Bija Andrew’s Zen Blog

In India, I have come to suspect that there’s a sentence that makes sense to American drivers that never crosses the mind of Indian drivers. That sentence is “I almost got in an accident!” We Americans feel a great deal of stress at near-misses–and I’m not going to give up that fear. In the famous areas of Rishikesh, the only vehicles allowed are motorcycles and official Jeeps, which ferry people from one end of the street to the other. Unless you get on a Jeep at one of the far ends, you have to walk, and the Jeeps come barreling through with no reason to stop. When I was walking with my friend and his children, this particularly disturbed me. I’m going to take this as an absolute: you should always slow down when you see a six-year-old in the road.

But the feeling that something almost happened, that a near-miss is important to note, seems foreign to Indian drivers. You didn’t almost get in an accident, they seem to say. You didn’t. If there was no accident, there was no almost-accident.

The different states of India are all one nation, of course, but they have different road taxes, and drivers must often stop and pay when crossing from one state to another. My day-long travel had me in a short space of time crossing the corners of a few close states: Uttarakhand into Himachal Pradesh into Haryana into Punjab. At the state crossing, the driver would pull the car over, say, “I need to pay tax,” take his documents with him, and be back in moments.

It didn’t seem different, at first, in the last border between Haryana and Punjab. The border seemed a little more elaborate than others, with a line of toll booths, and my driver stopped before them to get out and pay. (I presumed that hired tourist vehicles needed a different approach than private cars, that could pay the toll and go.) So he left the car running and left me alone. To wait. And wait.

I texted my friend in Patiala and told him the border where I was waiting. He replied, “Good, so you will be here in 30 minutes.” I replied, then explained the American saying “God willing and the creek don’t rise.” And I waited some more.

I grew concerned. But nothing was happening.

Then a police officer came and knocked on my passenger window. I said “Hello,” tentatively.

“Hello sir.” He paused. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, thanks. That would be great.”

He nodded. “Would you like a cold drink?”

“Yes, that would be better.”

A nod. “Would you like water?”

I paused. “No, thank you.”

“Would you like a cold drink?”

“Yes.”

He walked away.

A while later, four other policemen approached. “Hello, sir. You are from which country?”

“USA,” I said. “America.”

“Ah. Which city?”

“Detroit.”

“Which city?”

“De. Troit.”

“New York?”

“No, no. Detroit.”

He turned his head. “New York?”

“I guess… it’s near New York.”

The officer looked at me. “When you come to Punjab, you come to enjoy your visit, you come to be happy. And you see the people of Punjab, and you want the people of Punjab to be happy, right?”

“Yes.”

He pointed to the other officer. “His son, he lives in New York. His son lives in America.”

“That’s good.”

“So you come in Punjab, you are going to Patiala, yes?”

“Yes, when my driver gets back.”

“Soon, soon.”

I thought over what he said. There was something to the tone of what he said, something much like, “We can take care of it right here in Brainerd.” But I really didn’t know. So I took out my wallet and grabbed a 100-rupee note.

“Oh no,” said the officer. “No, I don’t need.”

Soon the officers were starting to walk away. “Your driver will be back in two minutes.”

I looked at the time. “Two minutes from now will be 3:36.” They walked away.

Maybe I hadn’t offered a sufficient bribe. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to bribe. Maybe they were coming back to drum up some charges that I was trying to bribe an agent of the law. Bribe, let me say, to get them to do exactly what they were supposed to do. But I thought I could have some digital evidence in my favor.

I texted Rupinder. Okay strange thing

It sounded like they wanted a bribe

He asked me how it happened, but in a moment, the driver came back. The older police officer spoke to him at the window while one of the officers gave me a plastic cup of Mountain Dew. He asked for my phone number. It seemed like he wanted somehow to keep track of which foreigners were staying in the area, but when I gave him the card, he said something again about his son in New York.

And soon we drove on.

The driver said that the police were just getting their lunch when he arrived, so they stopped to talk. Then they wondered if his passenger was getting uncomfortable waiting alone, so they came over to make sure I was doing okay.

I realized I was still caught in the way of thinking. I was in a situation where my fears were raised, and I clung to the idea that something almost happened. Maybe nothing happened. Maybe the police officers were just curious. Maybe it was a kind of theatre–press the tourist to the point where he thinks he’s being asked for a bribe so that you can tell the tourist that police do not take bribes. But nothing almost happened at the border to Punjab. Only what happened happened.

Years ago, I taught a creative writing class at a community college in rural Ohio. One young man in the class wrote a short story about a man and woman on their first date, who decide on a whim to go to Las Vegas. In the class workshop, I said, “It’s interesting how your run-on sentences and unbroken paragraphs add to the surreal nature of the story. It helps create the sense of a crazy, dreamlike world where someone can say, hey, want to go to Vegas? and then pow! they’re in Vegas.”

The student, a soft-spoken farmboy type, looked a little deflated. “I don’t know. I just wanted to write about two people on a date. I tried to think of something cool people would do on a date, like go to Vegas.”

I’m not sure if he knew that Las Vegas is a city surrounded by desert, a destination that would take hours to reach from any other city. It seems possible that he thought Vegas was a generic noun or a brand name, like people on a date might stop at a Vegas after their dinner at a Cheesecake Factory before they go to a nightclub. To a teenager in Fremont, Ohio in 1998, one’s best guess as to what it’s like to be grown-up and single seems to be a mish-mash of still frames from music videos and car commercials. The handsome man says to the beautiful woman, “Let’s go to Vegas,” and like Beetlejuice, you only have to say the name enough times and you’re there.

I’d almost forgotten all about this student, certainly forgotten his name and face, and forgotten the juvenile misunderstanding of an actual place. That is, until two weeks ago, when I, for the first time in my life, visited the real city of Las Vegas, and found out that I, too, had misunderstood the real place, mistaking it for a city that only existed in imagination.

I found Las Vegas very unsatisfying, but I hope you don’t think I’m saying this in a holier-than-thou Buddhist kind of way, that I’m claiming to be wiser than the hungry ghosts who come there in search of unfulfillable desires. No, I didn’t leave with a meditation on the pervasiveness of desire and suffering; I just left annoyed.

Here was the secret surprise of Las Vegas: it is the least sexy place I have ever been. Yes, I realize that means I’m putting it below Cleveland, below Calcutta, below Holdrege, Nebraska. But I think of experiences in other cities. When you walk down the street in Chicago, and you’re stopped in your tracks by an absolutely gorgeous human being, just waiting for a bus or walking to an appointment, or when you stop by a little diner in San Jose and your server is just radiant. Sexy.

This doesn’t happen in Las Vegas. I once heard a comedian talking about New York City, saying that often in Manhattan, he doesn’t know where to stare, because at one angle, there’s the most beautiful woman he ever saw, and in another, there’s the craziest man he ever saw. In Vegas, the alternative is a woman who thinks she’s the most beautiful you ever saw, and a man who’s paid to act like he’s crazy, and you can tell they’re both a little bored with the act. There are giant posters with images that look like human bodies, but the color of the skin is bronzed to the point of chemical, the shape barely human. Women and men, either one–you can tell they are supposed to be sexy, designed and shaped to be sexy, but as for any of the feel of human contact, totally nothing.

My hotel key card came in a paper jacket that encouraged me to ask about late checkout. I found out that this means “Ask, so that we can tell you no.”

This served as a working metaphor for all my experiences in Vegas. The text, the publicity, the signage all exhorted the reader to ask for anything. “Let us know anything we can do for you.” “Ask for whatever you want.” But dealing with real people was the uphill climb. Most of the customer service workers were surly and took a put-upon attitude. If you make a plan, the layout of the place is designed to sidetrack you from that plan.

The city is a master of judo. It uses your own momentum against you, causes you to spin up and fall on your face. Las Vegas doesn’t seduce you; you seduce yourself. I can’t blame it for being what it is, but as for me, it made me grateful for Detroit.

On the India travel forum I occasionally read, someone recently posted about a disappointing experience. He’d found information about an ashram on the Internet, and when he got there, he found bad conditions and an irritable swami, not the peaceful conditions he’d hoped for. I recognized some of myself in his experience, both from traveling India and from experience with spiritual retreats. Sometimes the search for enlightenment takes you to really uncomfortable places. Sometimes you have to recognize it’s not enlightenment at all.

When I read his story, the phrase “magical thinking” came to mind. I recently read a great book called Seven Laws of Magical Thinking by Matthew Hutson. Rational people, Hutson explains, often act by irrational principles. We have expectations of the way the world will work, and choose our actions based on these superstitions. Some of these superstitions are finely distinguished from sentimentality or style. If I like drinking tea out of the mug my grandmother gave me, and would be unhappy if that mug were replaced–even by an identical mug–is it because of some magical connection, that I believe Grandma’s spirit is present in the mug, or simply that it’s pleasant? Should I be a little sad that the shoes I wore through India got left behind in the hotel trash?

At a temple in Rishikesh, to thank me for a small donation, a priest gave me a jar of blessed Ganges water. That led me to some trouble considering the jar would have to make it through a trans-Atlantic flight in my checked luggage, but I managed. I thought about my aunt who visited Florida and picked up, as a souvenir, a little bit of beach sand. I wondered if that happened over the years in India–that thousands of years ago, some visitor to the Ganges thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool to take some of this water with me? And over the years people started adding their own magical thoughts to it, saying that Ganges water would bless their homes, that the spirit of Ma Ganga would watch over this water forever.

There’s a deeper kind of magical thinking we deal with in Zen as well, in dealing with the problem called dukkha, also called dissatisfaction or suffering. We think that someone out there has the magical power to change us, to make our lives complete, to drive away all our dukkha. Whether this “someone” is a guru, a lover, a billionaire, a publisher, or a genie, we keep looking for the magic lamp. People traveling in India often have this kind of magical thinking, and India itself has a fascinating way of dispelling that magical thinking. If you think India will be blissfully spiritual, you’ll find alarming materialism. If you think the spiritual teachings of India make people generous and kind, you’ll find shocking examples of unfairness and even cruelty.

But to explain this to the guy in the disappointing ashram, I found myself falling back into Hutson’s seventh principle of magical thinking: Everything Happens for a Reason. Maybe it was the master plan that there were important lessons to learn from negative example. He learned that inner peace does not come from running away to India; he learned that gurus don’t always help other people. And I went out on a limb with the magical thinking and said, this was the lesson he was supposed to learn. (I’m reminded of the time that, by coincidence, one week I kept running into references to Nietzsche in things I read and overheard. I wondered… is the Universe coming together to tell me I should read some Nietzsche?)

But as Hutson argues at the end of the book, a little magical thinking isn’t a crime, and it’s sometimes helpful for getting through our days. I’ll keep being a little superstitious, just because it’s fun to be in a magical world.