Cartwheels in a Sari (32 page)

As for Sri Chinmoy himself, it took years before I finally understood that the reason I had a new and richly fulfilling life was because of him. He had released me from his elaborate shadow box when I was too afflicted, too weak, to have done it myself. His freeing me was his greatest unwitting act of compassion.

As I receded further and further from my prior life as his disciple, my awareness and remembrance of Sri Chinmoy
shrank until I thought of him only on rare occasions. It was, therefore, unexpected that news of my former Guru returned to me as I lay in a hospital bed recovering from the birth of my daughter. Only a few hours prior to my daughter's entrance to the world, Sri Chinmoy had exited the world, dying of a heart attack on his front porch. While I had long ago dismantled him as my god and savior, his very ordinary, mortal death shocked me, as though a small part of me had still expected him either to be immortal or to ascend toward the heavens. I was sure that he, too, would have wanted something more visionary and celestial than a mundane cardiac arrest. As my husband nestled beside me, and I cradled my fragile, tiny daughter upon my chest, with wonderment I thought of the story of Sri Chinmoy's first visit to me as a newborn in the hospital, where he welcomed me with my name, blessing, and the myth of my birth. In between my birth and the birth of my own daughter, I had lived what felt like many lives, and I sensed Sri Chinmoy had as well. I suspected that he had secretly kept informed about me, following from afar rumors about my life, and I wondered if he knew I was having a daughter. His death made certain that my daughter would never meet him.

But I knew that one day I would want to tell her about him. Maybe I would describe to her the golden early days of the Center, when it was a small circle, a loving family with idealistic dreams to transform the world. Perhaps I would share with my daughter Sri Chinmoy's lasting impact on me—the vacant, permanent clearing of my faith and belief, and the amorphous, empty, and luxuriously open area that filled its place. I thought of the word
Guru,
teacher. He was no longer my guru and would never again be my teacher. I was
no longer his Chosen One and would never again be his victory. In the end, we had known too much about each other for false labels. But for my daughter, I realized, I would need to start at the beginning, with the wistful tale of a girl whose soul, years earlier, had been specially chosen to serve her guru.