Cartwheels in a Sari (7 page)

After the meditation, a select group of disciples was usually invited to Guru's house. Although the official meditations were relocated to the church, Guru continued his practice of hosting unofficial gatherings that spilled from his living room onto his porch. These invitations to Guru's house became a prized honor, evoking jealousy and envy for those who were regulars on the special list. My family was almost always invited, which meant that already late nights became even later.

Now, Guru appeared to have returned to his earlier weary and stern state. He sat quietly on his couch with his palm over his forehead. Finally, in a raspy whisper, he said, “You are all dear to me, very dear. The Beloved Supreme has a special task. Write, write very strong letters to Girish for speaking against me. Very, very strong, you write. Insulting him. Be merciless. Use all of your special American language to insult and scold him. You know his worst qualities, you know his weaknesses. You tell, tell all of this to him in letters that you send. Letting him know he is not a third-class disciple, not a fifth-class disciple, but the lowest of low class of disciple. You people, serve the Supreme by using all kinds of language to insult him.”

I watched as heads nodded in agreement.

Yes, Guru. Of course, Guru.

He is so bad, Guru. His massive ego has poisoned him, Guru.

He has lowered our consciousness, and he insulted us by insulting you, Guru.

Right away, Guru, of course, Guru.

I silently wondered, how could Girish be so bad?

The car ride home was quiet. I immediately began composing my own letter of insults, but since I had never written that kind of letter before, I realized I would need my mother's help; I wanted to ask her if we could start this morning, skipping what few hours of sleep still existed before I had to go to school, but my mother stared out the window. Ketan was asleep, gently snoring. My father drove, with both hands tightly clutching the wheel, as if trying extra hard to steer us in the right direction, though everything seemed to be pulling the opposite way.

“A
LO DEVI IS A FAKE,” KETAN SAID.

“I'm telling,” I threatened, retreating to my standard response to most everything Ketan said or did. “Go right ahead,” Ketan smirked, keenly aware that he had just bombarded me with the most shocking and sensational blow of my childhood.

He played it off calmly, casually buttoning his prized jean jacket. Since Guru did not approve of denim, Ketan was never able to wear it to meditations, hiding it in the car when we neared Queens, but all other times, even in the summer, he wore it constantly with matching blue jeans, and a plastic comb in his back pocket to fluff up his blond pompadour.

We sat across from each other in our hot kitchen. My father was at work, and my mother had dashed to the grocery store for vegetables to cook a curry for the evening's meditation. Ketan rocked his chair, resting his feet on one of the four mismatched seats cramped around our square table.

Often when Ketan claimed he had hot gossip, I'd just sigh or shrug my shoulders, feigning disinterest, in an effort to lessen Ketan's gloating. I squinted at him skeptically.

“You seem surprised.” Ketan mocked.

With news this explosive, Ketan could not bear to hold it in for a second longer.

“Alo's not a God-realized soul. Not at all. She's a big problem for Guru. Guru feels sorry for her, so he doesn't cut her off totally. We're all supposed to pretend that she's just like Guru. But we shouldn't meditate on her or anything like that. Just when she's around we need to fake that we like her and fake that she has powers. But that's it. You know how we have pictures of her on our shrines? Well, most disciples don't. They removed them all.”

I had been punched in the gut.

For all of my eleven years, I had worshipped before Guru and Alo. Alo Devi was Guru's Canadian-born companion who met Guru when he was a simple disciple at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India, where she had arrived alone to immerse herself in the yogic philosophies of the ancient East. After Guru befriended her, she helped Guru leave India, get a green card, and settle in New York City to build his own mission. Given the role of Divine Mother, a spiritual consort, Alo added familiar Western traditions and culture to Guru's path. To me, she was part grandmother and part saint. It was Alo who wrote my name in calligraphy on the day I was born; she blessed me, meditated on me, and had given me countless presents.

Ketan relished my openmouthed shock.

“You know how Alo's not really around that much anymore? That's done on purpose,” he said.

It was true that Alo spent little time in New York, and when she was in town, various disciples, including my family, were asked by Guru to take Alo on long outings, purposely
causing her to miss Guru's day appointments and evening functions. Most of the time, however, Alo wasn't in New York at all. She was in Puerto Rico, a second home for her, or she was on visits back to Canada, or working on her biggest project—arranging the Christmas trip. What began as a one-week visit to Florida, the Christmas trip had become an annual monthlong end-of-year spiritual retreat for Guru and a group of disciples to locations from South America and the Pacific Islands and beyond. Since children were not allowed to go, I loathed the event that left me at the airport, in tears, waving good-bye to Guru, all my disciple friends, and worst of all, my mother. Sometimes my father went, and a few times, they both went, leaving us to stay at the house of a disciple who had no clue as to what to do with two children. On one of those occasions I ended up in an emergency room for a tetanus shot after a horse chomped my behind when my appointed caregiver had dropped me off at a farm to explore.

“That's right,” Ketan said, as if reading my thoughts. “Guru keeps her away on purpose. She nags him and is really jealous. She wants everything to be about her, too. But, really, how could it be? Seekers wouldn't understand. They'd see two thrones up on stage and think they're married. People don't get the fact that Guru and Alo aren't like that. And even about Alo and Guru living together. People would think that they're, you know,
together.
It's crazy. Alo is on the third floor and Guru is on the second. But still, people think
that
way.”

What way? Although I didn't understand, I needed him to continue.

According to Ketan's unnamed sources, Alo resented the fact that Guru was getting so much press and had many new disciples all over the world. As Guru's position and status
grew, Alo found her own position diminished. In order for Guru to avoid dispensing to the public the complicated answer to the question of who Alo was, Alo was strategically tucked away. When Guru gave public lectures, Alo now sat in the audience. Alo's shrinking role had become enforced in private, too. Even at the church, on the shrine area originally fitted for two, now Guru's throne alone dominated the stage, and for the occasions that Alo came back to town, a small white wicker chair was placed near the dais's edge, and then mysteriously vanished when she was sent off again.

But, according to Ketan, what made Alo the most outraged was the influx of
gopis,
female disciples, who were always at her and Guru's house. In particular, it was my idol, Prema, and her counterpart, Isha, whose constant presence and elevated status irritated Alo the most. Though they were not related, nor friends, Prema and Isha, two women in their early thirties, like it or not were linked together. Guru had made them his two favorite disciples. Although Guru tried to keep their rank equal—he hadn't made a specific order for them—it was clear to all of us, and Alo, too, that they were his number one and number two devotees. Precisely because Guru never formally solidified their order, Prema and Isha were always battling to claim the title of Guru's number one. At times, they conducted their power struggle publicly. An ongoing competition was who would receive prasad first. When Guru called for prasad, both women slowly rose, straightened out the
pallu,
draped it across their backs like a shawl, then languidly moved toward Guru with folded hands. A few times they bumped into each other in the process, which caused a great fuss; neither one apologized, but one needed to back down, allowing the other to go forward. Most
days Isha made sure to beat out Prema's soulful steps and reach Guru first with a concentrated expression of soulful bliss, yet when it was Prema's turn to receive the blessingful fruit, she paused, extending the moment when her eyes locked with Guru's just enough to reassure us that though she was not always first, her devotions were purer. Different in every way, from looks to personality, when it came to marking their position, Prema and Isha were strikingly similar.

Though I adored Prema, and was constantly in awe of her motionless meditation and snappy dress, I also loved Isha. Short and thin, Isha was all angles. She had concave cheekbones, a narrow nose, and small vibrant green eyes with thinly plucked matching eyebrows. Her long red hair swung like a pendulum when she marched up to Guru. Her lack of outgoing friendliness was understood as part of her spiritual advancement. Every once in a while, she noted my sari or complimented my singing, and I beamed proudly.

Both Isha and Prema, Ketan confided, were Alo's sworn enemies. Alo resented the two young women who had taken over her house and her relationship with Guru. Though they had apartments of their own, only blocks away, they were Guru's cooks, drivers, secretaries, maids, caretakers, and confidantes and were always at his side. Alo insisted Guru banish both Isha and Prema, but for Guru, this was not up for negotiation. He would not hear of it.

Believing that the arrival of the young, pretty female duo was the cause of her fallen status, Alo felt constantly under assault, even in her own home. According to the rumors, Alo was aware that her decline in status was eerily synchronized to her decline in youth and Guru's financial ascent. Alo was used to having Guru all to herself, being his main woman, his
spiritual consort when he was just a barefoot young man in ragged clothes. Guru attempted to soothe her by assigning her two devoted followers of her own—Roshan, a bulky male ex-marine, and Heera, a young woman originally from Germany with a thick accent and a dimpled smile. Both Roshan and Heera were assigned to travel with Alo, assisting her to create the Christmas trips and with any other projects Alo wanted that were safely far outside the tri-state area.

Ketan also told me he had heard that Alo had begun to develop unusual traits, one of which was that she worried incessantly about the CIA. She was convinced that she was being followed. She knew that tollbooth collectors and hotel concierges were only fronts for CIA agents to track her down. Since Alo was always on the lookout for someone coming up behind her, she developed the capacity of sleeping only for short periods of time. She took naps. Lots of them. Every time she sat down at meditation, her eyes closed and her head bobbed, until her chin rested on her chest, as her back, already hunched, seemed to curl like a possum's.

I looked away from the table, down our narrow hall.

One of the last times a meditation was held at our house, Alo had arrived separately from Guru, since Guru traveled with Prema and Isha. I had been in my bedroom, and when I opened the door to the hallway, I saw Alo standing before the oval mirror that hung on the door to the bathroom. Only inches from the mirror, she stared, talking to herself. The conversation, apparently, was so engaging that she was illustrating her points with her arms. I watched, utterly still, hoping that I wouldn't disturb her. Her words were mumbles, but her eyes never faltered from her own gaze. Eventually, Roshan entered through the kitchen door and politely announced
that he had the car all warmed up. For a second, she looked at him as though she could not recognize the strange man in white pants and matching white shirt who said it was time to go home, and then she dropped her shoulders and nodded, obediently following him out the door.

Ketan continued to chat, as the sun shifted through various windows, until it finally slid from view altogether. I needed some time to sort all this out. Information was coming too quickly. Across from where I sat, above our telephone with the tangled cord, hung a black-and-white photograph of Alo and myself in which I was just learning to walk, attempting to balance on my pudgy legs, as she stood behind me, clutching on to my raised arms, lending me support.

THAT NIGHT, WHEN
I questioned my mother, she urged me to remain loving and kind to Alo, and not to worry about the rest.

I suspected she was lying. It couldn't be that simple.

And it wasn't.

I soon discovered that there were two distinct groups in the Center—those who knew that Alo was not God-realized, and those who didn't. The people in the know about Alo were mostly Guru's close disciples in the New York area. Few of the visiting disciples from around the country, and even fewer from the increasing number of meditation groups in Europe, knew Alo was a fraud. I quickly realized that knowing put me into the elite category. These were the disciples who, when Alo was away, made fun of her, laughing at everything about her from the way she warbled when she sang to how she always tried to move her chair to be closer to Guru.
I, too, joined in. It was fun. I imitated her bad posture and protruding chin. When Alo was in town, like the rest of those who knew, I overacted with full devotion, bowing lavishly to her after receiving prasad, and applauding loudly for her shrill singing. This was doing what Guru wanted, pleasing the Master unconditionally, which made him happy, and to make him happy, after all, was the only reason I even existed. I wrote her thick, fake letters of gratitude, praising her spiritual heights, and attributing to her all of the many eye-opening lessons I was learning in my spiritual life.

DURING THIS TIME,
Guru was perpetually on tour throughout the United States and Canada, giving free concerts and lectures in a frenzied effort to expand his mission, and so were we. Weekends, therefore, meant bus trips.