by Jayanti Tamm
I had failed. My eyes filled with tears. Guru did not look up at me again.
My mother stood up, ready as always to sacrifice herself for her family, but then, without any invitation, Ketan dashed up onto the stage, rammed his entire fist into the scripted lettering of Beloved Jayanti, and blew out my candles. So there, he glared at me. He had won.
“Oi,” Guru said at the chaos before him.
Happy Birthday.
AS THE NUMBER of disciples quickly grew, the informal meditation group my parents joined disappeared. In its place, Guru established the groundwork for a booming organization. Guru invited my parents to be active pioneers in the process, and they were both honored and overjoyed to be part of what they viewed as an expanding movement with the potential to radically transform the world for the better. My father, in particular, wanted to be at the forefront of Guru's evolving mission. Although my parents longed to move permanently to Guru's new neighborhood in Queens, New York, Guru told them to remain in Connecticut to manage the Connecticut Center—the gathering place for potential and current disciples. One year after my birth, after consulting with Guru, my parents found a humble two-story ranch house in Norwalk that had a fully finished basement to host the Connecticut Center. With plenty of parking, a separate entrance, and low rent, it was ideal. After Guru came to view the house, he gave his consent, and we packed up and moved. The Connecticut Center occupied the entire basement, and we inhabited the first floor of the house. I shared a room with Ketan, my parents had a room with separate beds, and there was a living room and small kitchen. Norwalk, in 1971, was closer to the country than the suburbs, and the house had a field on both sides with large woods stretching out behind it. The semi-seclusion worked well, for we were definitely unlike the other residents in the neighborhood.
It was made clear to me right away that the new house was not for us. We were just custodians; the house served the needs of the meditation group and Guru. Our living room had only one piece of furniture, a throne for Guru. Our kitchen cupboards stored the pots, utensils, and ingredients my mother used when cooking for Guru. Our bathroom shelf held special sponges and cleaners to be used before Guru's visits. The sole point of everything was Guru—and everything that belonged to Guru, including all his personal items— his cup, blanket, pens—items that had once belonged to Guru—used cups, blankets, and pens—or objects that had any faint relation to Guru, including candle holders, incense burners, and shrine cloths placed near his pictures, were sacred relics.
Our house felt like a Guru museum, replete with photo gallery—pictures of Guru occupied every single free space upon the wall—Guru with his hands folded, Guru laughing, Guru sniffing a gardenia, Guru sipping juice. From the entryway to the gap between the sink and medicine cabinet, we were surrounded by Guru. He was always watching me. He was always, always present.
My parents, striving to be obedient disciples, settled into their separate routines that Guru assigned them. Their schedules seemed to overlap only occasionally, and most often in their efforts to raise my brother and me to be model disciples. My father created board games such as Disciple Chutes and Ladders, where we dreaded landing on squares like “Did Not Meditate Soulfully—Go back ten spaces.” He also told us favorite stories such as the day Guru achieved God-Realization at age eleven, when he saw the Supreme in the clouds, and how when Guru was fourteen, just like Lord Krishna, he outwitted an evil force that appeared in the form of his own guru, Sri Aurobindo, and destroyed the demon, and teaching tales of how Guru's third eye allows him to know the past, present, and future simultaneously. So when I wouldn't eat my bowl of spiced dal, my mother gently reminded me that Guru was watching and not at all pleased with my behavior, which made me look around and quickly shovel the lentils into my mouth.
My parents worked diligently for Guru, especially on Mondays—the night Guru came to our house to hold meditations. Preparations began a few days before with each parent taking on specific tasks. It seemed that they always had separate projects that kept them in different rooms of the house. I never saw them together tidying up the meditation room or raking leaves. They moved, it seemed, in opposite directions, with my mother entering a room just as my father had shut the door on his way outside. As my mother cleaned rooms, picked flowers, and bought groceries, my father arranged chairs, lit incense, and swept the path from the driveway to the side door. While all of the setup took place, Ketan and I were told to stay out of the way.
Monday afternoons, I sat on the kitchen counter while my mother cooked some of Guru's favorite foods. Guru was a vegetarian, and made vegetarianism mandatory for all of us. I had never even tasted meat; and I didn't want to, since Guru said that meat contained restless animal-consciousness, and anything that he declared could lower my consciousness was to be avoided at all costs. But Guru enjoyed food and was a voracious eater. Since he took great pleasure in eating, his weight would perpetually fluctuate, to his great dismay. He often complained about the large number of calories in ice cream and samosas, after devouring a heaping plateful of both. I knew that Guru could use his spiritual powers to do anything, and sometimes I wondered why he didn't touch his own stomach and make it go away. But then I also knew that Guru was teaching us some sort of lesson that one day I would understand. Often at meditations, Guru, in a teasing voice, asked us why our master was so fat, and when we told him that he was thin, he would shake his feet, then say that he was not as thin as Lord Krishna or Christ, and not nearly as handsome, but when we told him again and again that he was much more beautiful than any other avatar, he would lean back in his chair and smile sweetly. Then I could tell he was happy.
As Guru preferred foods from his native Bengal, my mother tried hard to learn classic Indian recipes such as aloo chop, saag paneer, and jalabis. Having lost her mother at age eleven, my mother grew up in the scotch-soaked stink of a Chicago apartment with her permanently drunk father and her neurotic older sister, becoming a surrogate mother to both. Nightly she fished change out of her father's coat pockets in order to provide dinner. Even as a child, my mother dreamt of family dinners and cozy memories, and so having Guru and the disciples come to her kitchen was like hosting Thanksgiving dinner weekly, and she strove to prepare an array of elaborate dishes, trying to anticipate Guru's whims. Just in case he might be in the mood for an okra curry, vegetable pakora, or tamarind chutney, wearing her Guru-blue cotton sari and red bindi, she scoured the local grocery stores until she found ingredients she could piece together into a Mogul feast. Often, after days of preparation, Guru wouldn't touch a thing, asking instead for pizza. That only made her try harder to please him, and the next week, she was at it again, mincing garlic and rolling chapatis.
Although the meditation was supposed to start at seven-thirty, Guru was normally at least an hour late. My brother and I were not allowed downstairs inside the meditation hall unless Guru called for us, which meant my mother stayed upstairs while my father attended the meeting. Since the walls were thin and the floors were squeaky, it was mandated that we remain as quiet as possible so as not to disturb the meditation below us. Even for the golden child, this wasn't easy to do, especially with Ketan's ideas for having somersault contests or dare-jumps off the top bunk. Numerous spiritual seekers stormed upstairs urging us to shut up. When we tried to play quiet games, such as Guru and Disciple—one of Ketan's favorites, which involved the Guru sitting on his throne and barking a list of commands for the disciple, none of which would be done to his satisfaction—we still ended up being too loud.
“Good girl,” Ketan said, sitting on his bed. “Go get me orange juice.”
“Yes, Guru,” I answered.
Ketan always played the Guru, making me the disciple.
I came back with a mug, spilling orange juice all over the floor.
“You didn't put ice cubes in it. You are a bad disciple. You are unspiritual. Now, pick up my stufties. Soulfully,” he said, between sips of juice. “Stufties” was what we called our stuffed animals.<
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“Yes, Guru,” I answered, scooping his stufties off the floor and arranging them on his bed like guardians.
“You did not do that soulfully. I am very displeased with you. Now let me keep Fluffity Bunny,” he said, with a cheeky smile.
Fluffity Bunny? She was my favorite stuftie. He had crossed the line.
“MOOOOOMMM!” I screamed as loud as possible. “Ketan's a mean guru again!”
As my parents kept receiving menacing threats from women with folded hands when our thumps and banging proved too distracting for the culmination of peace, light, and bliss in our basement, my parents sought a desperate solution. For weeks, my parents had secret arguments spelled aloud for us not to understand, but we knew they were looking for a way to keep us quiet.
“It's HARMLESS,” my mother spelled, folding her sari.
“It's a BAD INFLUENCE,” my father replied.
“TO—UGH,” my mother said, shutting the door behind her.
The next Monday, my father asked Guru if Ketan and I could watch television in an attempt to keep us quiet. After careful research, my mother discovered that Monday night aired a double feature of The Muppet Show and Little House on the Prairie—both shows, just barely, were not too corrupting. Guru told his disciples that watching TV was like ingesting garbage. Most disciples did not even own a TV, and those who did were seen as suspect. My mother had a small ten-inch black-and-white TV that Ketan and I were forbidden to watch. When we asked my mother why she had a TV when it was so bad, she said she had a secret assignment from Guru, and that we shouldn't mention it to the other disciples. She hid the TV in her room, on a high shelf, out of reach. Guru had given my parents strict instructions about keeping us away from TV; while an entire generation of American youth was being raised by The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels, and The Dukes of Hazzard, we were memorizing Guru's aphorisms and using our mala beads to say our prayers. Some nights, however, from outside our parents’ door, when my mother was inside alone, we heard the faint sounds of a canned laugh track leaking out into the night, and we understood that she was working on her top-secret assignment. Ketan plotted and waited for a time that eventually both Mom and Dad would go away long enough for him to scale the shelf and watch what Guru had declared as forbidden garbage.
Guru, tired of hearing the continuous complaints about the noise level, finally agreed that he would allow us to watch both shows. This was ecstasy. Monday nights became the hands-down greatest night. Not only would my guru come and bless us, but we could also watch TV. Ketan and I became instant addicts. Ketan imitated Gonzo and Kermit, and I laughed, prancing around the room like I was Miss Piggy. We then gathered up extra pillows to sit upon as we watched the Ingalls family and their world. It was my first glimpse at how another family interacted. What? No guru? I asked my father why there was no guru on the show. He told me that there really was a guru that the family meditated with, but that was kept for special episodes that our TV antenna couldn't pick up. It made sense to me. All of his explanations and insertions of Guru were gospel. At our bedtime, in those few cherished minutes that my father spent with us, he read aloud from the small collection of outside books that he considered neutral enough not to corrupt us. However, he added his own editorial corrections that made the books more spiritual. He inserted sections, ensuring us that before the Hobbits went to bed, they meditated on Guru, and before Lucy went into the closet in search of Narnia, she asked Guru's permission. I never inquired about the Muppets’ guru. I assumed that the two old men in the balcony were their avatars.
Long after the TV was turned off, inevitably, we were summoned downstairs for the showing of what the disciples called the Golden Child and her brother. Public speaking and stage fright have never been a problem for me. When Guru first called me to the stage, I was too little to walk, and so my mother or father carried me up for Guru's public blessing. By the time I could walk on my own, I needed to earn my blessing. Usually, I was asked to sing. Guru loved music, and in the ashram where he was raised, bhajans, devotional songs, were taught and sung as part of the meditation and played a large role in the spiritual practice of the disciples. Like many other aspects of his teachings, Guru imported this practice when he came to America, no longer in the role as a disciple but as a guru. Although Guru spoke English fluently, most of the songs that he composed were in Bengali, his native language. With simple melodies, Guru taught hundreds and hundreds of songs on his harmonium, a small keyboard that needed to be air-pumped for the notes to escape.
Guru sat on his Guru-blue throne at the front of the hall, dressed in a yellow dhoti, which reflected the golden hue of his skin. Wisps of gray hair, cropped close to the curve of his scalp, hinted at what was once a full head of hair. Guru placed his hands together in front of his forehead, creating a deep bow. He held this position, as we all matched his stance, bowing low to him. Slowly, Guru unfolded and straightened, dropping his hands into his lap; his dark eyes scanned the room from left to right before closing into his “lion's pose”— the eyelids halfway shut and his eyeballs flickering, his pupils lost in a span of white. This movement of the eyes was a manifestation of a state of consciousness that, according to Guru, only extremely highly evolved souls could achieve. But that certainly didn't stop a lot of disciples from trying, including me.
“Jayanti, good girl. You sing two songs.”
That was my cue. I was on. I stood up, adjusted my sari, folded my hands, and marched up the aisle. I bowed to Guru, stood beside his throne, then turned to face the audience. On the floor beside his throne were arrangements of flowers, offerings from different disciples, some for special occasions, birthdays, or the anniversary of their coming to the Center, some just for an opportunity to have a bouquet near Guru, with a note that reminded Guru of their existence. Flowers always surrounded Guru, and each time I was near Guru I breathed in the sweet tropical scent.
I checked in with the important figures in the room: my mom mouthed the first few words of the song that we had rehearsed the entire day; my father was asleep, and his folded hands crashed into his lap, then his head rebounded awake; Ketan, from the back of the hall, kept his hands folded but poked his tongue hard from his right cheek to his left cheek in a concentrated effort to jinx me. I then scanned the rest of the audience—the men's side and women's side—Guru made them always sit on separate sides. I looked around for the favorite meditators whom Ketan and I secretly imitated: An-jana, a dramatic blond woman who kept her arms straight out in front, with her folded hands looking like the top of a pyramid; Prana, a frizzy-haired woman who consistently wore white and who stretched her neck, heaven bound, so we could see up her nostrils; Vivek, a short bald man, who brought his own folding chair, and spastically shook both feet. They were all there. I smiled, ready to go.
“Phule phule, dhule dhule, moranachi, khule khule, kota-hathe eshe koto jabo …”
“Bah, Bah. Good girl,” Guru said with a slight tilt of his head and sweet smile. “One more. Bah.”
Number two.
“Ananda bola nirvana dola, tunga ala …”
“Excellent.”
Guru was pleased. I had passed. I turned back to Guru and gave a deep bow, then I turned to the audience and gave them a deep bow. I had no idea what I had just sung.
When Guru taught songs, he rarely translated them. Music, he said, was the language of the soul, and it communicated perfectly; therefore it was unnecessary to translate. While I had hundreds of Bengali songs memorized, they could have been in Urdu, pig Latin, or Klingon, for all I knew. It didn't much matter anyway. What mattered was the consciousness with which they were sung.
“Most soulful, good girl. Most soulful.”
Yes. I had done it again. I had pleased him. “Soulful” was what I aimed for. I was done. I could go back upstairs.
WITH KETAN AS the leader, I eagerly agreed to his plots, curious to see how far we could push our boundaries. No longer satisfied with just our TV triumph, Ketan began scheming for our latest, and
most dire, rule manipulation: Operation Get-a-Pet. Guru forbade disciples from owning pets, and so Ketan wisely decided that on such a critical matter, the way to go was to exploit my Chosen One status to the fullest. The assault would have to come from me. Even the idea of having an animal made me shiver with glee. Ketan and I talked constantly in front of our parents about owning a pet, but we realized that we were wasting our efforts. The way things worked in my family was that my parents did not make any decisions.
“Ask Guru,” they would say when it was a matter of anything from our bedtime to having a rope swing.
Though I knew Guru prohibited pets, my desire for a small, fluffy friend seemed to outweigh my desire for spiritual progress. We decided that if I asked for an animal that Guru hadn't mentioned by name during his talks about not having pets, then maybe it would be all right. Dogs and cats were officially on his bad list, but we had never heard his policy on rabbits.
After weeks of plotting, we chose one Monday in April as the critical night. We had been extra quiet during the meditation, staying glued in our beds with the volume completely off during both The Muppet Show and Little House on the Prairie, and we had said extra prayers in the morning. And now it was time. Ketan nudged me forward.
With my hair in raggedy braids, wearing my best sari, I approached Guru after the meditation, as he lounged on his sacred throne that we were not allowed to touch.
“Jayanti, bah, good girl. All right?” Guru asked, holding a glass of mango lassi.
“Yes, Guru.” I answered with folded hands.
Folded hands and properly addressing Guru was second nature. I could not have imagined it any other way. I could keep my hands folded and sit with a straight back, knees tucked in—feet could never be pointed at Guru for it was a sign of disrespect—without squirming for hours; I'd had lots and lots of practice.
“Next week, you come and sing two songs. Two songs, good girl. You sing next week.”