The Empty Chair

by Bruce Wagner

  He was standing in front of the empty chair.

  Kura watched, head arched back in a pose of tranquil curiosity. He too was expecting to hear preliminary—introductory remarks.

  Then, the oddest thing happened:

  The man sat down.

  In the milliseconds that followed, I pegged him as a prankster, a rodeo clown using the sacred chair as a slapstick prop to keep the impatient crowd at bay, perhaps to soften the blow of the announcement that the star attraction was ill, and satsang would be postponed until tomorrow. A sonic boom interrupted my fantasia. A delirium of voices—like the reversed film of a building that was demolished, rising back up, a demolished cathedral—a great edifice of rising voices knocked my freakin’ socks off. Outrageous decibels shattered the snow globe, ruptured my eardrums with joyful noise, blistering and rapturous. My reptilian brain reflexively commanded me to join the uproarious Hosanna! and I did.

  Only Kura’s throat remained still. I know, because I never took my eyes off him.

  His song would come later.

  I’ve searched my mind and can’t remember a single thing the American said during satsang on that historic morning. But here’s what I know about the death of his teacher:

  Usually, the old man would awaken at 4 a.m. and retreat to the den to offer benedictions to the saints who came before him. Lost in prayer, he would bow to the Source itself and meditate until seven. But on the day he left this world, he forsook routine . . .

  The American had a routine too. He arrived at the tobacco shop each morning around the time that his teacher was finishing up. He made tea and chitchatted with Baba about goings-on at the track—this, that and the other. After a while the American would excuse himself to go downstairs, where he effected the gentle transformation of the lobby into a room suitable for satsang. He fetched the daily flowers left gratis on the sidewalk by vendors, placed them in vases then carefully swept up. Pulled flat pillows from a closet for attendees to sit on. Put up the altar, arranging coils of incense and sepia portraits of the toweled and diapered Masters of Advaita. Lifted the Great Guru’s well-oiled oak chair from its berth behind a display case, placing it front and center. Positioned a small table within the sadhu’s reach. Set a glass on the table then filled the pitcher with water, covering it with a linen napkin.

  On a counter near the entrance he laid out the beautiful Mogul Lane Press editions of the Great Guru’s books, plus tapes of prior satsang, for sale. (I remember the volumes had the faint smell of cigars.) One of the last things he did was to set up a tape recorder and mic and make sure they were functioning properly. In the time remaining, he meditated, his awareness focussed by street sounds and the quality of changing light. He took care to notice his breath and the soft, jostling shadows of wayfarers already gathering outside. Their heads merged and migrated, like elephants in a herd.

  At around 8:30, he let them in. The American could be warm or distant, depending on his mood. There were always the needy ones with inane questions: What time does satsang start? What time does it end? Is there satsang on Sundays? and so on. He tried accommodating those who wished to buy books or tapes but most transactions happened after the Q&A.

  Close to 9 o’clock, he would return to the mezzanine. The American always had oatmeal, prune juice, and toast with jam. Usually his teacher was already seated, dipping hunks of bread into a glass of hot chocolate. During breakfast the Great Guru rarely spoke though he wasn’t above ribbing his tablemate’s devotion to prunes by letting loose a cognoscente’s barrage of farts. The American would smile but always managed to suppress a laugh, inciting the saint to new heights of gaseous devilry. As this was the designated time for the disciple to bring him up to speed on sundry household matters, the Kitchen Cabinet’s attendance was compulsory. The ladies were loath to endure these noisome bull sessions but that was how Baba, in his infinite wisdom, had arranged it. While the oompah-pah of cosmic flatus grew more flagrant (not fragrant!), the Cabineteers clucked like chickens, kneading their brows and wringing their aprons in protest, looking generally miserable. At quarter-past, with exaggerated politeness, the Great Guru would excuse himself to make his toilet. When at last he emerged rejuvenated, two of the heftier cousins assisted him downstairs. By then, the American would have taken his customary place at the foot of the chair. After a few bows before the altar, the Great Guru lowered himself, and satsang began.

  But on that fateful day, the American overslept. It was the first time this ever happened and he reasoned that his body must have needed rest. Lately, he’d been more tired than usual; maybe he was coming down with something. What with his bookmaking—which referred to the horse and publishing enterprises in equal measure—and all the other jobs and duties thrown his way, he was stretched thin. Then he realized something with a start: he only dreamt he overslept. It was actually four in the morning and he lay in a pool of sweat.

  He closed his eyes again and pushed himself to remember fragments of a dream . . . they were running on a track—the American and the Great Guru. His beloved teacher was being kicked by horses. Turning toward his disciple, he wore a spooky smile that the American had trouble interpreting. Was it an expression of transcendent equanimity? Or a plea for help? If the latter, his hands were tied; intuitively, he knew any offer of rescue would be turned away. Still, he wanted at least to make a face-saving gesture—in the dream, he felt responsible for his teacher’s suffering—but didn’t know how. The feeling of impotence, and the collateral violence, was nauseating. The horses kept kicking and kicking. He heard the sound of the saint’s ribs snapping, breaking through the skin . . . He smothered any further recollections by promptly sitting up. It was just too mortifying, too painful to know such brutality swam in the shallow, primordial waters of his consciousness, that he could claim ownership of a dream scenario that sponsored such sadism toward the man he loved above all others, the only being he would have died for! Such sadness and remorse . . . unbearable.

  He leapt from drenched sheets to make tea but there wasn’t any—he’d forgotten to buy. Which seemed like another bad dream. While riffling the drawers and cupboards, he resolved to visit an acquaintance for counsel, a venerated Sufi healer who lived on the street. The dream was of the type that aroused atavistic fears and superstitions and the American wanted to learn if it was an omen; perhaps there were steps he could take to counteract its unsettling, cryptic prophesy. He decided to have tea at the tobacco shop—a perfect antidote to his anxieties. The presence of Baba would be a comfort and help ameliorate the aftershocks of his vision. The siddha would just have begun morning prayers.

  The American knew he was ill. His sweatless skin wanted nothing to do with the sweet, pre-dawn air. Yet the worse he felt, the greater his relief—at least sickness offered an explanation for those schizoid racetrack phantasms.

  Just a fever dream . . .

  By the time he reached Mogul Lane, he was winded. He made sure to softly close the door behind him (not that he ever closed it any other way), mindful not to startle his teacher’s attendants—those from the second ring of the inner circle whose duty was to stand at post in the kitchen should the Great Guru call out for hot water with honey. Stranger things have happened, but a break-in was nearly unthinkable. Throughout the years there had never been an incident, not even of tomfoolery, nor had a single stem of the thousands upon thousands of roses left at the shop’s door been absconded with.

  In crept the American . . . to darkness, much darker than he imagined. His eyes stung from the inchoate virus. Immediately, he saw the furry outline of his Master’s chair.

  That’s odd. Did I leave it there? Could I have?

  A wave of nausea. He closed his eyes and steadied himself. He thought harder—no way would he have left it. The chair was his responsibility and his alone. At conclusion of satsang, there wasn’t any question he’d have moved it back behind the case, where it normally lived. But at this moment, the Am
erican was unwell and lacked the clarity to be certain. The easy, confident relationship to reality that we take for granted, the ability to observe and process simple sensory data, to parse memory, had begun to decay. His mind whirred. Was it possible that at the end of Q&A, distracted by a rush of book and tape sales, he’d somehow forgotten to return the chair to its recess? And that the Great Guru, amused by his student’s rare show of absent-mindedness, puckishly ordered it to remain in its derelict locale? The thought did seem a bit convoluted, farfetched . . . all that, just for another little something to laugh about at their gassy morning kitchen klatches. Strange hijinks . . . to keep the chair there—more peculiar, than funny—

  He tried to recall yesterday’s events. He’d been at the track taking care of some bookie business . . . but had he returned to Mogul Lane? Had he come back at all? Because surely then he would have seen the chair and moved it—though he wouldn’t have left it there in the first place so what difference would it have made if he’d come back? Suddenly he questioned which came first, satsang or the visit to the track. Well, satsang, of course . . . but had he? Come back? (Now it was more about the sheer, arduous remembering.) Perhaps not—perhaps he’d gone straight home. Maybe he still was home! This morning, he dreamt he overslept; it would make things so much easier if he could still be dreaming. Still in bed, and deathly ill . . .

  Something superseded his tumbling thoughts—

  What’s this?

  A pile of blankets on the chair—no! He startled and retreated, his wobbly investigations literally coming to a head. He skittered to flip the light switch, then heard a woman’s shriek: his own. The Great Guru sat upright in his chair, eyes closed in mid-sip of the elixir of Eternity, illuminated from within as if by a swallowed ceiling bulb. How bizarre! The chela drew closer to regard the face. Its dentureless mouth bore the inviolable smile of those who die in peace and struggle no more. (Of course, the Great Guru stopped struggling long ago.) The American grew calm. He listened—it occurred that no one heard him cry out. Strange . . . He sat in meditation with the body until the first rays of dawn penetrated the shop’s window. He lit incense and candles and draped a blanket across his teacher’s lap. Upstairs, bodies and voices began to shift.

  Bedlam ensued, and wild disarray.

  Everyone went out of their minds. The inner circle was confounded by anguish, waylaid by grief. The widow was the first to stabilize and the others raggedly followed suit. In misery, it remained vital to eat. Hence, engines were stoked—the Kitchen Cabinet was in full throttle, adhering to an ancient tradition mandating all mouths be fed from the ovens of the house of the holy man who had merged with the Godhead. Vast amounts of foods delivered round the clock were ceremonially recycled, simmering long enough on the stove to be stirred by the Great Guru’s ladle; the neighborhood’s potluck and covered plates revolved with speedy, solemn ritual through the upper apartments’ quarters, their turnaround point being the den, the room said to be the most heavily imbued with the perfumed breath of the departed. (Even his bathroom was mined for hairs he’d shed, nails he’d clipped, for ambergris of earwax.) A host of activities, sacred and banal, carried forth amidst unthinkable, unmendable loss. When agonies reached a fatal pitch the brain intervened, reflexively enforcing time-outs, moratoriums on weeping and wailing, impromptu cease-fires—after all, tears needed to be replenished—caesuras in the song of suffering that allowed shattered devotees time to sleep, to eat, to bathe. The grief-stricken looked forward to such stupefaction the way workers do a holiday.

  The stone of such a catastrophic loss makes ripples in the water like rings in the trunk of a mighty redwood. (Sorry for the fucked-up simile.) Mortality’s clock ticks so slowly—then so quickly—that every hour of each successive day circling the ground zero of his death seemed to form a generation; so that within the week, when the body was burned on the Ganga, decades had already passed since the event. By the time Kura and I were finally informed, whole epochs had come and gone, civilizations fallen and risen again.

  The American was well equipped to deal with postmortem concerns. He knew his logistics but more importantly was able to mask his turmoil of emotions with an assuaging air of almost sunny indifference. In his years with Baba, he’d become deeply enmeshed in the ashram’s business and the widow trusted him implicitly. Normally, details of the funeral and other attendant decisions would redound to her; those responsibilities were summarily dropped in his lap. To the larger community, a number of arguments supported this wisdom. Many believed the unseen forces that awakened the American from his fever (and cleared his cupboard of tea) were the same ones that had guided him with invisible hand to Mogul Lane—in essence, he had been “summoned.” How otherwise to explain his teacher’s baffling behavior? Why else would he have been downstairs at 4 a.m., instead of singing supplications in the den? Why would he have pulled out his chair and sat waiting, on this morning, if it was not because he had chosen to die? It was obvious: the Great Guru carefully set the stage before invoking his favorite student to see him off. A final satsang for an audience of one! Any way you cut it, to discover the body of a saint is a fateful honor of inescapable import. And that he chose to meditate beside his beloved teacher was universally thought of as a magnificent gesture, which undoubtedly eased the Great Guru’s passage through the bardo of death. To say the American’s status rose higher each day would be an understatement.

  But the most “auspicious” sign of all was the nightmare he had of the rishi pursued by demons yet lightheartedly impervious to assault. He’d instantly regretted recounting his dream to the widow, an indiscretion he blamed on fatigue and the vulnerability of the moment. Too late . . . she took it as a further sign of providence.

  The guru was out of the bottle and would soon be hell-bent on granting a wish—whether it be the American’s or not.

  After the cremation, after the flowers and feasts and gutted candles, after the bitter herbs of death metamorphosized into the nectar of gratitude to God for having graced all of them with the privilege of having known and loved such a saint, after the frozen river of tears thawed enough to restore hearts and minds to the modest homes they’d decamped, after everything, came The Question, that hung in the air like a fiery harvest moon obscured by clouds. A storm of a question, whose distant rhetorical rumblings would soon be exchanged for lightning, hail and thundered demands: Who would sit in the Great Guru’s chair?

  The American slept little in the weeks following the death.

  He no longer went home at night, preferring to lie on a straw mat on the floor of the shop. He felt beyond exhaustion.

  And what about the chair? The widow ordered it to be left exactly where it was found. The American would stare at it before drifting off, almost against his will, his imagination at play in the shifting chiaroscuro. If he squinted just right, he could trick himself into seeing a seated figure; with another sleight of eye, the chair vanished altogether . . .

  Though sometimes a chair was just a chair—the saddest realization of all.

  During this in-between time he thought about the future but the farthest he got was trying to envision a life without his teacher. The prospect took the wind out of him.

  Not long after, the widow invited him into the den where her husband used to meditate and sing morning devotionals. She got right down to troubling business.

  “You must take the chair!7 It is your time. God willed it—even you cannot challenge the events of that morning. They were preordained. And who is there better than you for the job? If you know, do tell. You must listen. Twas you who sat at Baba’s feet for years. Twas you who helped spread his teachings wide and far—you know them cold! Your body is knowing them too, not just your mind. This you cannot challenge! What I am saying, you have an obligation. You have a duty. That is what I am saying. He that is immortal loved you. He invited you to the far corners of his heart, and other places, where no one has traveled, not even myself! I beg you
to consider! There are many good reasons to take the chair other than those I enumerated. The ones I am giving you now are the best reasons, the most obvious, for they are rooted in simplicity and common sense. But I contest there are many others, and some among them which are more than quite pressing. Surely, you are naïve to what I’m referring? I am telling you first to consider—then reconsider. You must take the chair! Now, good. Go! We shall talk again.”

  That night the American slept at home.

  You must take the chair!

  He wanted to talk back, but what could he say?

  You must take the chair!

  It was like being warned by a gypsy or getting advice from a consigliere in a cheap mob drama . . . she made him feel like a hoodlum. And in that room, no less, that room of prayer, his father’s room! He found himself fantasizing about leaving Bombay, something that never crossed his mind until now. He hadn’t yet visited Benares; it was said all men must go to Benares at least once in their lives. To die in Benares meant to escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth and gain direct admittance to nirvana. A vision of himself in that ancient city grabbed hold.