Buried Alive - Part 2

he next morning, I went to the garage to borrow a pair of rain boots. I found Bharat beside a table, oiling his rain hat. “Hey Bharat, good morning. Hey, whatever pair of pants I wear is gonna get ruined, right? Cause I have two pairs of pants, and these are the ones I like less.”

“I can loan you a pair of pants.”

“Nah, it’s OK. These are just some $30 things I got for free anyway. So, I was gonna borrow some boots of Paula’s, she said they’re out here.”

He pointed to a big pair of rubber galoshes.

“Hngh. Do you think I can wear these shoes inside of them? I don’t have socks.”

“I think actually someone left some socks here. They’re upstairs, hanging from the roof. Just there. Use this.” He handed me an iron pole and I went upstairs.

“How is it you brought such a gigantic suitcase and only two pairs of pants?”

“I packed quickly.”

“It’s best to pack light.”

“I usually do, but a couple weeks ago, I gave away all my bags, and this was the only bag I had left. It was so big, it didn’t seem to matter if I packed light or heavy.”

He grunted.

I fished the socks off a rafter and came downstairs, and while putting them on, I asked Bharat polite questions. I’m not sure why, but this was insolent. Somehow, addressing him as a normal person was rude, and I knew it, and was doing it on purpose.

“So, did you grow up in India?”

“No…” he gave me a look, then continued. “Mostly Europe. But most of my family is in India, Hindus. In Hyderabad. Formerly Pakistan. Back and forth of course, up there.”

“Haha.”

He went back to oiling his hat.

“I’ve been to Hyderabad,” I said.

“Probably in the south, right? That’s mostly Muslim. We’re in the north.”

“Oh yes, I didn’t know there were two. These boots are great. Thank you.”

“It’s cool.”

“Is there anything I need to bring up today? The candle? The mirror?”

“No, just you.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, I just want to get the graves dug by 4 PM. I want to get us back on track. The group is running a little behind, for some reason.”

“Ooh, uh-oh.”

ack up at the site, Bharat was evaluating our progress. He came to me and said, “You’ll need to go deeper over there. The whole thing really. The deeper the better.”

I was about three feet in. The soil was mostly rocks and clay. My thumb was torn open and my hands trembled from exhaustion. I said, “It’s slow going.”

“Do you want a hand?”

“Yes.” He got in and, jumping on my shovel with all his weight, and moved from one end of my grave to the other, breaking the soil to about three or four inches deep all across. I dug that out— it took me about two hours. Then, I made a ridge about a foot from the surface of the ground, one-third of the way inside the grave. I got tree branches about an inch in diameter and laid them over the ridge, one flush with the other. I constructed my air hole, and collected ferns, and lay them over the poles. I was ready to shovel dirt over that, but Bharat was back.

“Let’s see… No… Your air hole’s pretty… big there. Be careful, actually, you may get a badger in there with you.”

“But I can’t make it smaller, because… I…”

I had read a diary of someone who had done a Toltec burial, and said that he had no air.

“You’ll have plenty of air,” Bharat said.

“I don’t…”

“With a hole that size, you’ll get light in, then what’s the point? You might as well spend a night under the stars.”

I looked at him. We were having a staredown.

“You’re not going to die tonight,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No one has died yet. This has been going on hundreds of years.”

“There is always a first.”

“You need the sensory deprivations. Sounds need to sound different,” he used some big medical words, and began to form garbled arguments, and to seem nervous. It was never really made clear how it was that being buried was a spiritual activity. He said on the one hand it was to solve our problems, and on the other, that our problems did not exist. I always was curious if we were supposed to address our problems on their own terms—“I am lonely, I should be nicer to people”—or if we were supposed to apply some Buddhist nothingness to them—“I do not exist, there is no lonely, I learned this in the grave.” It seemed like Bharat couldn’t quite decide either. But we were doing this. He was still talking about habitual patterns, change, sensory deprivation, and liberation.

I said, “I’m not with you on this.”

He rose his voice: “It doesn’t matter. Just do it.”

“OK,” I said, but I didn’t.

t dinner, my hands shook from exhaustion. It was hard to use a fork. I spent 20 seconds pinning a cucumber. Bringing it to my mouth, my hand shivered all the way up. I focused on the avocado slices. They were slippery and slid away from the tines. I tried spooning my fork under them, but the trembling in my hand was too much. They kept falling. I lay my fork down.

“You’re not hungry?” someone said.

“My hands shake too much to eat.”

TO BE CONTINUED:

BURIED ALIVE!

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