The Great American Essay

"Be great!" he commanded finger thrust in the general direction of my solar plexus. "BE GREAT!" What simple advice I marvel some nine months and nine hundred kilometers separating my person from the guru's kingly injunction. He, himself, had been clad gaudily in the garb of kings of yore – ridiculous satin robes, bejeweled necklaces, and a fluffy, animal-skin brimmed hat – and held court as the most royal of royals do, allowing his subjects to prostrate before him. I sit on the edge of my too-hard bed and eat three-hour-old chow mein noodles from a borrowed plastic tub with a borrowed and bent spoon. A mouse comes to scavenge for edibles from the refuse heap I have created in one corner of the room. Daily visits have emboldened him to the point of being flinch-free when I toss him a bit of bread with a dab of jam made from blackberries, which, according to the label, were collected by children of Himachal Pradesh.

Earlier in the evening I had gone to the rooftop of the Cheapest and Best Evergreen Guest House mock-zombie style followed by the son of the hired hand whom Dipti loaned three hundred rupees to get a bicycle rickshaw on loan, but he spent on whiskey and girls instead according to Mama. We ascend the stairs under which is tucked the former servant, who returns now to ail away the hours on donated medicines prescribed to treat the swelling of organs brought on by years of smoking hashish, opium and too many other drugs the names of which I could not catch. I twirl the boy around and around and launch him star-ward (we counted three together) with lunar leaps before reducing him to a mass of tickles on the wet bedding he and his father share. Two days earlier I had sat for meditation in this same place and heard someone approach, or so I thought, and only after maybe five minutes of uncanny silence I had peaked to find the normally hyperactive, pleading and whining boy sitting in half-lotus posture not ten inches in front of me. Not a peep.

Yesterday, I had just returned from the Pahar Ganj's main bazaar where I had been trying to purchase a ticket online for Pakistan to beat my Indian visa deadline and assist with earthquake relief, when an explosion reverberates from the street. I assume is just one more of the fire works being set off in anticipation of Diwali which is only two days off and I am theoretically destined to miss because I have to leave the country. Ashok, the young Rajastani that has been trying to ghee me up for a loan to purchase a motor rickshaw appears in the second-floor courtyard of the guest house looking shaken and says there was a bomb blast on the street and body parts are scattered hither and yon with one person's face half blown off and it is bad. He assures me there is nothing I can do to be of help as police have cordoned off the area and later Papa is glued to the television and informs us that three bombs, then five bombs, then, no, three again, were set off in the city – two of which are on my daily route. The number of dead ascends late into the night and when the former child soldier from Nigeria comes home drunk he gets into an argument with Papa about who is stronger and stumbles into the fuse box killing power to the house.

The next day, which is today, I grab a rickshaw to head to Defense Colony for the first official meeting of the NGO for street and slum children that I am co-founding with the charmingly imperious Dr. Manjula Krippendorf. Past a Panicker's Travels bus, past a Society for the Eradication of Cruelty to Animals van, past the red-bordered rectangles on the wall where urinating is prohibited and into the tony neighborhood of the Doctor's bungalow. Five minutes early. The policeman, the Times of India model and the owner of the restaurant at Khan Market all arrive by noon, but the Doctor, who is four for four in being late to meetings, is not destined to show up for another hour when she arrives breathlessly apologizing and complaining about the traffic in the market saying that it takes so much time to get things done during the festival season, no?

After the meeting I ride with the policeman in an ambassador-style police car with a giant-sized cologne bottle secured with plastic brackets on the front dash board where one would normally expect to find a shrine to Sai Baba of Shirdi or the multi-armed Durga astride a tiger. At an intersection a street child approaches the car and holds up copies of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Chicken Soup for the Soul, but we don't know what to say to him because we haven't gotten that far in the planning of the NGO. The policeman is on 24-hours call due to the bomb investigation (the three bombings were most likely coordinated?!?) and when we arrive at his house I am repeatedly offered sweets by his wife whom he repeatedly reminds that I am fasting and all the while I still have to get back to the Pahar Ganj to look at other Web sites to check on tickets for Pakistan or risk becoming a fugitive on the run from the visa goon squad once again. The police complains that his son isn't aiming high enough and seems lazy and wonders if I can't give him a second pep talk and what I think of him, but his son is in the next room and so I defer judgment other than to say that he seemed like a 'cool' kid. 'Cool' clearly doesn't satisfy dad who excuses himself from the room without comment.

An animated Sikh doctor comes calling and gives me a vigorous massage/beating for my sciatica while we share notes about the salutary nature of the vegan diet to which he has been a twenty-five year adherent and though he is fifty four he looks to be in his twenties. He tells me that his daughter is staying in Maryland, but she doesn't like it there and that Americans are all iron with no hearts and that they make great men, but poor humans. "To be great you must not just have this," he begins shaking a clenched fist, "but this too," he finishes punching the hand to his chest in a fashion that leaves no doubt as to his Panjabi pedigree. The policeman's wife asks the turbaned doc what she should do about this and that ailment and he tells her she is of ten heads and has to become of just one mind, not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday, or later today or earlier today, or the next hour or the last hour, or even the next minute or the last minute, but just now and now and now and then the pains will take care of themselves, because they are not primary in nature. She nods absentmindedly and insists that he have some more sweets.

I take the 480 bus, or the 520 back toward the Pahar Ganj where police vehicles and armed patrols are sprinkled among the Diwali shoppers to give the appearance of security to an audience that is largely indifferent. I weave my way through the hoards to the Yogoda Satsanga Society and bask briefly in the stillness of the meditation room before acquiring ten heads of my own over visa issues, air tickets, where to store the pile of student letters, the street-child NGO, where to find food to break my fast that lasts till midnight, the ache in my left knee, disease-carrying mosquitoes, diwali, bombs, and how cold it must be up in the mountains at this time of year. The subsequent visit to the internet cafe confirms that it won't be possible to purchase tickets for Pakistan online and so I am destined to slip into non-compliance with the visa requirements the following day and do the bureaucratic shuffle once more.

Late that night, which is tonight, I slide in the DVD that was supposed to include a four-pack of bootlegged Hindi films and discover Alexander the Great instead with an option for Korean or Russian sub-titles. Alexander works his way east to India cutting down barbarians on his black steed that used to be afraid of its shadow and his mom keeps reminding him in flashbacks that he is destined to be great and there it is again. Be great. Alexander and I struggle with what that means. Be great. Oliver Stone tries to make the movie itself great by casting Anthony Hopkins in the role of a former compatriot of Alexander's now living in Alexandria and waxing reminiscent about Alexander's exploits. After ballyhooing his accomplishments for the first ninety nine hundredths of the movie, Hopkins' character ultimately is torn as to whether Alexander was all that great really.

Alexander is inclined to measure his greatness against the myths of old, those in particular of Achilles and Hercules, which Alexander pronounces, "HERA - cuh - lease" in a faux-Macedonian accent which sounds vaguely British. For him it is also tied in with the concept of fearlessness, especially overcoming the fear of death which is the greatest fear of all and in doing so become immortal in a way. Alexander's male lover is inclined to find him great because of the way he cocks his head ever so regally while sharing his dreams of joining the world's peoples under one banner. Alexander's large-breasted barbarian wife finds him great because of the way he fights back in bed and hisses at her. My own take is that greatness lies, at least partly, in forsaking the measuring stick of success provided by the society at large and superseding the confines of egoic ambition to the point that we die while still alive and can fearlessly pen a life story of ever-increasing connectivity and creativity without regard to gain or loss. Peace Pilgrim would be an exemplar. To give up a worldly inheritance for an unbounded and unknown universe may seem irrational, but it is essential as breath (is breath essential?) to those too great to be satisfied by the mundane. Greatness, in this context, is born of necessity – the phoenix ascending from the ashes of a self-lit funeral pyre.

At 12:01 a.m. I seize upon the noodles that I bought on the street at 9:01 p.m. and find them a tad slimy, but I am famished so I don't really mind, though I can't manage to stomach the second bag and decide instead to give it to Mama who fries it for the hired hand who took the 300 rupees from Dipti and the former hired hand who sleeps all day under the stairs and is thankful for the fruit I sometimes bring and is always needing more medicine.

Farmer fellow,
Pits stained yellow;
Hired hand,
Pituitary gland.

Just great.