by Jayanti Tamm
In order to get Guru's approval of my decision, I knew I'd have to convince him that my actions would ultimately work to serve him, which, to a certain extent, was true. I suspected I would always be serving him, no matter what I did. I pleaded with Guru that I be utilized to help him publicize his activities and recruit new disciples, by becoming a journalist. Guru, as I expected, was not enthused by my unexpected request, and he was perturbed that I wanted to enroll in a few journalism courses. When I was in high school, he had made it very clear that he did not want me to go to college because it was the domain of the mind, and dwelling in the mind, rather than the heart, only led seekers into a forest of poisonous doubts. I persuaded Guru that I would only be taking classes to acquire the tools needed to join his growing public relations team of disciples who gathered in strategizing meetings, toting around briefcases filled with full-color brochures of Guru's meetings with pop stars, presidents, and popes. When I notified my parents about my decision, my father thought it was great and commended me for taking the initiative toward financial independence. My mother appeared neutral, allowing me to negotiate directly with Guru for permission and directions.
To build my case, I wrote an article on Guru's newest project, his Soul-Bird drawings, a series of wobbly pen-and-ink doodles that were meant to represent the soul as a bird. I titled it “A Migration of Art,” glorifying his art and playing up the bird metaphor to its fullest. Guru loved it. He published it as a pamphlet and required all of the disciples to buy a copy. He told me I understood the consciousness of his soul-birds, and since he was so pleased, he agreed to allow me to hone my journalistic skills. I was empowered by my own manipulative magic, and it reminded me of the times as a little girl I had charmed Guru into bending the rules for me. Ketan was the only one who seemed suspicious.
“You're going to college? Why?” he interrogated, squinting his blue eyes at me, his blond lashes rapidly blinking. “You're not going to get yourself all tangled up in something, are you?”
“Oh, please,” I said, as if the very question was insulting.
ON THE FIRST day of my classes in Brooklyn, relishing the excitement of my new unsupervised surroundings, I sat next to the cutest guy in the room. I felt instantly energized. After class, Rufus introduced himself and invited me to a party that night. Without a single thought of the inevitable ramifications from the Center, I ended up leaving with Paul, a communist with shaggy black hair and a gap between his two front teeth. We sat at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Nostrand Avenue, composing lines of poetry. By the end of the night I wrote, I think I'm in love with you.
When I returned home, I had two messages from Sarisha, summoning me to celebrate Vani's birthday at Guru's house. The next day, when Ketan asked where I had been, I told him that I hadn't felt well, and had slept right through everything. When he said that he hadn't seen my car in the driveway, I rolled my eyes, as if affronted by his mere suggestion of a discrepancy.
Suddenly, I no longer missed Chahna or Oscar. I couldn't wait to ride the subway to Brooklyn. It was a safe distance from the eyes and ears of Guru's neighborhood, giving me plenty of space to test out my new self—Jayanti, the dark-arty-writer-communist-lover. With my refusals to answer certain questions about my past or family or invite anyone to my home or anywhere near my neighborhood, I appeared enigmatic and exotic.
After class, Paul and I would make out on the boardwalk at Coney Island for hours, until I knew I had to return for the evening meditation. Missing meditations was too obvious. In order to maintain the appearance of normalcy in the Center, I needed to be sure to raise the least amount of suspicion possible. I wanted to keep my footing steady between both worlds. Taking the full plunge either way felt too overwhelming. Though I knew I couldn't sustain both equally forever, I forged ahead. I attended bhajan practice, ran Runners Are Smilers, appeared at the tennis court before classes, and showered off Paul's sweat and licks by the evening meditation. The difficult part came with Guru's house late at night; I knew that alarms would be sent if I declined his invites, so most nights, I went to his house, then when it was over, I changed in my car at stoplights on my way to Brooklyn, returning just in time to change back for bhajan practice at five-thirty
I thought I was doing great. I felt vibrant and clever, thrilled with my managerial skills over all things me. There was no stopping me now, and why should there be? I felt I could exist this way forever. It suited me fine. I had everything. I inhabited the best of both worlds: I had friends, college, fun, and a boyfriend, while simultaneously, through my continuous presence at the tennis court and Guru's house, maybe could even still inch toward God-Realization. It seemed unfair that the two worlds had to be so distinct; it felt more natural to have both—a rich inner and outer life. I did not understand why spirituality could not be just part of a life and why it had to be piously segregated. My family thought I was doing great, and so did Guru. I kept Guru a secret from Paul, and I kept Paul a secret from Guru. Each seemed perfectly oblivious of the other and fully content with my attentions.
One night, I was sitting on the porch at Guru's house, when Fulmala, Vani's mother, who always seemed to be campaigning for Vani to take over my position, sat beside me.
She stared at my face for a few moments, as if she detected the thick black eyeliner and glossy lipstick I had worn earlier.
“You look different,” she concluded.
“Oh? My hair's in a bun. Last night I had it in a braid,” I said with an exaggerated hand motion to my head.
“Nope. That's not it. It's something else.” Her eyes scanned down to my toes and returned to my face. “I know what it is,” she said, lowering her voice.
“You do?” I asked, feeling my heart speed up and my cheeks flush.
“Of course. I have intuitive powers. I am a mother, you know.”
I sat, afraid that if I even swallowed, I'd be exposed.
“You've been released from Chahna's bad influence. Now that she is finally gone, so are her destructive forces.”
I exhaled in deep relief. Of course Fulmala didn't know. Guru didn't even know, and he was supposedly the Supreme of the Universe. Give me a break. I felt suddenly wildly cocky. I didn't care what she thought. Let her report me. Go ahead. I leaned in close to Fulmala, looked her right in her droopy eyes.
“I taught Chahna everything she knows,” I said, then smugly walked away.
ONE MORNING, GURU'S car pulled up beside me. As I went to open the door to the backseat, Asutosh motioned me away.
This was not an invitation. Guru's window slid down only a few inches, and I leaned in close to hear him through the thick glass barrier. In a low voice, Guru said he had been receiving numerous reports about me from disciples who spotted me sneaking out and returning at odd hours. My deliberate acts of disobedience and lack of aspiration were causing him great pain. Before I could respond, the window shut, and the car pulled away.
My facade as Guru's divine disciple had been exposed. In Guru's eyes I was two-faced and committed to nothing and no one but my own raggedy self, a lying, cheating, pathetic mess. It was all true. I didn't deserve Guru's trust, and I knew that I had deliberately broken all the lofty promises I had made to Guru when I returned to New York to be his peerless disciple. I let down Ketan and my parents, too, who were oblivious to my double life, shoveling blind support toward a false cause. My entire life was a false front. I had no one to confer with, and even if I did, it would expose my ungrateful and selfish self. The only thing I wanted was to be far away from everyone who knew how wretched I was, and to be near someone who didn't know a drop about my spiritual deceits and ineptitudes—Paul.
I invited him to come over to my apartment. I didn't care. Let Sarisha see me answer the door; let Ganika hear us rolling around the floor from the apartment below. I now craved a decisive reaction. Maybe Guru would kick me out of the Center for good, or maybe Paul would permanently kidnap me. The following afternoon, when Paul left with his change of boxer shorts and toothbrush in his
hand, I gave him a dramatic farewell kiss in the front yard, wearing only his Che Guevara T-shirt that skimmed my thighs.
The next day, I received a phone call from Romesh with the message that I was breaking Guru's heart and that Guru was asking me to leave the Center for a full six months. When that time was up, he would confer with the Supreme and see what steps would be taken. He said I was doing irreparable damage to my inner life, and he could no longer intervene against the inevitable and dire punishment of my soul. In the meantime, I was not allowed to attend any activities or have contact with anyone inside the Center.
I felt utterly calm. All the crazed turbulence ceased. My mind was in a quiet shock that padded me from thinking or fretting. I sat down and stared at the wall, enjoying its blank whiteness, its lack of complications.
My mother called me five minutes later announcing she and my father were on their way to come see me, and for me to stay still and wait for them. I didn't know what she imagined either she or my father could do for me, but I didn't stop them from coming. We went to a pizzeria, where my mother nervously babbled about planting pumpkin seeds in her garden, while repeatedly interrupting herself to force me to eat. My father remained silent as he ate both his own eggplant grinder and then finished mine. Before they drove back to Connecticut, my mother begged me to return with them for a little rest, but I declined.
A FEW DAYS later, as I walked to the Parsons Boulevard subway station headed to Flatbush to Paul, who remained fully oblivious of the rupture in my life, Tuhina drove past. I waved, but she didn't acknowledge me. On the next block, Vanita cycled by, also without even a nod. Ahead I saw Sarisha jogging toward me. When she came closer, she crossed to the other side of the street. I knew the procedure; it wasn't personal. They were obediently following Guru's orders not to talk to ex-disciples. Guru built an absolute fortress between disciples and ex-disciples. Once a disciple left, all contact with and even mention of the person was cut off. Any exchange with ex-disciples was a serious breach of Guru's rules, and many disciples were asked to leave Guru as a result. I couldn't blame the disciples, but I wondered why they would go to such extremes to avoid me. I wasn't a real ex-disciple; besides, I was still Guru's favorite, his Chosen One, so it seemed ridiculous. When I entered the subway station and waited on line for tokens, I spotted Ketan. It was the first time that I had seen him since Romesh's call. I had suspected that he had been busy on a media blitz for Guru and just hadn't been in town. I walked up to him from behind, placed my hands on his shoulders, and said his name with an overdone French accent. He stiffened, turned around to stare past me as if I were a ghost, then he turned and exited the station.
9
This Is Heresy
YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST SITting on the F train,” Chahna said, in her backyard. After many messages from Chahna, weeks passed before I eventually returned her calls. Though I was not ready to forget what she had done, after being suspended from the Center and having broken up with Paul, I realized that Chahna was my sole link to friendship. I desperately needed her. After all, she had only told Guru on me because at the time she believed she was saving me from what Guru said would be my “destruction.” Now that she was an ex-disciple, listening to her confidently assure me about life beyond the Center was a jolting shift. Her voice was buoyant, her sentences uplifted as though, by severing all ties to the Center, she had gained full immersion in the world. In a reversal of roles, she had become the older one, more experienced, coaxing me forward. According to the newly authoritative Chahna, the outing away from Guru's Queens would be good for me, and I agreed to visit her in New Jersey.
“I left the Center,” Chahna said. “And I'm fine. Safes don't drop on my head as I walk down the street.”
I hadn't thought of that. A safe could drop on my head.
Before I was banished, Guru had told me my soul had lost patience with my reckless life, warning me that he could no longer intervene to save me from its punishment.
“Your soul isn't going to push you in front of a speeding bus,” Chahna said.
Maybe her soul was not as spiteful as mine. A bus flattening me sounded more than probable.
“Guru always talks about his path being the Golden Boat, and if a disciple leaves the boat, then the person automatically drowns in the ignorance-sea. Guess what?” Seated in the shade of her family's small yard, Chahna inched her lawn chair closer to mine. “It's a lie.”
I looked around, expecting a surge of lightning to strike the aluminum chairs, instantly frying both of us, but none came. Hearing Chahna, the once pudgy, runny-nosed little girl with the greasy hair, brazenly denying one of Guru's chief edicts was a sacrilege. Instinctively, I defended Guru.
“You don't know that.”
“Hey. Do I look drowned?”
She certainly did not. Chahna had never appeared so beautiful. With her long hair loosely clustered on the crown of her head and secured by two Chinese-red chopsticks, she was elegantly funky. Her once insecure tics had stopped. She seemed happy, comfortable with herself and her status as an ex-disciple.
For the third time since I had arrived at her house, Rick, her boyfriend, called. Each time, curling the phone cord around her wrist as a bracelet and giggling tightly into the mouthpiece, she finally coaxed him off the phone with a smooch, a rushed iloveyou, and a promise to call him to discuss plans for that evening just as soon as she could. Towering over her at six feet, Rick had enough vintage fashion sense to compensate for his pockmarked complexion and bulbous nose. He had firmly entrenched himself in Chahna's new life, filling every space that might have been left empty from the Center. Even her parents welcomed Rick as an expected fixture in their family. Although both Chahna's parents were officially still disciples, for the past ten years they had been retreating away from the ever-expanding hustle of Guru's activities. From their open acceptance of their only child's curtailed spiritual life to their embrace of all things Rick, Chahna's family life felt alien to me. No wonder Chahna's post-Center crisis seemed nonexistent. Apart from my mother's regular visits with me that made me feel as though I were in hospice care, I felt estranged from my entire family. Ketan shunned me, as did Aunt Chandika; and my father, with his normal cocktail of aloofness and distraction, seemed more concerned about whether the skylight in my apartment leaked after a rainstorm than if I was even there.
Besides my parents, I had not heard from a single disciple. None of the throngs who held me as an infant, played with me as a toddler, or admired me as a child had bothered to phone, write, drop by, or even wave hello. I had been erased. Vanished. Jayanti who? Since childhood, I knew we were supposed to eliminate all traces of ex-disciples from our lives, and I had dutifully done so without much thought. Yet now that I was on the other side, I realized the cruel brutality of the practice.
The silence chilled me. I had never expected Guru to extend the same absolute policies toward me. I believed his tenderness was unconditional, and that soon enough he would nestle me back into his warm care. Never before had he been so severe and official with me. I was banned from meditations, both public and private, and not allowed inside the divine-enterprises. I obediently segregated myself, not wanting to put other disciples in harm's way, even accidentally. Before I opened my third-floor apartment's door for a quick run to the deli, I'd listen to ensure none of the other disciple tenants, including Aunt Chandika, was in the hallway. I wanted to spare both them and me the awkward duties of shunning an ex-disciple in one's own home.
When Chahna announced that we—with her assumed and obvious inclusion of Rick—were going out dancing, I asked why. Dancing, even traditional Indian dancing as a devotional art, was forbidden by Guru. In his belief that the body functioned solely as a vehicle to manifest the Supreme, all other activities involving the body—with the exception of exercise, which was viewed as a vehicle to keep the body fit for manifestation—were lascivious and suspect. Dancing was bad, a lower-vital expression. Even when I was a child, from the Chicken Dan
ce to the squaredance, all forms were condemned.
Before I had time to protest, Chahna raced up to her attic abode, gifted me with two mix tapes of music that she labeled as essential hits played in the club, then flung open her closet and giddily smothered her bed with hanger upon hanger of various billowy and slinky black outfits.
“Who died?” I asked.
“Everyone,” Chahna replied, walking toward the bathroom. “It's the look.”
Black, Guru declared, was the color of ignorance. It was officially banned from any disciple's wardrobe. Occasionally, while performing one of Guru's plays, disciples cast as hostile forces or demons draped themselves in black cloth, sending the clear signal even before uttering a single line that they represented the bad guys, causing many hisses and boos from the audience as they stood upon the makeshift stage. Now, staring at the black swamp that used to be Chahna's bed, I wondered if one of her first ex-disciple digressions had been to bundle all of her pastel printed saris into garbage bags and replace them with hanger upon hanger of clothes in Guru's ultimate color foe.
Chahna reappeared wearing ripped black fishnets, black combat boots, and a mini black satin vintage slip. White face powder wiped any trace of color or freckle from her skin, giving her the matte finish of rice paper. Around her eyes, black eyeliner flared like the open wings of bats. Caked upon her lips was a coat of black lipstick. The sole touch of color was a red velvet ribbon tied tight upon her upper neck. Dangling from it was a black spider.
“What happened to you?” I asked. She looked simultaneously glamorous and ridiculous.
Ignoring me, Chahna sprayed gel into her wavy hair, then asked why I wasn't dressed yet.