The Seeker Read Online Free PDF

mumbo-jumbo. And yet, he felt compelled to find exactly where the Brazilian yogi lived.
    An Australian blogger had last seen him in a cave high up in the Garwhal Himalayas. Max emailed him, the German lawyer, and the other bloggers who had mentioned the Brazilian, asking to call or meet them to discuss the Doctor and their own journeys. He didn’t know where they would meet. They were German, Israeli, Slovenian, Indian, from everywhere, and they seemed like seekers, never still, always on the move. They could be anywhere. And well, so could he.
    A shadow appeared on his laptop.
    Max looked up, startled.
    “Are you done?” said Sarah.
    Max shook his head.
    She frowned. “Can I see where you are?”
    Max pulled up the Excel file. He turned the screen toward her and walked her through his half-baked analysis.
    Sarah’s face dropped. “This isn’t enough. We need more for Tom.”
    Max saw the concern rise in her pale face. His pulse quickened. She wasn’t the one who’d watched over her shoulder all her life in fear that a stray bullet would paralyze her or worried each day that the junkies sleeping under the dark stairwell of her apartment building would rape her little sister. His questions could never be hers. He couldn’t live her life anymore.
    “You’re usually . . . Can we please get the fuck on it now?” she said. “We have to get it together by noon.”
    Max shook his head. “I can’t. I have to leave,” he said.

5
    “Time waste. You must not have come now,” said the man sitting next to Max on the floor of the train’s open doorway.
    Max smiled. This was the hundredth time he’d heard that in the last day—on the flight from London to New Delhi, in the rickshaw ride from the Delhi airport to the train station, on the railway platform and now on the five-hour train journey to Haridwar, the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. This was his first time in India; he had traveled outside the US only once before, to Kilimanjaro in East Africa, but enough Indian images had seeped into popular culture so that nothing was completely unexpected. Stray dogs and cows blended with the riot of motorists on the roads so he hardly noticed them after the initial surprise. The constant honking of car horns wasn’t anymore overwhelming than the ambulance sirens in Manhattan. And New Delhi with its shiny new highways and faceless skyscrapers appeared far wealthier than the South Bronx with its burnt, abandoned buildings. Even the street hustlers gently whispering bargains on marijuana and prostitutes were like boy scouts in comparison to the pimps and crack fiends back home. There were unexpected sights—a man riding a motorcycle with a sixty-foot ladder tied behind him, a marriage procession in the middle of a highway, colorful billboards of film actors with big barreled machine guns in their hands and fake blood gushing from head wounds yet not a hair out of place—but thus far the only true surprise was the Indian people’s unabashed curiosity. He tried to relax and enjoy the barrage of questions thrown his way and not take offense to people’s swift judgment on his travel plans.
    “Very wrong decision. You must come back in May,” said the man.
    The train stuttered in the thick evening fog. A bearded man with a bucket in his hand appeared from the white mist outside. He rushed toward the moving train and thrust one naked foot in the space between Max and his companion.
    “What . . .” said Max, jerking back.
    The bearded man grabbed the train’s door and pulled himself inside the train, his bucket flying behind him. Salted peanuts rained on Max’s head. A peanut vendor. He flashed Max an apologetic smile and began hawking his wares inside the train.
    Max’s companion in the doorway of the vestibule didn’t seem to notice the interruption.
    “Are you listening,
bhai
?” he said. “Himalayas closed in winters.”
    Max turned to him. “How can the mountains be closed? They’re always there,