Cartwheels in a Sari (29 page)

AS ANOTHER BIRTHDAY
approached, I wished I was near the end of my life rather than barely halfway toward middle age. I imagined myself in my thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies reciting poems for Guru with the rest of the children's group, then shuffling back to my assigned seat. My
destined future existence—an exact replica of my current one—was numbing. Caged and kept, I inhabited Guru's exquisite prison. Void of any spiritual drive, any longing for a higher power, I realized that nothing had made me happy. Neither being in nor being out of the Center had offered me a sense of belonging, of comfort. On the day of my twenty-fourth birthday, while most of my contemporaries in the outside world were finishing graduate school, getting engaged, buying apartments, eagerly embarking on life's possibilities, I realized I had already died.

Y
OUR MINDS ARE POISON. SUCH POISON,” GURU SAID,
holding the microphone too close, causing it to squeal with feedback.

As soon as Guru spoke, I stopped listening. Undoubtedly, it was to be another lecture about impurity, disobedience, and destruction. After Guru announced his New Year's message, disciples banded together in a sense of panic. Guru's usual New Year's message was an aphorism promising the upcoming year to reveal boons such as elevated states of consciousness and newfound wells of aspiration. The message, read at a final public gathering prior to Guru's departure for the annual Christmas trip abroad, assured disciples and seekers of another year frosted with special favors from the Supreme. This year's message, however, tore off the layer of promised bliss, dunking it instead inside a vat of doom. A warning of possible spiritual obliteration, Guru's manifesto was the first of many scoldings and lectures on the same theme repeated that year. During functions, Guru constantly sermonized on the slothful state of his disciples. Night after night, the disciples lowered their heads, absorbing Guru's poundings on
how deliberately disobedient and recklessly negligent they were in all matters pertaining to their inner lives. I believed I was the only person who wasn't rattled to the core. To me, this was not news, and I no longer cared or wanted to even hear about it.

Guru tapped the microphone. After a long pause, he said that out of his infinite compassion, he was giving the disciples the secret to regaining their inner progress.

“Inside your heart, deep inside your heart, beneath its insecurity, there is still hope. That hope is still pure, still good,” Guru said.

The audience, after having readied themselves for another barrage about their corrupt vital, body, mind and heart, sat up straighter. I blankly stared ahead.

“You must forget your current age, forget your age. All of you, no matter how old, must be, act, and become like seven-year-olds. Girls and boys. All of you should be like seven-year-olds. Seven-year-olds live only in the heart, the heart. No mind. No mind. Act and be like seven-year-olds,” Guru said.

He unzipped his electronic synthesizer from its custom case and taught two new songs: “I Am a Seven-Year-Old Boy,” and “I Am a Seven-Year-Old Girl.”

I mouthed along. I was past listening, letting his words affect me. I could sit for hours before him as he talked, but it was as though I was far away beyond hearing, beyond his reach. As a child, to fill the uninterrupted hours of silent meditation, I had played games in my head, but now I dwelled constantly inside a dark cavern of quiet, remaining empty and void. Blocking out what I didn't want to hear was easy.

When Guru instructed all the disciples to soulfully sing “I Am a Seven-Year-Old” every day, I dismissed this as just another
task to pile onto Guru's litany of mandatory daily duties that would soon enough rot into neglect. If disciples had performed all of the prayers, poems, songs, and chants that Guru had urged as part of their daily rituals, they would never have time away from their shrines to eat or sleep. But this directive was different.

That night when I entered the tennis court, I was shocked when some of the women in their fifties and sixties who brought their own folding chairs and specially designed orthopedic back support pillows had changed the style of their gray hair from an understated bun to pigtails. Other women entered with new pink Hello Kitty backpacks worn over their saris. Groups clustered, giggling together. To my horror, someone carried in a baby doll dressed in a polka-dot sari. The men, too, huddled in circles; some played jacks, cheering wildly. Others held a skipping contest up and down the driveway. This looked absolutely psychotic. I panicked at the spectacle around me.

I sat in the back row and watched Sarisha circulate through the aisle using a high-pitched baby voice to collect money for “a speshwel pwasad in gwatitude to Guwu.” Scanning the gathering of disciples digging into their purses and wallets with their smiley excitement, I questioned when this shift of receiving Guru's symbolic words on a literal level had occurred. I knew that in religions such as Christianity and Islam, long-standing debates raged between believers who read their sacred texts literally and those who viewed the same passages metaphorically, but we had understood Guru's messages to be metaphoric directives. How had the disciples collectively decided to turn this into a practical instruction and enact skipping and baby talk as a route to salvation? This
bizarre impersonation of seven-year-olds, this mad stampede toward the inner child, made me wonder if it was their defense, protective armor, against the maelstrom of demonic destruction promised by Guru in his New Year's prophecy. If so, then their desperate tenacity felt sad, and the idea of joining or even supporting them repelled me.

I now understood that by rejoining the Center I, too, lived like a dependent, mindless child. Until that moment, I had not witnessed the absurdity of my lifestyle. Stripped of all pretenses, the reality horrified me. Nothing about being a seven-year-old—naive and malleable—felt appealing. I did not want to neglect and shut down my mind, giggling blankly. I had been seven once, and I had no desire to return to that age. My numbness toward Guru and the Center subsided. I loathed everyone and everything around me.

With clenched teeth and my hands in fists, I restrained myself from screaming aloud. Below, the tennis court guards wheeled in various tricycles, motorized carts, and mini choo-choo trains, arranging the brightly colored, shiny vehicles along the court's fence. When Guru arrived, walking with a profound limp in both legs, he inspected his array of new toys. One by one, Guru climbed inside the child-sized vehicles and rode around the perimeter of the tennis court, making sharp turns at each corner as the disciples sat with folded hands in deep meditation, eager for the moment when Guru scooted past their area. Guru's self-indulgence, his ego, sickened me. Getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted on his own time clearly was not enough for him. To keep up his role as spiritual leader of his flock, he multitasked his personal hobbies, habits, and indulgences into so-called spiritual practice for all his ardent believers who financed and supported
him. From munching potato chips to bicep curls, he wrote off everything he did as a meditation, an opportunity for his disciples to be nearer to the Supreme.

Lap after lap, he toured the same small stretch until, eventually like a toddler, Guru moved on to his next toy. With each vehicle, Guru initially jerked the machine into motion, until he found a smooth ride. My whole body shook with restless anger. I hated it. I hated him. I hated every ounce of my entire life as Guru limped over to the vehicle he had saved for last—the mini red choo-choo train. Since his childhood, when Guru's father was an inspector on the Bengali railroad, Guru, like most little boys, held a fascination for trains, and now, as an old, frail man, he had his own with which to play conductor. Even when Guru tooted the caboose's clownish whistle, utter reverent silence continued. For the disciples, this was serious meditation. For me, this was beyond bearing.

As Guru lapped the tennis court in endless circles wearing his conductor's cap, I saddened, terrified that perhaps this
was
normal. Maybe this made sense. It was follow the leader, and didn't everyone follow some sort of leader around in circles? I suddenly remembered, years ago, loving the sickening dizziness of turning circles. One of the highlights of my entire year was performing gymnastics in Guru's Madal Circus. Banned from wearing leotards because they were too revealing, in my circus costume of a shiny sari, fearlessly tumbling, somersaulting, and cartwheeling around the stage to Guru's applause. He smiled and waved and told me to continue cartwheels in a sari as an encore. The inversion of my body, losing track of gravity and direction, was disorienting and delirious. From my vantage point, I saw Guru and all of the disciples upside-down, and no one else had. Their faces
blurred past, a rush of nonsensical colors and shapes. By the end of my routine, I didn't know which was the correct way. Both felt as equally unstable then as they did now.

I didn't wait for prasad or for Guru to invite disciples to the microphone to share their profound inner experiences during his meditative joyride. I fled to my apartment, where I decided to stay, taking permanent cover in my bed. I could not carry on anymore to another folded-hand meditation, another aphorism, another video. Other disciples plowed ahead, adapting to Guru's broadening plans, his new adventures, celebrities, peace awards to dictators such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Burma's Secretary-1. All of my ability to pretend was spent. Each day when I finally awoke, I was disappointed. I'd stare at the clock, counting how many hours remained and how I could erase them. There was always too much time, too many afternoon and evenings that even with my eyes closed still stretched over me. After sleeping and pretending to sleep, eventually the sounds streaming to my window from the street below—people leaving for work, children biking, police sirens—felt foreign. Their world was reliant on time, squeezing more hours out of the clock, stretching it to fit in more minutes for work or family. They had deadlines and appointments, engagements to uphold. By Guru's design, I had none. Twenty-four hours a day were available to trail Guru, bumbling along, waving and cheering him on, satisfying his needs. I ducked beneath the covers, hoping to fall asleep again, to speed the end of yet another day.

KETAN PILED VARIOUS
messages seasoned with judgment on my answering machine. His latest recording chided me for
missing the big celebration in honor of Guru driving. I didn't return any of Ketan's calls. One morning he banged against my door relentlessly until I stammered to open it. According to Ketan, in five minutes Guru would drive around the block, and attendance was mandatory. Since the weather had been getting colder, Guru's new hobby was driving in a circle from his house to the block with the divine-enterprises. A new Center information phone line, with its number safely guarded from all ex-disciples, posted frantic updates as to the exact time Guru would motor past for a drive-by meditation. Not wanting to miss it, disciples began lining the street, staking their spot with folded hands, waiting for the one-car parade. Guru splurged on a range of tiny cars, just like his array of mini-vehicles, to suit his various moods. Garages were rented throughout Jamaica to store Guru's fleet, and the cars, like the tricycles and choo-choo trains, were maintained and retrieved by the tennis court guards at Guru's whim.

Ketan, sporting a new suede jacket with matching gloves and perfectly coiffed hair, told me I looked like hell, not having showered for days and wearing stained pajamas. He ordered me to chuck on something decent, claiming there wasn't time to waste. Feeling lightheaded, I followed him out of the house into the gusty winds of the cold, dark morning. Even though Guru's route was only two blocks away, Ketan drove, and we waited inside his heated, idling car while disciples stood outside, shivering with folded hands as their saris billowed and tangled from the wind. Without looking at me, Ketan sternly informed me that the ominous year had already claimed a lot of disciples, dumping them out of Guru's boat for good. In the past, gossip of disciples getting kicked out of the Center had been my penultimate news to
savor, as it confirmed what had always been suspected, that the new ex-disciple had never been either good or worthy, and it had left a smug smile of reassurance about the highly evolved state of my own soul. But now these stories felt like testaments to the larger insanity all around me. As Ketan delved into the secret details of one male disciple's being caught with a woman in his apartment, and later when it was discovered that there had never been a woman, and the woman's voice heard by the disciple in the next apartment had been someone speaking on National Public Radio, the accused disciple decided that he would rather be out of the Center than have to live in Orwell's
1984.
I listened to Ketan's disgust with the next offense, a male disciple who called up his friend and sang “Happy Birthday” in a mock-seductive Marilyn Monroe impersonation. That same afternoon, a message came through Romesh expelling the crank caller from the Center for his misdeed.

“It's not a joke,” Ketan said defensively.

I never thought it was. I knew far better than to imagine anything could be buoyant and free like a joke. There was nothing humorous in the Center. Nothing over which to laugh, let alone smile. Ketan proceeded to tell me that some traitors, disgruntled ex-disciples, were organizing slanderous campaigns against Guru, claiming Guru had various sexual relationships with former and current disciples. One supposed relationship ended up with the woman pregnant by Guru and Guru's insistence that the woman have an abortion. The rabid group of ex-disciples was contacting the press and maniacally spreading lies about Guru and his mission.

“You don't use a computer, do you?” Ketan grilled me suspiciously.

I shook my head.

“Good,” Ketan said. “Guru doesn't want anyone using the computer. Especially for e-mail or the Internet. He's forbidden it.”

I nodded. I knew Guru did not allow a computer inside his own house, and told his good disciples they should not have them either.