by Marco Vassi
Then, without warning, Babba turned his head again, like a searchlight sweeping a prison yard. He went past Martin, whose heart ducked a beat, and stopped with Robert, who took the attention with perfect ease by leaning his tall torso forward until he touched the floor with his forehead. He remained in that posture, prostrate, for several seconds, and then righted himself to smile at his guru.
“This is your friend?” Babba said in a voice that barely escaped the metallic twang which afflicts those wise men whose native language is one of the Dravidic dialects.
Robert nodded. “Yes,” he said.
Babba inclined his head and then glanced up at Martin. Once again Martin braced himself. The previous look had been humorous, gentle, but this time the guru’s eyes were hard, harsh, almost cruel.
“Why have you come?” he asked.
Martin’s first reaction was social outrage. After having done Robert the favor of accompanying him, he had not only been singled out for public notice but was now being asked a rude question in terribly blunt terms. Yet he could not escape answering; everyone was waiting for his reply. He simultaneously rationalized Babba’s crudity by ascribing to him a lack of knowledge of American customs and tried to formulate some answer that would be, somehow, satisfactory. But his brain had turned to porridge.
“Robert asked me,” he said finally, his voice almost cracking and not carrying very far.
Babba frowned and shook his head from side to side a dozen times, all the while keeping Martin’s eyes fixed with his.
Robert leaned over and whispered to Martin. “He wants to know the real reason. He wants to know what your problem is.”
“I have no problem,” Martin said in a low voice.
“What does he say?” Babba boomed.
“He says he has no problem,” Robert said in a loud voice.
“See here, you have no right . . . “ Martin started to say but his voice was drowned out by the laughter that erupted in the room. Babba was rocking from side to side, holding his ribs with his hands, his arms crossed in front of his chest, in perfect imitation of a chimpanzee that had caught its finger’s in a printing press.
“Old fart thinks he’s funny,” Martin said to himself, chagrined at being the object of ridicule. And yet, he reasoned, he deserved it. Stating that he had no problems was a colossal lie. It would be a lie for any human being to say such a thing. Even if one had no personal problems, which would be extremely rare, there are still the problems of pain and suffering and hunger in the world, the problem of death, the problem of ultimate meaning. And such planetary and cosmic concerns aside, Martin was neck deep in emotional difficulties. He didn’t give Babba any great credit for knowing that. From his position of power in the room and with his vast experience with people, it would be practically a reflex act to mock anyone who claimed he had no problems.
The laughter subsided, however, and Babba dropped his pantomime and resumed his posture of simple sitting. His eyes rested lightly on Martin. Martin’s gaze was caught. Not only by the guru’s glance but by the fact that everyone in the room was watching their confrontation.
“What does he want of me?” Martin said to himself.
Yet, even as he watched, he began to understand. Babba’s eyes ceased being two black dots in a white round pill set in a sculpture of flesh called a face. They underwent a series of astounding transformations which escalated so far beyond anything explainable by physiology or psychology that Martin was swept up into the changes and taken on the strangest ride of his life. As he sat and looked into Babba’s eyes he saw his father, then his mother. He saw himself as a child, riding his first tricycle in front of his house. He saw the expression of death on his grandmother’s features as she lay in her coffin. Then, the word seeing itself was no longer adequate, for he lost all sense of himself as a separate entity. It was not that he sat in a place and Babba in another place and some peculiar activity known as sight took place between them, but more as though they were the space itself, aware of itself, alive, pregnant with infinite possibility. Martin fell out of time and place altogether. There was only that awareness, that emptiness, that space, which began to glow, to vibrate. It was like climbing on a car in an amusement park funhouse and suddenly being plummeted into a world of dazzling surprises. But at the very point when it seemed that the experience would sprout its most bizarre leaves, everything was ripped away and Martin was back in the loft on Chambers Street, sitting on the floor, while Babba looked down at him from his platform, and a thousand eyes peeked in on the drama.
Now he was vulnerable, for the veneer of these dimensional illusion had been temporarily removed and Martin had accepted the alternate reality, presented so deftly and ingenuously by the guru. The weight of Babba’s question increased a hundredfold. Why had he come? Babba’s eyes had become drops of molten lava, rock subjected to such intense heat that it actually melted. The fierce fires of endless sorrow burned in Babba’s heart and turned the world to ashes. As Martin’s gaze was drawn more deeply into the guru’s mind, a lifetime of loneliness and sadness welled up inside him. Now he not only saw the facts of his past, his parents, his childhood, the death of loved ones, the disappointments, but he felt all the emotions that he had denied himself because little boys, when he was a little boy, were not supposed to cry.
Babba’s question swelled in scope until it encompassed the entire world. Martin knew he was being asked not only why he had come to the meeting, but why he had come into the world. From what mysterious source had he originated, and what was his purpose in being here. And the question was addressed not only to Martin, but to everyone in the room, everyone and everything in creation. Why was any of it here? And if there was a God to answer that question for everyone else, then how did God answer when He asked it of Himself?
All the people, all the trappings of the space, all that he had been up until the instant that Babba looked into his eyes, dropped away, and Martin was left with the sheer nakedness of the moment. And then, the most peculiar thing of all happened. Somehow, without his knowing how or when, it seemed that he was sitting on the platform looking down at himself. Only he had now become Babba. They had exchanged identities. And he saw that there was no difference between them, that one was the other, that the guarded and lauded thing called the self was just a momentary viewpoint. Martin began to laugh, only it was Babba laughing. He was caught in the confusion.
His ears popped, and he was back inside his ordinary awareness again. He was Martin Gordis, age thirty-one, a physical education instructor, recently separated from his wife, living in New York City. He was in a strange loft with several hundred people to see a man from India who Robert said had changed his life. This information was all very interesting to him, but whose body was that rocking back and forth on the floor?
He felt Robert’s hand on his arm. His friend’s eyes regarded him with warmth and gentle concern. He looked up at Babba. The guru had assumed yet a different mask, as though he had aged fifty years. He seemed to peer down from a mountain top. Martin wondered how he could ever have felt that the two of them were one thing, interchangeable parts of some unspeakable whole.
“There is sorrow,” Babba said.
Martin nodded, but already he was retreating inwardly. He felt he had exposed too much of his feelings, and wanted to cover himself up. Also, he was translating his withdrawal into a judgment on Babba.
Sure there’s sorrow, he thought, the hokiest gypsy fortune teller can tell you that.
“You are unhappy,” Babba went on. “Why have you come?”
There was a buzzing in the crowd. Robert was leaning close. “This is very unusual,” his friend was saying. “Babba almost never talks to people the first time they come. And even when he does, he never insists the way he’s doing now.”
Martin realized that he had dropped his head and was staring at the floor, refusing to look at the guru, and that Robert’s expl
anation was by way of telling him that he was being given an extraordinary and rare opportunity. How could he continue to behave like a sulky child? And yet he did not want to give anything to Babba. He did not trust the man. His feeling was so strong that it surprised him, for Babba had not really done anything, and on what basis could Martin form a judgment of trust or distrust?
Slowly, Martin raised his eyes. Babba had not removed his gaze. Now he looked like a standard picture of a wise man. The white robes, the white hair, the cross-legged posture, the piercing glance, the air of composure. Martin took a deep breath and straightened his back. He looked back at Babba, waiting for another round of hallucinatory pyrotechnics to be shot off. But Babba became very still, and his image did not flicker as much as a candle flame in a windless room.
Then, in a clear, full, distinct voice, he said, “Divorce is death.”
The words hit Martin like a fist across the temple. The calculating portion of the brain advanced and rejected a dozen hypotheses about what the words meant, all within a fraction of a second. The successful interpretation, the one that registered, manifested in the form of behavior, however, not thought. Martin turned to Robert and, without hesitation, said, “You told him about my marriage problems.”
But Robert was wide-eyed before Martin even spoke, and even as he spoke Martin knew that the other man was innocent of the charge. There was no way he could have reached Babba with information he’d only received that evening. The only alternative was that the guru had taken a wild shot, and scored a lucky hit. But the look in Babba’s eyes discounted that theory also. Somehow, Martin realized, Babba knew everything that was going on inside him.
Babba turned his head and looked out over the audience of devotees and the curious. And when he spoke, it was to everyone in the room. “Marriage is the most difficult yoga for a man and a woman in this age. Once, when it was clear what it is to be human, then marriage was very simple. Now we no longer know what it is to be human, so we cannot understand why we marry. Marriage does not seem necessary. Even to have children, we don’t need marriage. And we can have more fun if we are single.” The last sentence was delivered with that delicate intimation of a pause which the professional comedian uses to trip his listeners into laughter. It was successful. People laughed.
“Marriage now is like a prison. Husband and wife keep each other in their seats. They watch each other like thieves. Sometimes marriage is like a party. Husband and wife have sex with other husbands and wives. The best marriage now is like a school. It is a place to learn. It is a yoga. But this is still not the way it was.”
He paused and gazed out into space. His face began to glow, and his eyes shone, like a child watching a Disney film. Babba gazed into the Golden Age, the first period after the creation, and his heart was full with the joy of what he saw. The vision almost shimmered above the heads of those sitting in front of him. Martin saw it too. It wasn’t anything specific, not a picture. What he saw was more of a feeling, a time when he and Julia had lain in each other’s arms and faced the inevitability of each other’s death. Martin remembered the impact of the realization that one day he would exist in the world without her, or she without him. And it was as impossible to grasp as the fact of his own extinction. They had talked about it, and too overwhelmed with the brute reality of the truth that thundered in their souls, they had begun to joke about how they would end, and made a pact that if either of them were about to die, the two of them would jump off a cliff together, like lovers in the old Japanese romances.
“But they actually did that,” Julia had said. “I mean, it’s a historical fact. Lovers who weren’t allowed to marry sometimes committed suicide together to make their love eternal.”
“Would you really do that with me?” Martin had asked.
“Would you? With me?” she replied.
And for a while they had not spoken, staring into space, trying to imagine what it would be like to grasp one another in a final embrace and then leap from a cliff . . . the dizzying rapturous fall through space, the last kiss, the ultimate look into one another’s eyes, and then the plunge into the arms of death, the consummate union of their love.
Each person in the room looked into the space where Babba’s eyes were drawing a vision out of the ether, and each saw a different image, a different feeling, a different memory. And yet, all were united through him.
Babba suddenly withdrew his gaze from the air and whirled back to Martin who was caught totally unprepared for the lances of insight that shot into his mind. He was still tasting that moment with Julia when Babba leapt into his soul with both feet.
“Julia,” Babba said.
Martin gasped.
“It is dark,” Babba said. “You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”
Martin’s senses jammed. The floor tilted under him.
“There is sorrow,” Babba said, repeating his earlier judgment. “There is much sorrow. You cannot see her. She cannot see you.”
Martin heard the sound of sobbing. He felt tears on cheeks and hands. He was in touch with a deep ache going from throat to chest. And it took several minutes before he realized that all that was happening to him, and that it was all part of a single action.
I’m crying, he thought.
He had slid to the floor and was now curled up on his side, his face buried in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. He wept from his belly to his brain. The tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed, the sadness of a world waiting to be recognized. All the transiencies of his life swept before him, the lovely things doomed to perish. His parents, his friends, himself at all the stages of his growth. And finally, Julia. Julia, who had become a burr of anger, a wall of resistance, a symbol of continual discomfort. He understood how long it had been since he had even seen her, known the texture, the grain and smell and cut of her. She had become some grim thing on the periphery of his sensations, an annoyance whose name he knew. And through that sudden realization, there gushed the tenderness of the early days, the pure union of the first years. Memories like galaxies exploded in his mind. Words, fragments of glances, touches, silent subtle agreements, a shared destiny.
And it was lost, lost as fully as though she were dead. She had died to him, and he had not been there to leap off the cliff with her. Rather, he had helped push her from the precipice, as she had tried to push him. Babba’s words burned in his heart, and each time it seemed he would stop weeping, a new layer of sorrow was uncovered, and he started to sob again.
Martin cried for almost a quarter of an hour. After the first few minutes Babba looked away, as did all the others in the room. He began to chant, a low, liquid sound, and it was taken up by the crowd. Within seconds, Martin’s sounds were drowned in a great waterfall of voices, a mighty AUM which swelled and grew and lifted every thought and feeling and identity of all those under its sway, lifted them all to a space in which the eternal and infinite and ever-present source and beginning of all manifest creation flexed its unfathomable power to cause the countless universes to dance.
That single sound, the distillation of all sound, held by ancient sages to be the primal sound of creation, existing before light, before energy, before matter, before life, moved with the force of elemental consciousness to lift the people in the loft beyond all concerns of daily details, of earthly bother, of solar influence, and even of galactic programs. Sitting erect, eyes closed, Babba and his followers soared through the empyrean with all the ease and sweet grace of gulls skimming over water. The A began as a murmur in the belly and progressed to a rumble in the chest; the U opened the throat, the M vibrated through the skull, combing the tangled neuron patterns of the brain.
Martin knew none of this. All he could feel was the dam bursting in his heart. For the first time in his adult life he could wail and sob and cry his anguish to the skies, bury his tears in the earth. The wall of sound which towered over him allowed him to lose all self-consciousne
ss, and absorbed even his most powerful cries.
Gradually, he wound down. His moans were interspersed with seconds of silence during which he coughed and tried to catch his breath. After a while, even the constriction in his diaphragm let go, and he gulped air down into his belly, that flat, muscled plane which had been tucked in and plastered over with exercise since he was fifteen years old and formed a military concept of posture. Finally, he was at rest, curled up on his side in the fetal position, both hands over his face, fingers in his mouth, his nose running, his eyes red, sighing.
Who am I? was the first formed thought in his mind.
As the swelling and sediment subside in a river which has been engorged by melting snow, returning to its prior contours and rates of flow, so Martin’s ego, shattered and blown out of all recognizable proportion, started to crystallize once more. Yet some other force was awake in him, that edge of panic, perhaps of greed or insecurity, that thing called evil or devil or ignorance, which cannot allow things to take their course; that curse of human beings who are aware of their own death and build civilizations as monuments to fear. It would not let him lie there, simply, like a child. Had that been possible, he would have emerged refreshed, reborn as it were, cleansed of tensions and alive to areas that had long been anesthetized. But the jagged rim of anxiety cut at him as a can improperly opened will snag the unwary finger, opening flesh and bringing blood.
What am I doing here? was Martin’s second coherent thought.
He opened his eyes.
Oh, my God. What will they think of me? completed the catalogue of his conditioned attitudes.
Babba was looking down at him. The guru had undergone yet another transformation, it seemed. Now he was like Martin’s grandmother as he remembered her. An old woman with a wrinkled face, lips that trembled slightly just before she began to speak, and fingers that knew how to grab him in just those spots which were ticklish or tender. His central memories of her were fat lemon gumdrops she gave him when she was pleased, and the brutally intimate pinches and squeezes she administered when she wasn’t.