Sarnath

I remember walking into our guest room for the first time. Today was the first that you and I had ever really spoken. We had to give an extensive explanation to the guest house owner that we weren’t married, we just had to share a room to save money and we were only here because we had to do our independent study. We felt the need to emphasize our disunion despite the proprietor’s obvious indifference. He shuffled us to our room, unlocked the padlock on the door It moaned on the hinges and clanked against the wall. My heart sank. The first thing I saw were the two beds pushed together into a corner. The mattresses were covered by a single coarse white bedsheet and nothing else. We were guided into our little room. Our eyes widened as we slowly realized we were expected to sleep directly beside one another even though we barely knew each other. But after all, this was India. Why would they think that we would sleep any differently?

We stood in the middle of our room. I unhooked my my orange backpack and lowered it to the cracked cement floor. Neither of us knew what we were supposed to do next. We were both so desperately awkward that even deciding who would take which shelves was uncomfortable. The landlord left, and we maneuvered silently around our tiny room designating our spots. We ttempted to guess where the other wanted to put their stuff without directly asking. I put my vitamins and soap in the sliding glass cabinet to one side, and you lined your folders and books on the other. I was careful not to pass the invisible division in the middle. I ended up regretting putting my vitamins in that cabinet because of the obnoxious screeching that glass made in the frame every time I had to open it.

Our easiest decision for silent designation were the fleece blankets.  They were at the foot of our bed beside our two tiny pillows. One was an amalgamation of fluorescent colors, and the other one was black plaid. I already knew which blanket I was expected to take: the colorful one. You didn’t seem very interested in bending gender norms when it came to the choice of blankets.  We should have probably layered our blankets when we slept because of how freezing Sarnath was at night, but that would have been too intimate and was against our silent agreement.

I fit my monstrous amount of clothes on the first three shelves of our the little cupboard built into the wall. I was worried I had taken too much space, but you only used one shelf and all of your clothes managed to fit into two impeccably folded piles. On our little metal desk, covered in a fuschia and white dish towel, I stacked my research books. After only a few days, you claimed that desk as your own, so I always felt I was encroaching on your territory whenever I needed to fetch any of my books.

Our bathroom connected to our bedroom by a rattly metal door that prevented us from ever using the toilet in the middle of the night. We had a western style toilet, but no toilet paper or fancy sprayer like the ones you find beside kitchen faucets in America. All the bathroom had was a silver spigot built into the wall and a small spouted plastic bucket. The combination of Western toilets and sprayers is great and buckets combined with squat toilets is fine, but there is something about a western toilet and buckets that will always be awkward.

There was a shower head poking out of the wall on the opposite side of the bathroom. Whenever we tried to turn it on, only a tiny dribble would peter out because all the holes were covered with calcium. We quickly gave up on the shower head, and for two weeks we used a big bucket and the water from the faucet to bathe. The water was freezing. Every time I took a “bucket bath,” you probably heard the splash of water and then my sputtering of “so cold, so cold.” That rickety bathroom door didn’t muffle any sound from our bedroom. There was pretty big crack between the door frame and the door, and I always felt self-conscious when you would walk past when I was bathing.

We spent the afternoon visiting all the temples in the tiny town of Sarnath, and as we walked we got more and more discouraged at how tiny and boring the it was. Sarnath is the kind of place you can easily explore in a day, but we had two full weeks. We couldn’t have a chosen a more mundane environment for our independent study. After exploring every temple very slowly, we had no choice but to return to our guesthouse, to our tiny room. We hadn’t brought anything to read other than our research books, and there was no internet. We were told the town was unsafe at night, so after sunset we could only sit and wait for time to pass. We sat for a long time in our empty room, struggling to find things to talk about. We tried to ration our conversations because we thought we would run out of good things to say.

When it was finally a reasonable hour to go to sleep, we couldn’t have been more relieved. We politely took turns in the bathroom, put on our pajamas and turned out the lights. We both lay there on our backs beside one another, keeping precisely a foot between us. Neither one of us moved for a long time. We both just stared at the dark ceiling and maintained a deafening silence. We were obviously both awake and uncomfortable with our sleeping arrangements. My mind was racing. I can only sleep on my left side, but I didn’t want to turn to face you because what if that made you uncomfortable? So I just sat and waited for you to do something and pick a direction to turn. I’m pretty sure you were waiting for me to do something too. I later found out that you could only sleep on your right side. We were just doomed to sleep facing each other. It took a long time for us to get used to sleeping like this. I remember a few days into our stay, in the bright sunshine, I mentioned I hadn’t been sleeping very well, and you admitted you couldn’t sleep either. It was the only time we ever addressed the sleeping awkwardness, but it was enough to relieve some of the discomfort.

As the days passed, we began to settle into our routine. We would wake up at 7:00 am and get ready for our day of interviews. We would try and spend as much time interviewing Buddhist pilgrims as we could because the alternative was sitting in our room and doing nothing. On the days I couldn’t find anyone to interview and I was alone, I would just stand in the middle of the room and stare at the mirror beside our little desk and look at how much I had changed since coming to India. I would measure my hair with my fingers and look at my tan.  I stood staring incredulously, unable to recognize the person staring back at me. Sometimes you would come back during one of my staring sessions, and I would run around the room trying to look occupied. Obviously, I could never find anything to use an excuse.

As time passed, you and I became better friends. We learned to depend on each other and be comfortable with our longer silences. We spent entire days at the park waiting for pilgrims to arrive. We sat on the uncomfortable benches in the blinding sun and developed our skills at picking out which pilgrims were from which country. We sometimes didn’t even have to see the pilgrims to know where they were from; we could hear them from a distance and know what country was their home. Sarnath, as a Buddhist pilgrimage site, was like an Asian embassy where thousands of people from every Asian country came together to chant around the big Stupa mound and meditate. It should have been an exciting, inspiring place, but other than interviewing the pilgrims and looking at the ruins, there was very little to do in the park. The fields of dry grass and un-labeled ruins weren’t enough to capture our imagination for two whole weeks, so we just sat and waited for time to pass. Once I got past the constant burning of boredom in my stomach I began to enjoy simply sitting beside you and bringing up whatever popped up in my head. I could share anything with you because I had nothing better to do. Having someone to vent to about the abnormality of the pilgrims and the general chaos of India made the country easier to deal with.

There was one night when we came back to our guest house and we were exhausted from interviewing so many pilgrims. We were still desperately bored. I took out my iphone, useless without internet, and opened one of the few apps that didn’t require wifi. It was called loopy and we used it to create musical looping patterns. Because we were too shy to sing around each other we went around our little room and tried to find interesting sounding objects. We made a shick-shick sound with two frail incense holders; we stood on our bed and moved the curtains back and forth against the curtain rod to make a sweeping sound; we tapped pencils on the hollow showerhead; and we slid our pens against the metal spiral of your notebook. When we listened back to our recording we heard the monotone sound of distant chanting by the Sri Lankans. We had gotten so used to hearing them that we had tuned them out.

I am convinced that had we not been stuck in the most boring place on earth, sharing the same bed, we would have never become friends. Throughout the program we never really spoke, and to be honest I avoided you because you reminded me of someone that I didn’t like. You became my only friend in the world for those two weeks, and we had to look out for each other. Sleeping beside you became a comfort and by the end of our time in Sarnath we stopped being worried about which way we faced. Sometimes I would wake up, and our knees would be gently touching. I was okay with that.  

Elephantine Eyes

Beside the Hindu monastery in Bodh Gaya, India, there is a small open-faced shack supported by worn wooden beams and topped by a corrugated metal roof. Around the shack’s perimeter, people try and look past a tall wooden fence punched with gaping holes. The curious faces attempt to catch a glimpse of the magnificent creature held within its boundaries.

Her name is Rajni, and she is the Maht’s traditional ceremonial elephant. Long before I came to India, I had learned of her presence. In preparation for my trip, I messaged a former student about her favorite activities in Bodh Gaya. She informed me about two elephants: Morti and Rajni,  male and female. I could sense her fondness of them through her writing. She mentioned a rumor that the elephants were to be married. She encouraged me to try and find out when the wedding was so that I could take advantage of that once in a lifetime experience.

Once I got to India, it took me a long time to get around to finding the elephants. I didn’t know where to start looking. Bodh Gaya isn’t very big, but it has many alleyways and side roads. I would probably have never found it by myself if it hadn’t been for a fellow student. She came back from exploring and told me that she found the elephant. My friend gave me a vague description of how to get there.  

One day, after an afternoon of running errands in town, I decided I wanted to take a different route home. I cut through the monastery grounds and followed a path along the river. It was a lovely day and the passage was lined by thousand-year-old ruins. It was nice to traverse in a space where the blaring horns of the rickshaws couldn’t joggle my brain. While making my way along the path I saw a large group of local people peeking past a fence. Curious, I strode over and tried to see past their heads. Through the small gap between the slats, I saw an elephant standing very still, looking out towards the river. Two local children ambled up behind me and asked  if I wanted to see her up close. I excitedly agreed. They led me on a short dirt path around the side of the fence and past a crooked gate. The children herded me until I was right beside her massive head, shaded by the sun thanks to the shack. She was beautiful. As an Indian elephant she was smaller than any elephant I had grown up seeing. Her skin was wrinkled like a tree trunk and gray like dried mud. Coarse hair stippled across her body. She was two times taller than me.

She wasn’t in the best shape. Over her left leg she had a sore the size of a saucer. Someone had painted a pink and yellow flower in chalk around it, perhaps to ritually heal it. If anything the flower only drew attention to it. It was bright red and swollen. She had thick chains wrapped around each of her legs so she wasn’t allowed to move very far. Four chains connected to a point and attached to the wall behind her. There were old scars circling her legs from when she tried to fight the chains long ago. Now, having lived so long in captivity, all she could do was look out towards the river. She was resigned to her fate. I could feel her withdrawal when I looked in her ochre eyes.

The caretaker, a lanky middle aged man with a white turban wrapped around his head, hovered around the elephant. I began asking him questions, but he only spoke Hindi. How old was she? How long had she been here? What was her name? Where did she come from? The little boys, understanding that I didn’t speak Hindi, began to translate my questions for me. Rajni was thirty-five, still quite young for an elephant and she arrived in Bodh Gaya the summer before. I asked why she had come, and the caretaker didn’t have an answer. I remembered Morti, the other elephant, and wondered where he was. Was he nearby in a similar shack that I had missed? Why was Rajni all alone?

I asked the caretaker about him. At the mention of Morti’s name, Rajni turned her head away from the river for the first time and carefully looked at me with her massive brown eyes. I looked at her as words were translated around me. The caretaker was surprised that I knew about Morti, and he looked uncomfortable. He said something in Hindi and the little boys translated for me. “Morti was sent away to a bigger city that needed an elephant,” the children said, wide-eyed. Somehow I didn’t fully believe them. The girl I had spoken to over the summer had mentioned something about how Morti had begun getting violent ever since Rajni showed up because they tried to keep the elephants separated from each other. I had a hard time believing Morti was still participating in holy ceremonies in another city. In Bihar, if something was impractical, they didn’t bother with it, and Morti had become difficult to take care of.

I looked at the caretaker, instantly saddened by the realization. “But weren’t they supposed to get married? Weren’t they going to start a family?” I inquired. The caretaker had nothing to say. I looked at Rajni, who was still looking at me with pain in her eyes.  “She must miss him a lot,” I whispered.

If an elephant could look surprised, I would say that Rajni did. As soon as the words escaped my lips, she took one lumbering step in my direction and rested her whole trunk against my chest -- an elephant hug. I looked in her eyes and I saw that she knew that I knew she missed him. I wrapped my arms around her nose and squeezed, hugging back. Her skin was abrasive and her nose bristles were prickly, but I loved her so much. She pushed her trunk into my chest very firmly and tried to get as close to me as she could. She was so solid I was afraid of falling back but her force was very controlled. With my arms still around her, I looked up at her face. She looked at me with as much awareness as any human I ever met. It was so obvious that she had a consciousness. Knowing that, her imprisonment and treatment seemed even more barbaric.

The caretaker, surprised, kept repeating to that she must like me a lot. Rajni had never shown such an affinity for a stranger before. He didn’t have to tell me that she loved me because I already knew. She knew so much and she felt so much. She was stuck here, out of control of her own circumstances. She was chained to the ground and not allowed to exercise her legs. She lived her life so long like this that she was no longer angry, but I think she knew that she could have had a better life if she was luckier. She was wiser than people around her believed her to be.

Eventually, Rajni took a step away from me. She left the tip of her trunk extended towards me so that I could hold it in my hands. She continued to look at me and I think she was smiling. I looked back and smiled at her too. I didn’t need to ask the caretaker any more questions to know who she was.

I didn’t want to leave her, but I was about to be late for tea and my class mates would start worrying about me. I took one last look at her, and she gave me one last nudge with her trunk. She looked back up at the river in the same way she had when I first met her. She seemed less embittered now. I felt okay saying goodbye. I went on my way.

I promised myself I would go back to visit her and bring her apples, but I never did. I aspired to be a person who gave her a little bit more happiness than most. That wasn’t the case. I never got around to seeing her again. I don’t think she expected me to do any different. She was used to seeing people she loved come and go. She knew how to survive on her own.

Head Shaving Ceremony By: Camille Mullins-Lemieux

I found myself sitting outside in a seafoam green plastic lawn chair at the Burmese monastery in Bodh Gaya, India. I was about to get my head shaved for my ordination as a Theravada nun in the town that held the most important Buddhist pilgrimage site in the world; the Mahabodhi Temple. It was hot and humid, as it was an early Indian September. The monsoon season had barely ended. I was sweating through my cotton Kurta and Pajama. The humidity caused my clothes to never fully dry.

I was surrounded by all of my classmates. A few of them were sitting in plastic chairs beside me also getting their heads shaved. I had a smile congealed on my face as I waited for my barber to appear and start my head. I wanted to deceive my classmates into believing that I wasn’t nervous. My friends Peter and Julia stood on each side of me holding a square of bleached cotton under my chin to make sure not a strand of hair touched the concrete ground.  I looked up at my friend Indigo standing in front of me, holding her ipod to take a video. People talked excitedly around me, and I could hear the nuns chanting Buddhist prayers a few feet away. I heard the shrill honks of rickshaws coming from the other side of the monastery fence.

I looked up at my two friends, standing like pillars on each side of me. They were joking around and laughing but I was so distracted at what was about to happen that I couldn’t really hear them. The person designated to shave my head silently crept up behind me. I didn’t have enough time to look to see who it was. He smoothly pushed my head forward and patted a handful of water from a nearby bucket onto the crown of my head. The water dribbled down the nape of my neck, down my collarbone and down into a puddle between my legs: the water stained my green pants and made it look like I soiled myself out of fear.

My mysterious barber gently placed his hand on my head and arranged my hair. He rested his safety razor on the center of my cowlick spiral, did short skims, and then swept the blade towards my forehead. With the first stroke my face fell. I was surprised at how quickly the blade cut through so much of my hair. One stroke easily shaved at least four inches of hair from my head. I sheepishly took a peek at the people around me and tried to look happy. My shearing had begun. I couldn’t go back. I felt serious, sober. I was neither afraid nor happy but I felt the need to prove to my friends that I was thrilled to have this experience.

The man continued to release the locks from the top of my head. My hair hovered over the white sheet in the dreads that I had made them into the day before. I locked my strands to celebrate their last decorative moments. The monk shaving my head seemed to be slightly disturbed by my knotted mane. He nudged the dreads and muttered something in Burmese to someone beside him. They both laughed. I felt a bit embarrassed. The person he spoke to brought a bucket of water and began pouring water onto the bunched hair to aid the monk’s shaving. The water trickled down my forehead, fell into my eyes then dripped off the tip of my nose. This time I looked like I was so afraid that I was crying. The way the water cascaded down my body kept forcing symbols of fear that I didn’t feel. I refused to look afraid of my impending baldness. The only thing I was afraid of was people assuming I was weak or narcissistic because of my loss of hair. I wanted to prove to those around me that I really understood the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment. Anything that exposed my fear made me feel like a failure.

My hair finally fell, clump by clump, into the cloth. It was so dark against the light fabric. It looked matted and alien. I felt a faint breeze on my partially naked head. It felt fresh despite the excessive heat. Since my bare head was now more visible, Julia and Peter were silent and the air felt thick. They weren’t in the mood to joke anymore. I was no longer smiling. My head was tilted downwards to accommodate the razor. I looked at my hands resting, deliberately relaxed, on the armrests of my chair. I now had to wait for the rest of my head to be peeled. As the Monk shaved the sides of my head, he moved his free hand like a spider to tighten my skin so the blade wouldn’t cut me. His fingers were surprisingly gentle but they never lacked competency.

By now more than half of my head was bored. I looked up at the person holding the camera and found that Indigo had bestowed video taking duty on my other friend, Kirby. Kirby was also recently shorn. It was the first time I saw him with his naked head. I was going to be like him soon. I could feel the monk’s hand on my naked scalp. It was strange to feel so much of the skin on my cranium being touched. A nun came up behind me and reached her arm over my shoulder and gestured a bottle of baby lotion towards Kirby to make sure his scalp didn’t get too dry or irritated. I felt the cotton of her robes brush against my ear and head. It felt cool and soft but my brain hadn’t fully caught up to the idea that my head was so exposed so the brush of the fabric was not welcome.

Since I was one of the last people to get their head shaved, everyone but those involved started bustling to organize and clean up the space. Someone was letting all the future monks and nuns know that we had to meet afterwards. The nuns were asking if everyone’s head was shaved. With all the commotion around me I felt like people had forgotten about me midway through my paring.  I felt an urgency to be finished. I felt like I was an inconvenience and people were waiting on me.

There was only one patch of hair left on the left side of my head. I laughed to myself, once again realizing what was happening to me. The monk rested my head against his chest as he peered over my head to access the hard to reach spots above my ear. There were strands of wet hair stuck all over my face and neck. “You look Great!” my friend Larissa called out to me, “It suits you.” I laughed, finally out of the head shaving funk. Peter, still beside me, muttered “you look like Karen Gilligan from Guardians of the Galaxy.” I laughed again, “I don’t know who that is!”

I felt the pressure of the moment again and stopped smiling. The monk began to swipe the razor on the stray hairs that he first missed. I could hear the shick shick of the razor on the tiny bristles left on my skull. The slight tugging of my hairs by the blade irritated my head but somehow it also felt smooth as it slid. I began to look around again because I could finally lift my head up a bit. Indigo was in front of me again holding her ipod. “You look so worried Camille!” she cried. I didn’t respond. “Is somebody left?” I heard one of the sisters call. Before getting my head done, I had seen the others had been personally shaved by the nuns and sung over, so I thought that the nuns made a mistake and had forgotten to do the same for me. “I think me!” I called, but it turned out they were just asking if there were any students left who wanted their heads shaved.

The monk stepped back and moved away. I didn’t know if he was finished since he left so abruptly. I turned to look behind me and grabbed the fabric still held under my chin and dried my neck. “Is it done?” unable to discern who my barber was. “You’re done!” Indigo called. One of the sisters came up behind me and picked strands of hair off my collar. “You go and wash, okay?” I swept my hands on my face and rubbed my eyes. I then rested my hands on my surprisingly warm head. “Oh my god!” I squealed.

Winter Break

Chicago

I got off the plane, the end of my grand adventure, and into the waiting arms of my family. It had been so long, it was as though I had forgotten I belonged to them and always had. I joined them on their journey home and delved into the world I now considered to be the future.

Vancouver

I wasn't home for long. After a few days I was placed on another plane and thrust into another set of open arms. My father's side of the family. They asked me questions I didn't know how to answer and started conversations that made me feel alone. I found myself in a position where I had to pretend like the last four months didn't happen for fear of being considered pretentious. By the end of the week I was a bundle of frustration but on the last night that frustration broke when my uncle and I went head to head in an argument about every problem we could remember on this massive planet. We didn’t end up discovering how to create world peace but the resolution of our argument made me finally feel like people understood that something had changed within me.

Montreal

Just as soon as I was beginning to feel settled, again I was carted off to an airport and flown to my mother's side of the family into more waiting arms and more questions I didn't know how to answer. I could feel hairline fractures beginning to form in my psyche. Having always been the person who wants to experience every moment fully, I found that I didn’t have the energy. So I didn’t. The first day I was in Montreal I stayed in bed, crippled by a migraine. My jet lag and emotional exhaustion finally caught up with me and no amount of guilt about wasting time could move me to fix my headache. My head eventually resolved itself and I had to face my family. Frustration began to build once again. Sometimes I would feel immense amounts of love and compassion for my family members and then the next moment I couldn't understand why people weren't trying to be better kinder people. My internalized Buddhism from my four months abroad made me hyper aware of my thoughts. Bo, by the end of the week I became a puddle of lonely confusion. My sister was an invaluable resource of love and understanding. She had been there all along and she had been helping me through my transition the whole time.

Chicago

One more airplane. I flew back to Chicago. I wasn’t welcomed by waiting arms and questions. I was welcomed by a warm bed and solitude. Sweet, reflective solitude. I spent the week mostly by myself reading or browsing the web. I met with a few friends who I had gone on my adventures with and they helped me feel more settled on this side of the world. The end of the week brought me to my upcoming arrival to school. I packed away my life again. I packed my Indian adventures and my home, Chicago. I packed Vancouver and I packed Montreal. When my dwellings were  packed, my mother and I brought them to my new home.