Originally published via The Bangalore Review on April 21, 2025.
१
I don’t know when it began. I would like to believe that it began five years ago, almost to the day; that it all took place in a rush on the morning that I moved away from New York City. I would like to believe that, and yet the reality is that it probably began a decade prior, somewhere within that long, dark foreverland between when I knew that I should give up drinking and when the onset of my sobriety occurred. Drying out represented an adjustment for me, if not an acknowledgment that the second half of my life would require a little more civility than the first. Sobriety caused me to become more aware. It caused me to consider my own mortality, particularly given that so many of my lifelong heroes were beginning to sputter and fade at right around that same time. More and more, I have found myself gravitating toward the younger artists, toward the up-comers, toward the ones who have audacity, if not true wisdom. I prefer the younger artists because they are still in a state of becoming, because they have not yet become walled in by their superlatives. It is a helluva thing when the creative act amounts to little more than muscle memory. A one-man show becomes a Q&A; a ramshackle rock concert becomes a choreographed performance.
No, wait. This is already veering off course. I need to bring things back to center.
On the morning that I moved away from New York City, the sky was clear and the traffic was tolerable. I remember sitting behind the wheel of a U-Haul. I remember passing shadows along the George Washington Bridge. I remember looking in the rearview and seeing a giant windsock floating free above the Hudson. A few minutes later, I had crossed into New Jersey. I was an ex-pat, just another broke idealist who had been priced out of his apartment. I felt like a failure, and I wrestled with that failure. In an effort to cope, I put together a 5-yr plan, the ultimate goal of which would be for me to either return to New York City, or to reinvent myself along the west coast. My plan was thorough. It included action steps and benchmarks. I told myself that I would bank a certain amount of money. And I did. I told myself that I would resolve all of my debt (except for student loans). And I have. I told myself that I would complete a collection of seven long-form essays, and you are reading number seven. Meanwhile, that 5-yr window is about to close, and I have not taken any strides toward moving back to New York City, nor have I taken any strides toward reinventing myself out west. What I have done is travel. In fact, I am traveling as I write this. It is morning here, and I am in New Delhi, India, a city that is located approximately 7,300 miles due east of the place I call home. I have come to New Delhi in pursuit of the ancients. I have come here to tap the meditative roots of Buddhism. Tomorrow, I will board a circuit train that is scheduled to make stops at several of the original Buddhist pilgrimage sites. In the spirit of non-attachment, I have only packed one bag. I have cash, but I do not have any credit cards. I have disconnected from the internet, and I have discouraged any of my friends from calling me on the phone. I feel at peace here, as if I have stripped away the world in layers. I can hear the wind breathe, and I am writing longhand by the pool.
२
I arrived in India a day ago. Since then I have been staying at a Holiday Inn, the perimeter of which is surrounded by a 10-ft wall. The hotel driveway winds into a portico where one can find valets, along with shuttle drivers, bellhops, security guards, and doormen. Inside, the lobby area is vast, and it is overstaffed. There are four desk clerks, a travel coordinator, a pair of greeters, and an information desk. There are also two restaurants, one bar, a pair of gift shops, and a spa. Along the upper floors, the hallways run fragrant, and the carpets blanket any passing luggage racks or patter. There are four elevators in this hotel, each of them positioned in a row. Whenever I step into one of these elevators, I tend to imagine that I am entering a portal, that every floor represents some critical juncture from my past. This floor might represent a difficult breakup, whereas that floor might represent the death of a friend. In each of these scenarios, I would be metaphysically present, yet out of body and detached. The elevator would open, allowing me to step into a corridor. There would be a flash, and then a thunder, after which I would be transported. Oh, to feel the rush of life’s great triumphs; to reabsorb its deepest sorrows. Once the illusion had faded, I would collapse into the elevator, and both doors would close, thereby rendering me unable to ever access that scenario again. I cherish the idea of being able to experience something fully one last time, and then being able to do away with it for good.
३
On Tuesday, I board the Buddhist Circuit Train at Delhi Station. I am elevated aboard this train, and insulated, and I am in constant motion, existing in remote opposition to the ground-level workers, their backs blazing in the sun. We pass rubble and ruin. We pass stone houses and thatched huts. We pass dirt farmers and vagrants, many of whom are all elbows and haunches. We pass men who are pissing along the pavements. We pass men who are shitting in white buckets. We pass through harsh and underdeveloped country. We pass by palm trees with fronds that cut the air just like daggers. We pass construction sites that have either been defunded or abandoned. We pass earth, and it is sun-dried and cracking. The air quality is atrocious here, and the tap water is full of parasites. There are cows lounging along the sidewalks and there are langurs soft-swinging from the wooden benches into foliage. There are dogs, homeless and mingy, and there are locals who are equally desperate for shelter and sustenance. The climate is arid during this time of year and the midday temperatures reach their peak in the mid-90s. The street merchants are mostly dressed in breathable fabrics and they huddle beneath the shade of canopies. There is debris everywhere, entire mountains of debris, like miniature landfills. But there is no broken glass, nor can there be broken glass. This is a social contract, largely enacted due to the Indian custom of wandering barefoot (a means of avoiding the sweat-drenched insulation of shoes and socks). The heat is such that the sun drains one’s ambition much like juice through a straw. There is no air conditioning, at least not in the streetside homes or the cubicle-sized concession areas. There are no backyard pools, and indoor plumbing is more of a luxury than a guarantee. There are 1.4 billion people in India, a population that is second only to China’s. As I write this, I have spotted what is known as a Neelkanth, an endangered blue bird that is widely considered to be a sign of good luck. The Neelkanth’s wingspan is an incandescent blur of florescent teal and cobalt, a reminder that there is still beauty in this oasis. In certain cases, that beauty needs to excavated. It needs to be carved out or dredged up. But it exists, and it is a natural beauty, wrought by time and the elements and human hands and the ages. Last night, I was reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Siddhartha is the story of how a prince became a deity by setting fire to his birthright. This is meditation as a parable, I wrote inside the margins. And this is meditation as a parable, as well.
४
When I started work on my collection of essays, I wanted every piece to read like a sustained narrative. I wanted to write in the present tense and I wanted to immerse myself inside of the experiences. I wanted to address the life of a loner, and a nomad. I wanted my collection to serve as the fulfillment of where I had been and where I was going. What I have learned is that my work is at its most incendiary whenever I can summon the courage to abandon my thesis, whenever I can break hard left and unleash black hell along the prairie. This is a matter of flexibility. The essay that I had planned on writing about artificial intelligence, for example, ended up being about the absurdities of corporate culture. The essay that I had planned on writing about combat sports ended up being about my innate fear of becoming a bad artist. I have reached a point, creatively speaking, where I feel as if I am being taunted by the sands of time. And then there is the fickle business of publishing. But I could give a fuck. I summarily refuse to accept that my window is closing. I mean that, especially now, as I scribble in a notebook during the balmy predawn hours of an overnight train ride. I am seated in the dining car. I prefer the dining car given that my cabin is really nothing more than an eight-by-six cell. My bed is a slab, padded and firm like an examination table, outfitted with one top sheet, an airplane pillow, and a pair of linens. A few minutes ago, our train pulled into Bodh Gaya Station (675 miles southeast of New Delhi). This is our destination, the first of many, yet I have not slept. Someone has left the train’s internal PA system on, and this has resulted in a persistent din throughout the evening. I have the curtains pulled back now and it is light outside, although it is not yet morning. Throughout this part of India, one can feel the sun before he can see it. The sun is intimidating. And then it arrives, a massive orb in tiger orange. The sun matters here in a way that it no longer can in the more established world. The sun is still a god here. The sun is Surya.
५
It is 7 PM and our group is running behind schedule. We are 30, all adults, and we are entering the Mahabodhi Temple, home of the Bodhi tree, the location where Siddhartha Gautama became the enlightened one. The temple is congested, and certain members of our group have proven either unwilling or unable to keep up. While awaiting these members along a footpath, I try to envision how this area might have appeared during the Buddha’s era (circa 500 BC). I picture fig trees set against a level expanse. I picture hunter green and khaki tan. A bit idyllic, but it is safe to say that Bodh Gaya has experienced a considerable amount of change since its enshrinement. First came the temple, and then the street vendors, and then, eventually, a robust military presence. I have been patted down twice since we arrived here. There are uniformed officers who are bearing AKs around every turn. In the days of the Maurya Empire (circa 300 BC), religious zealots would attempt to destroy the Bodhi Tree. In the event that they succeeded, and they did, the Buddhists would plant a new tree to replace the old. The current Bodhi tree is believed to be a direct descendant of the original. Historians estimate that the current tree has been in existence for a little over two millennia … a book of years with limbs so dense that they need to be held in place by iron posts.
६
According to Buddhist doctrine, Siddhartha Gautama meditated along the planes at Bodh Gaya for the better part of seven weeks. A few weeks deep, Siddhartha attained enlightenment while meditating beneath a fig tree. A few weeks after that, the 35-year-old was visited by Mucalinda, the king of snakes. Mucalinda slithered forth from an underground lair and perched himself behind Siddhartha. Rather than attack, the mythologically-overgrown cobra opened its hood, thereby providing a natural canopy for the young prince so that he could continue to meditate despite an oncoming storm. All of this is allegory, of course, but I find it intriguing, particularly given that it subverts so many of the Old Testament’s tropes. I speak here of the garden-weaving serpent and the fruit-bearing tree. But I also speak here of the Buddhist precept that it is not love so much as ambivalence that neutralizes aggression. Love is potent, sure, but love is fleeting and love hurts. And unrequited love can lead to hate. And hate corrodes the soul.
७
An additional word here, if I might, regarding the subversion of symbols. Archaeologically speaking, the Asian swastika is more than 5,000 years old. In Persian cultures, the early swastika was meant to symbolize the revolving sun, if not infinity and the never-ending journey. The Hindus popularized the swastika, and it took on even more significance after the Buddhists incorporated it into their wheel of law. Throughout India, one can still find the swastika adorning archways and murals. Over the years, the swastika has even been associated with certain Norse myths including Thor. As iterations of the swastika made their way across Europe, the Nazi party in Germany began to coopt its design. The Nazi swastika was rotated at a 45-degree angle and it generally appeared on a white background inside of a red band. Thus, a symbol of life became a symbol of death. Throughout America, the swastika persists as a neo-Nazi emblem of white supremacy and hatred. In the old world, however, it is still acceptable to hang a swastika as a sign of peace above one’s front door.
८
But where was I? Oh, right. The Buddha and the serpent, a story that will forever remind me of when I was living in New York. Back in those days, I would meditate after my long-distance runs. I felt at ease upon completing those workouts, and I had a bench where I liked to sit along the east side of Central Park (just north of Terrace Drive). “It is necessary to dig deep within oneself to discover the hidden grain of steel called will,” a placard on that bench read. This was a high-traffic area, brimming with joggers and cyclists and rollerbladers and pedestrians. All of that fell away a few minutes after I began to meditate. I became insulated, protected. It was as if I had vanished. It was as if I had become weightless. It was as if there was no longer any interference on the line. This might explain why an atheist who has no apparent use for organized religion would become so enamored with the Buddhist vibe. It was not the religious aspect, because organized religion, for all its condescension, is really nothing more than crowd control. As a result of my own struggles, I have become much more about the inward gaze, about an intense spirituality that rises up through the chakras. I have been riffing on this idea for a cool 30 minutes now. I have been scribbling notes onto the back of a vaccination card. Our group has reboarded a bus and we are on our way to Bodh Gaya’s Imperial Hotel. Tomorrow, we will eat breakfast before returning to the circuit train. Tonight, I plan on eating dinner with the others before slipping away to enjoy some sleep by myself.
९
Twenty-four hours later, and I am lying flat along the upper deck of a wooden boat that is moving south along the Ganges River. The late-day sky has faded to an armageddon yellow. Our tour guide is speaking, although I cannot hear what he is saying. My eyes have started following a kite as it bobs along the firmament. From a distance, that kite looks like a dog on a leash. The way it hastens forward—and then a tug—the way it scurries back. We are 100 meters off the coast of Varanasi, the holy city. There are stairs jettying the riverbanks. These stairs can best be described as concrete bleachers, or what are known as ghats. It is here, along the water’s edge, that bodies are cremated, as many as 100 per day. According to the Hindus, cremation allows for the soul to detach from the body, to achieve liberation from its unending cycle of rebirth and death. Nirvana. The mortal coil becomes air, the mortal coil becomes water. Mukti. After several hours on the pyre, one’s remains, mostly ashen with shards of bone, are escorted to the river, where they are submerged or set free, all of which might seem a bit macabre to the western observer. This is a sea of death, yes. It is the River Styx. Yet I feel tranquil. I have settled into reconsidering all of the lives that I have known; into reconsidering the suburban school boy, the track star, the runaway drunk, the longhaired rocker, the midway spectacle. I have taken to reconsidering the urban misfit, the Philadelphian, the Knickerbocker, the sober cynic, the mountain recluse, the would-be Californian. I have made peace with my past, and I have done so as a form of purification, a baptism, if not an opportunity to be reborn. Perhaps this is why I have always been so attracted to the ocean, where the light rises, and where the tide rushes out to meet the horizon. I look to the ocean for escape, in the hopes of smiling at something that cannot look away. It is the wind and the shock of the waves. It is the lack of politics and the absence of any corporate messaging. A beach is a place where a man can feel/he’s the only soul in the world that is real. I return to my youth by way of Quadrophenia. There is an overwhelming scent of decaying flesh in the air.
१०
Several days into our itinerary, I find that I am drawn toward the late afternoons. Mid-mornings bring the humidity, along with the extensive bus rides. A lot of the roads here are unmarked, and several of them are unpaved. There are no median strips, at least not on the backroads. The rule of law appears to be that size dictates which vehicles should be afforded the right of way, and which vehicles should be expected to pull over. Come midday, the heat is arid, and we are wandering across open spaces, and sometimes over steep gradients. Around the magic hour, the temperatures have cooled and the walking is behind us. We have eaten lunch, and we are only an hour or so from eating dinner. It is here in the remains of the day that I feel the most unburdened. None of this is exclusive to my time spent in India. For 20 years I have suffered from an anxiety disorder. During my acute stretches, I awake in the mornings feeling as if I have been hooked up to a generator, feeling as if there is a current running through my system. On the days when I can focus, I might run 7-10 miles just to bring my body back to stasis. I ride the lightning, so to speak, in the hopes of draining my neurosis. All of this is a circuitous way of declaring that the twilight has forever been my respite. The twilight carries with it a promise that the worst of it is over, at least until the morning.
Earlier today, our group crossed the border into Nepal. There were delays, and we suffered them. It is 5 PM now, and we have been afforded 90 minutes to roam freely around Lumbini, which is the historic birthplace of the Buddha. I spend the first 30 minutes snapping photos, after which I locate Ben. Ben is a fellow group member. Ben is also a physical therapist from the UK. Ben and I begin east toward the canals. Ben informs me that he is a devotee of Carl Jung, and we speak at length about this, over footbridges, in the shadow of the sun. Eventually, the conversation pivots into Jung’s “Four Stages of a Life” (i.e., The Athlete Stage, The Warrior Stage, The Statement Stage, and The Spirit Stage). I tell Ben that Jung’s stages strike me as being a bit archaic. Ben responds that these stages aren’t necessarily linear, and that people can either regress or fail to assimilate from one stage into another. “Oh, c’mon,” I say to Ben, goading him. “It’s too broad. And yet it’s vague enough that people might mistake it for something profound.” If this trip has taught me anything—and this trip has taught me many things—this trip has taught me that the world is vast, and that I know so little of what goes on beyond my front door. I want to bust out, break out, I want to become a student of foreign cultures. I want to chart the ruins of ancient Sparta. I want to enjoy my morning coffee somewhere in the foothills of Madrid. I am not done, which is to say that I am not even close to finished. My world is still growing and my intentions have become more precise. I am looking forward to the nights here. I am looking forward to that familiar pocket where the world cannot do me any trespass. In a few hours I will sit with my notebook and I will write out my dreams, and I will do all of this while holed up inside a Nepalese hotel. I love hotels, and I look forward to relaxing in a queen-sized bed. I get more excited about the little things now than I did when I was 23.
११
For a quarter century, the Buddha retreated to Shravasti during the rainy seasons so that he could rest and write and deliver his sermons. It was here along the western banks of the River Rapti that the idea of the Buddha as a messiah took hold. Throughout India, modern-day believers contend that the Buddha levitated at Shravasti, and that he self-replicated; that the Buddha transformed a toothpick into a tree and that he shot fire out of his shoulders, everything but pinecones out of his balls. Too much CGI, I say. I would prefer to imagine the Buddha’s residencies at Shravasti as being both primitive and unremarkable. I would prefer to imagine the grounds at Shravasti much like they appear to me today, which is to say full of clouds and without ceremony. We have been touring these sites for a week now, and the majority of our group have disintegrated into cliques. The only other Americans on the circuit train are Pat, who is five years older than me, and Kayode, who appears to be about 20 years younger. There are three Brits on the train (including Ben). The other two are a retired couple from Kent named Phil and Michaela. The remainder of our group is largely made up of seniors, almost all of whom are of Indian descent. The seniors adore Pat, although I get the sense that they do not adore me. And why would they? I have kept to myself throughout most of our trek. Up until yesterday, I remained unaware that approximately 75% of the circuit train’s passengers have been communicating via a groupchat. At about the same time, it occurred to me that—with the exception of Phil and Michaela—all four of the westerners on this trip are adult males under 55 who have traveled to India by themselves. That must seem curious. The loner’s search for a sense of belonging.
Upon pulling into Shravasti, we ride by bus to an ancient monastery called Jetavana. All 30 of us disembark, and we shuffle through the gates. A steady rain is falling, and a number of the seniors in our group have opened their umbrellas. From a distance, they look like mourners, proceeding slowly with their heads bowed. We stop in front of stupas. We stop in front of a hut where the Buddha lived. We pass monks and they are dressed in saffron robes. Watching these monks I am reminded of a line from a 15th-century poem: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. That thought sets me reeling … reeling deep into my teenage past. Wildwood, New Jersey in the 1990s, and, in particular, the winters. I drank through those winters, and, oddly, this provided a gateway into writing. I would write on winter nights when the ocean breeze combed its way across the dunes. I would write in an apartment where the heat was scarcely enough to warm my bones. I would wear layers indoors, a long-sleeve T-shirt under a librarian’s sweater. The world was quiet then. I had no cable and no internet. I did not own a landline phone. I had no neighbors. My nights were solitary, as nights like that were intended to be. I had a girlfriend but we mostly saw each other on the weekends. She was in school. I look back on those winters with nothing short of reverie. I mean, things were fucked up, but I had not fucked them up yet, at least not to the point of no return. I would suffer throughout my 20s and 30s, all the while maintaining this sense that I could come out of it on the other end of things. The other end of things? It is a phrase that would suggest the day-to-day of a person who has been living in repose. Only I do not mean it that way. I mean it in the way that life tends to mirror itself. I mean it in the way that as I was then, so a part of me has again become. During the warm-weather months, I work tirelessly, almost to the abstraction of anything else. The winters have become my rainy seasons, much like they were during the nineties. The girl who I was dating when I was 19 has reentered my life. The two of us are older now and we are more at ease with each other. I am feeling healthy enough these days that I can travel to the broken edges of the world. Only I have lost the summers, which feels like a way of saying that I have lost the joy in things. When I was young, the summers represented a place where nothing hurt. I was invincible and I was in love or in lust and it was warm and I was living at the Jersey shore.
१ २
Our trip came to an end earlier this evening. We made one final stop at the Taj Mahal in Agra. Good for business, I suppose, although it did seem strange that we capped off seven days of burnt-clay ruins by cramming into an opulent 17th-century mausoleum. Adjusted for inflation, the Taj Mahal would have cost an estimated $850 million to construct. Men died while erecting that tomb. Elephants were used to transport its blocks. Its main inlay includes 28 different types of stone. It is a casket for an empress, in accordance with the death-bed wishes of Mumtaz Mahal, the woman whose remains were buried inside its walls. But enough of that. I am back at the Airport Holiday Inn in New Delhi. I have all my notes from the past 10 days spread across a desk. Last night, I watched Michael Mann’s Heat on my cellphone. Every major character in Heat suffers a fate that is proportionately connected to his ability to abandon the person he loves most. To that end, there are only two top-billed characters who are left standing once the credits roll. One is Vincent Hanna (played by Al Pacino), and the other is Chris Shiherlis (played by Val Kilmer), both of whom accepted an emotional loss so that they could continue to pursue the things that make them whole. “That’s the discipline,” as Neil McCauley (played by Robert De Niro) explains to Vincent Hanna during Heat’s incendiary diner scene. It is a lesson that McCauley fails to heed, and it eventually results in him being shot dead. Detachment. This is a Buddhist precept. Is it a failure to find oneself alone in middle age? Or is the failure in accepting a day-to-day that compromises one’s objectives? I am not sure, although the question haunts me. It has for 15 years now. Occasionally, I do consider how much of my adult life might have been different if I had not developed an anxiety disorder in my early 30s. To live in constant fear of one’s constant fear. The pain begins to feed itself. I believe that I am meant to be alone. All things considered, I suppose the best that I can hope for is fulfillment in whatever form that might take. I seek nobility in silence, what the Zen philosopher Eihei Dogen once referred to as no waves, no wind, an empty boat flooded with moonlight. But I also seek to be the loudest voice in the room. A stunning contrast. Divergent flows.
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