Tim Parks - The Server

Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. So what is the sparkling, magnetically attractive Beth Marriot doing here? Why is a young woman whose irrepressible vitality and confident ego were once set on conquest and stardom, now spending month after month serving in the vegetarian kitchen of a bizarrely severe Buddhist retreat?

Beth is fighting demons: a catastrophic series of events has undermined all prospect of happiness. Trauma leaves her no alternative but to bury herself in the austere asceticism of a community that wakes at 4am, doesn’t permit eye contact, let alone speech, and keeps men and women strictly segregated.

But the curious self dies hard. Conflicted and wayward, Beth stumbles on a diary and cannot keep away from it, or the man who wrote it. And the more she yearns for the purity of the retreat’s silent priestess, the more she desires the priestess herself.

The Server sets western individualism against the Buddhist belief that what we call ‘self’ is insubstantial fantasy. Unsure of anything but pain and pleasure, Beth’s constant invention and destruction of herself and the people around her is both riveting and funny.

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still . He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books , and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.

SEX IS FORBIDDEN at the Dasgupta Institute. That’s one of the big advantages of working here. Of course I’m a volunteer, they don’t pay me, so I don’t mean really working. I’m a server, officially. Harper says it’s unusual for anyone to serve for more than three or four retreats in a row. Which makes sense. Parents don’t put you through school to have you spend your life cooking and cleaning for free. They have ambitions for you, they have their plans. It’s hard to disappoint.

All the servers here are young, or youngish, between things anyway. I suppose, if you think about it, people are always between things, there’s no other way to be. But you know what I mean. Summer jobs, gap years. Sometimes I wonder what things I’m between. I suppose it should be pretty easy to say what the stuff behind you is, how you came to be here and so on. Most people’s worries are about the future. But the longer I stay at the Dasgupta Institute the less certain I am about what happened before. In the early days here, when I first sat and tried to meditate, the past hammered on in my head. Everybody gets that. You sit and close your eyes and the thoughts start barking like crazy dogs. They used to, and I haven’t forgotten. Just that nowadays I’m not so sure any more what it added up to. Perhaps, churning over and over, the old thoughts have worn themselves out. The torment has faded. Perhaps the truth is I’m not between things at all at the Dasgupta. I’ll live here for ever maybe, or if I go, the Dasgupta will live with me.

This morning I felt very lazy. The gong sounds at four. Servers don’t have to start preparing breakfast till six, so I usually sit in the first hour and a half of meditation and leave when the chanting begins. This is definitely the best part of the day. Why? I don’t really know. Nothing hurts before dawn. You walk to the meditation hall through the dark. The morning air feels soft, everything’s damp and dewy and it’s very quiet. If you are one of the first, you’ll see rabbits in the grass. There are stars, and the stars are bright here. Chilly. People wear fleeces with hoods and look like monks or ghosts. Everything feels kind of ghostly and on hold. In the hall your cushion and blankets welcome you. The lights are dimmed. You close your eyes and listen to the others coming in, snuffling and fidgeting and coughing. That can drive you mad. A voice starts in your head: Hey, I didn’t get up so early to listen to your coughs and farts, thank you very much. I get enough stink cleaning loos. Then you realize these sounds are cosy. They protect you. That’s a strange thing. You’re going crazy with someone for constantly blowing her nose and you feel protected and humbled too. This person is making a big sacrifice coming to the Dasgupta and trying to change her life. Who are you to be so critical? In the end it’s good to feel humbled and say to yourself, Stop bitching about the poor woman’s snuffles, Beth Marriot. You’ve no idea the shit she may be going through, or the bad things she’s between.

So I let the coughs and snuffling be. I accept them, like an itch or a cramp, or the crows scrabbling on the prefab roof. Those crows can make quite a racket. I love the morning session. It’s the best. But today I felt lazy. When the gong sounded I didn’t get up. Something must be changing. Anicca . Feel the change. Ahneechaaa, ahneechaaaa, ahneechaaaa . I love the way Mi Nu says that word in her singsong Asian voice. Feel the pulsing in your wrists, Beth, feel the tingling in your cheeks. Change. Anicca . Maybe it’s the same change that made me pick up a pen. Today, on impulse, I picked up a pen. Writing is another thing that is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. Writing and sex.

Not that I ever minded the writing ban. The only rule that really got to me when I first came to the Dasgupta was the Noble Silence. No talking. No singing. For me there are moments when it just seems natural to say right out loud — Good morning, folks! Could you pass the water jug? Hey, you’ve forgotten to take your shoes off! Or other moments when I have to burst out singing, When the working day is done, Girls just wanna have fun! I just have to rock and shake and stamp my feet. So silence was hard for me. In fact what’s nice about being a server is that you can talk a bit, at least in the kitchen. No, you have to talk to get your job done. Though never to the meditators of course. The meditators mustn’t be disturbed.

Actually, I tell a lie. The no-smoking rule drove me crazy too. I’d brought three packs to get me through the ten days and smoked them in the bushes at the bottom of the field. People must have seen. But I never finished them. Eight months later I still have half a pack. You’d think this was a major event in my life, chucking smoking. God knows, I’d tried often enough, with Carl on my back. But now I can’t even remember when it happened. Meditation does that. We live in a trance at the Dasgupta. An endless jhāna . I like that word. One day I found I wasn’t smoking. One day I realized I had stopped thinking, of Dad and Mum and Jonathan and Carl and Zoë. I’d stopped thinking of Pocus, stopped thinking of the future. So the Dasgupta technique does work. I had grown in Dhamma. Except now here I am all of a sudden writing this down. Me who never wrote anything but songs in the past. Actually, I still don’t mind the no-writing rule. I mean, it was nice smoking when I wasn’t supposed to smoke. I didn’t stop because of the rule. And it’s nice writing now and knowing I’m not supposed to write. It’s made me feel pretty intense this morning. Intensely Beth. Maybe I’m about to switch from being a model Dasgupta server to a crazy, bad-girl rebel breaking all the rules. Then they’ll chuck me out and I’ll find out what things I’ve been between all this time.