by Tova Reich
Instantaneously transformed, Amma pushed you away from her with such force as if she were ejecting you from inside her own body, fortunately into the arms of one of her handlers who caught you like a seasoned midwife. She rose from her cushioned throne on the low dais, stuck out her tongue for all to see, and with her face contorted into a ferocious mask, her arms flailing wildly so that they seemed to multiply into four arms, she raged in an otherworldly voice, “I am Kali Ma, warrior-mother, goddess–rock star”—throwing everyone present in that hall, veterans and visitors alike, prostrate onto the ground, overcome by this vision, this manifestation of the divine, many of them writhing and weeping, some fainting and struggling for breath so that they had to be spirited away on stretchers by medical emergency crews from Amma’s Ayurveda clinic and her world-class hospital across the river. I alone was left standing, caught up in a fit of hilarity with Amma when our glances collided and our thoughts clicked. Amma’s laughter was later featured on her website as a precious glimpse of divine bliss, the highest maternal wisdom, according to the hermeneutics spin. She had a highly developed website from which you could purchase ashram gifts and elixirs, and even virtual hugs in an emergency, when you were in crisis far away, in desperate need of Mother. The site was managed by a devotee who twenty years earlier, at age eighteen, had sold his internet startup for an undisclosed stratospheric sum to dedicate the remainder of his life to Mother.
When you came to my bed that night, babbling gibberish about being spoiled, ruined, your self-esteem in tatters, and I proposed a healing visit to Amma, I wasn’t even sure if the guru was at her ashram, she traveled so frequently to personally deliver her actual hands-on hugs. On top of that, I certainly could not guarantee that after your deep dive into the Chabad ritual bath, you would be willing to set foot on soil polluted by idol worship. You promptly agreed to come along, however, one of your first overt expressions of rebellion against the indoctrination you had been put through, for me a truly reassuring sign that the process of mental and emotional healing was underway. I was so proud of you.
A quick call to my contacts at the ashram even in the early hours of dawn confirmed that Amma was in residence, as was often the case in August and September as the monsoon season waned, barring an unforeseen world crisis or other major humanitarian emergency during which every afflicted soul inevitably cries out for Mother. Amma always heard their cry, dropped everything and came running. She was, and I insert this here with a heart bursting with admiration for this amazing lady, addicted to the camera, a shameless self-promoter, not for personal aggrandizement, I hasten to add in her defense, but solely as a tool to manipulate the media on whom she depended to spread her message. Her staff was expected to function on all cylinders at very short notice, so when I called it was totally set up to handle my request. I was assured that arrangements would be made at once for our visit—unfortunately too brief, I informed Amma’s personnel with regret, a day at most, due to intense work pressures. I proceeded to book a flight for the next morning on IndiGo air from Mumbai to Cochin for the two of us and for Manika as well as a special treat—she had never been hugged by Amma and had never flown in her life, for Manika it would all be a delightful first.
A driver from the ashram, a devotee called Krishnapuri, who in his former life when he was known as Chris had been a pilot on Air Force One before giving it all up during the Clinton administration and coming to Amritapuri to perform seva selfless service for Mother, was waiting for us at Cochin International holding up a sign with our name inscribed on it. He took over our luggage, heavy with the requisite offerings to Amma, including my mother’s candlesticks, her silk saris, and whatever jewelry remained that Manika had not filched with Ma’s full laissez-faire awareness, plus decorative and household artifacts that Geeta and her goondas had missed while ransacking the Malabar Hill flat, which all in all was a good thing as there would be less junk and fewer painful reminders for me to transfer to our new digs in Colaba. We were led to the ashram car parked in a VIP spot for the three-hour drive along the Arabian Sea through the backwaters lush with tropical greenery to Amritapuri, rising like a vision as if out of nowhere into the night sky, its lofty pink buildings brilliant with the only lights on the subcontinent that never failed, Amma would never have tolerated that.
From the window of our room on the fifteenth floor in the hotel’s top-class wing, I could see the light pouring out of the main hall where Amma sat and dispensed public darshan. It looked as if Amma were pulling one of her all-nighter marathon hugging sessions, an athletic display of extraordinary stamina for which she was so justly renowned. Thanks to my longstanding business relationship with the Amma operation and the well-endowed clients I brought in, we were assigned a room in the luxury category. I could not help but be aware, though, that there was a higher level of accommodation one floor up that had not been allocated to us this time; we had not been offered the upgrade. In Amritapuri, nothing happened by accident, without Amma’s direct input. Like all great mothers, Amma was 100 percent hands on. Our room assignment could only mean that an exceptionally important guest was visiting. It crossed my mind that it could be the famous movie actress Sharon Stone, who had been running around at that time cheerleading and boosting for Amma devi, the angel, the hugging saint. I could only hope that if Sharon was not scheduled to be given a private audience, such as is sometimes granted by the pope and by other distinguished personages in the papal league like Amma to special friends of influence, when her turn came during public darshan to assume the position in preparation for being launched by a staff member for her hug in the bosom of Amma, she would be a good girl and remember to wear her knickers.
Standing at that window looking out beyond the world of Mother, if such a world truly exists or matters, it crossed my mind that we could simply run down to the main hall now where Amma was sitting, you and Manika could grab in your hugs, we could then check out at dawn or even directly after the darshan and talk Captain Krishnapuri into earning a few extra seva points by transporting us back to the airport, maybe even hijacking a plane and flying us home in presidential style, returning to Mumbai by early afternoon at the latest. Things might have turned out so differently had we seized that moment and gone for it. But you were already phasing into sleep patterns in your bed under a huge portrait of Amma, her moon face shining benevolently down upon you and Manika, who was cocooned in a blanket on the floor at your feet. After the spiritual hazing you had been put through in Chabadland, you had taken to sleeping as much as possible, a common teenager syndrome, I had read in a magazine somewhere. Teens required almost as much sleep as newborns and babies, according to the experts, due to an accelerated stage in the growth and development of their unstable nervous systems.
Now, with Amma smiling down upon you, it was as if you were recharging your batteries for the next morning when, before queuing up for your hug, you planned to revisit the original cowshed shrine in which Amma had experienced her first ecstatic visions when she was a young girl of about your age, swept up by compassion and love for all suffering creatures, moved to spread her arms wide and comfort with her embrace all the wretched of the earth, human and animal, including the family cows whom she kissed like Mrs. Murphy, their faces and flanks and tails smeared with dung. From what you had personally shared with me regarding the ecstatic nature of your falling stage, I recognized that you too counted yourself as an initiate in the rarified ranks of soul sisters seduced by the spirit while still legally underage, young girls who refuse all offers of marriage and survive by eating feces and shards of glass, as Amma was said to have done, who are shunned by family and tied to trees, beaten by their fathers for giving away the family treasures. I recognized that it was essential to give you the space you needed to work through this dangerously delusional stage without sabotaging your future, so that you would come out on the other side back on track. I counted on Amma to support me in this, which is why I let you sleep, and resigned myself to waiting for the morning.
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Amma’s active energy source was love, and the idea of Mother is love without limit. That’s why she never dried up like a battery or blacked out like the chronically failing electrical grid of Mother India. She was the ultimate Mother, powered eternally by love juice. The first person we met almost immediately after we stepped out onto the ashram campus the next morning, as if he had been posted there to wait for us, informed us rhapsodically that Amma was still hugging away in the main hall, she was on a roll, unstoppable—gods do not need sleep like spiritually challenged mortals or neurologically temperamental teenagers. We had better rush to get our hug tokens if we wanted a good number for our turn in line.
The air was pendulous with the sense of a rare holy hour. Amma was very on, in tune with an exceptionally high spiritual chord not discernible to the rest of us. Banners, flags, posters, and giant portraits everywhere with Amma’s face blown up, smiling so beatifically, beaming such sweet unconditional mother love and acceptance, seemed to be glowing especially brilliantly that morning, as if backlit by a heavenly radiance, like stained glass windows. Devotees were chanting the three hundred names of Amma, singing bhajans, meditating, crawling on the ground and picking up litter with their teeth, a singularly mystical form of seva. In the cowshed temple, worshippers were enacting a fire ritual and doing their puja, but as it turned out the cowshed was not your final destination after all, as I had assumed you had intended. Instead, you cast a bored glance at the scene there, then walked away and led us directly to the food court area, choosing the Western-style cafe where you ordered everything on the menu including a large pizza with tomato sauce (Let them eat pizza, Amma had ruled, when confronted with the hungry Western mobs at her gate), pasta with pesto, a grilled cheese sandwich, mashed potatoes, a cheese omelet, muffins and pastries, washed down with milkshakes from the juice stall. Amritapuri was strictly vegetarian, gliding toward a full commitment to veganism blocked only by a nourishing mother’s concern for the needs of her Western children. Already its food service was certified organic, local, composted, recycled, solar powered, sustainable.
You consumed every carb molecule and fat globule spread out in front of you slowly and silently, with no sign of feeling pressured about securing a good spot in the queue for your hug and no sense of embarrassment, a proud fat girl flaunting her human right to eat. Amma wanted you to eat. Amma said you may not be excused from the table until you cleaned your plate. Amma was feeding you. Mothers feed their children. Feeding her children is right up there at the top of a mother’s job description.
The main hall was packed when we arrived, not only with transient seekers and tourists, but also it seemed with the entire population of ashram residents, filling every space on the floor and vying nonviolently for precious spots on the stage directly in Amma’s force field, praying, chanting, meditating in anticipation of a rumored stunning revelation. After we removed our shoes as was required and set them on the rack outside the entrance, divested ourselves of all carryons, passed through the security gauntlet of metal detectors and X-ray scanners, you and Manika were each handed your token with a number indicating your place in the hugging queue. Despite the masses that had poured in that morning, the numbers you were given were not a long way off from the ones already flashing up on the board, like at a train station with its row of ticket booths, alerting you that your turn is coming up, you’re next, prepare yourself—know where you are going. From previous visits, I was aware that a stash of tokens was kept in reserve for visitors of status flagged for special treatment, media types and celebrities, politicians, major donor material, and also the chosen people with nothing obvious to recommend them, set apart for reasons known only to Amma herself in her divine maternal wisdom.
A volunteer named Shosh, a former attack-dog trainer in the Israel Defense Forces, a white shawl draped over her hair, ushered us to our seats in the front very near to the stage, removed the reserved signs stuck there, and with a blunt hand gesture, indicated to us to take our places. All of this was entirely in accord with the professionalism of the Amma operation as I had come to know it over the years. Holding a number of premium seats in reserve is always good policy in any people-moving performance-oriented enterprise; distance from the stage always needed to be factored in to optimize human traffic flow and keep the assembly line moving smoothly. We would not have a long wait. Our presence had been anticipated, we had not been forgotten even in this moment of intense spiritual excitement. Flexibility was built into Amma’s shop, to accommodate among other contingencies, sudden visits from persons of interest, among whom we felt ourselves privileged to be counted.
The stage directly in front of us was a great hive with the queen bee at its center surrounded by her attendants, monks and nuns, every cell filled with devotees sunk as in honey into a personalized form of sitting meditation practice, from catatonic obliviousness to heads thrown back rotating wildly, dreadlocks flying. The music blared nonstop filling the hall, pouring from the speakers, band after band replacing each other in shifts. It was a coveted honor to play for Amma during a sacred hugging session, and especially one such as this, so spiritually high.
The band on stage just then was an all-female group called Lakshmi and the Survivors, consisting of women and girls of all ages, some as young as five or six by my estimation, all costumed in crisp white linen. The leader, on clarinet or oboe (I could never tell the difference between those two but it was for sure a mouth instrument of some sort), was a clone or exact double or the twin sister of Monica Lewinsky, if not the great Monica herself. But it was only when my eyes took in the star singer, a senior citizen in her late sixties, that I realized who had gotten the best room at the ashram hotel, the one denied to us. It was Charlotte Harlow, my repeat client. I was the one who had introduced Charlotte to Amma during her first tour with me. She had subsequently become an ardent Amma supporter and devotee, taking the spiritual name Lakshmi, for the goddess of prosperity—money.
I recalled now that I had heard that Amma had tasked Charlotte with the care of rescued girls, abused through the sex trade, the ones who, based on the wisdom of the guru, would not thrive in her shelters in India, but would benefit most from being sent out of the country to live in Charlotte’s mansion on Foxhall Road in Washington, DC, under the care of professional PTSD therapists, be educated in one of the two most prestigious local girls’ schools of which Charlotte served on the board, either National Cathedral or Holton-Arms, and be given the full entitlement of private instruction, from tae kwan do to music training at the famous Levine conservatory, which Charlotte also endowed. The fruit of these music lessons was now on display in the band right before us—violins, flutes, and also voice training to provide the backup for Lakshmi/Charlotte clutching the microphone, singing in her aged, tobacco-ruined, upper-crust New Orleans–accented voice, “The House of the Rising Sun,” the Joan Baez version. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, and me, oh Lord, I’m one,” she crooned huskily over and over again like a mantra. This was the only number performed by Lakshmi and the Survivors but nobody seemed to mind. It was after all just soundtrack, and it was in the nature of soundtracks to repeat themselves. It was background music—the kind of music that is played over and over again while you are kept on hold to reassure you that you are still in the queue, you have not been forgotten.
We were on hold as the main show unfolded in the foreground. That was where the star attraction, Amma herself, sat on her low mother-soft settee-like pouf throne, all eyes upon her. The packed line of hug seekers inched along slowly and steadily toward her, flanked by seasoned crowd-control enforcers. As they approached the godhead, each supplicant was relieved of eyeglasses and any other facial obstructions or hazards, including nose, lip, eyebrow, and other rings in unexpected places that might rub against Mother’s ethereal personal surface area. Faces and other exposed body parts were sanitized with a baby wipe. The entire prepped package was then collapsed down to its knees at Amma’s feet, in readiness for the gen
tle tilt into her bountiful chest to receive a public hug of extraordinary intimacy lasting twenty seconds on average but sometimes as long as two minutes at Amma’s divine discretion. She signaled its conclusion by offering from her own hands a prasad that had been passed to her by a devotee performing one of the most desirable forms of seva—handing Amma the prasad for the freshly hugged, a gift of candy in a packet of sacred ash. Clutching this precious prasad, the drained human specimen from whom so much emotional and spiritual pus had just been squeezed out, was lifted up by the armpits, cut off from the maternal source as if reborn, removed and replaced by the next in line.
I could see all this unfold very clearly from where I was sitting alongside you and Manika, but the entire ritual, enacted over and over again, was also projected on a giant screen at the back of the stage, frame after frame visible to the ends of the hall of Amma’s mighty embrace, Amma rubbing a back, stroking a cheek, looking deeply into eyes and getting it, understanding exactly what was needed—planting a kiss, smiling, laughing, tickling, cooing baby talk, Amamama, loving unconditionally, comforting the suffering souls buried in her cushiony breast aching for the mother that is every human being’s inalienable right, handing to each of her children a piece of candy as the immortal rabbi of Chabad had once not quite handed to me a crisp new dollar bill but rather set it down on the table for me to pick up when I was a teenager and my mother had arranged an audience for me at his main headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York, in the hope that his blessing would straighten me out; I was such a difficult kid, Ma said, headed for no good. For me the institutional choice between a gift of sweets or cash spoke spiritual volumes, which went a long way, I felt, to explaining why I left Brooklyn for Bombay. Where was there another guru like Amma who gave of herself so personally in this way, who allowed herself to be felt up in public by her needy, deprived children? The rabbi of Chabad would not even touch me, he would not touch a strange unrelated female of any age, he would not even hold one end of the dollar bill for me to grasp the other end, but dropped it on the table between us instead like a bone dropped for a dog. And now here I was observing Amma’s full body hugs in large-scale format stretched out across the screen, Amma’s children whispering their most private secrets into her ear, weeping, sobbing, fainting, falling into a trance in her arms so that they had to be peeled off by a volunteer like a limp rag to keep the show rolling.