Transcendence for Beginners

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I . HALFWAY UP A MOUNTAIN

Twenty years ago, before I had a proper job, I met a man who lived in a cave halfway up a mountain in north India. The mountain path began just above Dharamsala, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Under British rule this was an important hill station and the summer residence of at least one Victorian Viceroy of India. Dharamsala’s colonial history made it a hospitable place for western travellers. Most days a few tourists hiked to the top of the mountain and back down again. After a couple of hours’ walking you reached the cave where this man, whose name I’ve now forgotten, had a little stall selling bottles of water and soda, snacks and sweets in foil packets, soft chocolate bars, cigarettes.

One day I climbed the mountain with an American woman I’d met at my guest house. On the way back we rested at the stall, looking across the valleys and distant hills stretching out beneath us. The man seemed reserved and rather stern, but in response to our questions he told us that he lived there. Beside the cave was a stone shrine. He called this a temple; it was just large enough for one person to stand inside, with three walls, no door and a roof. When he was sixteen or seventeen he had decided to leave his village down in the valley, renouncing what he’d been taught to hope for: marriage and fatherhood, professional success, a respected place in his community. He had moved into this cave and built his temple. There was no other stall or dwelling along the mountain path and he made enough money to get by. He was now about thirty, a few years older than me. I’d been in India for a couple of months and had seen a lot of sadhus with long matted hair, bare chests and feet, wearing beads and orange dhotis. But this man looked ordinary, in regular trousers, collared shirt and acrylic pullover.

A few days later I walked the path again, this time on my own. I stopped at the stall. The man showed me inside his cave. It was the size of a small room, neat and stark, with a little gas stove, a pan, a cup, a bowl, a bucket. His bed was a piece of cotton laid across the stone floor, and a wool blanket to cover him. It gets very cold up there in the winter. We went back out into the sunshine and sat together watching the great empty sky. He spoke a little English, enough to tell me about stormy nights when the whole mountain raged – ‘Boom, full power,’ he said, stretching out his arms and opening his eyes wide. There had been times when he thought he was going to die. A few years earlier he had met a European woman, passing along the path like me, and they’d lived together for a while. She stayed a few months, maybe a year. I had the feeling he wanted me to stay with him. An enormous bird of prey flew overhead. How wide was its wingspan, he asked me – surely five feet? – and he stretched out his arms again and said ‘Wow, full power!’ By this time it was late in the afternoon, the sun was sinking, and if I stayed any longer it would be dark before I reached the town. So I said goodbye and set off down the mountain path, back to my guest house.

My trip to India was coming to an end: in a couple of days I had to fly back to England. The next morning, my last in Dharamsala, I went to a shop that sold Kashmiri shawls and local textiles, and chose some gifts for my family. I also bought two colourful cushion covers embroidered with geometric shapes of trees, animals, birds – one for myself and one for the man in the cave. They came in many colour combinations and I spent ages choosing between them, and more time agonizing about getting one for him, because he might think it was touristy and silly. I bought a soft cushion to go inside his cover and walked back up the mountain path to give it to him. He seemed pleased, and put it in his cave on the stone bed. We sat together again for a couple of hours, smoked some hashish, gazed down into the valley and up into the wide blue sky. He went to get his cushion to look at it again. We tried to figure out what the animal shapes were supposed to be. ‘What is this?’ he said, pointing to one of them. ‘Is it a chicken?’ We collapsed laughing, tears filling our eyes.

Then we said goodbye. I walked slowly down the mountain, a little dazed under the bright sun, my heart swelling with something sad and sweet, a feeling I carried with me all the way to Delhi, on the plane to Heathrow, and back home to Manchester. This was my first visit to India and it had changed me. Most intense of all was my feeling for this man, or rather a mixture of feelings, among them an ache of longing – not a longing for him, but a longing we shared, which in his case had found expression in a little temple built stone by stone, with two bare hands, halfway up a mountain. Over the years I’ve met a few people who exuded a palpable spiritual quality, some rare insight or depth or stillness you could feel in their presence. The man on the mountain was not like that. It was his choice that moved me. This choice seemed full of courage and uncompromising love – but for what? Whenever I thought about it the word ‘noble’ came to mind, though I puzzled over what exactly that meant.

Eventually these impressions faded until I hardly thought of him at all. After that trip to India I got a job in a university, bought a two-bedroom flat, had a baby. I never went back to Dharamsala and I don’t know if he’s still there. Then last year I was asked to give the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews and, for reasons I did not immediately understand, I found myself thinking about him again.

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