Holy River by Al Jacobs
"The universe was the same screwball bastard."
HOLY RIVER
by Al Jacobs
I remember it was sunny. The sandbar was only visible in the mornings. I almost forgot I was divorced, doing yoga in the holy river. Holiness endowed by a myth I then thought farcical. And post-rise-and-shine neti pot ritual, we only had an hour before the wet sand submerged again.
Our instructor, Ji, a kid who should have been in high school, assured us this was an hour longer than most people ever got near the holy river. We long-stepped the braided streams to get out there with our mats. Our mats were just cheap rugs. But well-made. Cold water seeped through our rugs as Ji sang his commands. Poses we all now knew, having hit 3-a-day seshes for 2 weeks, minus Sunday, which was today. Our last day.
That night at the ashram, fellow westerners Oscar and Basia were renewing their vows. After sandbar yoga I asked Oscar about the night’s dress code. He said, “Just don’t look like you slept on the sidewalk.” I had to grab a linen kurta in town.
On my amble into town for the kurta, still blissfully present, I watched a rhesus macaque snatch a woman’s belt bag. The same type of monkey that padded around the tin roof of the ashram. This monkey though, was posted on the wire bridge, balanced on the side cable a few paces in. The woman the monkey robbed, another westerner in Keens, wore her belt bag like a sling off one shoulder. She looked deliberately past the monkey to avoid eye contact he’d interpret as antagonistic. Which was when the monkey reached for and grabbed the belt bag before she knew it. He scrambled past me on the cable, hopped the bollard onto solid ground and shimmied up a tree thicket. The universe was the same screwball bastard. How you could smell, in the same breath, the most delicious curry and unctuous raw sewage.
I was headed back to Delhi day after tomorrow, then on home. Not that I had anyone who cared. I’d trekked out here to move beyond me and Alice’s split. She’d called it running away. We didn’t have much so the attorneys couldn’t carve much up. Which Oscar had told me I should be thankful for. He was head pharmacist at a Walgreen’s in Hoffman Estates and his lady Basia came from cheese. They’d had to go through all this paperwork, he’d said. Which was why they’d never fully split, legally. Tonight they’d toast their reconciliation. They were where they wanted to try for kids. Resource-intensive Band-Aids, Alice would’ve said. We’d lost one on the way and it became everyone’s fault.
Prepping the feast was a group effort. We sat in the stagnant heat of the kitchen. My banquet duty was stemming okra. And if the sky stayed dry, Ji said we could eat by the river. The water flowed a swift Kelly green.
But if we wanted to now, Ji said, we could all take a dip.
Me, Oscar, and Basia were the only takers.
I went headfirst, shocked by the cold. I surfaced already downriver a ways, the current ripped that hard. It took some doing to get back to the bank of boulders. Basia and Oscar were already out, closer to the ashram. They didn’t dive, just dipped like Ji had said to. Oscar was a stocky Argentine who admitted he couldn’t swim that well. And Basia, a Chicago Pole, couldn’t swim strong enough to drag his ass back to the bank by herself.
I dried off and dozed in the dark of my concrete room. Changed into my new kurta when the time came. Got chillumed with the Brazilian woman downstairs, an interpretive dancer on sabbatical. She said she’d been here for months, had never once made it to class.
We all assembled on the bank at sundown. Ji led the ceremony, sat Oscar and Basia on an ornate blanket. Basia’s sari glittered with sandalwood firelight. Oscar wore a prayer scarf around his bald gourd. Ji joined their hands and spoke about interconnectedness, quoted an ancient passage in Sanskrit none of the whites understood. Then the couple went in to kiss but Ji kept their noggins separate so they just hugged. The candles they lit were wreathed by orange marigolds. Oscar and Basia sent theirs floating down the river.
An old man from town pumped an accordion to repeat the same few droning notes. The ashram’s resident Swede who claimed he played guitar sat next to the accordion but couldn’t match the chords.
Alice would’ve dismissed it all as corny, another hollow contrivance. We had a courthouse wedding. Austere, rational, like the hatchback she insisted we share back in the city. I lit a marigold candle too, but the current bunched it against some rocks and snuffed it dark.
The kitchen staff dished up lentils with my okra and long grain rice. We ate by the river too, hung out on the bank and smoked bidi until we felt sprinkles. Drops that intensified to adjourn the party with a roaring monsoon.
I watched the puddles roil from the Brazilian woman’s window. We’d run out of anything to smoke and neither of us wanted to meet the other halfway, beyond halfway, to make any kind of move. I went back upstairs, scrolled to defy the weak wifi, and passed out.
The storm had eased to a drizzle the next day. Drizzle that felt good after 2 weeks of dry heat at altitude. Oscar and Basia knocked on my door, dressed to swim. Behind them the river now ran the color of dead earth, ancient waste washed from the foothills. I told them I’d sit this one out.
Alice would’ve said, Classic, injuriously, still the Mephistophilian pest in my head. But Basia said, “Zero worries. We just need one last plunge before our train back tonight.”
“Of course,” I said, “do you.” I watched them from my balcony. They actually jumped in this time, clung to the bank as the river raced around them.
The drizzle fogged into a fine mist. Far bank barely visible. Oscar and Basia still weren’t downstairs when their tuktuk pulled up after dinner. Ji went up to knock for them. He came back and shook his head at the driver, who nodded his assent and left. Then I went up to their room and knocked. Oscar cracked the door. His face was grey. And I remember his shirt, spattered pink and orange. Sour flecks of green, brown, decay that fresh.
AL JACOBS writes, photographs, and is looking for a space to put on a short play in New York. Hit al@aljacobs.co.
