Authors: John Updike
“Partly” because our extensive records have been left in some confusion by the sudden retirement of our former chief accountant, Ms. Nitya Kalpana; it has fallen to me, though bereft of any formal training in business mathematics or double-entry bookkeeping (in fact, I skipped math beyond plane geometry, being rather foolishly infatuated at Concord Academy with the French teacher, whose third-year class met at the same hour as trig and introductory calculus), to straighten matters out. If you have on file any previous tax returns filed for Ashram Arhat I would be grateful for them, to use as a guide. Rest assured of one thing, however, gentlemen of the IRS: religious or educational, tax-exempt or not, our organization owes you absolutely nothing for fiscal 1985, because we have been running at a terrific loss.
Voluntary contributions, our main source of income, have dropped catastrophically, due principally to basically uncomprehending reporting in the Arizona press, beginning with the Forrest
Weekly Sentinel
and spreading to the media nationwide, but also perhaps due to the ripples or eddies (vrittis) that occur within the cosmic spiritual currents. The fees paid for lodging and instruction by our sannyasins (permanent students) and by enlistments in our many short-term (two- to eight-week) courses or therapeutic programs are significantly lower, as are receipts from sales of books, posters, fabric and ceramic products, and agricultural produce. Meanwhile, the
expenses of maintaining and expanding our ashram facilities to a level commensurate with our exalted aims have increased formidably. Our best estimate is that between two and three million dollars has drifted away within the present fiscal year.
Not, of course, that we expect the Reagan government to make up our losses. But we don’t expect to be dunned for money we don’t owe, either. During my attempt to fill out your forms, a number of questions arose; let me mention only the most nagging:
In Form 990, Part VII, yes-or-no Question 79 asks, “Was there a liquidation, dissolution, termination, or substantial contraction during the year (see instructions)?” As I say, there seems to have been a contraction, but how substantial relative to previous years I have no way of knowing with the incomplete information at hand. My sense is of a material contraction of some duration, amid a deceptive explosive spiritual growth. The instructions I am parenthetically instructed to “see” do not seem to be attached or included, or else I have not grasped what instructions (in your sense) are.
Re Schedule A of Form 990, Part II, “Compensation of Five Highest Persons for Professional Services (See specific instructions)”: Does spiritual guidance delivered in platform lectures and darshans (informal teaching sessions, with questions and answers) and in the even less tangible form of physical proximity and meaningful silence and
abstention from
public appearance constitute a “professional service,” and does compensation include limousines and bejewelled timepieces as well as cash? Again,
what
instructions?
Page 2029-8 of Form 1024 lists four columns of numbered types of Exempt Organizations and invites us to “select up to three codes which best describe or most accurately identify your purposes, activities, etc.” Number 030—“School,
college, trade school, etc.”—of course is one. And even though we are not 001 (“church, synagogue, etc.”), number 008—“Religious publishing activities”—is rather tempting, since our books are indeed—in the broad sense specified above—religious. But number 260 (“Fraternal beneficiary society, order, or association”) also appeals to a number of us here, since fraternity (which I assume includes sorority) is our goal, not only for ourselves but for all mankind. Along the same lines, under “Advocacy,” numbers 520 (“Pacifism and peace”) and 529 (“Ecology or conservation”) seem very much to the point, while others in the same “Advocacy” category, such as 522 (“Anti-communism”) and 539 (“Prohibition of erotica”), do not. But no doubt just two or three code numbers are all you need, and I am being, as a novice tax accountant, much too conscientious.
Yours sincerely,
Ma Prem Kundalini
Temporary Accountant,
Ashram Arhat
August 24
Dearest Pearl—
I’m sorry to have been so slow to answer your letter. The truth is, darling, it hurt your mother’s feelings a
teeny
bit. Of course I’m delighted that you and Jan had such a lovely summer in Europe—it was brutally hot here, and people, even the ones that didn’t get heat stroke, began to act very testy—not Vikshipta, the vile-tempered German I mentioned before—he actually left in July and I’ve heard is trying to get a counselling job in Seattle or Portland or some other
cool misty place, but my guess is he’ll be back; there’s even less of what he wants out there than in here—but the women I work with. The sannyasins call us the “godmothers,” not entirely kindly I think. Perhaps women together all day and night are too much of a good thing—that female
attentiveness
begins to work on the nerves, one begins almost to long for a man, who doesn’t notice
any
thing—your own father certainly didn’t have that among his faults, that tireless nervous susceptibility—I mean bursting into tears or storms of rage over each imagined slight or deviation from utter devotion. In the nature of my expanded duties here I’ve been spending more time with the Arhat himself, and one woman, called Durga, who still claims to be his chief executive assistant—though she does nothing these days but agitate and storm and sulk and consort with the security forces, young men full of guns—is jealous of me, and another, Alinga, my dear housemate, is jealous of
him
, our adored Master. I used to think women were so prone to jealousy because the patriarchal society denied them any power except that which they could extract from interpersonal relationships, but now I wonder if it isn’t more biological than that—the women here have power enough: the Arhat in his total goodness and rather playful fatalism grants them
all
of it, really—and relates, at a wild guess, to the vigilance female mammals have to have in regard to their young when they’re helpless, which continues even when no children are on the scene, except the infant we forever carry inside us, waiting to suck and be fondled. There are, as I know I already wrote somebody, a few children here, brought by single mothers or mated couples and even one or two born in the clinic since I’ve come, but by and large children are one area where the Arhat
isn’t
totally accepting and benign. He calls them “human tadpoles” and speaks of
the overpopulation in India and parts of Africa and the starvation as a horror worse than Hitler’s extermination camps because nobody’s able to invade and stop it, and indeed the Western nations’ efforts, shipping in food and inventing new kinds of wheat and rice, just postpone the problem and make it eventually worse—I think his own experiences when very young whatever they were were so horrendous that just the sight of a child is painful to him. The ashram keeps a little school up through sixth grade but older than that the children are bussed to the Dorado Regional High School forty miles away and come back as you can imagine with a great many conflicted and angry feelings from their contact with the children of the “Outer States.” They are encouraged to drop out as soon as they legally can, at sixteen, which is in a way sad, since their parents here tend to be if anything
over
educated.
All this as a prelude to speaking honestly with my own child, my lovely little priceless Pearl. I am glad as well as surprised that you found Jan’s parents so delightful—their house in Amsterdam dating back to 1580 and on a lovely quiet canal, their country estate with its working windmill and squawking peacocks, their apartment in Paris, their twenty-meter yacht kept at a Turkish harbor, their fluent English, French, German, and Italian. I still don’t understand why Jan’s father is entitled to call himself a count if they come from this long line of innkeepers and beermakers, but I’m glad you found the brewery itself so thrilling—though
of course
everything is
clean
, dearest, otherwise their precious beer would taste of lint and cobwebs and cockroach feces. The whole dreary process has to do with bacteria—a rather hideous microscopic kind of farming. Frankly I have always found the idea of fermentation rather disgusting, and even in college when it was the thing to drink and I had no figure worries I hated that sour
bitter burpy taste of beer. It has been really not the least of my blessings these last months to get away from your father’s martinis and all those suburban cocktail parties and to be in an environment where the human vessel and its conduits are as much respected as those giant glass vats and shiny copper tubing you were so impressed by are. Think of where the beer goes then—into the ulcerated guts of drunken loud barflies and then vomited out into bathroom bowls and onto the sidewalks.
Most of your life stretches gloriously before you and of course part of it must be exposing your sweet and unspoiled self to all sorts of people, including these van Hertzogs, vulgar and yeasty as they sound. And it is no doubt beneficial to add new words like “flocculence” and “wort” to your vocabulary. But I am, frankly, offended at your report of their excessive curiosity as to my present situation and, more hurtful still, your own embarrassment in regard to it. Whatever can be embarrassing? Your mother is seeking truth, beauty, and freedom, and
finding
it—what is there to be ashamed of? Be ashamed, rather, of her previous twenty-two years of respectable bondage and socially sanctioned frivolity. Who are
they
, these brewers, living as they do off of human drunkenness and forced bacterial labor, to turn up their noses at a “cult” which is striving to offer the world a new model of human arrangements? With their alcohol they are anesthetizing sick Mankind; we are attempting a cure. These vain and vapid van Hertzogs’ opinion concerns me less than that of a pair of their pet microbes—what saddens me beyond description is that my own daughter, the female child of my female womb, loved as much as any mother ever loved a daughter, appears to share the doubts of these square-headed Dutch folk. You ask me if I intend to stay at the ashram “till Kingdom Come,”
if I haven’t already “got out of it” all I am going to “get.” You speak of my renewal here as an “ego trip” when in fact the
flight from ego
is what I have undertaken, and you write the jeering words “group grope” when in truth the grope is all behind me, in that pathetic suburban squirming in the closets and backstairs of respectability. The relationships I enjoy in the ashram, those that wound as well as heal, all transpire in the bright sunlight of amaya, of non-deceit. I regret even so much as hinting at my friendships here, since you seem to discuss them promptly with Jan and thence they are relayed, in the language of prurient gossip, to your—I shudder to write it—possible in-laws.
Dear Pearl, I literally
did
shudder then, and had to steady myself by getting up from my bench beneath the dusty airy box elder in our little rock garden and walking out to the front of the A-frame to look toward the hills that shelter us from the north. Dawn light lies on their lavender tips like crinkled gold foil. I woke up in the dark this morning, writing this letter in my head. Alinga is still asleep. She and I had a long good talk last night, and like all you younger people she forgets to put herself to bed. What we talked about I would confide to you but don’t want it passed on to those nosy, judgmental van Hertzogs—I keep wanting to write “warthogs.”
You say Jan is “serious.” Serious is the one thing he impresses me as
not
, from all I have been able to discern between the lines of your cherished and pondered, though short and infrequent, letters. He is a floater, dear—a fleck of suds on his father’s malodorous fortune. A generation ago he would have been rioting and making plastic bombs and wearing filthy floppy rags; ten years ago he would have been doing the disco scene and jetting to Bali with all the other children of inflation. In these more straitened times he comes to Oxford
to study economics and just happens to make the acquaintance of an innocent golden American girl whom he of course wants to marry and not just incidentally thereby get himself his green card. They all love their green cards, these foreigners—Durga and Vikshipta have an incessant problem, and keep getting these badgering letters from the Immigration Service, and even our miraculous Arhat, who has brought so much wealth and profitable enterprise to the nation, became rather mysterious and irritable when I once asked him about his residency status.
But I mustn’t mention the Arhat, as that offends you. You write rather wistfully of your father’s visit this summer. You say he spoke fondly of me—as if that amazed you. You say he seemed in a forgiving mood—as if there was much to forgive. You write that he keeps our old home up, mostly by not living in most of the rooms, and has no conspicuous girlfriend—as if that will gladden my heart or shame me or do something to me. It does nothing. Nothing but make me feel a quite unnecessary estrangement
between you and me
. You write of him as of a lumbering fuzzy old bafflingly wounded teddy bear at the same time that he and this shyster Gilman he’s hired are bombarding me with the most preposterous legal documents, all meant simply to terrify a defenseless woman, who has for a lawyer that wimpy if formerly superficially attractive Ducky Bradford;
he
is so preoccupied with coming out of the closet as a middle-aged gay and humiliating poor Gloria and then discovering that life out of the closet is no picnic either that he can hardly lift a legal finger. (None of this came directly from him but from Midge, who on her last tape painted a pathetic picture of Ducky slowly realizing that the only market for an aging American man is with American women and that he should have announced himself when he was young and
slender or kept quiet forever—he’s Grecian Formula-ing his hair and wearing closer-cut suits, but it’s not nearly enough.)
You write of what a tender and attentive father yours was when the sad truth is he hardly bothered to kiss you goodnight most nights let alone read a bedtime story as you and he both seem to be fantasizing. Worse yet, even when you had a cold or mumps that time your face looked like a gourd, or that very odd fever up to 104.5° that had me so worried about possible permanent brain damage, your father the big Boston doctor couldn’t be bothered to doctor his own daughter but had me drag you over to the Beverly Hospital and sit there in the waiting room with the television turned up so loud and the air so thick with germs you refused to breathe and turned bright blue. Precious Pearl, make no mistake:
I
nursed you,
I
changed your diapers. I dried your tears. I sang you songs when you were nervous at night, on and on until my own eyes could hardly stay open. You sucked milk out of
my
breasts, took hold of life in
my
belly, not your father’s. All he did was clumsily contribute his sperm (I had no climax when you were conceived; I rarely did in those virtually virginal days) and show up at your graduations (and in fact, having written that, I just remember that he missed the one from Miss Grandison’s in the sixth grade—said he had a MSPCC board meeting—likely story!) and condescend to keep your picture on his desk (along with his boyish self in his Boston Latin baseball uniform and that one of me I always hated, in that foolish garden hat standing there tipsy and tense at one of the Hibbenses’ gauche lawn parties worrying that your father was going to lose the lens cap). Now of course that you’re a stunning woman and he’s a well-dressed man in his forties who hasn’t let himself go entirely to pot it’s all very cute for the two of you to trot out to the Queen’s Arms or the King’s
Joint or whatever the most expensive restaurant in Oxford is and split a carafe of an amusing dry Beaujolais and discuss in tiddly cozy fashion how far poor old Mother has wandered off the deep end: but
raising you was not an equal partnership
, and I
am
hurt, dearest Pearl, by what seems to me not so much your divided loyalty—that perhaps is to be expected and is healthy—but what can only strike me as
dis
loyalty. Be true to yourself, and you will be true to me. I did not raise my flaxen-haired darling to be her father’s cat’s-paw or for that matter some minor princess of malt.