The Seeker by Karan Bajaj Page B

from the boulder and walked over to their motorcycle.
    “Ignore him. He’s a city boy from Delhi, he hasn’t seen any real yogis,” said Shiva.
    They followed Omkara, quickly catching up with him. The road turned steeper. The motorcycle de-accelerated and swerved, then steadied again under Shiva’s able handling. Soon, the asphalt ended and a gravelly dirt road began. For the next hour, Max concentrated on moving his body in sync with Shiva as he leaned right and left, forward and back, using the weight of his body to help navigate the sharp hair-pin bends.
    They stopped outside a small closed roadside restaurant half-way to Gangotri two hours later. The restaurant’s tin roof had caved in from the thick deposits of ice on it and its door was blocked by a six-foot tall block of snow. No one seemed to have entered it for months. They spread a tarpaulin from Omkara’s motorcycle saddlebag on the restaurant steps.
    “How do the yogis get up to Gangotri in winter?” asked Max.
    “They just walk through the mountains,” said Shiva.
    Max stared at the blank white mountains surrounding him. He’d never be able to find his way to the guesthouse without a trail.
    Shiva seemed to read his thoughts. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The trek from Gangotri to Bhojbasa is a joke. We call it a ‘ladies’ hike’ in these parts. It’s an easy, well-marked path. A tall, fit guy like you could be up and down in five or six hours, even quicker now that there is no one around.”
    “Have you been up there?” asked Max.
    Shiva nodded. “I didn’t stop at the guesthouse though. I went further up where my uncle was meditating in a cave. Serious yogis live much higher up than Bhojbasa. You can’t get there on marked trails. Many curious people come here—this researcher from Glasgow University, that writer from Milan—the lower Himalayas are a total tourist trap. Yogis don’t want to be found so easily,” he said. “And higher up in the mountains, the locals respect that. If people want a yogi’s blessings, they’ll just touch the outside of the cave or the yogi’s footsteps in the snow and go. All this watching and taking pictures and gushing over exotic India is done only by foreigners and people from the plains.”
    Omkara noisily opened a packet of cookies. “All over the world people are striving for progress,” he said. “Only in India can you live naked in the mountains like a caveman and have idiots ask for your blessings.”
    “They aren’t cavemen,” said Shiva. “They’ve just realized sooner than all of us that man’s soul cries for the infinite in a finite world. That’s why nothing ever satisfies us.”
    Omkara got up from the steps. “My soul cries for an end to your infinite stupidity,” he said. He walked over to where the motorcycles were parked and took out a plastic container from Shiva’s motorcycle’s saddlebag. He began refueling his motorcycle from the container.
    “He really needs to watch his mouth,” said Shiva. He turned to Max. “You can never talk about yogis like that.”
    “I won’t,” said Max.
    “I’m serious.”
    “I said I won’t.”
    “Ever.”
    “Jesus. Never,” said Max.
    “Good. One of the yogis in the cave next to my uncle’s had kept his right arm raised for twelve years, not even bending it down while sleeping. Every moment, day and night, for twelve years, can you imagine that? My uncle told me that such practices—raising the arm and standing on one leg—train the yogi to treat his body with contempt so he can concentrate undistracted on the divine soul within,” said Shiva. “I’ll never forget how the yogi smiled when he saw me. His right arm was thin like the dead branch of a tree, just bone and loose skin on top, but his skin glowed like a lamp. It was freaky. A man like that, who doesn’t eat, who doesn’t sleep, who deliberately withers his arm away to bone, what can he not do? You can’t joke about things like this. Everyone in the