by Anne Cushman
A white-robed Indian woman pushed a laminated card into my hands. I looked down at it: “Remove glasses,” it warned. “Wipe off perspiration. Blow nose. Don’t blow on Prana Ma, just let her blow on you.” Then I was down on my knees, wiggling toward Prana Ma in a crush of people. In front of me, a middle-aged Western man was kneeling before Prana Ma. Her hands were cupping his face; she was alternately blowing on his forehead and murmering something in his ear. He was sobbing. His bald spot glistened with sweat.
Now it was my turn. I knelt in front of Prana Ma. She smelled like jasmine perfume, sickeningly sweet. Her hands cupped my face. She was crooning something in my ear in Malayalam, singsongy as a nursery rhyme. Her breath was a warm blast on my forehead. It smelled like breath mints.
Prana Ma spoke again, and the slender Indian woman next to her leaned forward to translate. “Mother says, blessings on your baby girl,” she told me.
“Oh—thanks,” I said. I must really be showing now. “But actually, it’s a boy.”
Prana Ma gave a peal of laughter and shook her head. “Not boy,” she said in English, patting my back indulgently. “Girl.” She said something else to the translator, who leaned forward again. “Prana Ma says: You are having a little girl. You will have some troubles with the pregnancy, but do not worry—all will be well. And you will name her Aradhana, which means ‘worship.’”
The mother’s thoughts during her pregnancy play an important part in the child’s character. That is why in olden times a mother would always chant the Divine Name during pregnancy. If this is done, the child also will be one who remembers God.
—Mata Amritanandamayi (1953–)
CHAPTER 19
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT.” Kalyani sat down across from me at a long table in the cafeteria. “What an incredible blessing. Your very first time seeing Prana Ma, and she gives you a name for your baby.” She eyed me with a mixture of envy and hostility, as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to kill me or become me. “I was with her for a whole year before she even told me that my dog that died had been reborn as a little boy in India who would one day be her devotee.”
“The only problem is, Aradhana is a girl’s name. My baby is a boy.” I scooped the runny rice and dal off my metal tray with my fingers. The line at the Western café was too long, so we had come to the Indian canteen instead. I was having a hard time letting go of my fantasies about mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables, but I just couldn’t face standing in another line.
“What’s the diference? It’s Sanskrit,” said Devi Das. “No one will even know. You can call him Ari. Or Dan.”
“Oh, it will be a girl,” said Kalyani. “Prana Ma’s never wrong about these things.”
“The doctor saw the ultrasound.” Across from us, a Western guy in a brown ponytail was shaking spirulina from a ziplock bag onto his dal. I watched in repulsed fascination as he stirred it with his fingers, turning it into a viscous green slime. “The baby had a penis.”
“Well, those machines aren’t a hundred percent accurate, are they?” Kalyani licked yogurt off her fingers. “Besides, Prana Ma can remove a penis, no problem.”
“Please,” said Devi Das. “Can we not talk about removing penises? It makes us uncomfortable.”
MAKING CHAPATIS, it turned out, was harder than it looked. The next morning, I stood at a long wooden counter in the industrialsized kitchen with a row of other women, mainly Indian, all wearing white saris. Their hands flew here and there, coated with flour: scooping up apple-sized blobs of dough, flattening them with their palms, then rolling them into neat circles with wooden rolling pins. In the time it took me to roll out one lumpy, misshapen chapati, the woman next to me produced ten, dusting them with flour and piling them high.
She probably learned this from her mother, I thought, watching her hands. But in my mother’s world, the closest we ever came to baking was the time we bought a roll of Sara Lee chocolate chip cookie dough, planning to slice it up and make cookies for an after-school treat. I must have been in second or third grade at the time; my mother was between jobs, so she was actually home in the afternoon, a rare occurrence at that time of my life. As we started to slice, my mother remembered that we didn’t own a cookie sheet. So we ended up sitting at the kitchen table, eating the dough raw straight out of the package.
My mother put on a jazz CD and poured a glass of wine for herself and a wineglass of apple juice for me. She sat down next to me and gave me a hug. “You see, darling,” she said, sounding surprised herself. “Sometimes what actually happens is even more fun than what you had planned.”
I tried to peel my chapati off the countertop, but it shredded to pieces. The woman next to me took pity on me. “Need more flour.” She sprinkled her own spot with a handful to demonstrate. “No sticking.”
“Thanks.” I scraped the dough off the counter, shook more flour on. “I’m sorry—I’ve never done this before.”
A wide smile lit up her whole face. “Every time, getting better. Soon—very good.” Her hands never stopped moving. “You baby—coming when?”
Funny how women could tell immediately that I was pregnant, even with my baggy clothes. Whereas so far, not a single man had guessed. “June.”
“I have three childs. One girl, two boy.”
“That must keep you busy.”
“Happy—yes. Always very happy.” She rolled out another chapati in four neat strokes. “You husband—where?”
“Um…” I gestured vaguely out the window in a gesture I hoped encompassed the entire universe. “Coming soon.”
“You mother—where?”
I gestured again. “In America.”
She ticked her tongue against the inside of her teeth. “You mother—missing you. You go—you mother house. Have baby in you mother house. You understand?”
“I understand.” I peeled up my chapati carefully, trying not to tear it. “But my mother’s house is a long way away.”
She shook her head. “You mother—missing you. You having baby, first you go to her.”
I set the chapati on top of my pile. What was my mother doing right now? It must be ten or eleven at night in California. I pictured my mother alone, watching a DVD. Drinking a glass of wine. Flipping through catalogs from Nordstrom and J. Jill, circling dresses she liked but would never get around to ordering.
THAT NIGHT, after darshan and dinner, I headed for the International Phone Centre, which was located across from the Krishna Shrine Room and right between the Internet Café and the Doll Shop.
I’d seen people all over the ashram cuddling and talking to dolls, presumably for a source of comfort when Prana Ma wasn’t around to blow on them. I stepped into the shop and looked at them heaped in their wicker baskets: blue-necked Krishna dolls, elephant-headed Ganesha dolls, ferocious Kali dolls with their red flannel tongues hanging out. Maybe I should buy one of those for the baby. Here you go, sweetie! This is Kali. She likes to drink blood. Shall we sacrifice the kitty to her? At least it wasn’t a Bratz.
I picked up a Prana Ma doll and gazed at its smug face, its black button eyes, its perpetually puckered mouth. “I never do anything without consulting Prana Ma,” Kalyani had told me this morning, hugging her doll to her chest. “But it’s just a rag doll,” I’d protested. “I know,” she’d said. “But she reminds me to turn my heart in the direction of the real Prana Ma.” Now I tried out a prayer: Prana Ma, help me know what to say to my mother. The doll looked back at me, inscrutable. A small tag protruded from her neck: “Made in India. Hand wash only.”
I knew I was procrastinating. I continued on to the phone room, where three phones were separated by flimsy barriers to give the illusion of privacy. I hope you’re as excited about this as I am…I picked up the phone. “I don’t need you to take care of me. I just need to know that you want to take care of me,” wailed the woman on my left. “Can you connect me to your supervisor?” demanded the woman on my right. I dialed the long-distance code, country code, area code. The pho
ne rang, then clicked into the screech of a fax: Like everything else in my mother’s life, her answering machine seemed to be operating according to its own laws. It might take my mother weeks to figure out why no one was leaving her messages.
The ashram fax machine was across the hall in the Lakshmi International Business Centre. I sat down on a stool and began to write.
A WEEK AND a half later, I still hadn’t heard anything back from my mother.
I checked the fax room compulsively, every couple of hours, in between darshans and kirtans and work meditations and meals. I even emailed Lori to see if she’d heard anything from my mom. Maybe my fax hadn’t even gone through. Maybe my mom was out of town. Or maybe the fax was just sitting in her machine along with some ads for 900 numbers in Las Vegas.
In the meantime, life with the Divine Mother was settling into a lulling rhythm. I went to kirtans and sang hymns to Kali and Durga, rocking out with the crowd as Prana Ma rattled her tambourine. I waited in line for a couple of hours each day for another minty breath on the forehead. I visited one of Prana Ma’s orphanages, where a couple of hundred girls sat at sewing machines, making rounds of rose-scented soap that they wrapped in rice paper for sale at the ashram store. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but ever since Prana Ma had blown on me, the lingering pain in my knee seemed to have disappeared.
Maybe this was what I’d been looking for. Maybe I’d stay here and have my baby. Maybe Prana Ma herself would attend at the birth. By dwelling in the energy field of the Divine Mother, I’d finally learn how to be a mother myself.
One afternoon toward the end of my second week at the ashram, I took a walk on the black sand beach. The sand was punctuated with land mines of human feces. The burnished gold coin of the sun was dropping toward the ocean. I sat down on a rock and watched a boy toss a net into the water and haul it out full of writhing fish.
I remembered coming home one day in fifth grade to show my mother a math test I’d gotten a 99 percent on. She took the paper from me and studied the gold star at the top, then the red X halfway down the page. “Why did you miss that one, honey?” she asked. “It’s so simple.”
Why should I even care whether she answered my fax? I had Prana Ma to kiss my boo-boos.
“Amanda?” said a voice as familiar as my own. I spun around and saw her coming toward me—a whirl of blonde hair, a gray silk pants suit, a gold necklace, a red-lipsticked mouth.
“Your bizarre young friend with the unusual hairdo told me you were out here.” My mother studied my outfit. “Amanda, honey, you need to come home so we can buy you some decent maternity clothes.”
“I HAVE TO SAY, white is not really your color,” my mother said, sipping her chai at the Jaya Jaya Chai Shop. “And darling, when was the last time you got your hair cut? You’re nothing but split ends.”
“Mom, this is an ashram, not a beauty pageant. And anyway, hair has not exactly been at the top of my list of things to worry about.”
“Being pregnant doesn’t have to mean you let yourself go.” She bit into a cinnamon bun. “Especially under your circumstances, it’s important to keep yourself looking attractive. When I was pregnant with you, I got my nails done every two weeks. A man at the bar where I was a waitress asked me out on a date when I was already a centimeter dilated.”
“Mom? I think that’s more than I need to know.” I took a gulp of chai. Running into my mom at an Indian ashram was like spotting the Dalai Lama at a Las Vegas strip club. “You must be exhausted. Why don’t I take you to your room, and we can talk more tomorrow.”
“Don’t be silly. I had a lovely night at the nicest hotel in Trivandrum, and a comfortable limo trip here this morning, although I must say the roads leave something to be desired. I think all this fuss about how difficult India is is a bit overrated.”
“Well, sure, if you’re traveling first class. I still can’t figure out how you pulled this trip off. It must have cost a fortune.”
“Not at all. I’ve been dating a lovely man for the last month or so who happens to be the events coordinator for Hyatt International. He has enough frequent-flier miles to fly me around the world three times.” She wiped her mouth. “In fact, after you and I leave here, he’s offered to put us up at a resort in Thailand for a week before we fly back home.”
“Wow—that’s great.” I’d been through this so many times with my mother that I couldn’t get too enthusiastic. “But—what exactly do you mean by ‘when you and I leave’?”
“Well, sweetie, that’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” She licked the sugar off her fingers and settled back in her chair. “Obviously, you can’t stay in India in your condition.”
“Why not? Millions of Indian women do.”
“Yes, well, millions of stray cats birth their litters under Dumpsters in alleys. That doesn’t mean that my daughter has to do it.”
“Are you comparing Indian women to alley cats? That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Don’t you dare call me a racist, young lady. When I met your father, I had my eye on a handsome young Mexican man who worked with me. If things had been a little different, you might be speaking Spanish right now. And I can tell you one thing for sure: If José had been your father, he’d be telling you the same thing I am—get yourself home to a good American hospital.”
“And I’d be telling him it was none of his goddamn business.”
“And I’d be saying, don’t you dare speak to your father that way! Of course it’s his business. He’s your father. He changed your diaper. He stayed up with you all night long when you had the croup, holding you in his arms with the shower on so you could breathe the wet air.”
“Well, even if he is my father…I mean, if he were my father…” I leaned my head in my hands, confused. What were we talking about? I had the feeling that I so often got with my mother—that she had deliberately led me into territory so tangled and overgrown that only she had the map to it. “Mom—I’m a big girl now. I can figure this out for myself.”
“Well, now, that’s just the point, Amanda. Obviously, you can’t. I mean, just look at you. Look at…this.” She gestured around the café. At the table across from us, a woman sat alone, singing to a Prana Ma doll as she spread jam on its croissant.
THE NEXT MORNING, Kalyani and I stood at the counter in the kitchen, where—just as I was getting competent at the chapati making—they had switched my assignment to grinding spices. I was smashing cardamom seeds in a granite mortar with a matching pestle. The smell rose spicy-sweet and intoxicating.
“Prana Ma called her here,” said Kalyani. “It’s obvious. It’s all part of her plan.”
“Well, I wish Prana Ma would tell her to go home. She’s going to drive me crazy.”
Kalyani looked at me as if I were threatening to turn down a date with Brad Pitt. “If my mother would come, I would be so happy.”
“Where is your mother?” It was only eleven o’clock, and already my legs were hurting. I glanced around the room, but I didn’t see a stool anywhere.
“She remarried a few years ago, and she doesn’t want me around. She’s afraid if her husband finds out that I’m with Prana Ma, it will break up their relationship.”
The kitchen door opened and my mother sailed in, wrapped in a white sari, with a splash of hibiscus flowers in her hair. “Good morning! I had a fabulous sleep, and I just went and got breathed on. Very sweet. But someone should tell that woman to cut down on the carbs; she’s getting a belly.”
Apparently, my mother had launched into ashram life with the enthusiasm with which she approached anything new. Beginnings, my mother had always been good at. Whenever we moved, we’d have a massive garage sale in which we’d sell off all her abandoned identities: barely used tennis rackets, a series of wind and stringed instruments, a Pilates Universal Reformer. I was always astonished by the ease with which she sloughed off her previous versions of herself, like a snake shedding a skin.
Now she kissed me on the ch
eek. “You shouldn’t be standing, sweetie, it’s not good for your circulation. Be sure you put your legs up for an hour a day or you’ll get varicose veins.” She spotted a stool behind a stack of burlap bags full of rice and pushed it toward me. “Here, sit down right here.”
“No thanks. I’d rather stand.” Suddenly, I was thirteen years old again, a sulky teenager.
She sat down. “Suit yourself.” She watched me pound the cardamom seeds. “Oh, no, honey, you’re doing it all wrong. You don’t hammer down on them like that. Look, let me show you.” She took the mortar and pestle. “You just set the pestle in the middle and kind of roooolll it—like so—you see?” Her hands rolled in deft circles. “Then it goes so much faster.”
I had to admit, her way was working better. “Since when do you know how to grind spices?”
“It’s not that different from mixing paint pigment. And for a while, when you were little, I had that job in the Indian restaurant, remember? That’s also where I learned how to wrap a sari.” She poured the powdered cardamom into a big ceramic bowl, added a handful of cloves. Kalyani was hanging on her every move, awestruck, as if my mother were a visiting expert brought in to give a professional demonstration of motherhood. “So, sweetie. We need to talk seriously about what you’re going to do. You can’t have the baby in India, that’s obvious.”
“Why not? Maybe I’ll have even have it right here. There’s a good hospital.” I reached for the mortar and pestle. “Want to give that back to me?”
“Yes, what a blessing to have the baby here!” breathed Kalyani.
“She will be a child of the Divine Mother.”
My mother kept on grinding without even glancing in Kalyani’s direction. “And then afterward? What would you do then? You can’t take care of a baby all by yourself.”