All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [126]
TRAVELING
I had long dreamed of visiting India, drawn to it by a desire to meet not maharajahs but sages, yogis, and ascetics, for I had never abandoned my project of the Shushani years, my study of Jewish asceticism. Why not compare it to Hindu asceticism, contrasting the Jewish idea of redemption with the Hindu concept of nirvana?
I was fascinated by the Hindu tradition. I studied mantras, yoga, and most of all tantrism, but from afar. I loved the beauty of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the cosmic connections they described. The Talmud’s Angel of Death and Shiva, god of destruction of Hindu texts, were both enemies of ignorance as much as of facile pleasure. Despite its apparent polytheism, Hindu mysticism was close to Jewish mysticism, except that my tradition rejects images, while they proliferate in Hinduism. A statuette of a Jewish Brahma would be inconceivable. Was the Vedanta a Hindu version of the Zohar? Was the world no more than a dream of God, and Creation but a wheel in eternal rotation?
The truth is that all mystical traditions have similar origins. It is only on the surface, on their most superficial levels, that religions seem opposed to one another or even incompatible. I wanted to find out if this was also true of Hinduism.
Travel expenses were a problem. Yedioth had no money, so I didn’t even bother asking. I wrote ten articles for various Yiddish newspapers, promised ten more for later, did a few translations, and bought a lottery ticket for the first time in my life. Miracle of miracles, I won a modest amount, and at last I had a ticket in hand, but not much more. The two hundred dollars in my wallet would not take me far.
There remained the question of a visa. Dan Avni, press attaché of the Israeli embassy and future writer and professor, phoned his Indian colleague and settled that matter for me.
During the crossing—with stopovers in Suez and Aden—I studied English, read translations of Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, and reread the teachings of Sakyamuni and the commentaries of Sri Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. A fellow passenger—whose visiting card bore his name and profession: “future physician”—gave me the name of an inexpensive hotel in Bombay. Except that for me everything was expensive. The medical student advised me to play the ponies. Aboard ship? You didn’t need horses to play. My instructor showed me how. At first I lost, then I won, then lost again. Games of chance are not my forte. The future physician didn’t do well either. Broke, he asked me to lend him two hundred dollars, my entire fortune, promising to pay me back in Bombay. I should have known not to be a fool, but I could never say no. The night before we docked, I felt panicky: I should never have trusted the future physician, should never have set out on this “spiritual” adventure in the first place. I would have done better to look for the mysteries of India in Paris. How would I pay for lodging in this vast country? What would I live on? But it was too late to turn back.
On a wet January morning, after three hours of interrogation and negotiation with the border police and customs agents (the inspectors couldn’t understand why I was the only passenger without a trunk), I finally disembarked in Bombay, carrying a battered suitcase and my typewriter. I searched for the future physician in the crowd, worried that he was a crook and convinced that I was an imbecile. But there he was, two hundred dollars in hand.
Near the harbor, as I looked for a taxi or, preferably, a bus, I was suddenly surrounded by a swarm of half-naked waifs ravaged by various diseases ancient and new, known and unknown. One wept with tearless sobs, another muttered incomprehensible words, a third pointed to the stump of his amputated left leg. Some were young, others ageless. Despite their condition, they seemed beautiful and mysterious—black, disheveled hair, eyes like tombs reflecting nothingness, their only clothing shirts that might