by Galaxy Craze
He pulled out a Snickers bar from his shorts pocket. It was squashed, but Sati didn’t seem to care.
“Where did you get that?” she asked excitedly.
Brad smiled. His metal braces flashed on his teeth. “We’ve got our sources. We’re already on a sugar high.” He held out his hand and his brother fived him with a giant leap off the haystack.
“Thanks, Brad,” Sati said, as she opened the wrapper. The chocolate had melted and now stuck to her fingers. She licked the chocolate off.
“Can I have a piece?” Molly asked, holding out her hand.
Sati broke off small pieces, giving one to Summer and one to Molly.
“Open your hand,” she said to me. I saw Eden watching her, wondering, hoping he would be offered some. She put some candy in my hand and I brought my hand to my mouth.
When she placed her hand in mine, I noticed a gold ring she wore with a small ruby.
“That’s a pretty ring,” I said.
“It’s my wedding ring,” she said. “I’m married to God.”
“Yeah, but God’s celibate,” Brad said, smiling slyly. He leaned against the wall. He looked about sixteen, lanky in camouflage T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts.
“Well, Parvati married me to him,” Sati said.
“It’s my turn next,” Molly said. “Parvati said she would make me one of God’s brides when I did better in school.”
Dylan climbed the wooded beams of the barn, into the hay loft, and sat up there watching us.
“Come up here,” he called to Summer, who looked at him shyly.
Sati stood beside Brad. “Thanks,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. She leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair had dried and was light brown, falling past her shoulders. The sun coming from the windows made her green eyes look as though there were pieces of gold in them.
Later, we left the horses and followed them to the dining hall. They walked from the stables and sat at the tables in their bathing suits and bikinis, barefoot. A sign outside the door said, PLEASE REMOVE SHOES. I left my sandals on the rack with the other shoes, but all through dinner I worried someone might steal them. They were purple wedged sandals, and I bought them with the money I’d made babysitting Eden.
The dining hall was a large wood-paneled room with a cathedral ceiling. There was an excited, secret feeling inside, the way I imagined boarding school would feel, or a summer camp in the woods.
The sound of voices rose to the ceiling, with the constant clink of dishes, the scrape of knives and forks against china, and laughter. The windows were open, and warm sweet-smelling air filled the room.
Across the dining hall, I saw my mother sitting at a table with Renee; they were talking and laughing. Renee covered her mouth with her hand. Eden and I carried our trays toward her, but we could see that her table was full.
Sati touched my shoulder. “I saved seats for you next to me.”
We followed her to a round table in the middle of the room and put down our plates. Dinner that night was salad, brown rice, sweet potatoes, and a bean and tomato stew. Eden touched his food with his fork, prodding it.
A man carrying a tray of food passed our table. “How’s my sweetheart?”
“Fine, Dad,” Sati said, blowing him a kiss as he walked away.
I recognized him from before. He was handsome, in a square-featured American way, the way I imagined the pilot who flew our airplane or an American doctor would look. We had seen him on the path when we arrived, and Renee had told us that he was a millionaire, the richest man on the ashram and one of Parvati’s favorites. He had raised the money for the hospice and the new school building.
Sati’s father set the tray of food down in front of a woman sitting alone at a table.
“Is that your mum?” I asked.
Sati nodded. “She’s going to have a baby,” Sati said. She crossed her fingers in the air. “Please God—I mean, Parvati—let it be a girl. I hope it’s a girl,” Sati said, holding up crossed fingers.
“I was hoping my mum would have a girl too,” I said. “But it was a boy.”
Eden looked at us from across the table, his fork near his mouth. “Mum told me when I was a baby you used to dress me up like a girl and push me around in my pram pretending I was your baby sister.”
Sati thought this was funny and laughed aloud. She took a sip of water.
“Can you keep a secret?” she said to me.
I nodded, but I had never been able to keep a secret for long.
“My mother’s going to give the baby to Parvati.”
“Why?”
Sati shrugged. “As a gift.”
I looked at her but did not know what to say.
“Parvati has always wanted a baby,” Sati said, “so my mother said she would give her one.”
I looked around the room for my mother. I wanted to go to her, to sit beside her, but she was surrounded by people. She held a mug of tea in both hands and her cheeks were flushed. She looked pretty and young; her hair fell loose around her face, and her eyes shone brightly. She smiled at something one of the men at the table said, tilting her head back so the arch of her teeth showed. I realized that I hadn’t seen her laugh like that in a long time.
We were given a room in Hanuman House, a small room with a window that looked out to the woods. A bed took up most of the space. A set of sheets, towels, and a blanket lay folded in a pile. The room was painted white.
At night, Mum hung a shawl over the window, so the sun wouldn’t wake us too early. She lit a candle that had been left, half melted, on the windowsill.
The bathroom was shared by everyone on the floor. A note taped to the mirror read, Be considerate of others. Leave the bathroom the way you would like to find it. Namaste. These kinds of notes were posted all over the ashram.
We brushed our teeth and wiped the sink clean with a piece of toilet paper, then carried our toothbrushes and toothpaste back to our room, where we kept them in a cup on the shelf. The house was sparse, tidy, and clean.
“What did Parvati look like?” I asked our mother when we were alone in our room.
“She’s from India,” she said. “She has long black hair down her back. She was dressed in a green sari and had a red dot in the middle of her forehead. She wore about a hundred gold chains around her neck and enormous diamonds, the size of ten-pence pieces, in her ears.”
The three of us sat together on the mattress with a blanket over our knees. It was a warm night but we sat close, talking about the guru in low voices, because the house was full of strangers and they were devoted to her.
“How old is she?”
“Maybe in her late forties. I’m not sure.”
“What can she do?” Eden asked impatiently. “I mean, can she cast spells? Can she make things float or move them with her mind?”
“Maybe she can, but we just talked.”
“What did you talk about?”
“We talked about”—I felt her squeeze my hand—“relationships and love, things like that.”
“Mum,” Eden said, “the food here is horrible.”
“The food is rather dull,” Mum agreed.
“My stomach hurts. I didn’t eat anything for dinner.”
“Pass me my handbag,” she said, nudging me with her elbow. She rummaged through it and pulled out four pieces of cheese wrapped in red wax and some packets of crackers and peanuts she had saved from the airplane.
“I took them from the man’s tray next to me,” she said. “He slept the entire flight.”
We divided the cheese and crackers into threes and Mum pulled out a roll of Rollos from her handbag.
“Mum!” we said, excitedly reaching for them.
We sat huddled together, with Mum between us. Eden laid his head on her shoulder and she stroked his hair. This feeling was familiar; it reminded me of an earlier time I couldn’t place exactly: a secret knitted-together feeling.
“So, all these people live here just so they can be near Parvati
?”
“Yes. She’s their spiritual teacher,” Mum said. Eden and I looked at each other and started to laugh. We laughed when Mum sang the hymns too loudly in church and we laughed when she said the words, “Making love.”
“How do you know she’s real and not just pretending?”
“I felt it,” Mum said. She held her hands in the air as though she were molding the words. “She makes you feel this warmth, this kind of love when you’re near her. She makes you feel taken care of, like everything will be all right.”
There was an expression on my mother’s face, a glazed look in her eyes.
“Can she do any magic, like make herself invisible?” Eden asked.
“Eden, she’s not a witch or a sorcerer, she’s a spiritual teacher!” I said, laughing so hard Eden began to laugh too.
“Really, you two. Laurel and Hardy.”
“But seriously, Mum,” I said, when I had calmed down, “why does she get to be the guru? I mean, what’s so special about her?”
“If you stop talking and giggling, I’ll tell you the story.”
A story. We settled down on either side of her to listen. “A long time ago—well, not too long ago,” Mum began. Her voice was soft, and a breeze came through the window. “When Parvati was a young girl, six or seven, she woke up one morning and said to her father, ‘I want to meet the Maharaji.’
“‘Why do you want to meet the Maharaji?’ her father asked her. So she told her father she’d had a dream about him, the same dream every night for over a year. In the dream, she sat at Maharaji’s feet, and he gave her a cup of rose water to drink.
“Eventually, Parvati’s father agreed to take her to see Maharaji. It was a long journey; they had to travel by train. When Parvati met Maharaji, she knelt by his feet and would not leave. She put flowers on his bed; she prepared his food; she washed his clothes and refused to return home with her father.
One day, while she was washing his clothes in the river, she saw blood in the water. The blood was coming from her hands. Maharaji told her not to be frightened; the blood on her hands was a sign from God. She had stigmata.
“What’s stigmata?” Eden asked.
“It’s like the marks Jesus had in his hands when he was nailed to the cross,” our mother said.
Eden looked frightened. He held his hands together as though even the mention of this was enough to cause him pain. In London, we had watched the story of Jesus on television and it made Eden cry, watching Jesus carry the cross through the crowds, the thorns on his crown cutting into his forehead.
“It’s all right, darling,” Mum said, kissing him on the side of his head. “She’s very kind and warm, not frightening at all.”
Eden nodded. He laid his head against her chest and closed his eyes. The story was over and the candle burned low on the windowsill.
The flame flickered as we lay down to sleep, and our mother kissed us good night and blew out the candle. I kept my eyes open. The night outside the window was lighter than the room, and the shape of the trees appeared through the shawl. The shadows of the branches looked like hands against the wall. They made me think of blood in the water.
ELEVEN
In the morning, the sun shone in the room. Eden was still asleep; so was Mum, with the pillow over her eyes. I went to the window to look outside. The sky was clear and the trees looked crisp in the light.
California. We were in California.
A young boy, who looked about Eden’s age, ran down the path toward the house. He ran quickly, barefoot, holding a letter in his hand. I heard footsteps up the stairs, then knocking on the door of our room. Mum sat up with a start. “What is it?”
I opened the door and the boy was standing there. “I have a message for Lucy from Parvati,” he announced. “Parvati wants to see you and your family this morning.”
His ribs rose and fell as he caught his breath to speak. He must have been no more than ten years old, but there was a fierce expression in his eyes, which seemed too old for his body. As though his own eyes had been taken from him and replaced with the eyes of an old man.
Parvati’s house was surrounded by a high bamboo fence, so that no one outside was able to see inside to her private gardens.
We were escorted by Renee. She led us down the passageway to a room with a red carpet where a small group of people were gathered.
“Lucy and her children are here,” Renee said, from the doorway.
The people in the room turned to look at us. I saw Sati’s mother and father sitting in the crowd.
Parvati sat above them, on a daybed. There were pictures of her in all the houses and rooms of the ashram, so I was not surprised by her appearance. She looked the way our mother had described her to us.
Her long dark hair fell around her. She wore a bright-green silk sari. Her face was elaborately made up, with eye shadow, lipstick, and mascara. There was a red dot in the middle of her forehead.
She looked at us from across the room. “Come here,” she said. We followed our mother through the room to her.
“I want to see the girl first,” Parvati said.
“Go on, May,” My mother said, pushing me lightly between the shoulders. “Don’t be afraid.”
I looked back at her, embarrassed that she had said this aloud.
Parvati took my hands in hers. “May.” She held my wrists tightly. “Your mother has told me you can be difficult. Look at me.” She put her hand beneath my chin, turning my face to hers. “I can see that you are unhappy. Tell me why.”
I shook my head, fighting back tears. “I’m not unhappy,” I said.
She held me tightly in her arms. “Who has hurt you?” she said quietly, in my ear. I felt myself begin to cry and I clenched my teeth to stop. I hated my mother then for bringing me here, to cry in front of a roomful of people.
Parvati put her hand on the back of my head. “It’s all right,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”
I wiped my eyes. I felt myself flush from the embarrassment of crying. I’m just tired, I thought, tired from the airplane.
“Your mother has come a long way to be here with me,” Parvati said. She is very brave. Most people do not have the courage to leave what they know. You must learn to respect her; she loves you very much. Do you understand?”
I wanted to pull myself away from her, to run out of the room, but I nodded like a puppet.
“She has given you so much. She’s been a mother since she was nineteen, and now she needs you to be strong for her. Will you do this? Promise me.”
“Yes,” I heard myself say.
She called Eden to her. “You are a sweet child,” she said to him. “Your soul is pure, but your mind is not. This is something you must fight against in your life.”
Eden, a pure soul. I imagined the color of green sea glass.
Eden glowed from the compliment. A gold star. Parvati kissed him on the cheek. Then told us to say good-bye to our mother. She needed to talk to her alone, and children were not allowed in the room anymore.
Eden and I stood outside, in the shade of a palm tree.
“Where should we go?” Eden said.
“I don’t know.”
We walked along the path, between the rows of trees.
Parvati was like a movie star, I thought. In her room there was a glass case full of ornate perfume bottles arranged on a tray. Through a half-open door in the hallway, I saw a dressing table and mirror surrounded by small white lights.
The day Keith Richards came into our father’s shop to buy an Indian chest for his German stereo, Sebastian went breathless. He practically fell over himself, trying to help him. My father played it slightly more cool, but even he was flustered: too busy with him to answer the telephone or help the other customers in the shop. It reminded me of the way Parvati’s followers treated her—too eager to please. In the room, when she had asked for a glass of water, there was a moment of panic among the disciples, as though her request couldn’t be granted fast e
nough. As though they feared no water could be found.
Eden and I walked along the path. He looked at the ground, kicking up sand with the toe of his sandal.
“I think Parvati’s a liar,” Eden said loudly. I pulled him by the arm. Two men with shaved heads were walking up the path. “Namaste,” they said, as they passed. By the way they smiled at us, I was sure they had not heard what Eden had said.
In the car from the airport, Renee had told us the ashram rules: no sex, drugs, or alcohol. But the major rule was this: If you knew of someone who had broken a rule or spoken badly of Parvati or the ashram, you were expected to tell on them to Parvati or the Women.
“What do you mean, Eden?” I said, when the men were gone.
“Well, I was looking at her palms, but she didn’t have any marks like Jesus. She didn’t have any marks at all.”
“Are you sure?” I looked down at the sand. Why hadn’t I thought to look at her hands? Was Eden becoming smarter than me?
“Well, I think so.” His voice sounded vague and he bit the nail on his pointing finger.
“You think so or you know so?”
“Um—well, I think we should try to have another look.”
That afternoon, Eden and I sat hidden by a hedge in the shade, chewing on blades of grass and breaking up little twigs. We were devising a plan called How to Get a Really Good Look at the Guru’s Hands.
Later, we went to Parvati’s house and knocked.
Keshi opened the door. She smiled at us but did not say anything.
“We came to see Parvati.”
“Yes.”
“We have a very important religious question, concerning God,” Eden said, “that we need to talk to Parvati about.”
Keshi told us to wait a moment while she went inside.
Eden and I waited on the doorstep. I looked at him and smiled.
The door opened. Keshi held a plain piece of paper. It waved gently, like a sheet on a clothesline.
“Here you are,” she said. “You can write your question on the paper and drop it in the box by the door. Namaste.”
We wandered around the ashram, thinking of what to do next.