A River Sutra Read Online Free PDF Page B

circle until the crowd no longer knows which of us has renounced the world today. In that closed circle I can hear the monks chanting:
"You will be free from doubt.
"You will be free from delusion.
"You will be free from extremes.
"You will promote stability.
"You will protect life."
My father is looking for me but he will not find me. I have become a stranger, my features hidden behind a muslin mask.
And now, my friend, my brother monks are waiting for me in Mahadeo.
    No, I cannot stay longer. You must find someone else to answer your questions.
If I am late, they will leave and I shall have to join a new sect of mendicants.
Don't ask me to do this, my friend.
I am too poor to renounce the world twice.
    For some time the memory of the monk disturbs me. When I sit on the terrace before sunrise with my face turned toward the source of the river, I find I cannot concentrate, seeing the monk's intense eyes above the white mask covering his mouth as clearly as if a photographic image is being projected onto the darkness.
In the silence I can hear waves lapping at the riverbanks and I think of the ascetics meditating by the holy pool at Amarkantak, seeking through their meditations to liberate themselves from the cycle of rebirth and death.
At this hour I have sometimes seen the dull glow of something being swept downstream and known it was the corpse of an ascetic thrown into the river with a live coal burning in its mouth. I cannot stop myself from wondering if some day while I am sitting here in the dark I will see the monk's body floating beneath the terrace.
On entering the jungle for my morning walk, I loiter under the trees until it is time to visit Tariq Mia, anxious to avoid the caves for fear of finding myself in conversation with another stranger. To dispel my morbid thoughts I admire the red blossoms shaken from the flame trees by clambering monkeys. Or I pause between the branches rooted in the soil around an immense banyan tree like pillars in an ancient temple to watch birds guarding their nests from the squirrels streaking through the flat leaves.
By the time I climb the summit of the hill, my preoccupation with the monk begins to evaporate like the dew receding all around me in the sunlight. On the far bank of the river the morning sun is striking the canals that irrigate the fields, and I can see farmers moving behind their buffaloes through flourishing crops interlaced by silver ribbons of water.
Now I am full of anticipation at being with my friend. Although Tariq Mia often teases me, sometimes even suggesting I am pretentious, there is a lightness to my step as I descend into the valley that separates us.
A narrow bridge spans the stream that flows past Tariq Mia's mosque. Extending on one side of the mosque is a marble platform leading to the sixteenth-century tomb of the Sufi poet and saint Amir Rumi. Another platform leads to Tariq Mia's residence. Behind the mosque the whitewashed village houses form a pleasant jigsaw up the incline of the hill.
There is a placidness to the scene that suggests the calm of simple lives ordered only by the passing of the seasons and the call to prayer.
But once a year the calm is broken by Sufi singers from all over India who congregate at Amir Rumi's tomb to pay homage to their saint and poet on the anniversary of his death. For ten days and nights the marble platforms are covered with carpets, campfires flicker on the hillside, the hills echo to ecstatic singing. Then the singers are gone and Tariq Mia's mosque is enclosed once more in its habitual tranquility.
Today, by the time I reach Tariq Mia's house, the cane mats are already unrolled on his veranda, the bolster pillows propped against the pillars, and on a small wooden table the chess pieces have been readied for our game.
Tariq Mia stands on tiptoe to kiss my cheeks, his thin white beard brushing my chin. "What an unexpected pleasure! How surprised I was to see you on the bridge!"
A young divinity student with the