Cartwheels in a Sari (13 page)

“Pallavi, divine,” Guru said, scanning for her from his throne on stage. Pallavi stood up at the far back of the meditation hall, the area designated for disciples who had not yet earned from Guru an assigned seat on the floor. When Guru located her, he invited her forward. Just as she was about to step onto the raised platform of the Guru-blue-carpeted stage, Guru stopped her.

“Good girl, you stay with Oditi, no?”

“Yes, Guru,” Pallavi answered, pausing right beside me.

“Then you get a promotion. You come sit beside Oditi.” Guru smiled.

I heard Oditi, a lanky Englishwoman who always festooned herself in gold and silver saris complete with matching pumps and handbags, clap with glee and giggle with delight at hearing Guru announce her name.

Pallavi bowed her head in gratitude at her seat upgrade.

“Your flute? Divine, bring your flute,” Guru said to Pallavi.

Pallavi looked at her empty hands, turned, and sprinted to the back. At this Guru shook his legs and smiled, and the entire hall shared a moment of amusement. Guru's intoxicating presence made it so easy to slip into his playful world and forget about everything else.

I turned to watch Pallavi's return up the aisle. Her sari was all white, and she wore a white turtleneck underneath it. Her round face was pale. Her straight blond hair reminded me of the corn broom my mother used to sweep the floor.

Guru told her to play two songs on her flute. While she played, her cheeks turned bright pink. By her last squeaky note, she seemed to be gasping for breath. Guru clapped with both hands held above his head. Following Guru's lead, everyone joined in a hearty ovation.

“She's such a sweet girl, and that was so soulful,” my mother said as she genuinely applauded.

“No, it wasn't,” I said, politely tapping my palms together, eager to show my mother, Guru, Pallavi, and everyone else in the hall what soulful really was. I wondered if Guru would ask me to either sing or recite a poem. I was equally prepared for both.

“Bah! I'm very, very proud of you, Pallavi. Very, very pleased with you. You come.” Guru reached down beside his throne and pulled out a thick Banaras red silk sari with an
ornate gold filigree border and a matching blouse. The fabric gleamed from the stage, and the women murmured in admiration. Asutosh, the official photographer, was already up on stage to capture the moment when Guru handed it to Pallavi.

As Guru gave her the sari, he whispered to her for a minute, and her head nodded. When she turned to the audience, she had the sari cradled in both arms with the flute beneath it.

I offered up a smile to her, but she seemed to be in a far-off land, nearly floating off the stage to land in her new seat. By the end of the meditation, I was still waiting for my turn to ascend the stage and display my soulful skills, but it never came.

Often in lectures, Guru told us that all of his disciples were dispensable, that no one was indispensable. He warned us that even if all of his current disciples left him, he would replace us with an army of new seekers, more devoted, more dedicated. These talks always made my stomach knot. The idea that I could be swapped with someone was incredibly threatening, keeping me always looking over my shoulder to see if someone was getting just a little too close for comfort.

That night when I arrived at Guru's house where only the specially invited disciples gathered for extra blessings, Pallavi was already there, sitting beside Gitali with the sari draped across her lap.

I went into the basement to find Ketan. I needed answers as to what exactly was going on. Ketan, always a control tower for any gossip floating across the Center airwaves, was my source for all news. At seventeen, the day after graduating
from high school, when he permanently moved to Queens to share an apartment with six key members of Guru's personal bodyguards, our relationship changed. He didn't have time for me now. He was far too important. He was a full-timer, and I was just a commuter herding back and forth to Queens each night with our lame parents. Nowadays, in order to get gossip updates, I had to corner him at meditations. Knowing which disciples were on spiritual probation from reports about undivine crimes such as singing without folding their hands or conversing with a member of the opposite sex gave Ketan a distinct and powerful advantage, and he relished it.

When I asked Ketan why Pallavi was suddenly in New York without her parents, Ketan shrugged his shoulders, but he couldn't keep his lips from arching into a smirk. Just like years ago when I wanted Ketan to give me something, he always had a price, whether it was the handover of a beloved stuftie or the act of making me tie his sneakers into double knots. Tonight, he faked a cough and remarked how utterly thirsty he was. When I promised I'd treat him later to a coffee—the only beverage he now drank—he let loose. According to Ketan, Pallavi had discovered her father had been criticizing Guru's public displays of weight lifting, claiming they were undignified. Pallavi's father felt the weight lifting presented an undignified public image for the Avignon Meditation Center, which he promoted as a sanctuary to study ancient Vedic philosophical traditions. As a result of Pallavi's report to Guru, both her parents were stripped of their status as Center Leaders and temporarily kicked out of the Center. She was then flown to New York as a reward.

Ketan noticed that the collar on his white button-down
shirt had flopped down, and he flipped it up so its pointed tips extended like antennae.

“Wouldn't it be great to catch Mom or Dad doing something bad?” he said. “You live with them,” he remarked, as if to rub it in. “Have you spotted anything fishy? Any rule breaking?” His white-blond lashes blinked quickly over his blue eyes.

“You're stupid,” I said. “It's Mom and Dad. They don't break any rules. They're just annoying,” I said.

But Ketan was right. If Pallavi's meteoric rise resulted from reporting on her father, I hoped I, too, could find out something about my parents to report. I instantly rewound the last few days to see if anything out of the ordinary had occurred, but I couldn't think of anything. My parents were hardly my main focus. I had my own concerns.

“Ready to be jealous?” Ketan asked. “Guru just made me an official guard. Eat your heart out,” he said, and turned to leave before I could respond. “Hey, don't forget to watch Mom and Dad. And if you find anything, tell me right away. I'm a guard. I'll do the reporting,” he said, walking upstairs.

AS A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD,
what was clear to me was that reporting on my parents was not only the spiritually correct thing to do but also held the promise of immediate payback in the form of attention from Guru. Ever since Guru's scolding over the Colin McLevy fiasco, I understood that my position as Guru's number one was no longer guaranteed, and I sought ways to please Guru and steal his pride and approval. If it meant turning in my parents, so be it.

At the time that I pondered my parents’ imagined reportable
crimes, unknown to me until twenty years later, my mother drove three towns away to avoid bumping into any Connecticut disciples as she nervously bought a pregnancy test. It had been years since she had been pregnant with me, and the signs and symptoms she had experienced then seemed to have occurred to an entirely different person—but she needed to be sure. She was two months late, and the simplistic plus or minus sign was now only seconds away. The distance from the bathroom floor where she sat to the sink where the results awaited seemed an impossible journey.

When I got home from school, I found my mother pacing the kitchen, opening cupboards to stare inside as if looking for something, then quickly closing them. When she reached one end of the kitchen, she crossed over to the other side and worked her way through the cupboards above and below the sink. By her third lap, I looked up with an exaggerated display of irritation. I was attempting to compose my list of “expressions”for Guru. She seemed oblivious to the utter importance of my labors, even though I'd made it very obvious by setting up my office in the kitchen with notecards, pencils, highlighters, and books straddled open with paper clips across the kitchen table.

“Would you cut it out?” I shouted, then crunched my teeth into a perfectly sharpened number two pencil.

Just last Wednesday, when Sajani announced to me that I was officially accepted as part of the select group who submitted “expressions” to Guru, I took this as a significant step toward reaffirming Guru's confidence in me. Under Sajani's management, each week a core group was blessed with the unique opportunity to aid Guru in his hyperprolific outpouring of poetry by submitting phrases and images that
would inspire his verse. After completing his
Ten Thousand Flower-Flames,
a series of aphorisms totaling ten thousand, Guru didn't waste any time. How to top ten thousand? Twenty-seven-thousand, of course. In accordance with his philosophy of self-transcendence, which I translated as “more is better,” Guru quickly launched his next project,
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants.
In order to generate this high volume of poetic output, Guru bestowed upon a chosen few the blessing of aiding him. Often at meditations, even during singing, I'd see disciples hunched over books on topics from self-help to seventeenth-century French literature, scanning for metaphors or lines to lift up and off the page to be divinely transformed by Guru. The few disciples selected for this task were the same ones who edited the final manuscripts before they were sent to Guru's own printing press for publication. Though Guru openly disapproved of intellectuals and academic pursuits, this group was as close to a sanctioned band of academic elite as there was in the Center, and I had wanted entry in the worst way. Now that I was inside Guru's poetic team, I needed to prove myself by compiling expressions that would not only generate aspiration-plant poems but would give Guru another concrete reason to retain his love for me. The very next day, I cut all classes and remained in the school library scouring the shelves for books that were ripe for metaphor plucking.

All I needed was a sanctuary where the urgency of my work would not be disturbed.

My mother opened the refrigerator door and leaned inside. It buzzed.

“God! Can't you see the importance of what I'm doing here! Guru's waiting right now for my expressions. I'm on
deadline,” I yelled to her half-disappeared form. “So get out. NOW.” I flipped a page as forcefully as possible.

Slowly, she stepped back from the refrigerator door and stared at me. For a few seconds she held her pose, then parted her lips ever so slightly as if she were about to whisper a secret.

“What's with you?” I huffed.

There was nothing to say; there was nothing she could say—frank discussions were not permitted in the Center or in our family. We plodded along separately, isolated by our devotion to Guru. Doubts, fears, and shortcomings were to be reported directly to Guru for immediate disciplinary action.

As if suddenly woken up, my mother looked at me, closed her lips, and left the room.

“What's Mom's problem?” I asked my father later when he crossed through the kitchen.

“Isn't she home?” My father, as usual, answered a question with a tangentially related question.

“Sort of,” I said, rolling my eyes, while dragging a fat yellow highlighter across my two latest proud and glorious expressions:
glittering wings of gleeful glee
and
sipping slowly from serenity's saucer.

My mother went into her room and closed the door. She had to write to Guru. Years ago, when the unexpected surprise of my entry into the family occurred, she and my father, newlyweds politely adjusting to life in a relationship neither one had sought or desired, together had informed Guru in our living room. Though Guru had expressed initial frustration because he had already enacted a policy of no sex and no kids, they had talked it through with Guru late into the night in a way that suggested that, as their personal guru, he was
the compassionate father who, no matter what the children did wrong, in the end could not help but lovingly and patiently accept and aid them. The result was, of course, me. And so, as my mother wrote to Guru that another baby was on its way, part of her dared to imagine that again, Guru would transform her error into his own miracle.

Unlike the last time, my mother did not mention the pregnancy to my father. She felt that even if he knew, he would not have cared. Although he may have had to answer to Guru about breaking the celibacy rule, with all of his legal work for Guru and the Center, my father had stored up vast amounts of spiritual credit, and often Guru decided the punishment for major and minor offenses based on a disciple's service, power, and influence. It seemed the more active a close disciple was in serving Guru, the more leeway was given when Guru's rules were broken. Of course, Guru had the final say as to whether the disciple's error would be overlooked or not, which always gave Guru the final upper hand. Still, my mother believed this matter, or any matter concerning her, was out of my father's realm of concern. My father knew shortly after their “divine marriage” ceremony was that they had nothing in common besides Guru, and he had settled into an irrevocable and unhappily accepted state of cohabitation. While my mother clutched on to motherhood as a way of fulfilling the gap of not having a real marriage, for my father, if the matter at hand didn't have to do with real estate development, tennis, or Guru, he wasn't interested. Besides, like everything else with our family, my father knew Guru made all the decisions and had the final word. Period.

“Let's go!” I banged on her door. It was already six-thirty,
and if we were to make it to Queens by Guru's new strict cutoff door policy of seven-thirty, we had to leave now or face being turned away by the guards who smugly blocked all late entry.

A plain white envelope clutched in my mother's hand, we barreled off to Queens to meet our Master—all four of us, in my secretly expanding family. Since Guru's mission continued to boom, we had permanently outgrown the Bayside church. The new headquarters was a large second-floor rental space above a tire store and auto-repair shop on the corner of Hillside Avenue, a main thoroughfare crowded with used-car dealerships and fast-food restaurants near the Van Wyck Expressway. “Progress-Promise,” as Guru named it, housed our functions. With a large area up front for seating on the cold linoleum floor, and homemade benches that increased in height toward the back, the venue held a few hundred disciples. Guru had a private entrance with a staircase leading into his own chambers.