by Jayanti Tamm
With clenched teeth and my hands in fists, I restrained myself from screaming aloud. Below, the tennis court guards wheeled in various tricycles, motorized carts, and mini choo-choo trains, arranging the brightly colored, shiny vehicles along the court's fence. When Guru arrived, walking with a profound limp in both legs, he inspected his array of new toys. One by one, Guru climbed inside the child-sized vehicles and rode around the perimeter of the tennis court, making sharp turns at each corner as the disciples sat with folded hands in deep meditation, eager for the moment when Guru scooted past their area. Guru's self-indulgence, his ego, sickened me. Getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted on his own time clearly was not enough for him. To keep up his role as spiritual leader of his flock, he multitasked his personal hobbies, habits, and indulgences into so-called spiritual practice for all his ardent believers who financed and supported him. From munching potato chips to bicep curls, he wrote off everything he did as a meditation, an opportunity for his disciples to be nearer to the Supreme.
Lap after lap, he toured the same small stretch until, eventually like a toddler, Guru moved on to his next toy. With each vehicle, Guru initially jerked the machine into motion, until he found a smooth ride. My whole body shook with restless anger. I hated it. I hated him. I hated every ounce of my entire life as Guru limped over to the vehicle he had saved for last—the mini red choo-choo train. Since his childhood, when Guru's father was an inspector on the Bengali railroad, Guru, like most little boys, held a fascination for trains, and now, as an old, frail man, he had his own with which to play conductor. Even when Guru tooted the caboose's clownish whistle, utter reverent silence continued. For the disciples, this was serious meditation. For me, this was beyond bearing.
As Guru lapped the tennis court in endless circles wearing his conductor's cap, I saddened, terrified that perhaps this was normal. Maybe this made sense. It was follow the leader, and didn't everyone follow some sort of leader around in circles? I suddenly remembered, years ago, loving the sickening dizziness of turning circles. One of the highlights of my entire year was performing gymnastics in Guru's Madal Circus. Banned from wearing leotards because they were too revealing, in my circus costume of a shiny sari, fearlessly tumbling, somersaulting, and cartwheeling around the stage to Guru's applause. He smiled and waved and told me to continue cartwheels in a sari as an encore. The inversion of my body, losing track of gravity and direction, was disorienting and delirious. From my vantage point, I saw Guru and all of the disciples upside-down, and no one else had. Their faces blurred past, a rush of nonsensical colors and shapes. By the end of my routine, I didn't know which was the correct way. Both felt as equally unstable then as they did now.
I didn't wait for prasad or for Guru to invite disciples to the microphone to share their profound inner experiences during his meditative joyride. I fled to my apartment, where I decided to stay, taking permanent cover in my bed. I could not carry on anymore to another folded-hand meditation, another aphorism, another video. Other disciples plowed ahead, adapting to Guru's broadening plans, his new adventures, celebrities, peace awards to dictators such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Burma's Secretary-1. All of my ability to pretend was spent. Each day when I finally awoke, I was disappointed. I'd stare at the clock, counting how many hours remained and how I could erase them. There was always too much time, too many afternoon and evenings that even with my eyes closed still stretched over me. After sleeping and pretending to sleep, eventually the sounds streaming to my window from the street below—people leaving for work, children biking, police sirens—felt foreign. Their world was reliant on time, squeezing more hours out of the clock, stretching it to fit in more minutes for work or family. They had deadlines and appointments, engagements to uphold. By Guru's design, I had none. Twenty-four hours a day were available to trail Guru, bumbling along, waving and cheering him on, satisfying his needs. I ducked beneath the covers, hoping to fall asleep again, to speed the end of yet another day.
KETAN PILED VARIOUS messages seasoned with judgment on my answering machine. His latest recording chided me for missing the big celebration in honor of Guru driving. I didn't return any of Ketan's calls. One morning he banged against my door relentlessly until I stammered to open it. According to Ketan, in five minutes Guru would drive around the block, and attendance was mandatory. Since the weather had been getting colder, Guru's new hobby was driving in a circle from his house to the block with the divine-enterprises. A new Center information phone line, with its number safely guarded from all ex-disciples, posted frantic updates as to the exact time Guru would motor past for a drive-by meditation. Not wanting to miss it, disciples began lining the street, staking their spot with folded hands, waiting for the one-car parade. Guru splurged on a range of tiny cars, just like his array of mini-vehicles, to suit his various moods. Garages were rented throughout Jamaica to store Guru's fleet, and the cars, like the tricycles and choo-choo trains, were maintained and retrieved by the tennis court guards at Guru's whim.
Ketan, sporting a new suede jacket with matching gloves and perfectly coiffed hair, told me I looked like hell, not having showered for days and wearing stained pajamas. He ordered me to chuck on something decent, claiming there wasn't time to waste. Feeling lightheaded, I followed him out of the house into the gusty winds of the cold, dark morning. Even though Guru's route was only two blocks away, Ketan drove, and we waited inside his heated, idling car while disciples stood outside, shivering with folded hands as their saris billowed and tangled from the wind. Without looking at me, Ketan sternly informed me that the ominous year had already claimed a lot of disciples, dumping them out of Guru's boat for good. In the past, gossip of disciples getting kicked out of the Center had been my penultimate news to savor, as it confirmed what had always been suspected, that the new ex-disciple had never been either good or worthy, and it had left a smug smile of reassurance about the highly evolved state of my own soul. But now these stories felt like testaments to the larger insanity all around me. As Ketan delved into the secret details of one male disciple's being caught with a woman in his apartment, and later when it was discovered that there had never been a woman, and the woman's voice heard by the disciple in the next apartment had been someone speaking on National Public Radio, the accused disciple decided that he would rather be out of the Center than have to live in Orwell's 1984. I listened to Ketan's disgust with the next offense, a male disciple who called up his friend and sang “Happy Birthday” in a mock-seductive Marilyn Monroe impersonation. That same afternoon, a message came through Romesh expelling the crank caller from the Center for his misdeed.
“It's not a joke,” Ketan said defensively.
I never thought it was. I knew far better than to imagine anything could be buoyant and free like a joke. There was nothing humorous in the Center. Nothing over which to laugh, let alone smile. Ketan proceeded to tell me that some traitors, disgruntled ex-disciples, were organizing slanderous campaigns against Guru, claiming Guru had various sexual relationships with former and current disciples. One supposed relationship ended up with the woman pregnant by Guru and Guru's insistence that the woman have an abortion. The rabid group of ex-disciples was contacting the press and maniacally spreading lies about Guru and his mission.
“You don't use a computer, do you?” Ketan grilled me suspiciously.
I shook my head.
“Good,” Ketan said. “Guru doesn't want anyone using the computer. Especially for e-mail or the Internet. He's forbidden it.”
I nodded. I knew Guru did not allow a computer inside his own house, and told his good disciples they should not have them either.
“All I'm saying is that you better watch it,” Ketan warned, pointing his index finger at me. “You need to clean up. You're hanging on by a thread.”
He then turned off the car and hopped out, joining the other tennis court guards, who, like Ketan, had been waiting inside heated cars, and just now joined the row of shivering disciples who had been positioned al
ong the sidewalk for hours.
A neighbor woman walking her dog, bundled up in a knitted sweater, tried to maneuver a path on the sidewalk as the disciples self-righteously held fast to their spots. Other outsiders, en route to work, familiar with the disciple blockade, sighed and crossed into the street, glimpsing peeks at the now routine morning spectacle. As I shuffled into the line-up, I imagined the scene looked like a training exercise for boot camp, with the troops temporarily halted by their commanding officer. Or it was a human line of prisoners awaiting execution by firing squad to be knocked off one by one. Either way, saris and whites and Guru-blue parkas splayed across the neighborhood, superimposing private faith onto public property.
Beside me, a short new visiting disciple jumped up and down, maintaining her claim to the line. She had spotted Guru. I watched her bounce in eager anticipation. Still a half block away, Guru advanced toward his human chain of disciples in a comically small Guru-blue two-seater that looked like it had escaped from a ride on a fairground. Afraid to drive anything large, Guru's personal fleet of cars consisted of an entire motorcade that would have been ideal for children and dwarfs. Disciples on both sides of the street stood at full attention, silent with folded hands. It had been hours since the recorded phone hotline announced Guru's meditative drive, and these faithful disciples who had been devotedly standing in one spot were now to get their reward. With a speed so slow that the wheels barely rolled forward, Guru proceeded up the block. Not looking at the disciples on either side of the street, Guru kept his windows tightly shut, not wanting to expose himself, ever so slightly, to the bitter temperature outside. As Guru passed where I stood, for a moment, with only his head and neck visible, I shivered, remembering back to my childhood chills of fear of the lifelike Guru bust that had plotted to strangle me. Back then, it had been my secret that I was not allowed to tell—no one uttered a word against Guru, the person or the image. As I stuck my hands in the pocket of my jacket, the chills I now felt resulted from waiting, endlessly waiting, in the cold morning. Nothing more. The fear was gone; so, too, was that little girl.
Studying Guru cruising in his playmobile, the absurdity of the moment, of the massive, elaborately concocted scam, assaulted me. A myth. A fake. A lie. The truth was that nothing was true. Guru Sri Chinmoy was a fabrication dreamed and designed by a young and churlish Bangladeshi intent on hypnotizing the world. He had manufactured his image as a modern swami, his own presentation, to suit his vision. With subtle modifications along the way, he molded himself to fit the story he wrote for himself. If Guru was fiction, an invention, I realized, then so was I, for he had created me. My values and truths were all approved, filtered, then injected into me by Guru. No ethics, philosophy, or ideas blossomed organically by myself. I was the creation of the Sri Chinmoy Experiment. I could not imagine that somewhere inside was a real person who could exist wholly unto herself. A fake, created as part of a larger scheme, for nearly twenty-five years, I had absorbed space, heralding a false life and false creator. Nothing around me was true; the emperor wore no clothes.
I didn't know if I had such a thing as my own will, but I did know that I still had control over my own body, and for the first and last time, I was going to use it.
With my head throbbing, I rushed back and scrutinized my small apartment. I needed a finale. I viewed the distance from my windows to the sidewalk below. Even though I was on the third floor, the drop, I concluded, was not far enough to offer a decisive conclusion. I moved from the windows, forcing myself to think of another plan. As I paced across the room, I veered to the kitchenette, surveying it for sharp objects. Never a cook, I owned one dull bread knife, which barely sawed through bagels. I angrily crossed into the living room, lifting my eyes to the ceiling. But without ceiling fans or overhead light fixtures and with the sloping contours of the dormers, fastening a cord from the ceiling was clearly impossible. There was nothing from which to hang, nothing to hold me as an anchor.
I entered the bathroom, positive I had found my answer. I grabbed a pink shaving razor and swiped it across my wrist. Nothing sliced, nothing cut. The blade was nestled inside its protective plastic. I tried to bend it, snapping the blade free, but it held securely in place. Smashing it against the sink, it nicked my finger, letting out a tease of blood, too shallow for any impact except a small and steady leak. I cursed and threw the razor inside the sink, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, which made me shudder. I couldn't stand to look at myself. To avoid confronting my own image, I thrust open the medicine cabinet. Surely something toxic, life-threatening, existed inside its shelves. I dumped dental floss, a nearly squeezed-out tub of toothpaste, mouth-wash, deodorant, and powder into the sink below. Although the shelves stood bare, I stared into the dusty levels, hoping I had overlooked a perfect potion. I wondered how other people were lucky enough to have vials and bottles of expired drugs at easy reach with which to brew a lethal cocktail. I didn't have a doctor, let alone access to forbidden prescriptions. I grabbed the plastic jug of mouthwash from the sink, hoping to find a warning sign proclaiming its fateful properties, but there wasn't any.
Time was wasting. This was taking too long. I needed something else. Urgently. I needed a gun. All I needed was a gun. I had never seen a real gun and had no idea where to buy one. I split open the phone book, tearing through pages, while my finger left a blood-smeared trail. I followed the prompts from the heading Handguns, to Sporting Goods Suppliers. When I called and asked the lady who answered the phone if they sold guns, in a nasal voice with a thick Queens drawl, she attempted to detail the lengthy process and waiting period required to obtain a gun permit. She was still speaking when I hung up on her. My head boomed with blurry pain. I was soaked with sweat. I could not wait. Nothing could wait. I hurled the fat yellow directory from my lap, its thick stack of pages cushioning its landing.
I had it, a new plan—foolproof and simple. Leaving everything except a single token, I ran downstairs and headed straight to the subway, energized with queasy hope. I didn't feel the cold air; I was still panting, bleeding, and sweating in overdrive. Ushered through the turnstile, I followed the sounds toward the distant puffing of an approaching train. It churned louder and louder. I raced to the platform, checking to find its direction. What at first appeared as a tiny flashlight soon morphed into the high beam of an approaching express train. I walked myself forward, steps from the platform's edge. This would be quick and easy and of my own volition, free of premeditated or predestined design. The hot air swirled dirt and garbage in wild clouds. I felt perversely light, as if I, too, could be lifted into the maelstrom of tunnel winds. No doubts. No highlight reel of my life screened before my eyes. No tears. No regrets. I literally had nothing to regret. Certainly no prayers. I didn't want the Supreme, Guru, or my own soul involved. I wanted all three of them, for once and for all, to stay away, far away. I did not look in any direction, but I moved forward, always forward, to my finale.
Arms jerked me backward.
“You fuckin’ sick?” A Hispanic man in his late sixties, wearing a navy blue janitorial uniform, dragged me in reverse, with his forearms pressing my collarbone.
The train streaked past, grinding the tracks, excreting a metallic stink.
“You crazy?” he shouted at me, furious.
He wanted an answer. But that was impossible. Even if could have spoken, I could not answer him or anyone. He held me still; his fingers, like pegs, braced my body. I wiggled my shoulders, jutting out my elbows.
“You speak English?” he demanded.
I kicked my legs wildly, and when he released his grasp, I sprinted toward the stairs out of the station. He yelled, but I never turned around. I did not feel my breath, legs, or arms as I kept running. Too stunned for any detours, I ran until I was in my own apartment. There the sounds of the subway stopped. Just an endless stretch of quiet replaced it. Around me, on all the walls, framed pictures of Guru stared mockingly, confirming their smug knowledge that I could accomplish noth
ing on my own; everything was ultimately decided and manipulated by him. I knocked the meticulously matted and framed photographs of Guru in various poses off my walls and shrine, hurling them into my garbage. It did nothing. Nothing could be done. I sputtered tears at my foolish entrapment, and at this pathetic and utterly debilitating attempt of ridding myself from my fabricated life. I screamed and screamed, until my throat was stripped sore, and I collapsed on the ground.
ONE WEEK LATER, the phone rang. It was Romesh. Without any explanation provided, Guru no longer wanted me to be his disciple. I was permanently banned from the Center. I listened, but I was not sure I understood what he said. I kept the phone to my ear, and he repeated himself. Romesh asked me if I had any message to send back to Guru. I sped through years of aching and exaggerated questions, of messages desperate to be sent and received, but I could not think of anything. He quickly hung up, eager to be rid of his task.
Hours later, I still held the receiver to a silenced line. I peered out my window, expecting a full eclipse or torrential hailstorm, but the sun filtered through the puffy white clouds, as though it were a normal Thursday in a normal week. I sat on the floor, while I tried to remember what Romesh had said. Part of me was unsure he had ever called, and I wanted to call him to double-check. My fingers could not read the numbers on the phone. The digits made no sense, appearing as squiggly abstract shapes. They were a secret code, untranslatable but to all those who were in on the grand scheme. I wasn't. I hung up. And I waited, waited for something to happen. All my life things happened, blessings, messages, scoldings, invitations, proclamations, and expulsions.