Dhumavati. A Voice in the Smoke

In Varanasi it had been in constant motion: talking, hooting, haggling, burning, praying, swearing, smelling of spices and incense. Even at night the city would not let you forget that life was going on all around.

In Manali it was enough to walk a little way from the road, and the noise stayed somewhere down below.

Dmitry had come there with almost no plan. He wanted to see the mountains. He wanted to live for a few days somewhere he did not have to keep pushing his way through people. And he also wanted to sort through, in peace, the books and notes he had collected in Varanasi.

The room turned out to be small: a bed, a wooden table, a chair, a window and a wardrobe whose door would only shut if you lifted it slightly.

Dmitry tried twice. On the third he got the knack.

“So that’s agreed, then.”

The wardrobe did not object.

He took a bottle of water out of his bag and put it on the table, and beside it laid his notebook, a dictionary and several books. Some of the books were in English, some had Sanskrit passages in them which he was still working through far too slowly. A few more small editions he had bought more because he did not want to regret it later than because he was sure of their value.

On one of the spreads he came across the name Dhumavati again. Dmitry’s eyes lingered on it.

In Varanasi it had constantly cropped up next to death, renunciation, widowhood, hunger, smoke and what various writers called inauspicious. But right alongside it there were also quite different things. Freedom. The giving up of illusion. Knowledge that appears where there is nothing left to adorn.

Dmitry wrote in the margin:

“Why is one and the same thing described both as punishment and as liberation?”

Then he added:

“Who decided that the absence of comfort necessarily means evil?”

He liked this thought.

He closed the book and went to the window. Beyond the houses rose the mountains – not as a backdrop: they took up half the world.

For several minutes Dmitry simply looked.

Then he put on his jacket and went out.

* * *

In the mountains it turned out to be far easier than in Varanasi to find a place where he could be alone. Dmitry would climb higher up the path until the last houses were left below. Sometimes he sat down on a rock, sometimes he simply stood.

In the first few days, out of habit, he still kept waiting for something to happen.

A meeting. A sign. An unusual sensation. Then he realised that he himself was turning the trip into an examination nobody had set him.

After that it became easier. He began going up there not for an answer, but because he could sit quietly and think.

In one of the little shops he came across some prayer beads. All sorts: wood, seeds, bone, stone.

Dmitry looked at them for a long time, but did not buy the most beautiful – he took simple ones that sat comfortably in the hand. The seller tried to show him a few more, clearly more expensive.

Dmitry shook his head.

“They’re not for hanging on a wall.”

The seller did not understand. So Dmitry mimed running beads through his fingers, and the man immediately nodded.

Out in the street Dmitry looked at his purchase again. It was then that he first clearly formulated for himself a rule that only grew firmer later on: a working thing is not obliged to be beautiful to an outsider; it has to work.

This applied to books, to prayer beads, to knives, and to any objects that would in time cease to be merely objects.

He did not know that yet.

But the habit had already formed.

* * *

Sanskrit irritated him more and more. Not the language itself – his own dependence on other people’s translations.

Dmitry would find one word in two books and see two different meanings. He would open a third – and there a third meaning appeared. At first he chose whichever seemed more logical, then he realised this was a bad method: what was logical to the translator was not necessarily what was actually in the original line.

He began writing out the forms separately, comparing endings, looking for recurring constructions. A single short phrase sometimes took him an hour, and the result might be the realisation that the original translation he was checking had been broadly correct.

At first this drove him mad.

Then it stopped bothering him: if an hour’s work confirmed that one line was correct, then the hour had not been lost.

In the evenings Dmitry sat by the window, drank tea and worked through a few words at a time. It did not feel like a spiritual feat at all. His eyes grew tired, his handwriting got worse, the dictionary kept falling off the edge of the table.

Once he spent half an hour looking up the meaning of a word and only then noticed he was looking at the wrong line. He covered his face with his hand.

“Brilliant.”

Nobody answered. Back then that was still normal.

He opened the right page and started again.

* * *

After a few weeks Manali no longer seemed to him the opposite of Varanasi – rather a different way of showing the same thing.

In Varanasi life and death stood so close together that they stopped being abstractions. In the mountains something else disappeared – the sense of one’s own importance. Against the slopes, the snow and the enormous sky, a human being’s certainty that the world owed an explanation to him in particular looked rather comical.

Dmitry liked that.

One day he was sitting above the town, running the new prayer beads through his fingers. He was not saying a mantra – just moving the beads along, getting used to their size and spacing. Then he took out his notebook and on the page with his notes on Dhumavati wrote:

“Don’t look for a convenient explanation”.

He thought for a moment and added underneath:

“If two descriptions contradict each other, first check whether they really refer to the same level”.

He would later use this line many times in quite different kinds of research. For now it had appeared for a very simple reason: Dmitry was tired of choosing between other people’s versions. He wanted to learn to read for himself.

* * *

Before leaving he laid his things out on the bed. There were not many clothes, but there were noticeably more books.

Dmitry looked at the bag. Then at the pile of books. Then at the bag again.

“Right.”

Some of the clothes he had to wear.

The books fitted.

At the airport the bag turned out to be heavier than he would have liked. He put it on the scales, looked at the figure for a few seconds, then began moving books into his hand luggage.

So ended his first India. Not with a revelation, not with an initiation, not with a meeting with a guru after which everything became clear. He left with almost the same number of questions as he had arrived with.

Only now the questions had become more precise. And together with them a new habit had appeared: not to trust the first convenient translation, not to consider a beautiful object a working one just because it was beautiful, not to be in a hurry to call a contradiction a mistake – and to go back to where the question grows deeper.

A few years later India would no longer be a one-off trip for him. But it began precisely then: with Varanasi, Manali, a heavy bag of books and the decision that one day he would read these texts without go-betweens.

Chapter Five

Between India and Russia

By the age of thirty Dmitry had stopped thinking of going to India as a trip.

A trip begins and ends. It has a ticket there, a fixed length, a return date, photographs, things you must manage to see, and a feeling that time is limited.

For him everything had become different.

India had gradually turned into a place he returned to. Russia – into a place he came to in order to sort out the matters that had piled up, earn money, see familiar streets, buy what he needed, build his savings back up and leave again.

At first this life seemed temporary.

Then several years went by.

The temporary turned out to be more stable than the permanent.

He might spend months in Varanasi, then decide that there was too little money left, buy a ticket to Russia and a few days later find himself once again among snow, grey buildings, familiar shops and people who simply could not understand why anyone would voluntarily spend so much time in India.

Gradually Dmitry stopped explaining.

“What do you do there?”

“I live.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning exactly that.”

“And work?”

“I work when I come back.”

“And that suits you?”

“For now, yes.”

Usually after this the other person would look at him as though Dmitry were deliberately rejecting some obviously correct way of arranging one’s life.

It did not bother him. The correct arrangement of someone else’s life had always struck Dmitry as a suspiciously simple thing – especially when it was explained by people who were unhappy with their own lives.

* * *

Coming back in winter was the hardest. After India the cold felt almost like a physical insult: the plane would land, Dmitry would collect his luggage, step outside – and for the first few seconds his body flatly refused to accept what was happening as normal.

Minus twenty. Sometimes lower. Snow. His breath became visible at once, his fingers froze before he had even managed to get his gloves out.

“Why on earth do people live here?” Dmitry muttered once, shoving his bag into the car.

A minute later he answered himself:

“Because they were born here.”

The car did not start at once. Dmitry turned the key again.

“Come on, love. I don’t want to either, but we both have to.”

At last the engine caught. He turned on the heater and sat for several minutes without taking his jacket off.

In India he missed proper quiet. In Russia, after a few days, he began to miss India.

It went on like that for years.

* * *

His returns home had one main purpose – money.

Dmitry had never been well enough off simply to live between countries without thinking about expenses. Tickets cost money. Accommodation cost money. Books cost money. Even a very simple life in India still required a constant financial reserve.

So each Russian stint turned into a short sprint. Sleep less, work more, spend only on what was necessary.

In those periods Dmitry would take up driving a taxi again – not out of any love for carrying passengers. Taxi work had one important advantage: the money came quickly. In the morning he could get on with his own affairs, and in the evening go out on shift and work until late at night. Sometimes the other way round.

On particularly good days he would come home, write down what he had earned in a notebook and at once put most of it aside. In his mind this little pile of money already bore a label:

India.

The rest went on petrol, food, the flat, the phone and necessary purchases. Every so often the car demanded repairs and instantly wiped out part of the carefully calculated budget. On such days Dmitry would study the engine with particular attention and try to work out whether it was possible to come to an agreement with machinery on a spiritual level.

The machinery refused all contact.

He had to pay.

* * *

The work with people came about almost imperceptibly. At first acquaintances asked, then acquaintances of acquaintances. Some came out of curiosity, some because they had already tried everything else.

Dmitry took this calmly. He did not call himself a doctor and did not try to explain to a person what they ought to think about the causes of their condition. He worked with the methods he knew at the time, and regarded what was happening as part of his own practice.

People paid. Sometimes a little, sometimes a great deal more than he earned in an evening in the taxi. Quite soon Dmitry realised that in a month of earnings like these he could put together a sum that used to take him several months to earn.

This both solved a problem and created a new one. The money brought the return to India closer – but along with the money came people who began ringing again. And then again.

“I have to go away.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

Dmitry did not like the question.

“Live.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Some took offence, some looked for someone else, some waited. Dmitry did not ask anyone to wait: for him this period was still temporary. Earn. Leave. Come back when needed.

Back then he did not yet understand that anyone you let close enough to yourself gradually becomes part of your chain of cause and effect.

He would learn that later. And far more unpleasantly.

* * *

Usually after a month Dmitry would already be counting the days. After a month and a half – looking for tickets. After two he would realise he had stayed too long.

He would sit at home at night with money, his passport and the laptop in front of him, flight options on the screen. Dmitry compared the price, the date, the connections, the price again. Then he would check his bank account. Then the flights again.

“If I go in a week’s time, it’s cheaper.”

A minute later:

“But that’s another week sitting here.”

A minute after that:

“Then again, I could earn a bit extra.”

Sometimes this went on for an hour. In the end the maths almost always won: he stayed a few more days, worked, bought a ticket, packed his things.

And on the day of departure his mood changed at once. The city that only yesterday had seemed grey and far too cold suddenly felt almost like home. On the way to the airport Dmitry looked out of the window: familiar buildings, crossroads, shops, snow, people at the bus stops.

He knew that in a few months he would miss all this.

People were strangely made. While they were in one place, they thought about another. When they got there, they remembered the first.

* * *

Varanasi greeted him differently. No easing back in: the first step out of the airport – and at once the air, the people, the voices, the movement. After the Russian winter the heat seemed almost a separate living creature.

On the way into the city Dmitry felt the familiar rhythm gradually re-establishing itself inside him. The next day he was buying tea at his usual place again. Two days later he was walking down a familiar street. A week later it already seemed as if he had never been away.

He would rent a room, lay out his books, get out his notebooks and carry on from where he had stopped several months before.

That was exactly what distinguished returning from travelling. You did not have to begin again – life simply went on.

* * *

His Sanskrit progressed slowly. Dmitry wanted it to go faster.

This mismatch accompanied almost everything he did: he could accept difficulty but could not bear slowness.

At first it seemed it would be enough to learn the alphabet. Then it turned out that the alphabet had been the easiest part. After it came endings, declensions, roots, verb forms, compound words that could take up half a line, rules to which an exception was immediately found, and an exception that in another text suddenly looked like the rule.

Sometimes Dmitry would close the book and simply sit for a few minutes.

Then he would open it again.

By thirty-two he could already work out a great deal more than at twenty-five. By thirty-three – notice other people’s mistakes in simple translations.

This was a dangerous condition. A person learns a little more and very quickly begins to think he now knows enough.

Dmitry went through this too. Once he argued for nearly an hour with a man over the translation of a short line, went back to his room, opened the text again – and twenty minutes later discovered that he was the one who had been wrong.

He spent the next day looking for the man. He found him.

“Yesterday. I was wrong.”

The man looked at him.

“Yes.”

“You could say.”

“I did.”

Dmitry went back over yesterday’s conversation in his mind and realised the man really had told him so.

“Fine.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He left. That evening an entry appeared in his notebook:

“Certainty is not a grammatical rule”.

* * *

Gradually books stopped being mere objects of interest. Dmitry began to collect material by subject: Dhumavati, Aghora, Shakti, the yoginis, mantras, various practical systems.

He was not trying to create an academic library – he bought what he could find and afford. Sometimes a book turned out to be useless. Sometimes a single page justified the whole purchase. Sometimes what mattered was not the text but a note in the margin, made by some unknown person many years before.

He liked old editions more and more. Not because of the romance of age: he had already understood that old does not mean true. But an old object sometimes preserved what later disappeared in reprinting. The form of a word. An unusual mantra. A commentary. A drawing. The order of the lines.

Once he bought a book almost solely because several of its pages had been written by hand. He could not make out the handwriting. He kept the book all the same.

“Later.”

The word “later” was gradually becoming an important part of the collection. I will read it later. I will translate it later. I will find an explanation later. Later I will understand why I bought it at all.

Some of those “laters” would come ten years on. Some – never.

* * *

Dmitry’s visits to Manali were different now. The first rapture at the mountains had passed; something else remained.

He knew where it was cheaper to rent a room, where to buy food, where you could walk several kilometres in peace and meet almost no one. He knew a few shops. He knew where the seller would immediately start telling a legend about some great saint, and where it was better to ask nothing at all until you had looked the object over yourself.

His collection of prayer beads grew slowly. More and more often Dmitry bought not ready-made strings but individual beads: he liked putting them together himself. Taking them apart, matching them up, restringing, changing the spacing, putting in a different spacer. Then taking it apart again, because it still did not sit comfortably in the hand.

He could spend half an evening on this.

To an outsider there was hardly any difference. To Dmitry there was.

* * *

One day he was shown an old bone mala. Not the kind that lay on the tourist stalls: small beads, very light, a dark surface, each piece a slightly different shade.

Dmitry took it and noticed the difference at once.

“What bone?”

The man looked at him. He did not answer straight away.

“Kapala.”

Dmitry knew the word. But for a few seconds he was silent all the same.

“Human?”

The man nodded.

Dmitry looked at the mala again. Until then human remains in ritual culture had existed for him more as theory. Kapala. Ornaments. Objects he had read about and seen from a distance.

It was one thing to know.

Another to hold it in your hands.

After large bone prayer beads, the mala seemed almost weightless.

“Old?”

The man nodded. Dmitry smirked.

“Everybody says old.”

The man did not smile.

“This old.”

His tone made Dmitry stop joking. He slowly ran a few of the beads through his fingers. Each was slightly different: not a factory product, not an attempt at perfect geometry – separate little discs.

At the time Dmitry did not yet know all that he would later learn about prayer beads like these. But for the first time he felt one thing: the material here was not just material.

He gave the mala back.

“How much?”

The price was out of his reach. Dmitry did not even try to haggle.

“Maybe next time.”

The man took the beads back.

“Maybe.”

The phrase was already familiar. In India too much existed only at the moment of meeting: today the object is there, tomorrow it is not; today a person is ready to talk, in a month you will not find him.

Dmitry was gradually learning to accept that too.

Badly. But he was learning.

* * *

The years between thirty and thirty-five gradually lost their clear boundaries. Later Dmitry sometimes tried to remember: was that at thirty-one? Or thirty-two? Before going back in the winter? After Manali? Before that book? After meeting that man?

Memory assembled time differently – not by the calendar, by events. That was when he first saw a mala like that. It was after this that he took up a certain text in earnest. That was when he realised one translation had been wrong. That was when he came back to Russia with almost no money. That was when he earned enough in two months to live in India for a long time to come.

The calendar existed somewhere alongside. But real life was measured by other markers.

* * *

The work with people in Russia gradually began to bring in more money. Along with this Dmitry’s inner irritation grew – not at the people, but at the system itself.

A person would come. Want a result. Pay. If things got better, they were glad. If they did not, they asked a question:

“Why?”

And Dmitry did not always know why.

His own position between certainty and the unknown troubled him more and more. He could see changes, could observe a person’s reaction, could believe he understood the process taking place. But the more he practised, the more careful he became with the words “I know”.

At twenty-five not knowing had irritated him. By thirty-five it had begun to acquire a different value: if you do not know, at least you are not lying to yourself.

One woman, after another piece of work, asked:

“Are you quite sure it will help?”

Dmitry looked at her. A few years earlier he would have answered far more confidently. Now he said:

“No.”

She was surprised.

“Then why are we doing it?”

“Because it may help.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll go on trying to understand.”

The woman looked at him for a while.

“You have a strange way of reassuring people.”

“I don’t reassure people.”

She smiled all the same.

* * *

Money from work of this kind Dmitry still put aside.

Russia, work, taxi, practice, money, ticket, India, books, research, return. Money again.

The cycle repeated itself.

By the age of thirty-five his life between Russia and India had begun to change. Dmitry no longer went away for many months as often as before: several years of this regime had taken their toll. Constant flights, the need to earn money all over again each time and to come back only for the sake of the next trip gradually stopped suiting him.

On one of his visits home he stayed in Russia for longer than a month or two. Taxi driving still remained a way of earning quickly if need be, and the work with people did not disappear at once either, but the basis of his income gradually became an ordinary five-day-a-week job to do with texts, books and documents. It did not require Dmitry to live for his work, but it gave him what he had hardly ever had before – a predictable income and the chance to get on calmly with his books and research after the working day.

Outwardly, for the first time in many years, his life had become almost ordinary.

It was precisely then that something began to happen that was hard to call ordinary.

* * *

At first it was like ordinary intuition. A thought would arise too distinctly.

For instance, he would be about to go somewhere – and suddenly understand with complete clarity: don’t. Not fear. Not laziness. Simply an inner “no”.

Several times he ignored it. Then he would discover that the decision really had been a bad one.

At other times the word would arise inside him: wait. He waited, and a few minutes later something happened that changed his plans.

Dmitry was wary of this. Intuition was nothing new – but this was something slightly different. Too specific. Sometimes it even had a tone of voice.

At first he put it down to his own thinking: a person is capable of holding an inner dialogue, asking himself questions, answering. Nothing mystical about it.