by Sonia Singh
Whoa.
If Starbucks bottled a jolt like that, they’d make millions.
Oh right, they already had.
Hours passed, and the sun hovered along the rim of blue. I continued to sit, watching the water gently caress the sand. I didn’t try the womb-tomb exercise again. There were now some scattered surfers paddling out into the ocean, and I didn’t think they’d appreciate tsunami-force waves, even if they did manage to catch the ride of their lives, literally.
The more I thought about what happened, the less strange it began to feel. It wasn’t just the surreal nature of it all. With that power inside me, everything had felt so—right. Like all the pieces inside of me finally clicked together.
God, I was starting to sound like New Age guru Deepak Chopra. But maybe people like Deepak had it right? There was another world beyond this world. A world I had neither seen nor believed existed, until now.
Besides, there was a Mehra family reunion coming up in a few months, and I was curious about what else I could do.
Standing, I dusted the sand from my jeans and slowly walked back to the car. Retrieving my purse from the passenger seat, I pulled out my cell phone along with the paper Ram had given me and began dialing.
Oprah always said every woman was a goddess…
As the phone began to ring, I knew exactly what I was going to ask Ram first—
How much did this job pay anyway?
Chapter 13
RAM WANTED to meet immediatel.
I called home, left a message on the answering machine that I was having dinner with a friend, and hung up. Both my parents had cell phones but I wasn’t about to call them and deal with potential questions. Tonight, Mom, Dad, and their guest could have a nice quiet dinner without me. Sooner or later Tahir would criticize the food or the furniture, and my parents would see the man for the ass he was.
Around seven I pulled up outside the Woodbridge apartment complex in Irvine. Ram was waiting outside, wearing orange robes as usual. I imagined he had quite a few of them hanging in his closet.
With anticipation I watched him approach the car. What was going to happen next? What would he teach me? He took a seat, and I caught a whiff of sandalwood. He’d also added a necklace of wooden beads.
“Where to?” I asked.
“Sanjay says there is a very good restaurant just down the lane. Why not go there?”
Not exactly the exciting beginning I’d imagined, but I was the student, and he was the teacher. I drove slowly down the street, keeping an eye out for restaurants.
“There! There!” He pointed excitedly. “That is the one!”
The familiar neon sign featured two words. I turned to him. “You can’t be serious. Taco Bell?”
“Yes, yes, it is Sanjay’s favorite place.”
“Okay…”
I parked and we walked inside. Ram gazed around the fluorescent fast-food establishment beaming, his sandals making a clip-clop sound on the linoleum floor. All around us people stared. I stared fixedly back, and most of them looked away.
He gazed up at the oversized menu screen, rubbing his hands gleefully. “What to have? Oh what to have?”
I’d never seen anyone this excited over Taco Bell before.
Ram looked over his shoulder and a thoughtful expression crossed his face. “I shall reserve a table. You will please order the food.”
I guess we knew who was paying. “Sure,” I said, and watched as he walked from table to occupied table, and eventually stopped beside a couple that looked like they were halfway through dinner. They glanced up and Ram smiled.
“Uh, we’re not exactly done yet,” the guy said.
“Please take your time.” Ram’s smile grew even wider. “I will sit only when you are through.”
The girl’s eyes traveled from his full head of white hair, down to his wrinkled face, and even farther down to his sandal-clad feet. “We’re done,” she said and stood up with the tray.
“Thank you. You are most kind.” Still smiling, Ram took her vacated seat.
For a moment the guy stubbornly continued to sit there. “Come on,” the girl insisted. Grumbling, he threw down his burrito and followed her.
Ram waved at me, and I found myself smiling and waving back. The priests of his temple had kept watch on the skies for thousands of years, waiting for my birth. A couple halfway through dinner at Taco Bell did not pose a problem.
When it was my turn to order, I decided to get one of every vegetarian item on the menu. I had no idea what Ram would like and figured he might as well try everything. At the last minute I ordered a Nacho Bell Grande for myself, without meat, in case he wanted a bite.
Hefting the fully packed tray, I grabbed thirty packets or so of hot sauce from the bin, because bland food comes right after malaria on India’s list of things to be avoided at all cost, and made my way over to the table.
“Bon appétit,” I said.
Ram reached for his drink and took a long sip. Grimacing, he stuck out his tongue. “This is Pepsi. I wanted Coke.”
“Taco Bell only has Pepsi.”
“Pepsi is too sweet.”
“I know. I prefer Coke myself.”
He sighed. “I am having a very serious Pepsi problem in this country.”
There wasn’t much conversation for the next thirty minutes, other than Ram holding up a quesadilla or tostada and asking me what it was called. “This is my favorite,” he said, taking a bite out of a seven-layer burrito. “What is this green sauce?”
I glanced over. “Guacamole. It’s made from avocado.”
“Delicious.”
“If you like, I can make it for you fresh. Guacamole is one thing I do well.” Maybe in the future I could add saving the world from destruction to that list.
“Yes please.” Ram popped the last bite of the burrito in his mouth, sat back, and let out a huge belch. A few kids next to us began giggling. Ram winked and smiled at them.
“About the lesson,” I began.
Ram sat up. “Yes, we will begin.”
“Great.” I stood up.
“We will do it here.”
“Here?” I sat back down. “In Taco Bell?”
“It is a most wonderful place, is it not?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“We need to be in a place with many people.”
It looked like we were staying. I’d long since finished my nachos and reached for a bean-and-cheese burrito Ram had left untouched. “Okay, so what’s the lesson?”
“First, what have you learned regarding Kali-Ma?”
“Well,” I chewed thoughtfully, “everything about her is so eww.”
Ram frowned. “What is the meaning of this eww?”
“She’s nasty, Ram. Why’s she always shown curling up to severed body parts?”
“Kali is the Dravidian She-Goddess,” he began patiently.
“Dravidian She-Ogre is more like it.”
Ram cleared his throat and fixed me with a stern look over the rim of his glasses. No longer was he the burrito-loving swami. “The essence of divinity is the absence of fear. That is Kali-Ma. That is why she is shown in the cremation ground, why she surrounds herself with blood and gore. She is bound with the terrifying, and she is unafraid. She is divine.”
I squirted some more hot sauce on my burrito. “You know, I’ve always considered myself pretty divine, too.”
“The battle to save the world will be fought between the divine and antidivine forces.”
“Antidivine, meaning evil?”
Ram nodded. “Evil is always based on fear and, therefore, not divine.”
“I’ve been wanting to ask you. Why didn’t I show any signs of being a goddess earlier? You know, like zapping my trigonometry teacher to the darkest corners of the universe or something?”
Ram stared at me puzzled. “Why would you do that to your teacher?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“A woman does not attain her full shakti unt
il the age of thirty.”
“Shakti?” I knew that was Sanskrit for feminine power or energy.
“You would not have been able to call the Goddess Within, until your thirtieth birthday. Now you are at full shakti.”
I wondered what the fashion magazines would say to that? Considering they subscribed to the idea that a woman peaked at eighteen. “I’m ready. What do I do?”
Ram pushed the tray away and rested his arms on the table. “Call the Goddess Within as you did earlier. Focus on the energy moving inside you.”
I recalled the storm I had summoned. “I can’t do that here,” I hissed. “Taco Bell wrappers will be flying all over the place, not to mention Taco Bell customers.”
“What you do not choose to happen, will not happen,” Ram replied firmly.
He did have a point. When I’d wanted everything to return to normal, it had, immediately. I nodded. “Okay, do I need to do anything besides that?”
“Stare at the people around you.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Malevolence.”
Malevolence? Who didn’t feel malevolent after ingesting a few fifty-nine-cent tacos? What if I confused it with heartburn? “How will I recognize malevolence?”
“You will know. It is what you are meant to do. Recognize evil and stop it.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Here we go again.
Chapter 14
THIS TIME I didn’t chant.
I began the process of visualizing and immediately the liquid warmth spread through my body. The spot above my eyebrows began to tingle, but the sensation was almost pleasant.
“You are radiant. The goddess has awoken,” Ram murmured. “Open your eyes and gaze at those around you.”
I turned and slowly skimmed the room. At first I thought my vision had blurred. There were fuzzy halos of light surrounding everyone. Then it occurred to me what I was actually seeing.
Wow, people really did have auras!
I couldn’t believe that the frizzy-haired lady at the metaphysical mall, who kept trying to force her crystals on me, was right.
I focused closely on the unusual light.
The kids who had giggled at Ram’s belching, along with other taco-loving tots, had colored auras, and each provoked a different emotion in me. Green auras emitted a sense of peace, red triggered energy and excitement. A few adults had color, too, some brighter than others. The rest had auras tinged with gray, from them, I felt nothing.
Slowly the realization dawned on me. Those with colored auras still had life in them. The brighter the color, the more life I could feel. It made sense that all the kids still had color, at that age life pulsed with possibilities.
But the gray auras far outnumbered the rest.
No wonder self-help books were such hot sellers. Maybe I could write one titled, “Turn your gray aura blue” or something like that?
My Malevolent Meter was quiet though.
Taco Bell was free of evil.
I turned to Ram. A brilliant bright yellow surrounded him. He oozed sunshine and happiness. The man was a walking Hallmark card! I almost had to reach for my sunglasses.
But what did my aura look like? I opened my purse, this time a striped Fendi with sharp silver buckles, and pulled out a compact.
Wait.
What exactly would I see?
I couldn’t help it, a small sliver of fear embedded itself in my brain. If I looked in the mirror, would I see Kali’s face instead of mine?
Straightaway, the warmth inside me began to dissipate.
Ram watched me intently. “Something is wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I didn’t feel any malevolence though. Too bad, huh?”
“Something happened when you reached for your purse.”
“I remembered I left my favorite lip gloss at home.”
Ram was stubborn as a schnauzer and opened his mouth to argue.
I picked up our tray and stood up. “Let’s go. I’m starting to smell like refried beans.”
Outside, the temperature had dropped considerably, and I shivered in my T-shirt. Hurrying to the car, I unlocked the doors and jumped in. “So did I do the exercise wrong? I feel like those monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil.”
Ram climbed into his seat and struggled with the seat belt. “Now that you have awoken the Goddess Within, there is no way you cannot recognize evil. It is your dharma, the reason you were born.”
I took his seat belt, locked it into place, and started the car. “Did anyone ask me about that? I would’ve preferred my dharma to be a little more like Julia Roberts’s.”
“It was your choice. It always is,” Ram said simply.
I roared out of the parking lot and cut in front of two cars. I noticed Ram clutching the sides of the seat. Maybe he wasn’t used to the way Americans drove on the right.
I took my eyes off the road and turned to Ram. His whole body tensed. “About this evil-stopping business…am I supposed to stare malevolence down with my nifty third eye? Offer up a free aura reading?”
Ram’s voice was unusually high-pitched. “Does not a red light indicate you must stop?”
“What?” I turned back to the road and slammed on the brakes. We screeched to a halt. I stretched and yawned. Ram looked positively green. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him eat all that fast food, it obviously didn’t agree with him.
In moments we were back in front of Sanjay’s apartment building. Ram practically clawed at the door handle and leaped out. He was trembling for some reason, but managed a smile. “Find the courage to trust your talents.”
“You mean the talent I just found out last night I have?” I gripped the steering wheel. “There’s so much evil in the world. Do I hop on a plane and take out the nearest dictator or start with the crime around here? I mean, the murder rate in LA alone could keep me busy for decades.”
“You will know what to do when the time comes,” Ram said. “Until then, just be.”
“How wonderfully cryptic. Did I mention Yoda is my least favorite character of all time?”
Ram waved cheerily. “Good night. We will talk tomorrow.”
I pulled away from the curb. So according to Ram, and he had a pretty good track record with the truth, my soul had volunteered to save the world from the forces of evil.
That made sense. I was quite the impulsive shopper. I’m sure my soul figured this particular dharma deal sounded pretty cool and glamorous. I bit my lip. Life wasn’t a 50-percent-off sale. But if it were, I was having the most critical case of buyer’s remorse ever.
Chapter 15
MY GAS-GUZZLER of a tank was nearly empty, and I pulled into a Chevron station near the entrance to the 405 freeway. Thankfully the gas station was deserted, and I didn’t have to listen to any male comments like, “What’s a little girl like you doin’ in a big car like that?”
I had my comeback though. “What’s a small brain like yours doin’ in a big head like that?”
The response was invariably the same and delivered with a sneer. “Bitch.”
I swiped my credit card, slipped in the nozzle, then leaned back against my car to wait. I could have a mini-nap in the time it took for my H2 to fill up. Deeming it unwise, however, to nap at a gas station late at night, with my purse sitting on the front seat, I instead thought back to the events of the day.
Why wasn’t I more Bellevue about all this? Shouldn’t I be on the shrink’s sofa, drooling into my neck? I had no way of knowing since there was hardly a support group for people like me. Harry Potter had a whole school of his peers. All I had was Ram.
Maybe my reaction was normal? A lifetime spent playing video games and watching movies made the unreal acceptable.
Hey! What if my life were a video game! A potential fortune lay with Nintendo. I didn’t think of myself as greedy, but if I was supposed to save the world, shouldn’t I at least be able to turn lead into gold or something? I mean, it was just—
Ugh
!
An invisible blow landed on my stomach with enough force to knock me out. But no one was there, and I was still standing.
Ugh!
There it went again. Uneasiness crawled up my back. The weight pressed against my chest and stomach. I could barely breathe.
I knew what was happening. It couldn’t be anything else.
I turned around.
Behind me two men were walking into the convenience store.
The malevolence radiated off them.
Ram was right. I would know evil.
The weight continued to press against me.
Dharma-fulfilling time.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
Chapter 16
THIS WAS NEW TERRITORY for me, and I thought about calling 911. But what would I tell the operator? “Umm, I just felt a really big pang in my chest…which sorta indicates evil’s around, and I’m a pretty reliable source being that I’m a goddess so…”
I decided to follow them in.
The clerk behind the counter saw me enter, but the two goons didn’t. They were too busy grabbing beers from the cooler. I moved past the magazines and dropped down in a crouching position behind one of the aisles, my face pressed against a packet of beef jerky.
From that vantage point I could see the front, but no one could see me. I peered around the corner and the clerk, a middle-aged man with olive skin and an Errol Flynn mustache, stared right at me with a puzzled expression. Quickly, I ducked back behind the jerky. Okay, so I wasn’t as unobtrusive as I thought.
I waited a few moments, but the clerk didn’t come down the aisle after me. Apparently a woman who wanted to get up close and personal with dried-up meat was no big deal. This was the night shift at a convenience store after all. There was probably someone masturbating in the bathroom right now.
I peeked around the corner again. The two men were at the counter. I got a good look at them from behind and summed up their appearance: saggy-assed.
One guy was white with a shaved head, his thick neck partially covered by the curling edge of a tattoo. A scorpion was my guess, but I wasn’t about to ask him to remove his shirt so I could see the design. The other guy was dark, Hispanic-looking, his hair pulled back in a braid. He had tattoos, too, mostly of evil-eyed eagles.