Cartwheels in a Sari (26 page)

“Oh? My hair's in a bun. Last night I had it in a braid,” I said with an exaggerated hand motion to my head.

“Nope. That's not it. It's something else.” Her eyes scanned down to my toes and returned to my face. “I know what it is,” she said, lowering her voice.

“You do?” I asked, feeling my heart speed up and my cheeks flush.

“Of course. I have intuitive powers. I am a mother, you know.”

I sat, afraid that if I even swallowed, I'd be exposed.

“You've been released from Chahna's bad influence. Now that she is finally gone, so are her destructive forces.”

I exhaled in deep relief. Of course Fulmala didn't know. Guru didn't even know, and he was supposedly the Supreme of the Universe. Give me a break. I felt suddenly wildly cocky. I didn't care what she thought. Let her report me. Go ahead. I leaned in close to Fulmala, looked her right in her droopy eyes.

“I taught Chahna everything she knows,” I said, then smugly walked away.

ONE MORNING, GURU'S
car pulled up beside me. As I went to open the door to the backseat, Asutosh motioned me away.

This was not an invitation. Guru's window slid down only a few inches, and I leaned in close to hear him through the thick glass barrier. In a low voice, Guru said he had been receiving numerous reports about me from disciples who spotted me sneaking out and returning at odd hours. My deliberate acts of disobedience and lack of aspiration were causing him great pain. Before I could respond, the window shut, and the car pulled away.

My facade as Guru's divine disciple had been exposed. In Guru's eyes I was two-faced and committed to nothing and no one but my own raggedy self, a lying, cheating, pathetic mess. It was all true. I didn't deserve Guru's trust, and I knew that I had deliberately broken all the lofty promises I had made to Guru when I returned to New York to be his peerless disciple. I let down Ketan and my parents, too, who were oblivious to my double life, shoveling blind support toward a false cause. My entire life was a false front. I had no one to confer with, and even if I did, it would expose my ungrateful and selfish self. The only thing I wanted was to be far away from everyone who knew how wretched I was, and to be near someone who didn't know a drop about my spiritual deceits and ineptitudes—Paul.

I invited him to come over to my apartment. I didn't care. Let Sarisha see me answer the door; let Ganika hear us rolling around the floor from the apartment below. I now craved a decisive reaction. Maybe Guru would kick me out of the Center for good, or maybe Paul would permanently kidnap me. The following afternoon, when Paul left with his change of boxer shorts and toothbrush in his hand, I gave him a dramatic farewell kiss in the front yard, wearing only his Che Guevara T-shirt that skimmed my thighs.

The next day, I received a phone call from Romesh with the message that I was breaking Guru's heart and that Guru was asking me to leave the Center for a full six months. When that time was up, he would confer with the Supreme and see what steps would be taken. He said I was doing irreparable damage to my inner life, and he could no longer intervene against the inevitable and dire punishment of my soul. In the meantime, I was not allowed to attend any activities or have contact with anyone inside the Center.

I felt utterly calm. All the crazed turbulence ceased. My mind was in a quiet shock that padded me from thinking or fretting. I sat down and stared at the wall, enjoying its blank whiteness, its lack of complications.

My mother called me five minutes later announcing she and my father were on their way to come see me, and for me to stay still and wait for them. I didn't know what she imagined either she or my father could do for me, but I didn't stop them from coming. We went to a pizzeria, where my mother nervously babbled about planting pumpkin seeds in her garden, while repeatedly interrupting herself to force me to eat. My father remained silent as he ate both his own eggplant grinder and then finished mine. Before they drove back to Connecticut, my mother begged me to return with them for a little rest, but I declined.

A FEW DAYS
later, as I walked to the Parsons Boulevard subway station headed to Flatbush to Paul, who remained fully oblivious of the rupture in my life, Tuhina drove past. I waved, but she didn't acknowledge me. On the next block, Vanita cycled by, also without even a nod. Ahead I saw Sarisha jogging
toward me. When she came closer, she crossed to the other side of the street. I knew the procedure; it wasn't personal. They were obediently following Guru's orders not to talk to ex-disciples. Guru built an absolute fortress between disciples and ex-disciples. Once a disciple left, all contact with and even mention of the person was cut off. Any exchange with ex-disciples was a serious breach of Guru's rules, and many disciples were asked to leave Guru as a result. I couldn't blame the disciples, but I wondered why they would go to such extremes to avoid me. I wasn't a
real
ex-disciple; besides, I was still Guru's favorite, his Chosen One, so it seemed ridiculous. When I entered the subway station and waited on line for tokens, I spotted Ketan. It was the first time that I had seen him since Romesh's call. I had suspected that he had been busy on a media blitz for Guru and just hadn't been in town. I walked up to him from behind, placed my hands on his shoulders, and said his name with an overdone French accent. He stiffened, turned around to stare past me as if I were a ghost, then he turned and exited the station.

Y
OU'RE NOT GOING TO SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST SIT
ting on the F train,” Chahna said, in her backyard. After many messages from Chahna, weeks passed before I eventually returned her calls. Though I was not ready to forget what she had done, after being suspended from the Center and having broken up with Paul, I realized that Chahna was my sole link to friendship. I desperately needed her. After all, she had only told Guru on me because at the time she believed she was saving me from what Guru said would be my “destruction.” Now that she was an ex-disciple, listening to her confidently assure me about life beyond the Center was a jolting shift. Her voice was buoyant, her sentences uplifted as though, by severing all ties to the Center, she had gained full immersion in the world. In a reversal of roles, she had become the older one, more experienced, coaxing me forward. According to the newly authoritative Chahna, the outing away from Guru's Queens would be good for me, and I agreed to visit her in New Jersey.

“I left the Center,” Chahna said. “And I'm fine. Safes don't drop on my head as I walk down the street.”

I hadn't thought of that. A safe could drop on my head.

Before I was banished, Guru had told me my soul had lost patience with my reckless life, warning me that he could no longer intervene to save me from its punishment.

“Your soul isn't going to push you in front of a speeding bus,” Chahna said.

Maybe her soul was not as spiteful as mine. A bus flattening me sounded more than probable.

“Guru always talks about his path being the Golden Boat, and if a disciple leaves the boat, then the person automatically drowns in the ignorance-sea. Guess what?” Seated in the shade of her family's small yard, Chahna inched her lawn chair closer to mine. “It's a lie.”

I looked around, expecting a surge of lightning to strike the aluminum chairs, instantly frying both of us, but none came. Hearing Chahna, the once pudgy, runny-nosed little girl with the greasy hair, brazenly denying one of Guru's chief edicts was a sacrilege. Instinctively, I defended Guru.

“You don't know that.”

“Hey. Do I look drowned?”

She certainly did not. Chahna had never appeared so beautiful. With her long hair loosely clustered on the crown of her head and secured by two Chinese-red chopsticks, she was elegantly funky. Her once insecure tics had stopped. She seemed happy, comfortable with herself and her status as an ex-disciple.

For the third time since I had arrived at her house, Rick, her boyfriend, called. Each time, curling the phone cord around her wrist as a bracelet and giggling tightly into the mouthpiece, she finally coaxed him off the phone with a smooch, a rushed iloveyou, and a promise to call him to discuss
plans for that evening just as soon as she could. Towering over her at six feet, Rick had enough vintage fashion sense to compensate for his pockmarked complexion and bulbous nose. He had firmly entrenched himself in Chahna's new life, filling every space that might have been left empty from the Center. Even her parents welcomed Rick as an expected fixture in their family. Although both Chahna's parents were officially still disciples, for the past ten years they had been retreating away from the ever-expanding hustle of Guru's activities. From their open acceptance of their only child's curtailed spiritual life to their embrace of all things Rick, Chahna's family life felt alien to me. No wonder Chahna's post-Center crisis seemed nonexistent. Apart from my mother's regular visits with me that made me feel as though I were in hospice care, I felt estranged from my entire family. Ketan shunned me, as did Aunt Chandika; and my father, with his normal cocktail of aloofness and distraction, seemed more concerned about whether the skylight in my apartment leaked after a rainstorm than if I was even there.

Besides my parents, I had not heard from a single disciple. None of the throngs who held me as an infant, played with me as a toddler, or admired me as a child had bothered to phone, write, drop by, or even wave hello. I had been erased. Vanished. Jayanti who? Since childhood, I knew we were supposed to eliminate all traces of ex-disciples from our lives, and I had dutifully done so without much thought. Yet now that I was on the other side, I realized the cruel brutality of the practice.

The silence chilled me. I had never expected Guru to extend the same absolute policies toward me. I believed his tenderness was unconditional, and that soon enough he would
nestle me back into his warm care. Never before had he been so severe and official with me. I was banned from meditations, both public and private, and not allowed inside the divine-enterprises. I obediently segregated myself, not wanting to put other disciples in harm's way, even accidentally. Before I opened my third-floor apartment's door for a quick run to the deli, I'd listen to ensure none of the other disciple tenants, including Aunt Chandika, was in the hallway. I wanted to spare both them and me the awkward duties of shunning an ex-disciple in one's own home.

When Chahna announced that we—with her assumed and obvious inclusion of Rick—were going out dancing, I asked why. Dancing, even traditional Indian dancing as a devotional art, was forbidden by Guru. In his belief that the body functioned solely as a vehicle to manifest the Supreme, all other activities involving the body—with the exception of exercise, which was viewed as a vehicle to keep the body fit for manifestation—were lascivious and suspect. Dancing was bad, a lower-vital expression. Even when I was a child, from the Chicken Dance to the squaredance, all forms were condemned.

Before I had time to protest, Chahna raced up to her attic abode, gifted me with two mix tapes of music that she labeled as essential hits played in the club, then flung open her closet and giddily smothered her bed with hanger upon hanger of various billowy and slinky black outfits.

“Who died?” I asked.

“Everyone,” Chahna replied, walking toward the bathroom. “It's the look.”

Black, Guru declared, was the color of ignorance. It was officially banned from any disciple's wardrobe. Occasionally,
while performing one of Guru's plays, disciples cast as hostile forces or demons draped themselves in black cloth, sending the clear signal even before uttering a single line that they represented the bad guys, causing many hisses and boos from the audience as they stood upon the makeshift stage. Now, staring at the black swamp that used to be Chahna's bed, I wondered if one of her first ex-disciple digressions had been to bundle all of her pastel printed saris into garbage bags and replace them with hanger upon hanger of clothes in Guru's ultimate color foe.

Chahna reappeared wearing ripped black fishnets, black combat boots, and a mini black satin vintage slip. White face powder wiped any trace of color or freckle from her skin, giving her the matte finish of rice paper. Around her eyes, black eyeliner flared like the open wings of bats. Caked upon her lips was a coat of black lipstick. The sole touch of color was a red velvet ribbon tied tight upon her upper neck. Dangling from it was a black spider.

“What happened to you?” I asked. She looked simultaneously glamorous and ridiculous.

Ignoring me, Chahna sprayed gel into her wavy hair, then asked why I wasn't dressed yet.

“Do your dad and mom know you dress like this? And where are we going, anyway?”

Before she could answer, Nitya, Chahna's mother, appeared at the top of the stairs, announcing she had just made popcorn. She chuckled at Chahna, complimenting her on the fishnets, reminiscing about how she, too, a long time ago, used to wear them, then she headed back down to the
Twilight Zone
marathon and her bowl of popcorn. Again, I compared this to my own mother, who I imagined upon seeing
me cloaked as a black nymphet would have cried, begging me to reconsider my life choices, and I wouldn't have blamed her.

Rick drove us to Manhattan in his massive black truck. As he pulled up to the front of the Limelight, and his muffler snarled exhaust, all heads turned.

We joined the line. Originally built in 1846 as the Holy Communion Episcopal Church, it now served as the Limelight, a nightclub owned and run by the notorious Peter Ga-tien. Every night, crowds waited hours to enter.

“Hey, Sarah.” An Asian boy with a multilayering of chains around his gazelle neck, waved at Chahna to cut the long queue.

I knew Chahna used Sarah, her birth name, at school, but hearing it aloud startled me. It confirmed the current distant divide between her two selves, the disposable Guru-coated entity and her other self. I suddenly envied her for having the option to shed one for the other, to slip into Sarah-mode at will. Since the only name and identity I had were given by Guru, I realized that unlike Chahna or Sarah, I could never switch from one to the next effortlessly, like turning a light on or off.