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beggars engulfed me, shoving battered tin bowls up toward my face. I flung coins into their outstretched hands until my pockets were empty, then retreated to the safety of my room and hid behind the bars that covered my window.
    There were two men who passed by my house every evening just at dusk. One of them, a leper whose hands and feet had rotted away, rode on a crude wooden cart—really nothing more than a few boards strungtogether over four pitted iron wheels. He lurched past my window swaddled in grimy rags, propped upright and pushed along on his miserable journey by another emaciated man only slightly less disfigured. The fellow on the cart sang the same enchanting bhajan every evening, so predictable that I waited for his voice as a signal to close my books and prepare for meditation. The melody could be heard from some distance off, weaving through the streets above the laughter of children playing, the cries of vendors peddling samosas and chutney and chai, the voices of goats and cows and water buffalo, the shrill whistle of a steam locomotive. It was a love song to God, a song so sublimely beautiful that, sitting at my desk, listening, for those few moments every day I could almost imagine a way out of my pain.

3
    T HERE IS A PASSAGE in the Pali suttas, among the earliest of Buddhist scriptures, where the Buddha observes that in direct, first-person experience—which is all we ever really have—“mind” and “matter” are inseparable:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Within this fathom-long body, O monks, equipped with thought and the other senses and sense objects, I declare to you is the world, the origin of the world, and also the cessation of the world.
    This may seem like an abstruse philosophical claim, but it’s quite obviously true. Looking back, for example, I can see that in Agra a corner was irrevocably turned. Like the young prince Siddhartha, I found myself outside the palace, in a new body and a new world, where nothing was quite the same as it had been and everything was unsettling.
    It was during those first weeks after my arrival in India that I began the task of acclimating myself to an unceasing parade of discomforts and petty inconveniences. I learned to appreciate electricity when it was available and to stay calm when the ceiling fan died, leaving me drenched in sweat that ran down my face and fell in salty drops onto my books and papers. I conditioned myself to approach the tap with no fixed expectation, to store buckets of water for bathing, to lay in a supply of candles, to apply extra glue on my aerogrammes and postage stamps, to ask directions from several different people and to believe nothing they said. I practiced striking the spindly Indian matches at a particular angle so they wouldn’t snap in my fingers. I struggled to cultivate equanimity while jockeying for a place in the unruly crowd at the post office, at the train and bus stations, at the bank.
    Any counter, every public office or shop, was always crowded, no matter what time of day I arrived. I recall one occasion when, after patiently allowing myself to be elbowed, squeezed, stepped on, pressed, and shovedfor an hour while waiting to buy a train ticket, my “turn” finally arrived. As I approached the window the clerk informed me, in the most offhand manner, that I needed to go to window number 5, immediately adjacent to his own, where I would have to pick up a form that he himself was not authorized to issue and, bearing that form, return to him, at which time he could sell me the ticket. This meant at least another hour in the train station. When he finished speaking I struggled to find a Hindi vocabulary sufficient to express the profundity of my disbelief.
    â€œ Aap ne kyaa kahaa? What did you say?”
    But he was no longer looking at me. He appeared to have forgotten me entirely. He turned to receive a glass of chai handed to him by the friend