by Anne Cushman
“Do the leaves say where I will find this guru?”
“Unfortunately, the leaves are not specific on this point. But they do indicate that at the present moment, you are in India, and the guru is definitely residing in India as well.”
“Um…Do the palm leaves say anything about…children? A family? A partner?”
He shook his head. “On the subject of marriage, the palm leaves are silent. But do not be discouraged. Although rare for a woman, the life of a renunciate is a noble one.”
Renunciate. I looked down at my hand again. Ridiculously, I felt like I was about to cry. Outside, a rickshaw horn repeatedly warbled the first notes of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” “Just leaving the palm leaves out of it for a minute. Do you personally have any idea where I might find my teacher?”
He frowned, then slid open the rickety drawer of his desk and pulled out a Palm Pilot. “There is one teacher I have heard good reports of. He has a small ashram in West Bengal, not far from Calcutta. For those on the path of purification, he is said to be unsurpassed.” He clicked on his Palm Pilot and began scrolling through names. “His name is Sri Satyaji. I will give you the information, and you can do the needful.”
Lotus Pose
(Padmasana)
Sit on the ground and cross your right foot high on your left thigh. Now place the left foot over it, tucking it high on the right thigh. Greet the ache of your hips, the twinge of your knees, the knot of muscles that snares your breath in its trap. Let the stalk of the spine grow long from its roots in your pelvis to the floating blossom of your head. Close your eyes and melt the ice encasing your heart. Feel the wind of your breath blowing through your forest of muscles and bones. Notice how stillness is always filled with movement.
Celibacy is to a Yogi what electricity is to an electric bulb. Without celibacy no spiritual progress is possible…Do not think of the opposite sex. Do not look at the opposite sex. Looking at the opposite sex will create desire to talk to them. Talking will create a desire to touch them. Eventually you will have an impure mind and will fall a victim.
—Swami Sivananda (1887–1963)
CHAPTER 13
A FEW DAYS LATER, after a sixteen-hour train ride, Devi Das and I arrived in Calcutta—a city so thick with smog that whenever I blew my nose, the tissue turned black. Plateglass office buildings loomed over festering slums. On a roadside billboard, an Indian woman in a Western yoga leotard leaned on a giant tub of “India’s first probiotic ice cream.” At an ancient Kali temple, we watched a Brahman priest jerk back the head of a baby goat and slit its throat with a knife; as the blood spilled on the stone floor, throngs of pilgrims tossed hibiscus flowers at the altar where the black-faced goddess towered with her red tongue hanging out. “Kali destroys our egos,” Devi Das explained, as I backed away, shaking and sick. “She slaughters the obstacles to our spiritual awakening.” Back in my hotel room, a generator throbbed outside my window. I lay down on my bed and pulled the blankets over my head, dizzy and nauseated and scared. What am I doing here? I’m out of my mind. It wasn’t until later that night that I looked at the date in my plan book and realized that it was Thanksgiving Day.
“SRI SATYAJI has decreed that we all wear white at his ashram, as a manifestation of the divine purity to which we all aspire.” The white-saried, gray-haired British woman sitting at the desk in the ashram reception office eyed my bedraggled blue salwar kameez and Devi Das’s brown robes as if we had showed up wearing nothing but thongs and nipple pasties. “Suitable white clothing is available at the ashram store for a minimal fee.”
I nodded, too queasy to answer. Devi Das and I had taken an overnight bus from Calcutta, the roads growing more potholed the farther we got from the city. For the previous two hours, we’d lurched and swayed down a winding country road that was more dirt than pavement. The outside of the bus was streaked with vomit. Inside, it was crawling with cockroaches. Devi Das had slept, oblivious, letting the bugs crawl over him. But I had stayed on guard, flicking them off my bare skin with a shudder, stamping at them futilely in the dark. Just after sunrise, the bus had stopped outside the gates of the Satyanam Ashram to let us off; then it had rumbled away toward the nearest village, fifteen miles away. Now all I wanted was to get in bed.
“Men and women must stay in separate accommodations, even if they are married. Conversation between men and women must be avoided whenever possible, and any physical contact is strictly forbidden. It is best to avoid eye contact, as well, to minimize the potential for distraction. In the temple and the eating hall, men and women will sit on opposite sides of the room. Liberated from allurement, the mind is freed to concentrate upon the Divine.”
I nodded again. Who was I to argue? If Matt and I had been practicing yoga on opposite sides of the room, maybe I wouldn’t be in the mess I was in.
“After you have settled into your rooms, you will be assigned a job to assist in the functioning of the ashram, such as washing dishes, sweeping the meditation hall, cleaning the bathrooms, etcetera. When performing these practices, please remember that women are forbidden to touch Sri Satyaji’s meditation cushion, his robes, his eating bowls, his laundry basket, his sheets, or any other of his personal items, which are all labeled with an om sign and may only be handled by his personal attendant. Sri Satyaji is very sensitive to energy, and a female touch on his personal items will cause him severe psychic distress, in addition to causing him to break out in a rash all over his body.”
“That is exactly what happens to us when we eat cashews!” said Devi Das delightedly. “Sometimes our tongue swells up so we can barely talk.” I jabbed him in the side with my elbow, willing him to shut up. The next bus wouldn’t pass until tomorrow morning. If we got thrown out of here, we’d be sleeping under a tree.
“And please remember this: Women are strictly forbidden to enter the meditation hall when they are on their menstrual cycle.” The woman looked at me accusingly, as if expecting me to demand tampons on the spot.
Oh, that won’t be a problem. I’m ten weeks pregnant. I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Something told me that this was a fact I should keep to myself for now.
THE SATYANAM ASHRAM was a tumble of small brick buildings, nestled in a crook of a sluggish river that wound through a green valley lined with rice fields. After buying a white salwar kameez and a white wool shawl at the ashram shop—really just a walk-in closet in the back of the reception office—I made my way down a winding dirt path to a tiny building marked with the wooden sign WOMEN’S RESIDENCE HALL. A few chickens clucked and pecked in the dirt by the steps.
My room was a clean cubicle with whitewashed walls and two side-by-side cots with barely a foot between them. Bright sun streamed through a curtainless window. I would have a roommate, I’d been told, a German woman whose Sanskrit name was Darshana. But she wasn’t there when I arrived, and I couldn’t hold my eyes open. I peeled off my filthy clothes and crawled into bed between rough, clean sheets that smelled of basil. Wood doves cooed outside. I was asleep seconds after my head hit the pillow.
IN MY DREAM, I’ve just given birth to a litter of kittens. I chase them around the hospital room, frantic, praying no one will notice they aren’t human. Perhaps if I nurse them and diaper them they will morph into babies? But they won’t stay still on the diaper table, and I can’t find a litter box anywhere. Maybe Matt will know what to do. But where is Matt?
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, the pooled sunlight was gone, and the ashram room was in shadows. I couldn’t remember, for a few moments, where I was, or even who I was.
“You have been asleep for hours. It is almost dinnertime.” The voice was crisp and curiously formal, with just the barest hint of a German accent. I rubbed my eyes and sat up, dizzy and disoriented. Cross-legged on the opposite bed sat a woman who looked about fifteen years older than me—and about twenty times more beautiful—plaiting a waist-length mane of golden hair.
“I didn’t want to wake you.” Her face was severe, with sculpted feat
ures and pencil-thin eyebrows arched over steely gray eyes. “But you were talking in your sleep. Who is Matt?”
“Just a guy I used to know.” I pulled the covers tighter around my bare shoulders, looking at the white clothes I had hung on a hook in a corner. I felt at a disadvantage being undressed while she was clothed.
“We all have people from our past who haunt our dreams. But as we do the meditation, our mind purifies our ancient karma, and they trouble us less and less.” She stood up, tall and slim as a model, in a white linen sari with bits of silver thread flecked through it. She must have had it specially made; I’d seen nothing so fine in the ashram shop. “The shower is down the hall, on your left. I will meet you outside after you are clean and escort you to dinner.”
Darshana had been at the Satyanam Ashram for almost three years, she told me as we walked toward what she referred to as the “dining temple.” Before coming to India, she had been the art director at a lingerie mail-order catalog in Berlin. But now she returned to Germany only once a year, to visit her mother and renew her visa.
“Don’t you miss your friends? Your family? Your job?” I pictured her in a business suit and stiletto heels, a fashion dominatrix presiding over layouts of anorexic blondes in push-up bras.
“No. My former identity has been burned away in the fires of practice.” We stepped into a small stone building that looked like a remodeled stable. “I have no interest in reclaiming it.”
Inside, we took our places cross-legged on a brown clay floor, our backs to the wall, along with about ten or twelve other women—about half of them Western, half Indian. About the same number of men were lined up facing us along the opposite wall. I sneaked a peek at Devi Das, outfitted in what looked like a pair of white pajamas, but he kept his eyes dutifully downcast as the devotees put their hands in prayer position and began to chant.
When the chanting was over, servers began moving down the lines of devotees, laying out a banana leaf and a metal cup in front of each person. I copied Darshana, keeping my hands in prayer position at my heart as women with metal buckets began walking down the line, ladling out food onto our leaves: sticky white rice, runny lentil dal, a pile of spinach, a scoop of yogurt. Another woman ladled water into our cups. “Don’t worry,” said Darshana, reading my mind. “All the water at the ashram is purified. Just as we will be, if we do the practices correctly!”
There were no utensils—I scooped the food into my mouth with my fingers, clumsily, trying to remember not to touch it with my left hand. (The left hand, Devi Das had told me, was for wiping after you used the toilet; to touch your food with it—or anyone else, for that matter—was viewed by Indians as not just rude, but disgusting.) “We follow a sattvic diet here at the ashram,” Darshana explained, deftly flicking a ball of rice into her mouth. “No onions, garlic, or spices of any kind—nothing that will inflame the passions or agitate the nervous system.”
So that’s how I got pregnant! Too much garlic! I licked my fingers. I would become purified, and I would do it quickly, before anyone noticed that my belly was starting to get bigger.
The sun was setting as we walked back to our room. White egrets flapped over the rice fields. Somewhere nearby, a cow lowed. I could feel my whole body start to relax. This was a place where I could really make some spiritual progress. The next morning, I would start my meditation training. I would find inner peace, like Darshana. How hard could purification be, anyway?
“ENERGY CAN LEAK from any of the holes of the body—eyes, ears, mouth, sexual organs.” Sri Satyaji sat at the front of the meditation hall on a stack of white cushions, his white robes draping over his folded legs. He was a stocky man with a black beard and bushy black eyebrows that met in a straight line over the bridge of his nose and leaped up and down as he talked. “It leaks through our inattention, our craving, our habits of distraction. The more it leaks, the less we have available for God realization. So we must control our habits to restrain our energy.”
Sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the back row, I swallowed a yawn. Darshana had woken me up before dawn to come to the hall for morning meditation. Walking through the pale predawn light, my new white shawl draped around me, I’d felt uplifted and exotic, like someone playing a leading role in a film about spiritual practice. I could hear the sound track playing in my head: an Indian raga, or maybe something by Philip Glass. But now I was sleepy and hungry, and I desperately needed to pee. My knee hurt. Was there anywhere I wasn’t leaking energy? A summer camp song began singing in my head: There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza…Next to me, Darshana sat still as a statue, her eyes downcast, her thumb and forefinger lightly pressed into a perfect mudra, and her mouth curved in a slight, blissful smile.
“Gather your energy into one point, behind your third eye,” intoned Sri Satyaji. “Now concentrate on the sound of hum…sah. Hum on the inhale, sah on the exhale.”
Huuum…saaahh. Huuum…sahhh. With what shall I fix it, dear Liza, dear Liza, / With what shall I fix it…Huuum…saaahh. My favorite camp treat had been s’mores, toasted marshmallows and chocolate melting between graham crackers. My stomach rumbled. Darshana had told me that we were only allowed sweets at the ashram on special Hindu feast days. Maybe one was coming soon? Huum…sah. Huumm…sah. “Let the sound of the mantra quiet the waves of the mind, so it becomes like a clear lake reflecting the sun of the true Self.” Sri Satyaji’s voice was hypnotic; I could feel my head sagging forward. At least my morning sickness had subsided. I could hear birds chirping. I pictured my baby floating inside me, her tiny fingers forming a mudra just like Darshana’s. Or his tiny fingers? Hey. Suppose my baby is a boy? Is he sitting on the wrong side of the meditation hall?
“YOU MUST LOAD the dung into this wheelbarrow, like this.” Darshana lifted the pitchfork full of cow manure and with one deft gesture slid it into a rusty red wheelbarrow—a feat she managed without getting even a speck of it on her white sari. “When the wheelbarrow is full, take it out behind the cowshed and spread the patties in the sun to dry.”
“To dry? Why?”
“We burn it as fuel in the kitchen stove. Here, you try.”
I picked up the pitchfork and scooped up a steaming pile. For our special today, we’re offering a manure-grilled eggplant…As I was lifting it, the fork tipped. Cow manure cascaded down my leg, leaving a green streak on my white pants.
We had finished our silent breakfast—sweet, sticky porridge drowning in boiled milk. Now Darshana was introducing me to what she called my “yogi job”: cleaning the cowshed. The cowshed was a brick building with a packed earth floor covered with a thick layer of wood shavings and sawdust. Ten or fifteen cows wandered in and out at will, through wide doors opening onto a grassy field with a clump of cottonwood trees at one end.
I looked around the shed, strewn with patties of cow dung. It smelled of manure and wood chips. “Will you be working here with me?”
“No. My yogi job is vegetable chopping.”
Perfect. I saw her in a clean sunny kitchen, French-cutting carrots into crinkly slices. “Any chance I can help you with that instead?”
“Cleaning the cowshed is actually a very sacred duty,” reproved Darshana. She pointed to the wall, where a Vedic inscription was painted in red letters on the battered wood:
The Cow is Heaven, the Cow is Earth, the Cow is Vishnu, Lord of Life.
The heavenly beings have drunk the outpourings of the Cow.
When these heavenly beings have drunk the outpourings of the Cow,
They in the Bright One’s dwelling place pay adoration to her milk.
I nodded. I had come here for secret teachings about enlightenment. Instead, I was going to be shoveling shit.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Please make sure you are eating lots of vegetables, especially leafy green ones (but cooked, never raw, because of the microorganisms). And lots of dairy products; make sure they’re pasteurized. I’ve been looking into hom
e-birth midwives for you; you can deliver the baby at our house. You need to stay as far away as possible from the medical establishment. Did you know that the rate of C-section in the U.S. is higher than any other country in the world, except South Africa and Iran? Oh wait, no, maybe that’s the incarceration rate I’m thinking of.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Interesting story in the Times today about yoga teachers trade-marking the names of certain yoga postures. Very foresightful of them. I suppose “yoga” was taken centuries ago, but any way we can lock up the word “enlightenment”? Please look into it.
“PRAKRITI—MATTER—IS inherently unsatisfying,” pronounced Sri Satyaji. “Only by discovering our identity with purusha, eternal spirit, can we find bliss. Confusion of purusha with prakriti is the soul’s bondage; disassociation of purusha from prakriti is the soul’s liberation.”
It was almost noon, and the meditation hall was stuffy; I felt a thin trickle of sweat traveling down my spine. I was always hot these days, as if my whole body were an oven that had been turned on high to cook the baby. “Purusha = spirit = good,” I scribbled in my notebook. “Prakriti = matter = bad.”
“Disentangling spirit from matter is the path through which the soul can come to know itself. Meditation is the path by which this can be accomplished,” Sri Satyaji droned. I pictured spirit and matter all tangled up in a wadded ball—like my hair, dirty and perpetually snarled, a matted frizz of prakriti. Whereas the goal of practice was to have hair like Darshana’s—an untangled, shimmering waterfall of pure purusha. “Meditation = conditioner,” I wrote.