Space Between the Stars (28 page)

We climbed into Kitsaun's clunky old BMW, the backseat and trunk holding our cache, and drove to Mom and Dad's on Harold Street. As we opened the garage door and carried soup pots, foot-long cooking spoons, and the sample plate into the hallway outside her bedroom, we saw Dad watching us from the living room window, hands on his hips, whistling “When Your Lover Has Gone.”

Mom came home from work just as we finished. “Hi, girls. What do you have there?” She was breathing heavily after her long walk up the hill from the streetcar stop on Ocean Avenue. Her thin face was flushed red. Brunette hair fell softly over her brow. She pulled off her tan jacket and sat on Kitsaun's chair, next to the pile of recipe and management books.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, holding a bundle of white aprons in my arms. “We're starting to buy equipment for the restaurant.”

She looked around. “Everything is so big!” Mom was a Depression-era minimalist. She had miniature handwriting, wore her clothes until they were almost threadbare, and liked small sizes of almost everything. She smiled wanly and walked upstairs. We could hear Dad's voice booming through the floor, “What are they doing?”
We couldn't hear Mom's reply, but we fell onto Kitsaun's bed—laughing at how ridiculous we must have looked to Dad, lugging huge pots and pans, whisks, and plastic tubs into Kitsaun's bedroom, our saris flapping behind us.

From an 1,800-square-foot, empty storefront, we built a cafeteria-style restaurant that Sri Chinmoy named Dipti Nivas—“the Abode of Light.” Perhaps more than anything else I had done since leaving L.A., the birth of our restaurant became the manifestation of who I was as a spiritual person and strong woman. I wrote an employee manual and job descriptions, determined shift times, and trained the workers based on the mission statement I wrote: “to serve humanity by offering pure, fresh food prepared in a peaceful and loving environment.”

Carlos continued touring and recording, and the restaurant became my “child.” Sevika was our bread baker and turned out loaves of light, whole-wheat ecstasy taken from a recipe in
The Tassajara Cookbook
, from a famed Zen monastery down the California coast. We opened in September 1973 and had fifty customers our first day. I had never stood on my feet eleven hours straight before, and could barely keep my eyes open on the drive home to Mill Valley. Every morning we would be back early—washing vegetables, cooking marinara sauce for spinach lasagna, and cutting up fruit for the fruit salad with honey-and-yogurt dressing. Rushes of customers came at lunchtime and from five until seven in the evenings. In between, people trickled in, giving us time to prepare for the following day and review what had not worked. We had a few failures of the recipes I chose: Carrot soup did not survive the first cauldron. And once, I made spanakopita, a Greek spinach dish with intricate
layers of flaky dough, spending more than an hour with the process of chopping, mixing, and drizzling butter over the masterpiece; but during the final layering, I was called away and forgot to add the spinach that was draining in the colander by the sink. That casserole was a disaster.

Within a few months, Dipti Nivas became well known in the Bay Area. A reputation for delicious casseroles and low prices brought customers from Sonoma, Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, and Marin. They joined the local “regulars”—the name we endearingly called those who ate lunch and dinner with us many times a week. R. B. Read, columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner
, wrote that our restaurant was “a vegetarian delight,” with meals of “truly gourmet quality.” Kitsaun and I jumped into each other's arms, overjoyed that our hard work had been publicly recognized and our restaurant praised.

We hired more employees and became noticeably more efficient. Hundreds of diners ate at Dipti Nivas each day. I was able to work one shift rather than all day and night. My schedule began at 2:30 in the afternoon and ended at closing. When I arrived at the restaurant, I meditated; then I layered a tossed green salad over brown rice and smothered it in blue cheese dressing; I ate at our desk in the cramped office, or at a table in the low-seating area if we were not busy. The staff was never allowed to eat in the kitchen. I was a stickler for cleanliness and posted a sign on the wall: DO NOT TOUCH FACE OR HAIR WITHOUT WASHING HANDS AFTERWARDS.

During my shift I worked as cashier: I would ring up sales,
oversee the flow of food from kitchen to counter, and make sure the shakes, sandwiches, casseroles, or sundaes were placed on customers' trays before they left the cash register to sit down. Because we were cafeteria-style, we did not take reservations. Sometimes strangers sat together, happy to get a table at all when we were busy.

My spirit was buoyed by the hum of voices and the laughter that chimed through the dining room.
I'm twenty-three years old and these people are enjoying the menu I created.
I could not believe I was managing a restaurant loved by the people of San Francisco, a grand city with many award-winning gourmet restaurants. Regulars told us that one of the reasons they kept coming back was that they felt energized and full of light eating our fresh food. I swam in God's mercy, feeling that my time apart from Carlos was being rewarded.

Kitsaun managed the early-morning chores and often finally left at six or seven at night, after the dinner rush. If someone called in sick, she would work two full shifts. She thrived in the exhausting labor and, like me, was consumed with Dipti Nivas. When the doors were locked at ten at night, I emptied the sandwich bar—wrapping cheese, bread, and tofu salad, and saving sliced tomatoes for fresh marinara sauce we would simmer the next day. The busboys washed the last dishes, pots, and pans; then they swept and mopped the whole restaurant and turned off the dining room lights before taking the streetcar home. Every day they washed hundreds of plates, cups, bowls, and saucers without complaint, their faces red and rippled with perspiration. They scrubbed stainless-steel casserole pans lined
with cheese and sauce baked to a hard crust, while suds sloshed on their white uniforms. All that we did was for Guru.

The restaurant work purified my heart, and the simple act of serving our customers balanced the life I had as Carlos's wife. Mom and Dad had raised Kitsaun and me to understand that fame was inconsequential to one's character. Mom was never in awe of musicians Dad knew, and Kitsaun and I had grown up hearing famous names without any reaction or fawning from any of our relatives. Sevika told me she had overheard a young woman in line at Dipti Nivas say, “If I were Carlos Santana's wife, I wouldn't work here.” But I remembered L.A.— and I knew I would rather be at the restaurant than anywhere else.

My goal was to be a light to the world. The more work I did and the more projects I took on, the more motivated I became. I yearned for people around me to know God.

arlos wrote to me from Hong Kong, “Here I am, two o'clock in the morning, all wet. We just had a water fight and it seems like everybody in the hotel was involved. Of course, I started it (this time), but everything is all right now. The security guard came over and we all cooled it.” It was a three-page letter about sold-out shows, how similar Hong Kong was to New York, and that a typhoon was coming. In the middle of the news, he wrote, “I love you with all that I am. Please don't feel lonely, for I am always with you in everything you do and say. You are my first and only love, for you are my physical aspiration for the Supreme.

“How are my children, the cats, and how are the cars running?” he concluded.

From the beginning of our marriage, I was Carlos's link to home, to family, and to spiritual growth. And he was my link to thinking more freely and to embracing a life with open boundaries. Like an immense John Coltrane saxophone solo, Carlos
taught me to not think about the constructs put on me by society. His upbringing did not teach him to fear some One in Heaven, the way mine had; and he was not impressed with authority. My years as a Girl Scout—earning badges by collecting old newspapers to take to the dump, visiting the elderly, and singing simple songs about friendship—had trained me in good works. Carlos offered me independence.

I flew to Brazil to meet the band and to spend a week on the road, enjoying the stadium concerts and hearing how their music had changed since I'd last heard them perform. The Rio de Janeiro show was in a soccer stadium. I sat to the side of Car-los's equipment, out of the audience's sight, watching his lanky body skate across the stage, his guitar plugged into a Boogie amp: the umbilical cord to his sound. He cajoled his guitar to speak the melodic language of his muse. Fans danced sensuously across the field. As Carlos strummed the first, slow, tremulous notes of “Samba Pa Ti,” the crowd gasped, and then a wind of ecstatic screams reached the stage. Fans struck matches and lighters, holding the flames high above their heads, flickers of light appearing one by one, ignited milliseconds apart like fireflies across the sky. From the field to the top of the bleachers, people swayed in unison, their faces glistening with emotion. Every note Carlos played resonated from a familiar place inside me. Dad's guitar playing held the lineage of Charlie Christian, T Bone Walker, B. B. King. They lived through Carlos's hands, too. How Dad wrote a song, fingered the frets, how he played the world through his Gibson, had foreshadowed Carlos's music in my life and carried the stories of jazz and blues innovators whose music had lived through times of great suffering.
The audience went wild, begging for more after the concert ended. But after three encores, Carlos refused to return to the stage. He was dissatisfied with his equipment and how he had sounded through the stage monitors. Even though the crew tried to convince him the speakers in the arena had sounded magnificently clear, Carlos could not be consoled. It was the first time I heard him yell at his roadies and not go back out onstage when the crowd was still screaming for more.

The promoter took the band to a dinner club that had tables on an outside terrace beneath palm trees. Platters of seafood, vegetables, and rice were placed in front of us. Carlos pulled me onto the dance floor when the house musicians played a slow song. I shivered from the flame of his body close to mine, and we floated cloud-like, sounds of the concert still echoing in my ears. My heart caught in my throat singing out my love for Carlos, although only I could hear. I felt Carlos's anger leave, and the heat of his body engulfed me. Santana's manager, Barry Imhoff, snapped his camera—the flash lighting in my eyelids as I rested my head on Carlos's shoulder.

In our room, we sipped champagne, the last drink of alcohol I had as a disciple, and Carlos folded hotel stationery into airplanes, flying the white birds from our balcony to the beach.

Every nuance of Carlos's life endeared him to me. He knelt to speak with children playing in alleyways, pouring coins into their hands. In our room, we listened to Weather Report, sharing the magnificence of Jaco, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul's solos. I learned when to fade into the background and observe Carlos's life, when to participate. On hotel beds, we discovered where one of us began and the other ended.
We meditated each morning in soft candlelight. I concentrated on the rise and fall of my breath. Sometimes I heard no sound. Other times, the flush of a toilet in another hotel room, or the bell of the elevator stopping on our floor, caught my attention. When the distractions lodged in my mind, I prayed as I had as a child, “The Lord is my shepherd …”

Phone calls back to Kitsaun at Dipti Nivas assured me that she was handling the restaurant just fine. After seven days of travel—hearing hundreds of horns honking in the metropolis of Buenos Aires, and seeing the red clay of Brasília and its angular, modern buildings—I flew home to San Francisco, eager to return to the restaurant and our customers. On the road, I had been treated like a queen, staying in beautiful hotels with soft feather beds, ordering room service that arrived on silver trays with roses in crystal vases. But, as much as I loved the road and being with Carlos, it was his journey, his work, and I was an extra appendage. At Dipti Nivas, I cooked curries, chopped vegetables, and rang up customers at the cash register, caught in the activity that fueled my creativity. It was hard work—and I loved it.