I didn’t think he’d be so happy to see me. I tried my two Hindi words to which he responded in fluent english. The man introducing us had fumbled our names, so from now on mine would be Charlie. I assume having a bit of holy blood comes with at least a few languages, pop out in the world with latin, sanskrit and some street spanish. Or how is a god born? When do you find out you’re a little something extra? I was too shy to ask and he’d already gone to make us Chai. Not even a god has figured out something better than Chai. As drizzle set in over exposed moraine, a tin cup with something warm was as close to heaven as I could get.
His hut is nestled deep in the Himalayas next to the snail trail of a receding glacier. The scars in the cliffs left from the glacier movement illustrate a different time scale, one of nature's earliest gods. I sit while he serves joyously, jubilantly even. His tough black hair filled in with whispery gray threads. Desperate to say something, I sit in silence. Perhaps he knows how to slow the ices’ melt or make the White-bellied Heron come back. Resisting my usual urge to fill the space I watch and sip. He pours glass after glass from his stone charred pot, his service to others not lost on me.
Service for its own sake feels like an idea lost by the West. Forgotten in the flurry of hyper individualism and bootstraps. Perhaps there’s a vulnerability to it that feels out of place in America, a resignation to letting someone take care of you. A fear of showing weakness. If the American dream meant having our own plot to care for, then how did we get so alienated from our land?
Every religion offers its own framing on service. In Christianity they speak of using whatever gift you have received to serve others, stewards for the many forms of God's grace. The sentiment is echoed in Islam where acts of service and good deeds earn you blessings and draw you closer to Allah. In Hinduism, Seva is the service to God and humanity, and is presumed without the expectation of return. If religion is just serving what you deem greater than yourself, and I’m on my second round of chai, what does that make me?
To see a demi-god serve feels different. I feel a phony, a trickster, inadvertently unraveling a cosmic order. I want to say stop. Tell him I’ve paid to get this far. My life has only been my own, nothing more. My opportunities, just nails in the floor left for me to trip over. You’re doing something different. You’re holding together the ends of the rope that tie all of time together. Time that has made kingdoms crack and peasants pariahs. The time I see has merely graced these young mountains. The time you live by has given them their stories, watched as we learned their humility and worshiped the power they have over us.
Maybe it’s only fitting that I have to wash my own dishes, squatting beneath my broken baby blue umbrella. His Aunt Pavriti was married to the destroyer of worlds but never left him a dishwasher. I wondered what would happen if I let myself live on his time. My goals overgrown by the fall flowers, my sense of self washed away with the spring monsoons. I could sit in the stones next to you as we meditated in your outcropping day after day.
It feels too easy to mystify that sense of time. To think all I must do is preach fullness and wanderlust to each traveler that passes through my life. Naive to think we have any choice in sacrificing our time to the new gods of leisure and spectacle. Give me quick reads, overnight shipping and a few minutes to scroll. I want to know, not learn.
I flash back to myself in New York City, cozy beneath the concrete canopy. Prior to leaving, I sat ten floors up in the climate change industry's ivory tower. My view left me convinced that those living in these himalayan valleys would be forced to move. Suffocated by floods, then drought, their glaciers' newfound mortality would be felt by all. But when I made it up the valley, I saw nothing of the sort. Reflecting off the ice I saw the glacier's biblical complexion. The last few years I felt my gods get replaced by apes. Amateurs in the art of apocalypse, the monkeys were eager for the role but only had one page to practice drawing on.
Who's to say what’s god and what’s not, maybe that’d be missing the point. The pluralism of today is its own doctrine and its own purgatory. We’re left to define purpose and contentment for ourselves. Our parents worked their whole life for security and comfort, just so I could ask these questions. So that I could choose any blueprint of beliefs, and voila, they’re mine. If they lose meaning, don’t worry, I can keep searching up a new valley for a new god.
I sat wishing he’d give me a list of morals, a perfect person to be. Chastise me for leaving the village or not being there for thy brother. Start me back in the garden and I'll prove I can serve our land.
A tap on the shoulder brings me back to the cold dirt. It turns out that it’d been lost in translation. My tea pouring deity isn't a god at all but the last wiseman of the valley, a line blurred by stories and tradition. He’s a monk dedicated to staying in this very spot. But sitting in the corner of the rock hut I can still see his divinity, as if God had already walked in and he’d been ready with a fresh pot of chai. In the still air I wondered what form He would take next for me.
What to Say When You Meet Gods 7th Cousin
