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.