grew up so fixated on the illusion of industry that I never recognized the implication of reward, of some distant future in which effort itself would be honored. I didn’t believe in god or salvation, but I was nevertheless fixated on what was to come.

I’d also grown up in the downward mobility of the Rustbelt, in Akron, where my mother and I moved twelve times before my twelfth birthday because we never had enough money to stay put. As a child, I’d always known I was an expense no one could quite afford and a logistical obstacle no one could quite solve, and yet I had no idea how much, as a young adult, every move I made, or avoided, was because I still believed myself to be a kind of general imposition. An incumbrance that I imagined could only be offset by extreme, if fictional, self-sufficiency. And for reasons I believed, at fifteen and eighteen, to be the antidote to all that upheaval rather than a continuation of it, I’d kept on moving, as frequently and as drastically as I could manage. I originally spent several months in Bodhgaya as an undergraduate, and by the time I was twenty, I’d lived on three continents and both American coasts.

To confront the Buddhist notion of the present, then, was both elusive and unsettling. I could arrive, by choice, in a different country, but I could not upend so easily my fixation on what was next. In that way, laying my body flat down on the ground, over and over again, made sense. Not only because bowing, in various forms, is a common practice across all major Buddhist traditions, but also because I was afraid. I was scared to need or to want anything. I was scared to do something wrong. I wanted to believe that I could generate kindness and gratitude because I wanted to believe I was worthy of either. Prostrating became something to do with my body when I didn’t know what to do with my life.

*

“What’s happening, Subodh?” I asked. In his late teens, with sparkly eyes and wavy hair, side-parted with pomade, Subodh worked for Gautum. He came out into the back yard twirling a dishtowel and sucking his teeth.

“Too much eating the fields,” he replied, squinting toward the thatched shack behind which the farmers had cornered the boar, blocking them from view. “Every farmer is very angry and throwing rocks.”

I thought back to Lakshmi, the female deer who had belonged to the Burmese abbot across the road. After escaping out of the gate and racing into the fields, she was stoned by famers as well. But Lakshmi was lithe. She would have been killed quickly. Wild boars, by contrast, have hide like elephants, and the coarseness of their hair seemed like armor. This pig was thick in every direction and had to have weighed more than each of the sinewy men who were killing her. From the riverbed came the flat sounds of rock hitting fat. The boar was screaming still, fully conscious.

The woman in purple, meanwhile, was sounding worse off than the pig. She sputtered and paced, her hands clenched into fists, as she wondered out loud how to pay the men off. How to keep them from doing what they were already doing. To no one in particular, she kept saying that this shouldn’t be happening, as if her distress would be enough to stop it. That was what happened, sometimes, to westerners on holiday in India, who conflated their entitlement with their money, failing to comprehend when neither mattered. She didn’t understand what Subodh had just explained to me; the pig was feral and wasn’t for sale and wasn’t going to stop eating the fields if left alive.

Scratching his belly, Shiv Ananda strolled out behind the middle of the three restaurants that sat cheek by jowl, between where I was sitting and where the other woman was stammering. One of the owners there, Shiv Ananda was tall and handsome and had a long, bushy moustache that made him look even thinner. With his faded Lux undershirt pulled halfway-up his torso, he scanned the horizon while Raj Kumar tiptoed out behind him, barefoot and anxious.

Raj Kumar was eleven that year but had been bussing tables and doing dishes since he was seven. A few nights before, I’d been kidding around with Raj Kumar, giving him a hard time for never remembering my name. “I’ll write it down for you,” I said.

“I don’t know reading and writing, Madam,” he said, looking at his hands, the giddiness we’d just shared draining from his face.

“I’ll write it in Hindi, Raj Kumar,” I said, not yet understanding. “I’ll write the sounds in Devanagari.”

“I don’t know reading and writing, Madam,” he repeated while I took too long to grasp the illiteracy he was trying to make known.

Watching Raj Kumar watch the woman in purple, I wondered what he thought, seeing such wealth and such concern collide around the fate of a big, hairy animal. Shiv Ananda smiled, not heartlessly but knowingly, and lit a cigarette with a short, white match he pushed down and away, against the box, in a single, deliberate stroke. The shrill sounds of panic and pain were coming one on top of the other. A crowd was starting to gather.

*

The American man who would become my son’s father was not my boyfriend. We’d gone to college together and had briefly, awkwardly, been involved when I was still seventeen, after we met in the financial aid line during freshman orientation. He’d grown up in SoHo, where he really did go to art galleries and read poetry and drink espresso. I was this earnest, cornfed girl from Ohio, who’d been captain of the swim team and had never read Kafka. And yet, back then, it never occurred to me that just because no one that interesting had ever been interested in me, that didn’t mean I had to like him back. For a month, he smothered with me affection and poems comparing my hair to Egyptian gods while I kept persuading myself that I loved every minute.

After that, we didn’t speak for a few years until, by chance, we both ended up spending time, separately, in India. He was studying Buddhism as well, under an older Tibetan Rinpoche, living in exile, who had a small monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas. Because we’d already failed once at romance, I’d been confident that we could inhabit the intimacy that travel required without anything getting weird. But things had been weird for months. We slept together off and on, sometimes taking separate rooms, sometimes not. Once, near his teacher’s gompa outside of Darjeeling, we’d been holding hands in the road until a few of the monks appeared from around the bend, and he dropped my hand like a hot coal. Proof, I’d assumed, that he was as ambivalent about me. When he’d left Bodhgaya a few weeks earlier, to return to his teacher in the Hills, I swept out the room we’d shared, relieved at the relief I felt to be on my own.

*

“Why don’t they cut her head off?” I asked Subodh. I had been spending a lot of time down the road at the Kalyan Chicken Center, where you picked out your chicken, still alive, from a flat basket outside and where, inside, the floor and bottom half of the walls were painted red to camouflage the mess. I knew that decapitating an animal or slitting its throat wasn’t instant death, but it seemed more benevolent, or something, than stoning.

“There is no other way to kill,” he said. Wild boars were too big. No knife was sharp enough, no blade was long enough. There would be no way to hold her down. Subodh and I looked at one another while we listened to all the noisy desperation. The pig’s frenzied need to eat, to feed her babies. The farmers’ frenzied need to kill her, in order to feed their own. Wincing, I wondered about shooting her.

Around Bodhgaya, armed bandits known as dacoits were notorious for their attacks on trains and on the houses of wealthier villagers. In the 1990s, kidnapping for ransom was both common and lucrative. The hospital in Gaya, for instance, the nearby city, had been closing at night because doctors and nurses kept getting taken hostage. But although guns existed, it was unlikely any farmer owned one, let alone had it tucked into the top of his lungi for a day in the fields.

Two years later, I was back in Bodhgaya with my son when, one night, I heard shots that I thought were firecrackers. The next morning, though, I learned that masked dacoits had forced their way into Subodh’s house, looking for jewelry, shooting and killing Subodh’s uncle, who owned a successful chai stall in the center of town. Subodh, home at the time, escaped out the back door and had come running toward Gautum’s. Seeing him that morning, I would think back to this day, to the day the pig was killed, and I would remember how sparkly his eyes had been and how vacuous they then became.

As the pig’s voice was growing thin with scratchy surrender, the woman in the purple hat wiped her nose and sipped her tea, gulping a bit at the air. Subodh went back inside the restaurant, and Shiv Ananda stayed put with his hands on his hips while Raj Kumar stood in his shadow. We were like neighbors in three adjacent backyards, each lost in our own observation of something it felt like we shouldn’t be watching but did anyhow, knowing, too, that our presence made no difference at all to the pig bleeding to death by the riverbed.

Ultimately, the doomed mama boar was only a coincidence. Not an omen or a sign. But that our fates were intertwined was undeniable. For all the ways in which, within days, I would feel as exposed and as trapped. For all the futility of her squealing. All the enormity of her belly and her teats. All her big, messy need. All the trouble she caused.

*

When the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh visited Bodhgaya, he imagined the Buddha under the Bodhi tree: “Looking deeply at the leaf, he saw clearly the presence of the sun and stars – without the sun, without light and warmth, the leaf could not exist,” he later wrote. “This was like this, because that was like that.”

Bowing up and down under the Bodhi tree, I had been unable to comprehend that same evidence of interdependence. What I understood intellectually, I did not yet feel in my heart. But that day, it was the boar who made apparent the illusion of self-sufficiency. The impossibility of being able to outrun her own needs. The deceit of a separate self at all. The boar had been too big to subsist on the garbage on which the little ones fed. She had been insatiable. In order to survive, she’d done the only thing she could. In turn, so had the farmers. Even if they thought of themselves as adversaries, as opposites, during the stoning, it was their inseparability that became apparent. This was like this, because that was like that.

Next to the tape player, Gautum kept a ledger of tabs, so no one had to make change every day. Flipping through the pages, I considered the hash marks and the passage of time, seeing who ate jam butter toast every day in December and who drank ginger chai or Nescafe with their cinnamon buns. Running my hand over my own page, I wrote down the afternoon’s thali and a fresh lime soda. Though I never thought of the ledger as anything other than a transactional record of meals consumed and rupees tallied, I saw it then for what it was: confirmation of my own dependence on the farmers who harvested the lentils and thrashed the rice. My entanglement in the pig’s death. My need, even, for her to be killed.

*

Had I been in the U.S., it’s true that I might have had a ‘choice.’ But by the time Dr. Varma tossed the syringe with which he’d drawn my blood into a cardboard box in the corner of the cement clinic, with rebar sticking out of the roof for the second story that was never built, I knew that I would not undo what was already happening. I would not ride the train to Delhi or Calcutta, and I would not fly all the way back to the U.S., only to find myself that much more alone.

Although I didn’t understand how disassociated I was, what that hovering vantage point provided instead was a kind of omniscience. As if I could sense, if not quite see, that as the butcher was slicing through the chicken’s neck and as the farmers were stoning the boar and as Raj Kumar was pumping the handle at the tube well and as other pilgrims were bowing up and down and up and down under the Bodhi tree and as, along Main Bazaar Road, the orange juice man was cranking oranges and the pomegranate juice man was cranking pomegranates and the candyfloss-wallah was spinning sugar into bright pink puffs, we were, all of us, in motion. All at once. Nothing fixed or static, even in the stillness of the sunlight.

Besides, there was no Middle Way in pregnancy, no compromise or in-between. As there has not been for most women, for most of history. The understanding of which was not resignation, nor surrender. But rather the beginning of the end of my assumption everything was a matter of working hard enough.

Instead, it would be the faith of pilgrimage that sustained me in the months and years and decades that followed. Because it was in Bodhgaya, between nothing and everything, that I began to confront and to relinquish my impulse to outrun myself, to see beyond the illusion that I’d ever been separate, either. In the villages there, older women referred to themselves as hum, meaning ‘we,’ because the first-person singular was irrelevant or implausible. And it would be my son who taught me why.

That day, though, not yet knowing of the of evidence of interdependence I carried in my own belly, I walked out of Gautam’s front doorway, believing myself to be walking away. The heat rippled off the blacktop, and along the road, women squatted under faded, black sun umbrellas, selling onions and bottle gourds as busses thundered past. In the honking of the motorbikes and the ringing of the cycle rickshaw bells, I could no longer make out the pig’s cries. At some point not long after, I heard that boar meat in the market went for ten rupees a kilo, cheap even by village standards and one-quarter the price of chicken. Death still not a single thing. Beautiful, because life wasn’t either.

Liesl Schwabe’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Words Without Borders, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and Off Assignment, among other publications and anthologies. She served as a 2018-2019 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India and currently directs the Writing Program at Yeshiva College.