Cartwheels in a Sari

by Jayanti Tamm

  “That's so sick! I hate you!” Ramona shrieked. “Have a drink for me and tell him to tell Bruce I'm available anytime!” She winked and ran out of the junior lounge. I waited until everyone cleared out, then I walked down to the end of the gated entrance, outside the massive stone pillars, away from the chatty patrol of the other kilted girls and their glamorous moms who clumped together forming tennis dates. Since Guru refused to let me drive, I waited, far from anyone, for the unmistakable sound of my father's car chugging up the windy hill, sputtering and backfiring, clotting the air with burning smoke. I thought about Clarence Clemons and his upcoming visit to the tennis court and the ten songs written about him that I still had to learn. Clarence Clemons had become another disciple. Sort of. A “disciple,” when it applied to celebrities, meant that they dropped in for a meditation a few times a year and received a spiritual name and tons of attention, cakes, songs, presents, awards, and photos. I was positive that Clemons, like Roberta Flack and others who came as new disciples, would not be told on for talking to a member of the opposite sex or listening to rock music on the radio. I, on the other hand, had just been scolded for having cut my Guru-mandated long hair to give myself some wispy bangs, and even though I securely bobby-pinned them off my face during meditations, my delinquency had not gone unnoticed with yet another message expressing disappointment from Guru.

  “Drive,” I commanded my father, urging a quick getaway, after heaving the dented door shut with both hands.

  “Good day?” my father asked.

  “Yeah right,” I said, smearing sarcasm.

  Lately, my mother and father were like two massive canker sores; even thinking about them made me irritable and edgy. I blamed them for my current status both at Greenwich Academy and in the Center.

  “It stinks in here.” I winced, covering my nose with my left hand from the collection of my father's stinky stained Sri Chinmoy T-shirts in the backseat.

  “These stupid windows don't even open.” I sighed with deep exasperation.

  My father's explanation of having been tarring the roof of a new condominium project just made me more irritated. Other Greenwich Academy girls’ dads didn't walk around in ripped tar-stained sweatpants and T-shirts, nor did they transport used roof shingles in their car in one of many regular runs to the dump. Though some of my classmates had parents in building development, it meant that they just owned or traded real estate. My father bought funky parcels of land, mostly with dilapidated houses, which he then sold or traded for yet another odd-shaped lot of land. It seemed he was always engrossed in at least two real estate projects, but nothing happened at our house nor did we ever see any profits roll back to us.

  My mother and my father, I decided, were determined to be a constant source of humiliation for me. My mother seemed to be always poking around in my business, and since Guru had stopped talking to her, I decided that she wasn't one to pay much attention to. My father no longer crisscrossed the East Coast giving meditation classes or working on manifestation for Guru. Spending the majority of his time on his own projects, my father, however, was still a front-row occupier at meditations and Guru's trusted lawyer, which meant that he maintained his reputation as one of Guru's most important and close disciples. At that time, his opinion held clout with Guru, and he was often invited to Guru's house even on nights when I wasn't.

  I felt constantly edgy. I needed something to jolt me toward inspiration. I needed a miracle.

  THE MIRACLE WAS awaiting me when I arrived at the tennis court the next morning. The court was being frantically decorated with crepe paper garlands, tissue paper ornaments, and masses of flowers. Guru had done it. A miracle. He had lifted seven thousand pounds with one arm. An enormous blown-up photograph of the moment graced the middle of the court, surrounded by hundreds of flickering white tea candles. In the photo, the steel bar that held the plates stacked like a massive roll of LifeSavers was supported on each end by a U-shaped cradle that hung slightly above the height of Guru's shoulder. The design was created so that when Guru pushed on the bar, it braced against the side of its cradle and slid up the side, then when Guru released the weight, it clanged back into its base. Photos captured all of Guru's previous lifts, and as the weights got heavier, the angles of the photos changed. To make the feats clearer to the public, Guru instructed the photographers to shoot from a low angle, to provide the most dramatic shot.

  In the photo, wearing a white singlet and tight shorts, Guru grimaced as his right arm strained against the monstrous weight.

  I was stunned. When had all this happened? How had I missed out on this?

  The guards, busy tidying up, and the assembly line of volunteers who were packing special bags of prasad to honor the occasion, worked excitedly to finish before Guru's arrival.

  “Thanks a lot,” I grunted to my mom, as though she had simply forgotten to fill me in on the events.

  “Honey, this is all a surprise to me. You know I wasn't invited to Guru's house last night. Only your father was,” she said, taking a seat in one of the side benches.

  Even a gift of sour candy with a note filled with animal stickers from Chahna didn't help my rotten mood. I merely nodded an acknowledgment of her offering when I spotted her waving to me from her seat at the back. I knew Chahna would never consider her lack of awareness of Guru's latest news as a concern or drawback, and that fact, in addition to everything else, was an irritant to me. Her detachment from her low status in the Center never failed to amaze me. While I valued Chahna's loyalty and undying friendship, parts of her character seemed beyond my understanding. Everyone in the Center cared about status. What was the matter with her? I decided it must be a flaw, a lack of spiritual drive.

  When the “good singers” were summoned to practice a congratulatory song for Guru when he walked through the gates, I joined them, pretending that I had known about the lift and even hinting that I had been present at the event.

  Isha's car crunched up the gravel driveway and when the gate opened, Guru entered to our song. He folded his hands together and walked over to the gigantic picture and meditated before it as the photographers scrambled for a prime shot. Guru's throne was brought into the middle of the court, near the photo, where he then invited the disciples who had been at his house the previous night to share some of their experiences of the lift. One by one, weepy disciples stood before the microphone, gushing their gratitude at Guru's transcendent one-arm miracle lift. But my father remained silent.

  I had known that my father was invited to Guru's house after the meditation, and by the time I went to bed, he hadn't returned. That morning, when I woke up, he was still out for his traditional long weekend run, so my mother and I left without him. I was jealous that he had witnessed the miracle firsthand while I had been asleep only blocks away. It was so unfair.

  Guru then announced he was selling copies of the picture. Disciples raced down to line up with handfuls of cash to purchase the sacred relic. I nudged my mother to hand over the money and cut in line. When I stood before Guru, he held the photo with both hands and concentrated on me before stretching out to release the photo. I folded my hands tightly together, pressed upon my chest, and stared at Guru's golden face. Across his third eye, the morning sun dazzled its reflection, until his entire face was drenched in light. The arrangements of congratulatory flowers garnished the air with perfume, while the heat from the candle flames quivered low. The second I stood barefoot before Guru, I felt overwhelmed by his humbling and beautiful presence. The waves of energy that surrounded him enveloped me completely, erasing all thoughts. This was what I loved about Guru. Being in his presence created a tangible change in me; it made me holy, better.

  “My Jayanti,” Guru said. “You see what your guru can do? Through the Supreme's infinite compassion, anything can be done.”

  He reached to his side table and gently lifted a pen to the picture. Across the span of his white singlet, over his own heart chakra, he wrote “Jayanti,” and drew a series of curly,
interconnected birds that formed a tight protective circle around my name. When he finished he tapped his finger against my scripted name etched onto his heart.

  “Jayanti, divine. My infinite love and infinite pride, my own Jayanti,” Guru said, extending the photograph to me.

  I reached for it with both hands, gazing into Guru's venerable face. I never tired of looking at him. Guru's face had been my focal point for my entire life, and it still offered an endless series of surprises. When he joked, deliberated, or scolded, his expressions were unrestrained, natural. Depending on the sun's position, Guru's skin shifted from shades of saffron to amber to gold. I studied his eyes, watching them silently broadcast blessings.

  Flanked by his staging of flowers and incense, I longed to sit on the ground before Guru's throne and never leave. With a sweep of ancient devotion, all my outer strife and worries seemed to utterly wash away. Rid of desires for wild freedoms, suddenly I wanted to spend my life inside his trance, drinking in his light, his consciousness. The way he made me feel when I stood near him, fixated on his presence, was a sense of completion—I was aligned, whole, and safe.

  Mesmerized, I didn't put the photo down and carried it with both hands like it was a sacred tablet for the entire function. Seven thousand pounds was beyond a human or even superhuman feat. I felt awed, humbled, and instantly renewed. Guru's lion roar of determination and his arm raised in triumph over the mountains of dead ignorant matter realigned my skewed life and reaffirmed the real reason for my existence. It dwarfed all the absurd babble that was the everyday. Greenwich Academy's self-importance shrank to crumbs to be brushed away. Binge drinking and Polo shirts, debutante balls and make-out sessions—who cared? With my name emblazoned on the photo, Guru made me part of his miracle. I was practically an eyewitness. How many of the billions on earth could make such a claim? Who wouldn't want to be in on one of the greatest miracles, the parting of the Red Sea or the raising of Lazarus from the dead? And this was better, by far. Unlike those miracles confirmed only by hearsay and vague tales, we had empirical proof. We had eyewitnesses, photographs, and a video.

  “Dad,” I shouted, running to catch up with him after the function ended.

  He continued walking.

  “Dad!”

  Still no reply.

  “DAADDD!” I got beside him, panting, still displaying my photograph. “You need to tell me totally everything that you saw.”

  I waited for his story, rich and full of detail, the inside scoop, the backstory for the miracle. I wanted nothing left out.

  My father, never one to display a crack of emotion, didn't slow his pace.

  “You'll have to see for yourself,” my father finally said to me.

  THOUGH I WAS renewed by Guru's weight-lifting miracle, I now found both of my parents to be mysteriously distant; my father dropped out of all manifestation committees and removed himself from most extracurricular Center activities. My mother continued propping me close to Guru, as she too drifted further away.

  Although the Center was rapidly growing, especially in eastern Europe, where the end of the cold war brought hordes of seekers eager to experience new religions, the core of older disciples was in flux. In particular, many of the other disciple children, as they grew up, became less involved. When they did turn up at a meditation and Guru called the children to the stage, I noticed the girls wore eyeliner and the boys’ hair was too long for acceptable disciple standards. Eventually all but a handful of the original members dropped away, and they were soon replaced by a whole new crop of kids, guided by eager parents who had recently joined Guru's path. I didn't pay much attention to the new disciples, nor did I really miss the ones who had left. For me, as long as Chahna was still a disciple, I was happy. Fiercely protective of her, I wanted to keep close guard on Chahna in order to protect her from committing some of my own mistakes.

  TRUDGING THROUGH public school in Bayonne, New Jersey, Chahna now braced for high school with dread.

  “You're lucky,” Chahna said, tearing the skin off her prasad orange as we sat on the front stoop of the Queens house. “You're basically done with school forever.”

  With my high school graduation two weeks away, I was almost officially school free and apprehensive of what was next. Secretly I longed to be college bound like the rest of my class, but I knew Guru would never allow that. Any attempt to sway my parents away from Guru's decree would be hopeless; they always seemed to obey.

  “I wish I were done,” Chahna said.

  “Yeah. Just be sure not to get caught up in any of the crazy college pressure,” I said, adding a chipped giggle for believ-ability. Not wanting to be a bad influence, I resisted telling Chahna how much I wanted to go to college.

  “I'd never want to go to college,” Chahna said earnestly. “I asked Guru if I could stay in Queens this summer to work in the health food store. I can't wait.”

  I had been dreading that Guru would assign me to work there for the summer and, even worse, as a full-time job when I graduated. With its lack of customers and spare shelves, the store was depressing.

  Chahna's excitement over working at the disciple-owned health food store silenced me. I suddenly realized that instead of being the good big spiritual sister, I was actually the bad influence. Without receiving any outer attention from Guru, Chahna was fiercely devoted to him. On many occasions, I overheard her begging her parents to bring her to meditations when her parents had just popped a mound of popcorn to settle in for a Star Trek marathon on TV. Chahna knew where she wanted to be, and she was diligent in her spiritual practice. Although I was careful to keep my past disobediences with boys private, once I had asked Chahna if she had ever liked any boys. When she responded simply, “What for?” I knew then my Chahna was spiritually pure and wholly committed. I didn't have anything to worry about for her, but I wasn't so sure about myself.

  What would happen when I graduated from Greenwich Academy in two weeks was uncertain, to me at least. My classmates had their futures all figured out; the reason their families had selected the prestigious prep school was for its near guarantee of Ivy League acceptance. Most of my classmates had had private SAT tutors and essay coaches since freshman year, polishing and retooling their college applications. The rest was a waiting game with college visits and phone calls from their alumni parents to other high-powered alumni. All students had mandatory sessions with the college counselor, Mr. Holland, a red-haired man who always wore silk stripe ties and moccasin loafers.

  My visits to Mr. Holland, where the colorful banners of the Ivy Leagues decorated his office like coats of arms, clearly left him baffled.

  No, I hadn't thought about what my top choice colleges were. No, I hadn't visited any campuses. No, my parents didn't have a preference.

  He stared at me like I was a severely disabled child who up until now had been forced to live this way because my parents had not bothered to investigate a simple corrective procedure.

  “You do realize that this is the most important decision you will ever make, don't you?” Mr. Holland asked, speaking extra slowly, folding and unfolding his tortoiseshell glasses.

  On his round table lay glossy brochures with blond pony-tailed young women clutching books and striding beside a blazered professor with a goatee, his hands in a wide gesture. Around them students sat in multicultural clusters beneath autumn trees, engaged in animated discussions. A neogothic clock tower loomed in the background. The idyllic scene hypnotized me. I wanted to be there more than ever.

  “You are taking this college process seriously, Ms. Tamm, aren't you?” Mr. Holland's glasses clicked faster.

  He slowly put his glasses back on, signaling serious business.

  “You give me no choice. I'm going to have to write a letter to the Tamms, informing them of your lackadaisical attitude about the college process. If this letter does not return to me, with their signature, then I will be forced to invite Mr. Tamm in for a conference to discuss this matter. You wouldn't want me to have to both
er Mr. Tamm from his busy schedule to come in, would you?” Mr. Holland asked.

  I wanted to explain how much I longed to go to college, that I was not allowed, but I couldn't. It was too strangely complicated. He would never understand.

  Guru did not approve of college for his disciples. Never having graduated high school, Guru made a clear distinction in his philosophy between the mind and the heart. The mind was the source of doubt, of stubborn questioning and intellectualism, whereas the heart was the apex of faith, of unconditional surrender. In Guru's aphorisms, he praised the childlike heart and chastised the obstinate mind. Repeatedly, in both formal lectures and front-porch chatter, Guru blasted institutions of higher learning. College, Guru felt, was a deterrent to the spiritual life. Fostering the mind was negating the heart. Unlike years ago when Guru had urged my father to pursue law school, the rules had changed. Now, disciples who joined the Center while attending college were quickly persuaded to drop their outer studies, if they were serious about pursuing their inner studies. Disciples who shunned college proudly felt superior to the unfortunate disciples who, in their dark pasts, had obtained degrees.

  The remote vision of myself as a normal student inhabiting the world of the glossy autumnal college brochure, living in a dorm surrounded by friends and activities not focused on manifesting the Supreme, seemed magical. Never having given much thought to what I wanted to be when I grew up because I knew it was not going to be my decision, college, in my fantasy, had less to do with career goals than with the luxurious freedoms of a life away.

  Since my father had an advanced degree, I thought he might understand the necessity of college for me and would argue this point to Guru, but he didn't seem concerned. Whenever I brought up college fairs or application dates, he remained quiet, sifting through stacks of tax forms.