Cartwheels in a Sari (17 page)

I observed the disciples who worked at the other “divine-enterprises,” Guru's name for disciple-owned small businesses whose profits supported Guru. Because the owners of the stores were off doing other tasks for Guru, their employees ended up working from opening to closing and missing out on events, including Guru's many trips. Even when they had a rare day off, they were limited in their activities because
as workers in divine-enterprises, they were paid only a few dollars a week, yet they were grateful. Without health care or a retirement fund, they happily worked in the stores, feeling fortunate to be sheltered in Guru's atmosphere rather than the outside world.

As far as the option of working directly at Guru's house, besides Prema and Isha, Apala and her handicapped brother, Mihir, were the only other full-timers. Over the years, as the menageries of the Madal Zoo had been dying out, Apala still cared for the tough surviving zoo inmates, while Mihir sat on the front porch in his wheelchair, dressed in
sanyassi
robes while sneakily listening to Howard Stern through his headphones. I didn't see any position open for me, and I was relieved.

When I had hinted to my parents that I was concerned about my future, they seemed aloof. My father told me I should start doing strength training, and my mother suggested that we make lunch.

“Jayanti, good girl.” Guru sat in his kitchen on a white chair, his legs resting on a stool. A large plate of chickpea curry and a tall glass of red energy drink rested before him.

“You sit.” Guru motioned to an empty chair beside his feet.

I had never been seated on a par with Guru in his own house. I was always on the floor while he was in a throne, chair, or couch.

“Your letter was most soulful,” Guru said, spooning a heaping portion of chickpeas into his mouth.

I waited while Guru chewed.

“Your outer schooling is finished, finished. But your inner schooling is to continue, always continue. That is the real school. The only school. You are so obedient to me. Others
have gone on to college and, oi, their inner lives destroyed. Such poison. Such mental poison.”

I nodded, agreeing with Guru, agreeing how bad others were for going to college. I loved it when he confided to me his displeasure at the disciples. The more he complained about their undivine behavior, the more secure I felt. I sat up straighter, feeling suddenly confident with my position.

“I have meditated on your soul, good girl.” Guru gathered up another mouthful of food and chewed with his mouth open.

I waited, paused for my set of directions, my life's instructions, as Guru munched. Then he drank. And ate some more. He spilled, a curry stain splattered onto his white tennis shirt, but he remained oblivious.

“To please the Supreme, the absolute Beloved and your own soul, you will work at the United Nations. So many of my disciples, like Gitali and Hemal, work there in order to serve me.”

Guru's phone rang. Suddenly our heart-to-heart, the conference about my life's direction, was over. Guru was on to other tasks.

As Guru reached for the phone, he added that he had already instructed Hamsa to work on getting me into the UN. Then he lifted his hand to dismiss me and took his call.

When Hamsa tapped me on the shoulder that night at the function, handing me a manila folder with United Nations application forms, I wondered how much longer Hamsa had known about my future than I had. Having toiled her way up through the ranks of the UN, Hamsa now worked as a professional in human resources, which made her even more useful to Guru as he instructed flocks of disciples to become full-time UN employees.

“So how fast do you type? How fluent are you in dictation?” Hamsa asked, fixing the plastic comb straining to hold back her frizzy gray hair from overtaking her face.

When I explained that I couldn't do either, without dropping her smile Hamsa said the first step would be typing school.

Sitting at a cubicle with large padded headphones, typing letter patterns at a dated second-floor secretarial boot camp above a tuxedo rental shop, I removed my fingers from the typewriter's keys long enough to question my soul. This was what my soul had wanted? I looked around at the other typists furiously pecking at the keys. How did typing and filing become necessary qualities for spiritual seekers? Surely sages in India didn't have to go through all of this. Guru must have gotten something wrong, I decided, and I hoped he'd quickly realize his obvious error.

I failed my first typing test at the United Nations. Shuffled into a room with sixty desks, each with its own typewriter, the proctor of the general service test, a Malaysian woman with a microphone held too close to her lips, causing chaotic feedback, informed us speed and accuracy were what mattered. The hot room filled with nervous typers lacked oxygen. I stared at the keyboard to remind myself where my fingers needed to be. As soon as she yelled “Start!” and the microphone crackled, we were off. The clanking of the keys sounded like a horse race. Other typers were galloping, and their speed made me feel like I had to catch up. My fingers were flying off the keyboard and landing randomly on any key. I was trying to hang on, not lose total control of the reins, but it was too late. When the race was over I had done thirty-eight
words per minute with twenty-two errors. All bets were off. I had lost.

Guru was sympathetic when I reported back my results, and he cheered me on to practice and try again. Weeks later, after I failed my second test with even worse results, Guru consulted Hamsa about a backup plan. In addition to the various UN departments located around the Secretariat Building, each member country of the UN had its own base of operations nearby. The United States Mission to the United Nations, directly across the street from the Secretariat Building, was where Kumud, a disciple for more than twenty years, worked. A tall southern woman, Kumud had told Hamsa about an opening for a secretary in her own department at the U.S. Mission. Being an official part of the State Department, the job didn't require passing any of the UN's general service tests. Instead it meant having a thorough background check by the FBI and obtaining a high-level security clearance.

When the FBI agent came to my house to interview me and my parents, I was sure I would never get the job. My background consisted of one thing: Guru. Allowing high-level security clearance to someone whose church leader publicly declared he had been a lion in his animal incarnation, and during his many human incarnations had been the Emperor Akbar and Thomas Jefferson, among others, seemed like a long shot. My references, all disciples, would be proof that I wasn't the optimal, stable candidate for high-level security clearance. But I was wrong. Perhaps the State Department was more open-minded than I thought, or their background investigations left a lot to be desired, but I was offered an entry-level position with high-level security clearance in the
same division as Kumud. Kumud was the executive secretary, working directly for the head attaché. Her solid work ethic had gained her the respect of her colleagues, and they tried to overlook the other element that she brought with her to work every day—a mission to manifest Guru. Dressed in a sari, Kumud's desk was a homage to Guru, and twice a week when Guru visited the UN to give his peace meditations, Kumud dutifully traversed the office inviting the ranks from the ambassadors down to custodians to join her. They always declined, prepared with a variety pack of polite excuses.

Being brand-new and stationed on Kumud's floor, she hovered about me constantly. When the other secretaries, Maria and Lucy, in confidence, asked me how I knew Kumud, I casually explained that she was an old family friend. I was advised by Hamsa to keep my connection to Guru quiet. News had surfaced that an anti-Guru campaign was brewing at the UN, and a concerted effort was in place by the executive administrators not to hire any more of Guru's disciples. Guru decided that to ensure disciples were still hired, they would have to go in “undercover,” dressed in “Western clothes” and even having to revive their original “prespiri-tual” names.

On my second day of work, Maria and Lucy entered my closet-sized office to gossip about every State Department officer who worked on the floor. They had just started to describe the new junior press officer, Todd, whom they thought would be a perfect match for me, when Kumud came into the room.

“It's twelve-fifteen,” Kumud said. “We don't want to be late for the
meeting.”

The secretaries eyed each other and skirted out the door.

Kumud could hardly wait to bring me to my first UN peace meditation as an official employee. Since having found the Chosen One a job, Kumud was suddenly on Guru's inside track, a place she had never been.

Guru's United Nations peace meditations were held inside an ordinary conference room. Though mostly filled with disciples, both those openly “out” and those still “in the closet,” scattered through the room were a few nondisciples, colleagues brought to the event by their eager disciple cowork-ers. Guru entered the room late, stood up at the front, and meditated. He recited a few aphorisms on peace, and then asked for the prasad. To each attendant he handed a small chocolate wrapped elegantly in silver and blue foil with the UN crest embossed. When it was my turn, he smiled and held the chocolate lovingly in his hands for what seemed like minutes, before he blessed me. I knew then that Guru was pleased. I was where he wanted me to be.

One week later, when my first paycheck arrived, I signed the entire check directly over to Guru. It was the least I could do. Other disciples gave half, if not all, of their salary to Guru in regular donations he called “love offerings.” Now that I finally had my own money, I, too, wanted to give Guru everything, just like he had given me.

After a few months, even though I knew Guru was proud of the routine he had orchestrated for me, the novelty of the outside working world quickly wore off, and I wondered if a post at Guru's house would have been better; at least it might have offered some variation to a nine-to-five routine. I was restless alphabetizing and filing documents. Stuffing envelopes and answering phones felt monotonous and disappointing. Nothing about the Center had prepared me for the
slow-but-steady work ethic and compliance required for a low-level career in the State Department's bureaucracy. Guru advocated spontaneity, out-of-bounds thinking, and even rule-breaking, as ways to achieve rapid results, and since Guru rarely played by the rules, I didn't want to either.

One Thursday morning, I passed the security checkpoint and chatted hello. When I stepped onto the elevator to my floor, I nearly crashed into a man wearing jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt. He was reading a tattered paperback copy of Nabokov's
Lolita
that covered his face.

“You're new here,” he confirmed, lowering his book and squinting at me. “I set up your office.”

“You work here?” I asked, scanning his rumpled outfit.

“They keep us locked in the basement and call for us when they need the dirty work done. It's called ‘Office Services,’ “ he said with a smirk. “You wouldn't have noticed us. We're the local untouchables.”

I scrambled for a comeback.

“And so part of your job is reading while riding the elevator?” I asked.

“It's a great story. You should read it,” he said as the doors snapped shut.

When I discovered later that afternoon that my desk chair just wouldn't adjust to the proper height I needed, I eagerly called up “Office Services” to ask for a replacement. Ben, a grumpy older man, huffed that he would send someone to fix it. I waited, making sure not to leave my office. Sure enough, Oscar, the elevator reader, made the call.

“I hear there is a chair issue,” he said, leaning against my doorway.

He was of slight build, and his black hair, too long to hold its current cut, drooped into his dark eyes. He rolled in my new chair and told me that my office needed some type of personal ornaments—pictures, postcards, and plants—that reveal a person's private side.

“What's your deal?” He blew the hair off his forehead and sat down. “Why are you here?”

I mumbled something about a lifelong interest in UN affairs.

Oscar didn't say anything, but his laugh let me know that he didn't buy a word. By the time he was paged to carry tables upstairs for a luncheon hosted by the ambassador's wife, I felt jolted awake realizing that work just might, after all, be exciting.

WHEN KUMUD INVITED
me to lunch with her, since Guru was out of town and wouldn't be at the UN for a meditation, I declined, not wanting to leave my desk in case Oscar dropped in en route from removing an old filing cabinet or changing a fluorescent lightbulb. I sat fiddling with paper clips, staring out the window.

“Busy day?”

I hadn't seen Oscar approach. He carried a clipboard with work orders and a pencil rested behind one ear. I flung my paper clip chain into a drawer and flipped my hair over my shoulder.

“If you need a box of jumbo paper clips to work with next, I can arrange a delivery,” Oscar whispered, as though he were a special agent.

The phone rang, and I wrote a message. Oscar stood waiting, amused, as I filled out the official message log, pressing hard into the four sections of colored carbon paper.

“I see why they pay you the big bucks,” Oscar said, when I hung up.

Before he left, he asked me to hang out that night.

Later, I worked up a raspy, cloggy throat voice, then called Apala, the head of the singing group that Guru had assigned me to join, to let her know I wouldn't be able to make practice since I felt too ill. When she wished me a speedy recovery and even offered to drop off some soup, instead of feeling guilty for lying, I congratulated myself for being such a good actress. The lie came easily, and I thought that as long as I did it well, I could outwit everyone.

Since many disciples worked in the United Nations complex, it was common to bump into sari-clad devotees while waiting in line at delis or crossing the street. To be safe, I told Oscar I'd meet him by the subway, which was a few blocks away. While I scanned the crowds merging down the stairs into the subway station, Chandika, my father's sister, a disciple who worked at UNICEF, collided with me. She wore a bright pink sari and had large headphones over her ears, as she practiced out loud one of the hundred Bengali songs that her singing group had to perform. Without taking off her headphones, she yelled for me to join her, so we could rehearse on the ride home. She had moved into the first floor of our house. Loud and known for her drastic mood swings, Chandika reveled in being bombastic and quirky. After Guru told her that she had been a duck in her animal incarnation, she started collecting ducks, and her apartment was a shrine to the aquatic bird. I spotted Oscar in the distance, at the top
of the stairs, searching for me. With my best dramatic performance, I suddenly clutched my purse, panicking that I had forgotten my keys at work and needed to rush back to the office.