It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
—J. KRISHNAMURTI
It was two-thirty by the clock when I woke up in the semidarkness of the dormitory, the dream still vivid and present. That man was back again, as familiar as an old friend. He had been visiting my dreams for four years now and still I had no idea who he was, where he had come from, or what he wanted from me. His eyes stared right at me with an open, forthright look, and his wide lips were pressed into what might or might not have been a smile. The expression was neutral—I couldn’t say that he was happy or sad, friendly or not, but he was radiant, glowing with an intense energy. He was silent this time. He had only spoken once before, in a language I didn’t understand.
The last time he appeared I wasn’t even asleep. It was on the train just a few months earlier, when my family was moving, yet again, from Ahmadabad to Kolkata. Draw a line all the way across India at its widest and you can imagine how long a train trip that was. No kid could sleep the whole way, let alone one with my energy. I was in the top bunk, staring at the grimy ceiling and still perfectly conscious even as the metal rhythm was lulling me. Then out of nowhere, there he was. The dome of his shaved head was so vivid I could have reached out and touched the stubble. His eyes glimmered under fuzzy eyebrows that were as white as his crisp, white shirt. He wore a yellow cloth over it, fastened at one shoulder. It was all so intensely clear and bright, nothing sleepy about it at all.
I was six years old in 1985, when the dreams and visions had started. The very first time too, there was no question that I was wide awake. I was with a friend who lived in the same compound, at Evelyn Lodge, where our bungalow was. I had gone to his apartment to ask him to play and we were walking toward the cricket field when I saw what looked at first like streaks and patches of orange in the sky. Was it sunset already? That would mean it was time to go home, but it couldn’t be. We hadn’t even started playing. Then the colors resolved into shapes and their outlines became clear. Men in robes of that saffron sunset color, with shaved heads, were milling about. There was a deer and a small hut. Some of the men went into the hut and came out again. It was as vivid as if I were watching a scene from life.
“Do you see that?”
My friend followed my gaze, squinting into the sky. “See what?” He swung the bat at nothing. I pinched myself. That was what you were supposed to do if you thought you were dreaming. It made no difference. Slowly, as we continued to walk, the scene faded into the sky and disappeared. Later, when I got home, I told my parents, but they said I must have imagined it.
I worried that there was something wrong with my eyes. But I had no trouble seeing the blackboard in class, or the ball when it was my turn to bat, or the mangoes hanging in the orchard, waiting for my arrows. And if it was my mind that wasn’t right? Well, it was right enough in all other departments. My grades were excellent.
And so it was forgotten, no big deal, and the memory would have been lost in the jumbled closet of a child’s mind if I hadn’t seen the other things later. There was a place that I dreamt of again and again, but even when I was awake it appeared very clearly to my mind’s eye: A rocky peak loomed above a plain, wrapped in woods and scrub but with boulders and a cliff face exposed. I had a bird’s-eye view, but I could see no buildings, no human mark on the landscape, nothing to hint at where this place was or why it should rouse in me a lingering sweetness, a yearning. It was as perplexing as the man who kept visiting my dreams, and just as persistent. There were other people who appeared at times, some with shaved heads and some with dreadlocks, wearing different shades of yellow, orange, or red. But he was the one I saw most clearly.
I was old enough to know that dreams, however weird they might seem, are normally rooted in the workings of our own minds and that waking hallucinations are not normal. I didn’t have a theory—not even a half-baked hint—about what these intrusions in my mind might signify. They seemed to come from beyond me, beyond the world of logical sense, a genuine mystery that begged to be solved.
Now I lay there in the darkened room, listening to the random snuffles and snores of a hundred sleeping boys, and felt a mounting sense of urgency. I wasn’t going to get any closer to the answer by lying here wide awake until the morning bell. To find it, I needed to go out and search for it. After all, mysteries are how adventures begin.
It was time. I crept out of bed slowly. There was just enough shadowy light spilling over from the foyer to see by. Moving as quietly as possible, I put some clothes into a small daypack. I sat on the edge of the bed, so I didn’t have to risk the noise of pulling out the desk chair, and wrote a note to my parents. Just a few words that revealed nothing so much as a ten-year-old’s hubris—that I was leaving on a spiritual quest and didn’t know where it would take me, but they shouldn’t worry. I slid the note under the wooden lid of the desk.
I thought about stuffing the bed, but there was no point. This wasn’t a prank. The staff would know soon enough that I was gone, and it seemed that a spiritual quest ought to begin with a certain dignity. I padded through the hostel dormitory, past the many beds with boys arranged in many ways, and then down the hallway. I put my sandals on and stepped out into the night.
St. Vincent’s High and Technical School in Asansol was one of the oldest of the many schools that the Irish Christian Brothers had built in India, and the campus was vast. I kept to the shadows of the tree-lined paths, avoiding the few streetlights. By the time I had walked from the hostel to the gate, there was a hint of morning mist and the faintest wash of light in the sky. Dawn was still an hour away. I was surprised to find the gate ajar and no sign of the watchman who was usually there at all hours. No need for a story. A pedal rickshaw stood in front of the gate as if waiting for me. I climbed in and said, “Station,” as if I were any traveler on a busy day, not eager for questions or conversation. He leaned into the cycle to start and we moved through the silence of the empty streets.
I knew these streets better than most who boarded at school. My family had lived in Asansol before my father’s job took us to Ahmadabad. Although Asansol is a huge industrial hub in West Bengal, where the British first mined Indian coal that fed the nearby steel mills and railways, its heart still felt like a small and sleepy colonial town. So provincial, in fact, that my mother was the first woman to learn to drive there. I was her passenger as she practiced maneuvering the oversized Ambassador around bicycles, rickshaws, and free-roaming cows, not to mention the pedestrians who would stop in the middle of the road to stare at a woman driver.
We were halfway to the station when it occurred to me I had no money to pay for the ride, or for a train ticket. I had the idea to stop at the home of a family friend who lived on Gorai Road on the way to the station. The man I called Bhola Uncle was from a zamindar family of wealthy landholders like my own, and one of very few friends in the business world who my father trusted. As a high-level career officer in the Indian Revenue Service, my father found his social life was much constrained by the fear of corruption. That threat of sticky social ties was also the reason for the constant reposting that came with his position and moved us so often from city to city.
But Bhola Uncle never leaned on my father for favors. Though his home was palatial in scale and the relatives who shared it with him flaunted their money in other ways, it was what he himself did with his wealth that impressed me as a child. Once a week, the poor of Asansol would line up at the entrance to his family’s compound and he would sit at the gate, looking owlish in his huge glasses, and scoop rice or wheat out of sacks with a metal container, as an offering to anyone who came. He seasoned each measure of grain with a few kind words, very softly spoken, and a smile.
I asked the rickshaw wallah to wait. I crossed the lawns and gardens of the compound, past the various apartments, guesthouses, and the relatives’ mansions, and finally the big temple where I knew I would find Bhola Uncle up at this early hour, doing his morning prayers. He was surprised to see me.
“I need a hundred rupees.” It was blunt but I didn’t want to explain, just hoping that he wouldn’t ask questions, trusting that he would trust me.
“So you have some expenses?” he said, with barely an eyebrow raised. I said yes. He reached into the pocket of his kurta and handed me a note.
Years later I had the chance to ask him what he was thinking that morning—just as my parents asked him soon after, when they were desperately searching for me. He told me what he had told them: “After all the years that I’ve prayed, all the good deeds that I’ve done in good faith, if the boy has stopped here first, my money won’t lead him to trouble no matter where he is headed.” I’m sure it gave my parents no comfort at that moment, but for me his simple response of a hundred-rupee note with no questions asked was an unspoken blessing on my journey.
Asansol Station is a big junction where several lines meet and many tons of freight move through every day. Even at that hour of the morning it was coming to life. People were stirring from sleep atop piles of luggage. A smoky mist hung over the platforms, the smell of diesel and damp coal and cooking fires. There was no line at the ticket counter.
“Where to?”
I couldn’t name a city or station. I didn’t know if I was headed north, south, east, or west. But there was a train already waiting at one of the platforms nearby and something about it felt right, so I pointed. “Wherever that one goes.”
“Where to?” he insisted.
“The end of the line. Third class.”
Though it wasn’t scheduled to leave for another hour, the train was already crowded. An elderly gentleman sitting by a window caught my eye and gestured to the space next to him. I squeezed in. I wanted to avoid talking, but not be rude. Say as little as possible, let them think I was shy.
People and bags continued to find space that didn’t exist before they found it. Eventually the wheels rolled. The windows had bars but no glass—a much clearer view, I was happy to discover, than the air-conditioned compartments in which my family normally traveled. The train yards gave way to mills and cuttings, and then to fields, paddy and jute, ricks and piles flashing between the trees that lined the rails, orchards of mangoes and lychees, and village after village after village. We made long, lingering stops that seemed to last hours in small stations, and equally long, unexplained stops in the middle of nowhere. Families unpacked tiffin lunches and passed me a portion as if I were one of their own kids. When they got off at their stop and another family replaced them, more boxes were opened, more snacks were passed. I wouldn’t go hungry.
The day faded slowly and the constant wind turned chilly. I knew that in another part of the train there were sleeping cars where bunks were being spread with bedding, but here people slumped or curled where they sat. Heads rested on strangers’ shoulders. I must have dozed off many times, but it seemed like much of the night I sat up awake, watching the small clusters of amber lights that we passed, glimpses of bare bulbs in village rooms, and long stretches of darkness between.
What on earth did I imagine a spiritual quest entailed? Where did that idea come from?
My family were Hindu, from a Brahmin clan who were landed farmers, rather than priests as one might expect. By personal inclination they ran the gamut from deeply religious to deeply rational atheists of Marxist bent. There was a rhythm of rituals that persisted regardless, whether the quiet daily habits of elderly women, or ceremonies that came around a couple of times a year and lasted for a day or two, enveloping all of us in the hum of chanted mantras and the clear, rapid dinging of the bell. Flowers and fruit and flames, red kumkum and yellow turmeric. Sometimes there was a meal offered to the whole village, with the kitchen ramped up to industrial scale. A year before, I had gone through the thread ceremony that marks a Brahmin male as an adult, and a few years before that I had submitted without complaint to the Mundan ritual where my head was shaved ceremonially for the first time. I was comfortable in the world of these rituals in a way that most kids were not. I was touched by the seriousness and, though I was notoriously rambunctious at most times, I was patient in these situations, sitting still as if on the shore of another world.
The spiritual meaning of the rituals seemed secondary; they were simply what we did. I had Muslim friends whose families had different customs, celebrated different holidays. Obviously the Irish Christian Brothers who managed our education had their own faith, which they shared in careful doses designed to pass as tradition and character-building rather than proselytizing.
None of this, as I understood it then, had any bearing on why I was sitting on a train bound for an unknown destination.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by the sadhus who sometimes appeared in the village during religious festivals. I couldn’t look away from the coils of matted hair that were wound around their heads like turbans made of snakes. One squatted at a small fire, coated with ash and dust as if he were a creature made of the parched earth itself, grounded in a way that we who wore shoes and clothes could only imagine. The pale ash painted on his face made his eyes all the more piercing in contrast. They held my gaze—eyes that were as naked as the rest of him, with a vulnerability transformed into unashamed assurance. Nothing to lose. Sometimes I saw sadhus on the train, roaming the aisles. They were allowed to ride free, without tickets, passing through our world but not of it.
I remembered how I would sit up in bed at night, eyes shut tight, willing my hair to grow into snakes by the power of my mind. Unsuccessfully. I had outgrown that silliness, though I hadn’t overcome my fear of real snakes. And I was still more likely to approach a sadhu and attempt to strike up a conversation than to keep a safe distance and avoid eye contact, like most of my classmates would have done. But I didn’t set out from St. Vincent’s that night with a vision of becoming a sadhu.
The dawn spread a glow slowly across fields and orchards, and finally into the carriage. A mist rose off the damp earth, and here and there people were doing their morning business in the fields. Soon after sunrise, the passing villages each spread a bit farther until they began to blend together and concrete prevailed. We were in a dense city by the time the rhythm of the train finally slowed to a halt as the last batch of passengers rearranged themselves, gathering up bags and still-sleeping children. It was the end of the line.
I was surprised to recognize the station. Patna was the junction where we would be met by car and then drive a few hours farther to Vishnupur Titirah, the village where I was born and where we spent every summer. I had family here in Patna too. I could have gone to the pay phone. Within half an hour someone would have picked me up and the whole adventure would be over, as if I had gone in a circle and ended up where I started. But in truth that phone call didn’t enter my mind. From the moment I had stepped out the door at the hostel, I never once thought of turning back.
It was clear however that I still had farther to travel. The din and crush of Patna at rush hour did not recommend it as a likely destination for a spiritual quest. I made my way through the whirlpool of traffic that circled in front of the station, and walked right past the Hanuman temple where I normally would have clamored to stop for laddoo. The sweets were unimportant now. I found the bus terminal. Once again, I was obliged to name a destination in order to pay the fare. Once again, I pointed at a nearby outbound bus and asked for a ticket to the end of the line.
That bus never reached its last stop. The driver made a valiant effort and pushed it farther, another stop and beyond that, long after the engine had begun moaning in pain. He took it slowly, alternately coaxing and cursing the last miles, then nursing it through the final throes with heroics on the transmission. The bus died with sudden silence on a stretch of highway that ran through rice fields. They were recently planted. Green shoots poked through a mirror of water that reflected the towering clouds of the late afternoon sky.
The passengers complained. The driver insisted that another bus would arrive to pick us up; we only had to wait. But the sun was moving lower in the sky and this wasn’t a road that was safe at night. There were dacoits in the area. Passengers shouldered their bags, or balanced bundles on their heads. Many were close enough to home that they could hike the final distance. A passing Tempo stopped and left with a few more clinging to the back of the van. The bus driver smoked his last bidi and then stretched out on the back row of seats and dozed off. I climbed the ladder to the luggage rack on top of the bus and found a comfortable perch to watch the sunset. The light faded and I pulled a loose flap of tarpaulin over me to shield myself from the wind. The moon rose full, reflected in the rice fields. All night long it came and went, now bright, now dimmed behind clouds as the wind blew, and I drifted in and out of sleep.
It was still dark, with a stripe of deep sapphire low in the east, when I woke to the sound of passing cars. I grabbed my pack and hurried down the ladder in the bouncing headlight beams. A Jeep slowed down and I could see there were maybe twenty people jammed in or hanging off the back. A hand was extended. I grabbed it and squeezed between the hangers-on.
The Jeep disgorged us all at a bus station in a very small town that was not quite awake. This was indeed the end of the line. I started walking down the main street where the shops were still shuttered, the stalls boarded. I was hungry but not worried; something would show up. Within minutes, as I continued to walk, the town petered out behind me. I crossed a highway and I was on open road, fields to either side, birds loud in a dawn chorus. I walked for maybe an hour and still the sun hadn’t risen, though the sky was bright to the east, on my left, where a ridge of hills stood in the not-too-far distance. More than hills, though not quite mountains, they rose higher the farther I walked. High enough to delay the sun that was incandescent in the sky now, just behind the peaks and silhouetting them. I stopped. My breath stopped, and a shiver passed through my body. This was the place I had seen so often.
A smaller road turned off toward the hills. It led to a small roundabout and the base of a chairlift, the metal seats dangling motionless like a carnival ride abandoned in the off-season. There was not a soul in sight. A wide paved path led up the hill. I started climbing. As I did, a deep sense of the familiar came over me. This view, the stretch of valley below, the rock face and the crevices in the boulders, the very shapes of the leaves that brushed the path—all this I knew. It wasn’t just the recognition of the images I had dreamt. It was a memory of the place itself. This was my home, where I had once belonged.
And in the moment after that door of memory opened came a muddled flush of bewilderment. None of this made any sense at all. What was I doing here?