Read Online Maya by C. W. Huntington - Free Book Online Page A

what will happen, even tomorrow. What good is it to pretend otherwise?”
    â€œThere is no question of pretending,” he replied. “One resolves to act then lives on the strength of that resolution. It may fail—one may fail to fulfill one’s dharma—but there is no other path to love. There is no mystery, Mr. Stanley. Love is not about getting what we want. Love is about how we live with what we are given.”
    This was not the sort of thing I wanted to hear.
    A handful of letters had come from Judith since my return to Delhi. She wrote of her job as a secretary in some god-forsaken office. She sent a sketch, with a description attached, of a piece she was struggling to complete—an intricate maze of gears and sprockets sprouting like tulips from the carcass of a wrecked car. She was still at it, poking around scrap-metal yards in her rusted Toyota pickup, scavenging bits of jetsam for her creations. But lately she had achieved some recognition. She wrote that her work had been included in a show and a few pieces had attracted the attention of a prominent critic. For years I had watched this process from a distance, secretly envious of her dedication to the task, her relentless labor to give birth to these brutal iron children, blue and orange sparks from the acetylene torch crackling off her welder’s mask as she hunched over her work like some crazy shaman rescuing yet another lost soul from the land of the dead. Her letters described the life she was living withoutme. Our separation was becoming a given, though neither of us knew what the future would bring.
    Sometime in November, weeks after I had begun to anticipate such a letter and even to shape my response, she wrote of a “tired anger.” She would not be coming to India. I immediately sat down and composed a dramatic pledge of eternal, undying love. I did my best to convince her that this separation was itself an element of our relationship. “We have to see that what is happening now belongs to our marriage just as much as the time we spent together.” In some perverse way, I actually believed this. A few days later I wrote to her that my letters were like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “You need to assemble them, if you can, into some larger picture, in order to understand me as I am now, as I’ve become.” But I knew that the metaphor was inadequate; it disguised the tenuous complexity of our situation, for both of us were changing far too quickly to communicate through the mail. The feel of the envelope as it slid from my fingers signaled the first leg of a long journey that could only end in loss.
    One day not long after Thanksgiving, I went out and got my hair cut short. Back in my room I looked in the mirror and was shocked with the sudden recognition of my unconscious motivation, the pitiful, childish defiance that lay behind my trip to the barber. Years before, Judith and I had argued absurdly over the length of my hair. She wanted me to let it grow long, down over my shoulders; I wanted it short. In the end I had provoked her by asserting my right to decide for myself how I should look. The result was my “prisoner of war” haircut, as she called it. She could barely wait for it to grow long again. “Only God could love you for yourself,” she said afterward, quoting Yeats, “and not your yellow hair.”
    Undeniably, I had learned something from Judith’s example. She encouraged me to go through the motions and repeat my lines. But I was never convincing in the role of husband. My love was stained with the conviction that all of it was nothing more than a peculiar form of living theater. And still, it was true: Judith made me yearn to love. I longed to commit to her, and to the world, in her superbly romantic way, but always I failed. I dismembered her warm, human affection and replaced it with sadness and pain and fear.
    And now, in India, everywhere I looked I