The Names

aspects of control. Astrology as control. The young man was delivering the car to a rental firm fifty kilometers away. This seemed to be his job, delivering cars, driving cars, and his strong hand on the horn indicated it was a job that nourished some private sense of imperium. His name was Bhajan Lai (B.L., thought Owen routinely, checking the map for names of towns in the area) and he was interested in talking about the approaching solar eclipse. It would happen in five days, being total in the south, and was very important from scientific, devotional and cosmic standpoints. His manner was remarkable for the element of reverence it contained, a stillness he hadn't seemed to possess, and Owen looked out the window, wanting not to dwell on this cosmic event, the trampled bodies it would produce, the voices massed in chant. He was happy simply looking. The humped cattle turned at the bamboo pole, threshing stalks of rice.'We are having the moon come across the sun, which is much the larger body, but when they are in line we are seeing one is exactly the size of the other due to relative size and relative distance from the earth. People will bathe in holy places to correct their sins.”Divinities of increase. In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins. Owen recognized a statue of the bull mount of Shiva and walked past the musicians and across a tiered porch into the temple vestibule. It was time for the sunset puja. A white-bearded pink-turbaned priest threw flowers toward the sanctum and these were immediately swept up by a man with a fly switch. There were people with marigold garlands, a man in an army greatcoat, two women chanting, figures bundled on the floor, half sleeping, with betel-stained mouths, one of them concealed behind a kettledrum. Owen tried intently to collect information, make sense of this. There were coconuts, monkeys, peacocks, burning charcoal. In the sanctum was a black marble image of Lord Shiva, four-faced, gleaming. Who were these people, more strange to him than the millennial dead? Why couldn't he place them in some stable context? Precision was one of the raptures he allowed himself, the lyncean skill for selection and detail, the Greek gift, but here it was useless, overwhelmed by the powerful rush of things, the raw proximity and lack of common measure. Someone beat on hand drums, a green bird sailed across the porch. He was twenty-five miles from Rajsamand, in the Indian haze.Coomeraswamy said, 'But what will you do after you've seen this Sanskrit ghat of yours? I think you'll want to rest awhile, won't you? Come back to Sarnath. You'll be ready for a long rest by then.”'I'm not sure what I'll do. I don't want to think about it.”'Why don't you want to think about it? Do you feel this is not an auspicious time to go to Rajsamand?”He had graying hair, an immense kindness in his eyes, a stab of light. As if he knew. Smoke hung over the plain. The soaring birds, the kites, turned slowly above the white horizon. Why didn't he want to think about it? What was beyond Rajsamand, after the pure white embankment, the peaceful lake? He studied inscriptions not only in stone but in iron, gold, silver and bronze, on palm leaves and birch bark, on ivory sheets. Bhajan Lai told him that people had been gathering for weeks, living in tents or in the open, to prepare for the solar eclipse. He blew the horn at a tonga, at men on bicycles, at a small girl with a switch walking a dozen bullocks across the road. Beggars were assembling, holy men, those who will bathe in pools to seek their release. A million people were waiting at Kurukshetra, he said, to enter the tanks of water. Owen looked out the window, saw men reclined on charpoys outside spice stalls, white vultures hunched in trees. Bhajan Lai took a long-peaked cap from a pouch on his door, showed it to Owen.'You are having a hat with you?”'I left it somewhere.”'It was what kind of hat precisely?”'A round hat with a loose brim. A sun hat.”'This is for eclipse!' the young man said.A man in a dhoti walked toward him in furious contemplation, hands behind his back. Owen smiled. Among the brown hills were fields of sugarcane, the thick stems ending in wispy flower-heads. There were no cars or trucks on the road. He walked into a barren valley. Men with yellow turbans here, cows with tricolor horns. He saw the hilltop fortress that stood above Rajsamand. The kites turned in the burning sky. How quiet here, the day of eclipse, no trucks, no buses. Past the wheat fields, the clumps of pencil cactus. Bells rang lightly, a boy on an ox-drawn cart. Owen smiled again, thinking how in the midst of this wandering among Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, the Buddhist students in Sarnath, stunned time and again by the fairytale dynamics of Hindu cosmology, he had begun to think of himself once more as a Christian, simply by way of fundamental identification, by way of linking himself to the everyday medley he found around him. When people asked, this is what he said. Christian. How strange it sounded. And how curiously strong a word it seemed, after all these years, to be applied to himself, full of doleful comfort.He came to the town that was set below the fortress and walked down the main street, where water buffalo lay in shallow ditches. Stalls and shops were closed, day of eclipse, and pregnant women stayed indoors, or so the driver had advised him. A disabled truck blocked the end of the street, front tires and rims gone, body pitched forward, down like a Mausered rhino. A woman sheeted in white stood by a door, a gauzy pink cloth fixed over her mouth. Owen edged past the truck and approached a gate in a yellow wall some yards from the edge of town. On the other side of the wall was the Sanskrit pavilion, as he'd come to call it, a marble-stepped embankment stretching about four city blocks along Rajsamand Lake. He judged there were fifty steps down to the water, a descent that was suspended at intervals by platforms, jutting pavilions, several decorative arches. A miraculous space in the dullish brown distemper of the countryside, cool, white and open, an offering to the royal lake. And miraculous as well for what it was not-a ghat swarming with bathers, pundits under sunshades, those who sit erect and see nothing, the mendicant, the diseased, the soon-to-be-turned-to-ashes. There were two women at the lowermost step, beating clothes, far to Owen's left, and a boy with a melodious face, approaching. That was all. Owen walked down to the nearest pavilion, entering to stand in the shade awhile, noting the elaborately sculptured columns, the dense surfaces. Set into a platform nearby was a slate panel on which he could faintly make out a block of text about forty lines long. The boy followed him along the embankment, up and down steps, across platforms, under the arches, in and out of the three pavilions. In time Owen counted twenty-five panels encased in ornamental marble, the epic poem he'd come to see and to read, one thousand and seventeen lines in classical Sanskrit, the pure, the well-formed, the refined.The panels were accompanied, as almost everything seemed to be, almost everywhere, by carved images of elephants, horses, dancers, warriors, lovers. Everything in India was a list. Nothing was alone, itself, unattended by images from the pantheon. The boy did not speak to him until Owen by a simple shift of the head indicated he was ready to step outside his studious bearing, the contained exaltation of this first short hour on the embankment. The women pounded clothes on the bottom step, the sound fading toward mid-lake, mid-sky, renewed before a silence could obtain.'This is a poem of the Mewar kingdom,' the boy said. 'It is the early history of Mewar. It is the longest Sanskrit writing in India today. This lake is circumference twelve miles. This marble is from Kankroli. The full cost is more than thirty lakhs of rupees. You are from?”'America.”'Where is your suitcase?”'It's just a canvas pack and I left it under a tree up there.”'It must already be stolen.”He wore short pants, sandals, high socks, a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the top. His eyes were serious and bright, showing an interest in the wanderer that would not be satisfied without an earnest dialogue. He inspected the man openly. Sunburnt, dusty, wide-eyed, bald on top. A shirt with a dangling button.'Is there a place I can spend the night?”A watch with a cracked band.'You must go back out to the road. I will show you.”'Good.”'How long will you stay?”'Three days, I think. What do you think?”'Do you read Sanskrit?”'I will try to,' Owen said. 'I've been teaching myself for almost a year. And this is a place I've wanted to see all that time and longer. Mainly I will study the letters. It's a handsome script.”'I think three days is very long.”'But it's beautiful here, and peaceful. You're lucky, living near a place like this.”'Where will you go next?”The women were in red and parrot green, beating in a single motion. Where would he go next? The repeated stroke reminded him of something, the Greek fisherman he'd seen a dozen times walloping an octopus on a rock to make the flesh tender. A stroke that denoted endless toil, the upthrust arm, the regulated violence of the blow. What else did it remind him of? Not something he'd seen. Something else, something he'd kept at the predawn edge. The boy was watching him, smooth face tilted in an air of inquiry, a manner that seemed laden with mature concern. As if he knew. The women started up the steps, the washwork in baskets on their heads. The boy's hair gleamed nearly blue. He climbed to the top of the embankment, pointed with a smile toward the tree where Owen had left his rucksack. Still there.Owen used the pack as a cushion, sitting cross-legged before a panel set into the nearest platform. The boy stood behind him and to the right, able to see the text over Owen's shoulder.The letters, attached to top-strokes, were solid, firmly stanced.It was as though the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered. He studied the shapes. What was it about the letter-shapes that struck his soul with the force of a tribal mystery? The looped bands, scything curves, the sense of a sacred architecture. What did he almost understand? The mystery of alphabets, the contact with death and oneself, one's other self, all made stonebound with a mallet and chisel. A geography, a gesture of the prayerful hand. He saw the madness, even, the scriptural rage that was present in the lettering, the madness of priests who ruled that members of the menial caste were to have their ears filled with molten lead if they listened to a recitation of the Vedas. It was in those shapes, the secret aspect, the priestly, the aloof, the cruel.The boy spoke several lines aloud in a beautiful musical pitch but