The Yoga of Max's Discontent Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, and he had traveled outside the United States only once before to Kilimanjaro in East Africa, but enough images of India 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’tany more overwhelming than the sound of ambulance sirens in Manhattan. And with its shiny new highways and faceless skyscrapers, New Delhi appeared far wealthier than the South Bronx, with its burned-out, abandoned buildings. Even the street hustlers gently whispering of bargains for 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 unabashed curiosity of the Indian people. He tried to relax and enjoy the barrage of questions thrown his way and not to take offense at people’s swift judgment of his travel plans.
    â€œVery 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.
    â€œWhat . . .” 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 advertising 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, right?” he said.
    â€œNo, no,” said the man, shaking his professorial face so hard that Max worried his glasses would fall off the train. “What I mean is, roads are all blocked. Big storms. Forget getting to Uttarkashi even, definitely not farther up.”
    If that were the case, coming to the Himalayas in December had indeed been a waste of time. From the train station in Haridwar, Max intended to go up to Uttarkashi, a seven-hour journey by road, then take a bus to Gangotri, the origin of the river Ganges, another six hours north, followed by a ten-mile trek up the mountains to Bhojbasa near the Ganges’s source glacier, where a lone guesthouse served holy men living in the Himalayan caves. The Brazilian doctor had last been seen in a cave near the guesthouse.
    Max hadn’t accounted for the roads being blocked, but he had planned well for the trek to the guesthouse. Within a week of quitting his job, he had said good-bye to Sophia, taken care of his apartment and finances, gotten an Indian visa, and flown to New Delhi via London so he could reach the Himalayas before the winter peaked in early January. In his backpack, he had his best cold-weather hiking gear: woolen base layers, insulated down pants, two thick sweaters, one synthetic jacket, one hard-shell jacket with a hood, two pairs of gloves and hats, four pairs of woolen socks, and multiple hand and toe warmers, enough to survive in temperatures much lower than the minus-ten degrees expected in the Upper Himalayas. And somehow he