Cartwheels in a Sari (21 page)

By inwardly doting on Oscar, I rationalized, I wasn't doing anything wrong. If Guru inquired as to whether I had contacted Oscar, I could honestly answer him that I had not. Even though I wanted to, I restrained myself, so I could, on some level, try to please Guru and do what he wanted. I was still obeying Guru, even by a thread. I wasn't technically breaking my promise to be faithful to the Supreme. After all, I kept telling myself that Guru was the only person who really mattered, that the rest was an illusion, a trap, and I wouldn't allow myself to be carried away again, but it wasn't easy.

Sitting in the sun in the main square writing postcards to my parents and Chahna, I composed postcards to Oscar, but as I dropped the others in the post box, I cast his into the garbage can. When I was alone in Lalita's third-floor apartment, I dialed Oscar's number numerous times but hung up before it connected. Still, I knew that these dangerous indulgences were not what Guru, my soul, or the Supreme expected from me. Being aware of my disobedience made me feel worse. Each time I scurried off to call Oscar seemed like I
was being twice as deceitful. Knowing it was wrong and yet deliberately pursuing it was a confirmation of my spiritual sickness. The last time I dialed his number, I looked at a framed photograph of Guru smiling with the sun illuminating the back of his head, creating an aura of white light. Guru's divinity, relaxed and utterly easy, felt like a slap. Again and again, I was not worthy to be the recipient of Guru's compassionate smile, his love. I disgusted myself. Seated before my shrine, I ripped up the one photo of Oscar that I had smuggled with me, and begged Guru for inner assistance.

Assistance came in the form of the Montpellier disciples, my new spiritual compatriots, who showed me a way to be quietly at peace. Long before I had arrived in their city, I was known to the group of twenty-five disciples from Center legends. I had not noticed any of them when they pilgrimaged to New York twice a year for celebrations to honor Guru's birthday and his anniversary of arriving in America. To me, the majority of the thousands of visitors who arrived in Queens from all over the world blended together simply to cause long lines, fewer seats, and general gridlock. Very few visiting disciples emerged from the masses to capture Guru's personal attention, and those who did were either well-connected, rich, or celebrities. With few exceptions, the rest of the international visitors came and went without notice.

Lalita was the only Montpellier disciple who stood out. Having joined the original Paris Center in the seventies as a young engineering student, her unflustered, fearless determination to spread Guru's message in every province of France had quickly earned her Guru's counsel. With much of her initial grunt work now passed on to the next generation of eager new disciples, her position was Guru's unofficial leader of
France. Attending Guru's concerts and trips abroad, she left her crew of workers to the arduous labor of running a restaurant. As in most divine-enterprises, disciples believed it was a privilege to work in a spiritual atmosphere and avoid the dreaded outside world. Their privilege most often included twelve-hour days, no benefits, and subminimum wages. At the restaurant, I was given the light and clean tasks, but I was still relieved when my few hours were over. In contrast, I noticed that the women disciples who labored for hours seemed joyful and content. Because Guru's laws prohibited men from working with women, the men who toiled the overnight shifts of dishwashing and cleaning did so happily. With Guru's music on an endless loop, and pictures of Guru plastered on all the walls, they worked without a hint of a complaint. Twice a week they met together for a one-hour meditation followed by a short singing session, and sometimes on the weekend they ran along the beach. Their lives seemed private and peacefully contemplative.

Though Lalita was always in the loop, up on what Guru said or did at the last function, the majority of disciples were removed from Guru as a personal adviser and didn't seem to mind. Most were drawn to Guru's extended philosophy of meditation and service. Guru himself was not what they chose. Having a personal relationship with him was not what they had expected or, I suspected, what they wanted. They had a deep reverence for Guru, but their lives did not revolve around needing Guru's daily affirmations. Their days and nights weren't composed of sitting at the tennis court wishing Guru would acknowledge them. They understood that Guru did not know them personally, but that did not seem to bother them. They attended weekly meditations and made
the biannual pilgrimage to New York, but the rest of the time was theirs to spend as they chose.

In this serene and independent climate, disciples didn't eye each other, waiting for acts of disobedience to call and report to Guru. I doubt anyone had reported another disciple. Beyond the handful of disciples in Guru's top clan, the rest labored hard and lived simple, quiet lives apart from the tension and intrigue of being first-class disciples. To me, this was a revelation. I had no idea that there were alternatives to the kind of discipleship that had been expected of me since birth. Had my parents known about these more-relaxed approaches to Guru's path? If they had, why wouldn't they have selected a calmer, more balanced life in which to raise Ketan and me? I realized that in all the blurry years of sleep-deprived nights, my parents never suggested we stay to enjoy the quiet pleasures of an evening at home. I wondered, if I had been allowed some independence, some freedoms and flexibility, would I have been a better disciple and a more balanced person?

After months in Montpellier, with Guru's full permission I drifted across the great capitals of Europe, visiting the various Centers. Though I always stayed with disciples, I didn't have any set schedule or timetable. If I wanted to work at a divine-enterprise I could, and if I wanted to head off to another city, I could do that as well. Armed with a Eurail pass, I was free to decide where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. Not having to be at the tennis court or a meditation, the pressures of Guru's tight grasp loosened and dropped. For the first time in my life, I was in charge.

The evenings I spent at various centers for meditations, but the majority of my days I spent alone idling through
ancient palaces transformed into museums, cinemas, piazzas, and monument gardens, acquiring a self-guided cultural education. Guru never endorsed visiting art museums or cultural centers. Even though I had traveled extensively on Guru's Christmas trips, Guru did not encourage us to absorb the local culture and rarely wanted us to venture beyond the meeting room of the hotel. Though Guru wrote songs and plays and painted, he had no interest in the works of anyone else and didn't expect his disciples to either. As far as devout disciples were concerned, Guru's creations were the highest, greatest, and would prove to be the most significant in the future—forget the Renaissance masters, Sri Chinmoy was better.

Without a regular routine, I ventured places alone but had a built-in network of disciples who were only too eager to extend their homes and hospitality to me. In Vienna, I stayed with a female disciple who had a framed picture of Guru holding me as a baby on her altar. I had never seen this woman before, and when I tried to introduce myself, she gushed that of course she knew who I was. Prior to my visit, she, like so many other visiting disciples, was a nameless, faceless seeker who worked in one of the divine-enterprise stores in Vienna that sold discounted items imported from China. Daily, she took three trams to work a ten-hour shift in the store. She was always smiling and cheerful, and I was again struck by how different the path was of a “visiting disciple.”

As the months accumulated, I, too, found myself slipping into their Zen-like ease. Even with regular phone calls and letters from my mother about Guru's latest news, like the Sri Chinmoy Peace Blossom site, a program to rename major
landmarks in Guru's honor, I received the reports from Jamaica with a newfound sense of distance. In laboring to restrain my thunderous longing for Oscar, I had managed to train my emotions to be muted and still, even those for Guru. The source of my life, the reason for my being, Guru, like all of my former attachments, was no longer something I actively missed.

One crisp morning, as I was about to depart for Barcelona, Lalita called with a desperate request, urging me to Paris. As an offering to France, Guru bestowed upon the French disciples the opportunity of arranging a free public concert for ten thousand people. From the raspy sound of her voice, I could tell she had been on the phone for hours. With the event only weeks away, she was staying at her father's apartment in Paris, transforming his study into a makeshift concert command center. Accommodations were arranged for me. I would be the guest of a new dynamic disciple named Josette, and the sooner I could arrive to help, the better. After all that Lalita had done for me, and the fact that I didn't really have a legitimate excuse with which to decline, I reported for duty.

Guru's public concerts, billed as the “Peace Concert with Sri Chinmoy,” were the supersized version of Guru's original humble lecture series from the early seventies. He was no longer content to play in classrooms and gymnasiums for small crowds; for Guru to perform, the venue needed to be impressive and the audience overflowing. Visiting Centers that had produced concerts to Guru's satisfaction received a boost in their standing. For the disciples of the Cologne Center in Germany, the first international Center successfully to
fill a concert hall with ten thousand, their rewards included many disciples receiving their official “spiritual names.” To outshine the Cologne Center, the stakes were raised. The British Centers booked Royal Albert Hall; the Australian Centers countered with the Sydney Opera House. Guru had recently scolded the French disciples for not adequately aspiring, and he offered them the chance to produce a concert for ten thousand in Paris as a boon to rekindle their weak inner lives. Lalita, although she no longer lived in Paris, raised her hand and gratefully thanked Guru, promising him the French would victoriously succeed. Uttam, a well-known composer of contemporary classical music, was the Parisian Center leader. An effete man who carefully guarded his delicate piano fingers, Uttam had discovered Guru through the music of the legendary guitarist John McLaughlin, when McLaughlin had been one of Guru's devoted disciples. Hailing from an aristocratic Parisian family, Uttam was more than pleased when the new crop of hungry disciples clamored to become more involved in Guru's mission. As Uttam's role became more of an honorary position, he gratefully watched from the sidelines, letting the others run around until exhausted.

When I arrived at the Center meeting in Paris, Uttam sat at the back of the room, using the wall as support, with his legs outstretched, while Lalita, from her seat closest to the shrine, read out the long list of volunteer duties required in planning for the mega-concert. I was expecting the disciples to be superenthusiastic, but I noticed not many people were signing up to accept tasks, and the time in between her calling out jobs and the responses grew ever longer. Finally
, when the volunteering completely stalled, Guillaume, a grasshopper-thin man with round oversized spectacles who worked as a chef, finally called out, “Pourquoi pas?” The whole meditation room, except Lalita, burst out in whistles and cheers.

With most slots left unfilled, I felt I needed to scribble my name in as many as I could. I figured it was high time that I started to work for Guru, and I hoped my lead would be contagious for the other disciples. It felt like for the majority of the one hundred Paris disciples, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of presenting Guru to ten thousand people in the largest, most prestigious concert hall in Paris, while très chic in theory, was an obtrusive, expensive reality that interrupted their daily Parisian rituals. If they weren't prepared to manifest the absolute Supreme, I felt obligated to pick up the slack. I crammed hundreds of leaflets inside a backpack and headed out to the metro station at Les Halles, a bustling district known for hip dining and endless nightlife.

“La Concert pour la Paix.” I smiled with leaflets in both of my outstretched hands.

Dressed in jeans, a purple cardigan, and reflective sunglasses, I might as well have had my head shaved with orange robes and a tambourine from the hostile reception I received. Pedestrians who saw me looped in elaborate circles to avoid me. Those who were too preoccupied to notice me until the leaflet appeared directly before them either shrugged me away with a turned shoulder or shooed me away with a flick of their hand. Passersby who felt either vague curiosity or pity snatched the Guru-blue rectangular paper with a central photo of Guru seated cross-legged holding a flute poised
upon his lips. Across the bottom half, in compact script, the date, time, and phone number urged an immediate call to reserve free tickets before they all disappeared.

“La Concert pour la Paix,” I announced joyously, like I was handing out free round-trip airline tickets.

After one second of inspection, the flyer was crumpled. Comments flew at me—some, luckily, I couldn't translate— ranging from lack of interest to visceral anger. People shouted at me about “la culte,” which easily translated; I knew Guru's Center had been placed on the French government's official list of cults. Many shoppers handed the flyer right back, indignantly. I nodded politely, understanding none of this was personal. As the afternoon sun was muted behind clouds, the nearest garbage pail overflowed with my flyers. When I took a moment to replenish my stack from my backpack, I found myself stranded in a sea of Guru-blue papers littering the sidewalk with Guru's holy form tread upon by thousands. The trail of flyers continued like a small river for a few blocks, until they eventually dried up.

In this city of millions, certainly there were at least ten thousand seekers who longed for the experience of an authentic spiritual master. Though Paris was a voluptuous mecca where the finest of everything was up for sale, a single evening focused on inner peace was not too much to ask. Since the concert was only a few weeks away, with my backpack still heavy with leaflets I prepared for my second round. I moved to the top of the metro stairs, aiming to hit the afternoon commuters.