Inside Mohammad’s Tent

SUNDAY IS FUN DAY (Special)

Thank You God!  This morning I discovered Mohammad’s Restaurant on the Main Road that rings around Bodh Gaya.  At last—a relatively warm place to sit and drink real milk coffee, not the usual watery imitation I’ve been encountering since I arrived.  At Mohammad’s the tent is made of canvas, covered in plastic, so it at least stops the wind.  And the kitchen fires send little blasts of heat out into the dining area.  When you first enter the cozy atmosphere you feel like you are melting.  I have finally un-hunched myself and straightened up for the first time in days. I can actually stand tall.  Inside Mohammad’s tent I remove my woolen hat and gloves.  Before long I peel off my outer layer of sweaters.  I’m not close to enlightenment, but I had found a kind of nirvana.

The surprise of finding a pure vegetarian Muslim-owned-and-operated restaurant full of “foreigners” in Buddha Land pleases me.  I like the diversity.  Chocolate cream pie.  Apple pie.  French fries. Banana pancakes.  Tibetan momos.  Chinese lo mien.  The menu is also diverse—and each item is startlingly inexpensive.

At 8 a.m. the place is abuzz with conversations in a variety of languages.  An international crowd of heady Buddhists very hep on practicing their Dharma, as they call being good, debate over the meaning of the Kalachakra Initiation and other related topics.

Pretty Betty hails from Hong Kong, is half Chinese and half English and an airline hostess who hopes to find an American husband who will do what she calls a “paper marriage” with her so she can settle in the U.S. and be near her guru Rinpoche who is “mostly based in California.”  Betty wants only a marriage on paper, though, “no murky stuff,” as she refers to the joys of connubial bliss.

Betty’s Tibetan-style prayer wheel is of the designer kind, made in California with “more than 80 million prayers inside it on micro-fiche,” she claims.  Spinning the prayer wheel equals saying the prayers in full yourself, apparently; and, as she puts it, “You are gaining merits for the next life.”

Another way to gain merits, according to these New Age Buddhists hanging out at Mohammad’s, is to perform prostrations—moving from stand-up positions to kneeling, to lying down on the floor and rising up again, folding the hands at the crown, the mouth, and the heart in between. It is best, they agree to wear yoga pants or workout attire when you do these spiritual stretches. These aspirants are not talking about a couple of sets of 12 or 15 prostrations; they are talking in the hundreds of thousands per year!

Four days have disappeared.  Chunks of experience deleted.  Where is it? Gone with the winds of change.

Today I meet Harold E., a self-styled shaman from Philadelphia, USA.  He says he came to Bodh Gaya because, “I just got caught up with some monks I met in south India and I traveled north with them because they were coming up here for the Kalachakra.”

Harold E., in his 40s, is about six feet nine inches tall with a white Afro and a salt and pepper beard.  He’s about the size of a Canadian mountain bear.  There’s nobody with eyes that could miss seeing him.  And Harold E. seems to like that. To make matters more conspicuous, he carries his didgeridoo—given to him in Australia, he says, by aboriginals—wherever he goes.

At Mohammad’s the didgeridoo—about five feet long—rests beside him at a table where he chats with a variety of seekers.  Does he think he got to be in Bodh Gaya for the Bodhisattwa Initiations because of good karma, one of Harold’s new fans, a 21-year-old student from New Hampshire, USA asks.

“Karma Sharma—I don’t really buy it,” Harold E. replies. “I figure I got here because I was lucky and, most importantly, I wanted to come—just for the experience.”

Yet, it will be Harold E. who’ll be playing another instrument, a large Australian conch—on the second morning of the initiations.

“The powers that be asked me to play because they saw my conch and said it was a very sacred instrument,” he said.

Then, Harold E. removed his didgeridoo from its case and began blowing ethereal dreamtime music through it.  Everyone at Mohammad’s couldn’t help but notice the performance.  Whether they wanted to or not, they listened.

Shaman Harold, who wears an African jungle theme sheet as a cape over his jeans and T shirt, told us that he had visited indigenous peoples in many parts of the world.  In fact, he has his own website that he maintains in order, “To help all native peoples who have been displaced by so-called modernity and whose innate skills and talents are often unrecognized.”

What’s more, and mysteriously, all these indigenous peoples have concurred that Harold E. is a priest—an up-lifter of the dead in spirit.  In each of their particular languages his name turns out to be the same.  For instance, to some of the Red Indians of the Americas, he is, “God of the Wind Who Comes with Thunder and Light.”  To others Harold E. is, “He of the Wind.”  The Kahunas of Hawaii call him, “He Who Heals the Healers.”  And, to the Australian aboriginals, he is simply, “Strong Breath.”  Whatever it is, when it comes to talking about his talents, Harold E. is definitely long-winded.

He gives me a demonstration of his power.  He takes my left hand and holds it between his two palms.  Then he blows his breath into the center of my palm, the one on the hand he’s just held.  Most astonishing to me, I start weeping uncontrollably. Then, after a good cry, I suddenly feel relieved of all my burdens.  The feeling of peace I experience lasts for several hours.

Does Harold E. have healing powers or was I just grateful to be touched by a man?  Whatever, his touch brought with it the lesson of my complete attachment to the world.  I want a loving relationship.  I want to be kissed.  I want to be held.  I want …. 

Yes, of course, my Guru who teaches non-attachment, the dropping of desires, and the mirage of the body-mind-complex is certainly laughing at me.  But he also teaches, “Be happy.  Don’t worry.”  So, hear in the warmth of Mohammad’s tent I am full of joy and all my worries have dissolved like the morning fog.

FIRST LOVE

(Excerpted from Chapter Five of Wild like a wolf: my holy life)

The first memory I have of my father is of him sitting up in a bed in a hospital ward with many other sick men. I am a toddler.  He asks me to do a dance for the patients.  Someone starts clapping and I am jumping around happily thinking that I am dancing.  Suddenly a patient starts to call out for help.  He is obviously in pain.  Then he screams.  Nurses run in and pull the curtains around his bed.  All the clapping is finished.  My dance is cut short.

My mother takes my hand and we leave to ride the train back home.  There are no good-byes. We pass along the Connecticut River and I look out at the bleak winter sky.  Sitting in my mother’s lap, I don’t feel the same way I did before seeing my father. At home my dancing was never cut short.  But something hidden, something to fear was there in that hospital ward, in the moans and screams of the patient, in the urgency of the nurses, something that curtains had to be pulled around so that no one could see it, something that had the power to cut short the dance.

In the second memory of him I am on tip toes straining to see over the top of the parlor window sill.  I must have heard that he was coming home from the convalescent patients’ part of the hospital because I was waiting at the window that looked out on the road in front of our house. I waited there for a long time before the tan, four-door Chevrolet sedan stopped and parked out front.  I could not see the driver, but I heard someone honk the horn.   Once.  Twice.  Twice again.

Suddenly I saw my mother running towards the car.  Her long, golden brown hair was swinging on her green V-neck sweater.  She opened the back door of the Chevrolet and stretched the top of her body forward.  After a bit of rummaging inside the car, she was standing upright again and nearly carrying what looked like a big boy.  She was supporting him as if she was a big crutch and he was leaning into her. The boy was wrapped in a white bed sheet.  His hair was very black and shiny with waves in it. I recognized the handsome face I had seen in the hospital. The man who had said, “Let me see you do a nice little dance for us.” 

As my mother helped him towards the house I could see that for the first time since I’d known her she was wearing red lipstick.   And she was crying.

Daddy was just 24 years old when I met him.  He didn’t ever read to me from books, but he told me many stories.  I loved listening to his words.  He told me that we, he and I, were Portuguese; that my mother and grandmother were Polish and that’s why we spoke Polish in the house.  He said that when he had met my mother on the steps of the Crayco Hotel in Bellows Falls, Vermont and they fell in love he was Jackie Reis, a welter-weight boxing champion who had never lost a fight.

For a few years they lived happily-ever-after. But as soon as I was born things began to change.  When I was two something horrible happened to him and he and the Angel of Death did 15 rounds together.  Nobody won. But Daddy woke up in the Bellows Falls hospital and heard the doctor whispering to the nurse, both of them standing at the foot of Daddy’s bed, “He’ll be gone before morning.” 

So, when the coast was clear, Daddy, bleeding from the rectum, as much blood as a slaughtered pig, he said, walked home, more than a mile, through the winter snow and below-freezing gusts of wind and collapsed onto the front porch.  Babcha and Blanche were at home and they both heard the thud.  It was Grace of God, Daddy said, who took him up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to Mary Hitchcock Hospital and delivered him to Emergency.  The sun was just coming up over the horizon; the icicles on the roofs hanging like crystal scalpels. 

When the anaesthesiologist put the mask over Daddy’s handsome face, he didn’t go right off to sleep.  Daddy remembered his body when it was a gleaming temple.  He said his whole life played out like a Technicolor movie in front of him. He saw my mother, her large breasts and her tiny waist. He saw his baptismal name in lights, Joaquim Charles Reis, and bits and pieces of his rubbish childhood, the fourth baby born of Theresa Almeida and Frank Reis, immigrants from San Miguel—a Portuguese island in the Azores. 

Daddy’s first job was not easy.  He had to take the punches of grown men and not fall down.  He was 11 when he learned this job from his enterprising older brothers who didn’t exactly invent it, but had been punching bags themselves for a couple of seasons. To keep from tipping over when the mill men punched him, one by one on pay-day Fridays, Daddy learned to stand with his legs wide apart, locking his ankles and his knees, then tensing his calves and thighs, and, most of all, freezing his spine. 

These rubbish kinds of childhoods were common in Fall River, Massachusetts he said where immigrants had come to work in the woollen mills, and where Frank, who looked like an exotic native Hawaiian surfer in his wedding photo, was actually a porter on a ferry boat until he died of TB or as they used to call it, “Consumption.”  After that, Theresa, became a washer woman, with seven living children, no insurance and monthly rent to pay.

So, Daddy dropped out of sixth grade and took the punches.  He became a sort of legend.  The family always had enough to eat.  This is what poor kids did.  It’s what they still do.

Daddy’s two older brothers, Scottie 13 and Joey 12, became his trainers and later his fight-career managers. They collected big money from those heavy-drinking, child-punching mill workers on pay-day Friday nights.   The Reis Boys said if anyone could punch their little brother Jackie in the stomach and make him fall over with a single whack, they would win the jackpot.  They stood outside the mills, week after week, selling their wares. One punch cost five dollars.  If no one made Daddy crumple, then the Reis Boys got to take the money home.

Daddy never crumpled then.  And he never crumpled afterwards.  He stayed hard as tombstone granite, graduating from mill-yard punches to below-the-belt punches in the New England boxing rings.  He was a welter-weight wonder, all charged up by the sound of the ringing bell and the victory taste of his mouthpiece until he met my mother and fell in love with her—until I was born.

And then, all of a sudden, his intestines exploded like bicycle tires that God-ordained night at Mary Hitchcock Hospital.  His colon and part of his ileum had to be removed.  They were like dazzling garden snakes that just went rotten and full of holes because of salt tears and sugar karma and huge, blood-curdling screams that never got let out.

Boxing boys don’t whine.  They just keep on dancing.  Or, they die.

After his intestines got thrown into the hospital trash, Daddy had to wear a bowel bag for the rest of his life on Planet Earth.  At the hospital, and later at the convalescent home where he was sent to live for centuries, Daddy learned how to change his bowel bags and how to make new ones out of clear plastic sheets, cut into handkerchief-like squares.  Each plastic sheet was clutched together with a black rubber ring about the circumference of a silver-dollar piece.

Daddy placed this apparatus over the constant wound of the artificial opening on his left side, out of which his excrement now dripped, and he strapped it securely into place with a leather belt.  He stuffed cello-cotton between the leather belt and the bowel bag, to soak up any excrement or blood that might accidentally leak outside the black rubber ring.

He didn’t go to therapy because in the nightmare time before cable TV, there was no such thing as therapists for hospital patients, at least not up in our neck of the woods, or so he said.

Nowadays the bowel bags are ready-made and very efficient. And there are psychological counselors to help the gouged-out patients to accept the madness that accompanies their losses.   But the horror, just like Daddy’s horror, is still the same.

Mostly everybody who heard Daddy’s story said how lucky he was to be alive, that he almost haemorrhaged to death and that the resident doctor at Mary Hitchcock who performed the emergency surgery that blood-soaked-white-moon night was a hero. 

Doctor Milne was just about my father’s age when the two of them entered the last-fight arena together.  It was the two of them against the marauding hordes from the Death Lands.  After 33 years of caring for my father, carving up his body, moving the artificial opening from one side to the next to preserve the tissue around it,  performing various other related surgeries, it was hard for Doctor Milne to know where his patient’s  body left off and  his own began.  You could say he shared a psychic connection between his soul and my father’s.  When they were together, they could read each other’s minds. 

When my father died at 56 and hundreds of people came to the Fenton and Hennessy Funeral Home, I remember how hard Doctor Milne cried—so unashamed, right in front of everybody. He was on the kneeler beside my father’s open casket and he was clutching Daddy’s waxy-looking hands. I could tell by the way Doctor Milne was shaking that his grief went all the way into his bones. It was obvious to me that he had lost the Jackie Reis, welter-weight champion part of himself. 

All the cockiness, all the sure-footedness, all the razzmatazz drained right out of him.  After awhile, his sobbing stopped and he got up off the kneeler and reeled out of the funeral home.  It almost looked as if he were drunk.  Whether he ever realized it or not, my father’s ghost, in silver satin boxing trunks, and maroon leather boxing gloves strutted out beside him that poison-ivy night.  Left.  Right.  Left.  The punches whopped the shadows. And the shadows jabbed back.  

After the burial, when I asked my mother why she never cried at the hospital on that last day of Daddy’s life, and why she never cried at the funeral, she said, “For me, your father died a long time ago.”

But from the very beginning moment that my daddy danced into my life and long after he danced out, I was One with him.  When he cried, I cried.  When he laughed, I laughed.   And when he beat me up with his boxer’s fists and sometimes knocked me unconscious, I didn’t hate him. In a mystery way I might have deserved it—or maybe I was redeeming our whole family, you know, like Jesus. 

To be continued….

MAKE UP - MIRROR REFLECTIONS

SUNDAY IS FUN DAY (Special)

As the train chugs onward I look into my folding makeup mirror.  Several new wrinkles have etched themselves around the corners of the eyes.  The jowl lines have deepened.  The neck skin is definitely sagging.  There’s no escaping the reflection.  It’s mine.

As I stare out the windows at the vast stretches of parched lands and the sullen faces of the people clumped near the railway tracks engaged in various forms of survival—making dung patties for their fires, gathering scraps of wood, collecting bits of rubbish, I wonder: How can anyone help but cry in an India of such desperation, an India that Gandhiji himself might never have dreamed possible?  My tears plop down onto my journal, obliterating the words.

Nothing is permanent, the Buddhists say.   If you believe in reincarnation you could imagine that these impoverished people might be rich in the next life.  If you don’t accept the: As you sow, so shall you reap directive, I guess you’ll be despondent too.

Perhaps I can pretend that nothing is real, just Maya, passing clouds.  But, in spite of the words of the sages and saints, I can only see life as it exists.  If I have a third eye, it is blind.

  As the sky darkens and the stars pop out, I remember festive New Years Eves, red satin dresses, platters full of tasty foods, bubbling champagne, kisses under the mistletoe, oh, those kisses, and an abundance of friends—ah, yes, the good life!

  Now I’m in another world. My heart is here.  My Guru is here. But have I become a better human being having settled down here for the past more than 20 years?  I don’t know.  I left everything behind in the United States, my status, my good-paying job, my well-furnished home, my gorgeous clothes, my reliable old car…my beloved and very large family…

I did this so that I could move forward on a path that I pronounced (to myself only) would lead me closer to God.  But what appears to have happened is that I got closer to my self and further away from my pre-conceived idea of God as a supernatural force separate from me.  Meanwhile, now that I am consciously merged with God, I am still far from being an ideal human being.  Does this mean that God is imperfect?  Could be.  And is this why the Tibetan Buddhists don’t use the word God when referring to Nirvana within the Ultimate Emptiness?  Could be.

In the glow of the dull train light, my spying pen moves stoically on.  Why is it that I have attained so little lasting satisfaction in my long life?  Why is it that I always have to look so deeply at things?  Why can’t I just ignore?

Nothing is permanent. The wheels of the train bogey, rolling over the tracks, are repeating the mantra. But the last images I saw as I left Pune Railway Station are imbedded in my consciousness.  After departing from Dharmavaram, Andhra Pradesh, on the Pune Express, an overnight journey, I had stopped in Pune for two nights on my way to Bodh Gaya. 

Hundreds of Osho devotees who live inside and outside of the ashram constructed by their late Guru, Bhagawan Rajneesh, a Vedanta scholar, roam through the relatively clean and westernized Pune streets.  They sit in cafes, coffee houses, and restaurants that look as if they have been lifted out of the poshest Los Angeles, Paris, or Amsterdam neighborhoods and teleported to Pune. These devotees are natives of India as well as foreigners.  They come in all shapes, sizes, age groups and colors.

 I found it a little funny that most of them dress in maroon, monk-style robes, not unlike those worn by Tibetan Buddhist lamas.  Funny, because dressed in these robes, many of the Osho ashramites smoke cigarettes, drink Kingfisher beer, and openly wrap themselves around each other in touchy-feely love holds. Some lovers stroll hand-in-hand through the ashram gardens kissing each other in full view of the passing crowds. Others slip into the many huge stands of bamboo.  One dramatic young Indian couple found a large rock on which to stage their Hindi-film-style courting capers.

Funny, because the real-life Osho disciples remind me more of the bawdy, medieval pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer than of other New-Age groupies I have met along the path of my own odd spiritual quest.  I say odd because in the beginning it was never a conscious quest I undertook.  I just kept trying to escape my own angst, rather than follow my own bliss, as the late mythologist Joseph Campbell had suggested people do.

Then, in a less-idyllic setting, about 12 kilometers from the ashram locale, there is the very old woman with a huge, maybe 50-kilo bag of rice on her head—trying to cross traffic—on congested Mahatma Gandhi Road!  Dressed in a green rag of a sari, she grabs at many people passing by her.  She is begging them to help her. They move on as if she is invisible.

I am in a rickshaw on the other side of the road divider that is about two-feet high.  I hear the old woman shout, “Baba!”  She stares at me imploringly.  I scream at the driver to stop.  He is either ignoring me, or he can’t hear me.  Horns are honking. Gears are grinding.  Engines are throbbing.  A pony pulling a cart loaded with three grown men whinnies in terror.  The old woman goes missing in a cloud of city-bus exhaust.  

I reach the railway station at 3:57 p.m.  The DBG is scheduled to leave at four.  It does.  Luckily I’m on it, but the dust of Pune has seeped into my pores.  No amount of Lakme Cleansing Milk is going to get it out.

Dalai Lama on Forgiveness

His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama has said, “Forgiveness is an essential part of a compassionate attitude, but it is a virtue that is easily misunderstood.  For a start, to forgive is not the same as to forget.”

For many years I carried around a huge burden—the hatred I felt toward the man who had sexually traumatized me when I was young.  I also carried around rage at my family for not protecting me.  Add to this, my own guilt, for being too afraid of the perpetrator to expose him.  After all, he was a highly respected individual in the community and I was a mere child.

But Dalai Lama teaches it is vital to keep in mind the distinction between the doer and the deed.  He agrees, “Sometimes this can be hard.  When we ourselves or those very close to us have been victims of terrible crimes, it can be difficult not to feel hatred toward the perpetrators of those crimes.  And yet, if we pause to think about it, we realize that distinguishing between a terrible deed and its perpetrator is actually something we do every day with regard to our own actions and our own transgressions.  In moments of anger or irritation, we may be rude to loved ones or aggressive toward others.  Later we may feel some remorse or regret, but when looking back on our outburst, we do not fail to distinguish between what we did and who we are.”

With intense therapy and a determination to rid myself of all negativity in this matter, I got the courage to file a case against my perpetrator years after his actions.  I received a settlement, most of my family was supportive, and other victims of the same man came forward.  With justice served, I forgave my abuser, my family, and myself.  

His Holiness, the Embodiment of Compassion, taught, “Given that we find it so easy to forgive ourselves, surely we can extend the same courtesy to others!  Of course not everyone is able to forgive him-or herself, and this can be an obstacle.  For such people, it may be important to practice compassion and forgiveness toward themselves, as the foundation for practicing compassion and forgiveness towards others.”

Indeed, I worked on generating compassion towards myself first. Consequently, I was freed of the related physical, mental, and emotional pain. 

As Dalai Lama had indicated. “Another truth to keep in mind is that forgiving others has an enormously liberating effect on oneself,” he said. “When you dwell on the harm someone has done to you, there is an inevitable tendency to become angry and resentful at the thought.  Yet clinging to painful memories and harboring ill will will do nothing to rectify the wrong committed and will have no positive effect on you.”

I have let go of the past. Although, I never want to forget it. Recovering from the trauma has given me a new life and an understanding of those victims and their perpetrators who have suffered and are still suffering.