There were Master’s Indian disciples who were all learning to be swamis. They wanted to renounce the world and had shaved their heads and wore an orange sort of toga thing. When they were ready, Master was going to make them into full swamis. Most of these junior swamis were very young—just boys, some of them—but even those that weren’t all that young were certainly so at heart. Sometimes they reminded me of a lot of school kids, they were so full of tricks and fun. But I think basically they were very serious—they couldn’t not be, considering how they were renouncing and were supposed to be studying all sorts of very difficult things. The one I liked the best was called Vishwa. I liked him not only because he was the best looking, which he undoubtedly was, but I felt he had a lot going for him. Others said so too—in fact, they all said that Vishwa was the most advanced and was next in line for full initiation. I always let him come and talk to me in my room whenever he wanted to, and we had some interesting conversations.
Then there were Master’s foreign disciples. They weren’t so different from the other Europeans and Americans I had met in other ashrams except that the atmosphere here was so much better and that made them better too. They didn’t have to fight with each other over Master’s favors—I’m afraid that was very much the scene in some of the other ashrams, which were like harems, the way they were all vying for the favor of their guru. But Master never encouraged that sort of relationship, and although of course many of them did have very strong attachments to him, he managed to keep them all healthy. And that’s really saying something because, like in all the other ashrams, many of them were not healthy people; through no fault of their own quite often, they had just had a bad time and were trying to get over it.
Once Master said to me “What about you, Katie?” This was when I was alone with him in his room. He had called me in for some dictation—we were all given little jobs to do for him from time to time, to keep us busy and happy I suppose. Just let me say a few words about his room and get it over with. It was awful. It had linoleum on the floor of the nastiest pattern, and green strip lighting, and the walls were painted green too and had been decorated with calendars and pictures of what were supposed to be gods and saints but might as well have been Bombay film stars, they were so fat and gaudy. Master and all the junior swamis were terribly proud of this room. Whenever he acquired anything new—like some plastic flowers in a hideous vase—he would call everyone to admire and was so pleased and complacent that really it was not possible to say anything except “Yes very nice.”
When he said “What about you, Katie?” I knew at once what he meant. That was another thing about him—he would suddenly come out with something as if there had already been a long talk between you on this subject. So when he asked me that, it was like the end of a conversation, and all I had to do was think for a moment and then I said “I’m okay.” Because that was what he had asked: was I okay? Did I want anything, any help or anything? And I didn’t. I really was okay now. I hadn’t always been but I got so traveling around on my own and then being in this nice place here with him.
This was before the Countess came. Once she was there, everything was rather different. For weeks before her arrival people started talking about her: she was an important figure there, and no wonder since she was very rich and did a lot for the ashram and for Master when he went abroad on his lecture tours. I wondered what she was like. When I asked Vishwa about her, he said “She is a great spiritual lady.”
We were both sitting outside my room. There was a little open space around which several other rooms were grouped. One of these—the biggest, at the corner—was being got ready for the Countess. It was the one that was always kept for her. People were vigorously sweeping in there and scrubbing the floor with soap and water.
“She is rich and from a very aristocratic family,” Vishwa said, “but when she met Master she was ready to give up everything.” He pointed to the room that was being scrubbed: “This is where she stays. And sees—not even a bed—she sleeps on the floor like a holy person. Oh, Katie, when someone like me gives up the world, what is there? It is not such a great thing. But when she does it—” His face glowed. He had very bright eyes and a lovely complexion. He always looked very pure, owing no doubt to the very pure life he led.
Of course I got more and more curious about her, but when she came I was disappointed. I had expected her to be very special, but the only special thing about her was that I should meet her here. Otherwise she was a type I had often come across at posh parties and in the salons where I used to model. And the way she walked toward me and said “Welcome!”—she might as well have been walking across a carpet in a salon. She had a full-blown, middle-aged figure (she must have been in her fifties) but very thin legs on which she took long strides with her toes turned out. She gave me a deep searching look—and that too I was used to from someone like her because very worldly people always do that: to find out who you are and how usable. But in her case now I suppose it was to search down into my soul and see what that was like.
I don’t know what her conclusion was, but I must have passed because she was always kind to me and even asked for my company quite often. Perhaps this was partly because we lived across from each other and she suffered from insomnia and needed someone to talk to at night. I’m a sound sleeper myself and wasn’t always very keen when she came to wake me. But she would nag me till I got up. “Come on, Katie, be a sport,” she would say. She used many English expressions like that: she spoke English very fluently though with a funny accent. I heard her speak to the French and Italian and German people in the ashram very fluently in their languages too. I don’t know what nationality she herself was—a sort of mixture I think—but of course people like her have been everywhere, not to mention their assorted governesses when young.
She always made me come into her room. She said mine was too luxurious, she didn’t feel right in it as she had given up all that. Hers certainly wasn’t luxurious. Like Vishwa had said, there wasn’t a stick of furniture in it and she slept on the floor on a mat. As the electricity supply in the ashram was very fitful, we usually sat by candlelight. It was queer sitting like that with her on the floor with a stub of candle between us. I didn’t have to do much talking as she did it all. She used her arms a lot, in sweeping gestures, and I can still see them weaving around there by candlelight as if she was doing a dance with them; and her eyes, which were big and baby-blue, were stretched wide open in wonder at everything she was telling me. Her life was like a fairy tale, she said. She gave me all the details though I can’t recall them as I kept dropping off to sleep (naturally at two in the morning). From time to time she’d stop and say sharply “Are you asleep, Katie,” and then she would poke me till I said no I wasn’t. She told me how she first met Master at a lecture he had come to give in Paris. At the end of the lecture she went up to him—she said she had to elbow her way through a crowd of women all trying to get near him—and simply bowed down at his feet. No words spoken. There had been no need. It had been predestined.
She was also very fond of Vishwa. It seemed all three of them—i.e. her, Master, and Vishwa—had been closely related to each other in several previous incarnations. I think they had been either her sons or her husbands or fathers, I can’t remember which exactly but it was very close so it was no wonder she felt about them the way she did. She had big plans for Vishwa. He was to go abroad and be a spiritual leader. She and Master often talked about it, and it was fascinating listening to them, but there was one thing I couldn’t understand and that was why did it have to be Vishwa and not Master who was to be a spiritual leader in the West? I’d have thought Master himself had terrific qualifications for it.
Once I asked them. We were sitting in Master’s room and the two of them were talking about Vishwa’s future. When I asked “What about Master?” she gave a dramatic laugh and pointed at him like she was accusing him: “Ask him! Why don’t you ask him!”
He gave a guilty smile and shift
ed around a bit on his throne. I say throne—it really was that: he received everyone in this room so a sort of dais had been fixed up at one end and a deer skin spread on it for him to sit on; loving disciples had painted an arched back to the dais and decorated it with stars and symbols stuck on in silver paper (hideous!).
When she saw him smile like that, she really got exasperated. “If you knew, Katie,” she said, “how I have argued with him, how I have fought, how I have begged and pleaded on my knees. But he is as stubborn as—as—”
“A mule,” he kindly helped her out.
“Forgive me,” she said (because you can’t call your guru names, that just isn’t done!); though next moment she had worked herself up again: “Do you know,” she asked me, “how many people were waiting for him at the airport last time he went to New York? Do you know how many came to his lectures? That they had to be turned away from the door till we took a bigger hall! And not to speak of those who came to enroll for the special three-week Meditation-via-Contemplation course.”
“She is right,” he said. “They are very kind to me.”
“Kind! They want him—need him—are crazy with love and devotion—”
“It’s all true,” he said. “But the trouble is, you see, I’m a very, very lazy person.” And as he said this, he gave a big yawn and stretched himself to prove how lazy he was: but he didn’t look it—on the contrary, when he stretched like that, pushing out his big chest, he looked like he was humming with energy.
That evening he asked me to go for a stroll with him. We walked by the river, which was very busy with people dipping in it for religious reasons. The temples were also busy—whenever we passed one, they seemed to be bursting in there with hymns, and cymbals, and little bells.
Master said: “It is true that everyone is very kind to me in the West. Oh they make a big fuss when I come. They have even made a song for me—it goes—wait, let me see—”
He stopped still and several people took the opportunity to come up to ask for his blessing. There were many other holy men walking about but somehow Master stood out. Some of the holy men also came up to be blessed by him.
“Yes, it goes: ‘He’s here! Our Master-ji is here! Jai jai Master! Jai jai He!’ They stand waiting for me at the airport, and when I come out of the customs they burst into song. They carry big banners and also have drums and flutes. What a noise they make! Some of them begin to dance there and then on the spot, they are so happy. And everyone stares and looks at me, all the respectable people at the airport, and they wonder ‘Now who is this ruffian?’”
He had to stop again because a shopkeeper came running out of his stall to crouch at Master’s feet. He was the grocer—everyone knew he used false weights—as well as the local moneylender and the biggest rogue in town, but when Master blessed him I could see tears come in his eyes, he felt so good.
“A car has been bought for my use,” Master said when we walked on again. “Also a lease has been taken on a beautiful residence in New Hampshire. Now they wish to buy an airplane to enable me to fly from coast to coast.” He sighed. “She is right to be angry with me. But what am I to do? I stand in the middle of Times Square or Piccadilly, London, and I look up and there are all the beautiful beautiful buildings stretching so high up into heaven: yes I look at them but it is not them I see at all, Katie! Not them at all!”
He looked up and I with him, and I understood that what he saw in Times Square and Piccadilly was what we saw now—all those mountains growing higher and higher above the river, and some of them so high that you couldn’t make out whether it was them, with snow on top, or the sky with clouds in it.
Before the Countess’s arrival, everything had been very easygoing. We usually did our meditation, but if we happened to miss out, it never mattered too much. Also there was a lot of sitting around gossiping or trips to the bazaar for eats. But the Countess put us on a stricter regime. Now we all had a timetable to follow, and there were gongs and bells going off all day to remind us. This started at 5 A.M. when it was meditation time, followed by purificatory bathing time, and study time, and discussion time, and hymn time, and so on till lights-out time. Throughout the day disciples could be seen making their way up or down the mountainside as they passed from one group activity to the other. If there was any delay in the schedule, the Countess got impatient and clapped her hands and chivied people along. The way she herself clambered up and down the mountain was just simply amazing for someone her age. Sometimes she went right to the top of the ashram where there was a pink plaster pillar inscribed with Golden Rules for Golden Living (a sort of Indian Ten Commandments): from here she could look all around, survey her domain as it were. When she wanted to summon everyone, she climbed up there with a pair of cymbals and how she beat them together! Boom! Bang! She must have had military blood in her veins, probably German.
She had drawn up a very strict timetable for Vishwa to cover every aspect of his education. He had to learn all sorts of things; not only English and a bit of French and German, but also how to use a knife and fork and even how to address people by their proper titles in case ambassadors and big church people and such were drawn into the movement as was fully expected. Because I’d been a model, I was put in charge of his deportment. I was supposed to teach him how to walk and sit nicely. He had to come to my room for lessons in the afternoons, and it was quite fun though I really didn’t know what to teach him. As far as I was concerned, he was more graceful than anyone I’d ever seen. I loved the way he sat on the floor with his legs tucked under him; he could sit like that without moving for hours and hours. Or he might lie full length on the floor with his head supported on one hand and his ascetic’s robe falling in folds around him so that he looked like a piece of sculpture you might see in a museum. I forgot to say that the Countess had decided he wasn’t to shave his hair anymore like the other junior swamis but was to grow it and have long curls. It wasn’t long yet but it was certainly curly and framed his face very prettily.
After the first few days we gave up having lessons and just talked and spent our time together. He sat on the rug and I on the bed. He told me the story of his life and I told him mine. But his was much better than mine. His father had been the station master at some very small junction, and the family lived in a little railway house near enough the tracks to run and put the signals up or down as required. Vishwa had plenty of brothers and sisters to play with, and friends at the little school he went to at the other end of town; but quite often he felt like not being with anyone. He would set off to school with his copies and pencils like everyone else, but halfway he would change his mind and take another turning that led out of town into some open fields. Here he would lie down under a tree and look at patches of sky through the leaves of the tree, and the leaves moving ever so gently if there was a breeze or some birds shook their wings in there. He would stay all day and in the evening go home and not tell anyone. His mother was a religious person who regularly visited the temple and sometimes he went with her but he never felt anything special. Then Master came to town and gave a lecture in a tent that was put up for him on the parade ground. Vishwa went with his mother to hear him, again not expecting anything special, but the moment he saw Master something very peculiar happened: he couldn’t quite describe it, but he said it was like when there is a wedding on a dark night and the fireworks start and there are those that shoot up into the sky and then burst into a huge white fountain of light scattering sparks all over so that you are blinded and dazzled with it. It was like that, Vishwa said. Then he just went away with Master. His family were sad at first to lose him, but they were proud too like all families are when one of them renounces the world to become a holy man.
Those were good afternoons we had, and we usually took the precaution of locking the door so no one could interrupt us. If we heard the Countess coming—one good thing about her, you could always hear her a mile off, she never moved an inch without shouting instructions to someone—the moment we
heard her we’d jump up and unlock the door and fling it wide open: so when she looked in, she could see us having our lesson—Vishwa walking up and down with a book on his head, or sitting like on a dais to give a lecture and me showing him what to do with his hands.
When I told him the story of my life, we both cried. Especially when I told him about my first marriage when I was only sixteen and Danny just twenty. He was a bass player in a group and he was really good and would have got somewhere if he hadn’t freaked out. It was terrible seeing him do that, and the way he treated me after those first six months we had together, which were out of this world. I never had anything like that with anyone ever again, though I got involved with many people afterward. Everything just got worse and worse till I reached an all-time low with my second marriage, which was to a company director (so-called, though don’t ask me what sort of company) and a very smooth operator indeed besides being a sadist. Vishwa couldn’t stand it when I came to that part of my story. He begged me not to go on, he put his hands over his ears. We weren’t in my room that time but on top of the ashram by the Pillar of the Golden Rules. The view from here was fantastic, and it was so high up that you felt you might as well be in heaven, especially at this hour of the evening when the sky was turning all sorts of colors though mostly gold from the sun setting in it. Everything I was telling Vishwa seemed very far away. I can’t say it was as if it had never happened, but it seemed like it had happened in someone else’s life. There were tears on Vishwa’s lashes, and I couldn’t help myself, I had to kiss them away. After which we kissed properly. His mouth was as soft as a flower and his breath as sweet; of course he had never tasted meat nor eaten anything except the purest food such as a lamb might eat.
The door of my room was not the only one that was locked during those hot afternoons. Quite a few of the foreign disciples locked theirs for purposes I never cared to inquire into. At first I used to pretend to myself they were sleeping, and afterward I didn’t care what they were doing. I mean, even if they weren’t sleeping, I felt there was something just as good and innocent about what they actually were doing. And after a white—when we had told each other the story of our respective lives and had run out of conversation—Vishwa and I began to do it too. This was about the time when preparations were going on for his final Renunciation and Initiation ceremony. It’s considered the most important day in the life of a junior swami, when he ceases to be junior and becomes a senior or proper swami. It’s a very solemn ceremony. A funeral pyre is lit and his junior robe and his caste thread are burned on it. All this is symbolic—it means he’s dead to the world but resurrected to the spiritual life. In Vishwa’s case, his resurrection was a bit different from the usual. He wasn’t fitted out in the standard senior swami outfit—which is a piece of orange cloth and a begging bowl—but instead the Countess dressed him up in the clothes he was to wear in the West. She had herself designed a white silk robe for him, together with accessories like beads, sandals, the deer skin he was to sit on, and an embroidered shawl.
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