Maya by C. W. Huntington Page A

outside the neighborhood chai stall. Pricks, dicks, schlongs, and dongs of various sizes are exhibited on street corners or poking up along the river, each one inserted into a stylized vagina— yoni , in Sanskrit—that strongly suggests at least one way of understanding the reference to “ecstasy.” There are thousands of them in Banaras, an estimated total of some 30 million such lingams in India.
    In classical Indian epistemology the word lingam also refers to the characteristic mark or sign of any object, evidence that a thing is what it is: smoke is the lingam of fire. For me Banaras was precisely that. Everything I had heard about Shiva’s city seemed to confirm my experience and stamp it with the imprimatur of truth. In Banaras, apparent dichotomies are immediately resolved, the relative and the absolute merge, sex and death, the sensual and the spiritual— bhoga and yoga —flow together like two mighty rivers joining in one great, swift current that bears on its shoulders all the joys, and all the sorrows, of this earthly life.

7
    W HEN I STEPPED OUT onto the platform in Banaras, Ed’s hair, his moustache, and his tight synthetic pants were everywhere.
    My rickshaw departed from the station, bumping along the streets through markets where cows feasted on vegetable refuse, while troops of monkeys, fuzzy orange acrobats, swung through a tangled maze of electrical wires. It was early morning. Here and there men dressed in brightly patterned lungis stood idly massaging their gums with twigs from the neem plant. The smell of chai and incense and hot vegetable puri seemed to emanate from the earth itself. Razorback hogs and furless, skeletal dogs skirmished over heaps of garbage. Untouchable sweepers, their heads wound in grimy scarves that left no more than a thin slit through which they glared out at the world, waved their straw brooms in wide arcs, as if they were sorcerers who had conjured up this fantastic scene and could just as easily cause it to vanish.
    I carried with me Ed’s hand-drawn map showing the way to his flat. He lived not far from Shivala crossing, on the second floor of a three-story gray stucco building. The rickshaw stopped just across from Agrawal Radio, at the entrance to a narrow cul-de-sac that led to Ed’s house. Nearby a woman crouched at the knotted foot of pipal tree, holding what looked like a brass teapot cast in the shape of a cow’s head. She poured water into one palm and shook it over a smooth upright stone smeared black with sandalwood paste. On its surface two points of vermillion marked the eyes through which some primordial spirit, revered in this way for countless centuries, looked out from a deep silence upon our mortal labors.
    The entrance to Ed’s lane was marked by a granite bench with ornate, ponderous arms carved into the shapes of stems and leaves. A cow tied at one end fed placidly from a concrete urn, her long eyelashes flecked with straw. On occasion, over the years, I have chanced to pass by that bench, and every time I succumb all over again to the curious mixture of excitement and peace that I felt standing there on that first morning with Ed River’s map clutched in my hand.
    I paid the rickshaw-wala the fare we had agreed on at the station, and ignoring his appeal for more, stepped cautiously around a pile of fresh manure and walked down the lane to Ed’s door. I knocked, tentatively at first. Then, finding no response, I rapped a bit more loudly. From inside I could hear the delicate beat of tabla, a complex rhythmical cycle that flows like blood through the heart of every Indian musician. And then, the unmistakable slap of bare feet. A chain inside rattled, the wooden panels were pulled back, and I was confronted by a stout Indian woman in a muslin sari drawn up to just below her knees and tucked in at the waist. She looked me over for a moment before speaking in a matter of fact tone: “ Aaiyay .”
    I