The Sensual Mirror (17 page)

The silence was thick, alive, intelligent. Through it Martin could hear the faint strains of traffic from the street and the echoes of rock music from the bar. But even those familiar sounds were rendered exotic by the quality of silence in the room. It was as though the loft had been transported all at once to a mountaintop in India and the noise of the western world relegated to a quaint memory of a peculiar time.

All the attention was on Babba and it was impossible for Martin not to add his own curious gaze to that of the others. Babba sat, nonplussed and utterly at ease, as though he were alone by a river watching clouds turn crimson in the sunset. From a purely theatrical viewpoint alone, the performance was admirable and extraordinary. Martin had never seen anyone on a stage reflect such calm. People on stage either gave speeches or acted or sang or danced or projected a presence. But Babba did none of these. He merely sat, and the simple act was so powerful, so breathtaking in its simplicity, that it commanded attention.

Given that implacable stillness as a ground, the slightest hint of movement erupted with the violence of a lightning flash. So when Babba suddenly sharpened his glance and sent it sailing into the middle distance, it was as obvious as if he had hurled a bright red beachball into the crowd. The recipient of the glance stiffened as though stuck with a pin, flushed pink with embarrassment, and then smiled in confusion. It was a woman in her late thirties, with all the plainness of a dime-store saleslady on a Saturday night just before closing after a day of frenzied shoppers. She wore a white blouse and a black skirt, and carried her mousey hair behind her skull in a tight bun. She was totally unexceptional, and Martin would not have noticed her if a thousand like her had passed him marching in goosestep down Fifth Avenue. But now, for a few seconds, she was a radiant star, singled out. Her eyes shone with joy and a pixie spirit danced above her head. For a few seconds, she was beautiful.

Martin looked quickly back to Babba. The man had not so much as flexed a muscle. Whatever it was that had flowed out of him couldn’t be measured very easily in units of physical strength. Then, as Martin watched, Babba’s eyes shifted again and did some extraordinary dance, seeming to whirl around, each eyeball in an opposite direction, come together, vibrate like yoyos at the edge of their strings. The heads of the people in the audience turned from Babba to the woman and back again, and everyone laughed, as though an irresistibly funny story had just been told. The woman blushed even more, half-hid her face in her hands, and sank into the general laughter.

Martin was confused. He had understood the earlier bit of flattery, subtle as it was, but this escaped him. He turned to Robert for a clue, but his friend was caught up in the general mood of merriment. Martin waited for the hubbub to subside and then turned back to Babba to see what could happen next. But the guru had escaped to vapidity; his attention had turned inward, it seemed. A long time passed. Martin’s legs began to ache. As supple as he was, the unfamiliar posture was stretching muscles that were almost never used in this manner. He shifted his weight surreptitiously, and as he did Babba’s eyes turned and fixed him on the spot, catching him unaware and off balance. Worse, the eyes of everyone in the room followed the guru’s gaze to see what he was focusing on now. Martin suddenly found himself the object of attention of some five hundred people.

He half-turned to Robert for protection. He was experiencing the first wave of a very strong panic. He had never felt so exposed in his entire life. But Robert was only looking at him with a kind of rapt imbecilic smile, and in his newfound friend’s face he saw no recognition at all. It was a moment of madness.

Then, as quickly as it had come on, it stopped. Babba flicked his eyes elsewhere, and the concentrated energy of the room spun toward a different direction. Martin was seized by a spasm of intense relief, followed immediately by a dull throb of disappointment. For no matter how unpleasant the moment had been, it had also been fantastically explosive, a shock of impacted light, a shaft of iridescent vitality such as Martin only felt as the peak of his form atop the parallel bars when every system in his body was attuned to the complex adjustments necessary to maintain such a strenuous balance. Martin found himself straining forward slightly, as though by his posture he could lure Babba to turn back, to fix those magic eyes on him once more. Without any self-consciousness, without any word having been spoken, without a thought having crossed his mind, he had blended into the awareness of the hundreds who sat at Babba’s feet. If the Martin of a half hour earlier could have seen himself at that instant, he would have scoffed in disbelief; for this Martin had that same look of blind yearning which marked the follower of any charismatic figure. His eyes were a bit moist, his cheeks slightly pink, his mouth teasing the dawn of a smile.

Then, without warning, Babba turned his head again, like a searchlight sweeping a prison yard. He went past Martin, whose heart ducked a beat, and stopped with Robert, who took the attention with perfect ease by leaning his tall torso forward until he touched the floor with his forehead. He remained in that posture, prostrate, for several seconds, and then righted himself to smile at his guru.

“This is your friend?” Babba said in a voice that barely escaped the metallic twang which afflicts those wise men whose native language is one of the Dravidic dialects.

Robert nodded. “Yes,” he said.

Babba inclined his head and then glanced up at Martin. Once again Martin braced himself. The previous look had been humorous, gentle, but this time the guru’s eyes were hard, harsh, almost cruel.

“Why have you come?” he asked.

Martin’s first reaction was social outrage. After having done Robert the favor of accompanying him, he had not only been singled out for public notice but was now being asked a rude question in terribly blunt terms. Yet he could not escape answering; everyone was waiting for his reply. He simultaneously rationalized Babba’s crudity by ascribing to him a lack of knowledge of American customs and tried to formulate some answer that would be, somehow, satisfactory. But his brain had turned to porridge.

“Robert asked me,” he said finally, his voice almost cracking and not carrying very far.

Babba frowned and shook his head from side to side a dozen times, all the while keeping Martin’s eyes fixed with his.

Robert leaned over and whispered to Martin. “He wants to know the real reason. He wants to know what your problem is.”

“I have no problem,” Martin said in a low voice.

“What does he say?” Babba boomed.

“He says he has no problem,” Robert said in a loud voice.

“See here, you have no right . . . “ Martin started to say but his voice was drowned out by the laughter that erupted in the room. Babba was rocking from side to side, holding his ribs with his hands, his arms crossed in front of his chest, in perfect imitation of a chimpanzee that had caught its finger’s in a printing press.

“Old fart thinks he’s funny,” Martin said to himself, chagrined at being the object of ridicule. And yet, he reasoned, he deserved it. Stating that he had no problems was a colossal lie. It would be a lie for any human being to say such a thing. Even if one had no personal problems, which would be extremely rare, there are still the problems of pain and suffering and hunger in the world, the problem of death, the problem of ultimate meaning. And such planetary and cosmic concerns aside, Martin was neck deep in emotional difficulties. He didn’t give Babba any great credit for knowing that. From his position of power in the room and with his vast experience with people, it would be practically a reflex act to mock anyone who claimed he had no problems.

The laughter subsided, however, and Babba dropped his pantomime and resumed his posture of simple sitting. His eyes rested lightly on Martin. Martin’s gaze was caught. Not only by the guru’s glance but by the fact that everyone in the room was watching their confrontation.

“What does he want of me?” Martin said to himself.

Yet, even as he watched, he began to understand. Babba’s eyes ceased being two black dots in a white round pill set in a sculpture of flesh called a face. They underwent a series of astounding transformations which escalated so far beyond anything explainable by physiology or psychology that Martin was swept up into the changes and taken on the strangest ride of his life. As he sat and looked into Babba’s eyes he saw his father, then his mother. He saw himself as a child, riding his first tricycle in front of his house. He saw the expression of death on his grandmother’s features as she lay in her coffin. Then, the word seeing itself was no longer adequate, for he lost all sense of himself as a separate entity. It was not that he sat in a place and Babba in another place and some peculiar activity known as sight took place between them, but more as though they were the space itself, aware of itself, alive, pregnant with infinite possibility. Martin fell out of time and place altogether. There was only that awareness, that emptiness, that space, which began to glow, to vibrate. It was like climbing on a car in an amusement park funhouse and suddenly being plummeted into a world of dazzling surprises. But at the very point when it seemed that the experience would sprout its most bizarre leaves, everything was ripped away and Martin was back in the loft on Chambers Street, sitting on the floor, while Babba looked down at him from his platform, and a thousand eyes peeked in on the drama.

Now he was vulnerable, for the veneer of these dimensional illusion had been temporarily removed and Martin had accepted the alternate reality, presented so deftly and ingenuously by the guru. The weight of Babba’s question increased a hundredfold. Why had he come? Babba’s eyes had become drops of molten lava, rock subjected to such intense heat that it actually melted. The fierce fires of endless sorrow burned in Babba’s heart and turned the world to ashes. As Martin’s gaze was drawn more deeply into the guru’s mind, a lifetime of loneliness and sadness welled up inside him. Now he not only saw the facts of his past, his parents, his childhood, the death of loved ones, the disappointments, but he felt all the emotions that he had denied himself because little boys, when he was a little boy, were not supposed to cry.

Babba’s question swelled in scope until it encompassed the entire world. Martin knew he was being asked not only why he had come to the meeting, but why he had come into the world. From what mysterious source had he originated, and what was his purpose in being here. And the question was addressed not only to Martin, but to everyone in the room, everyone and everything in creation. Why was any of it here? And if there was a God to answer that question for everyone else, then how did God answer when He asked it of Himself?

All the people, all the trappings of the space, all that he had been up until the instant that Babba looked into his eyes, dropped away, and Martin was left with the sheer nakedness of the moment. And then, the most peculiar thing of all happened. Somehow, without his knowing how or when, it seemed that he was sitting on the platform looking down at himself. Only he had now become Babba. They had exchanged identities. And he saw that there was no difference between them, that one was the other, that the guarded and lauded thing called the self was just a momentary viewpoint. Martin began to laugh, only it was Babba laughing. He was caught in the confusion.

His ears popped, and he was back inside his ordinary awareness again. He was Martin Gordis, age thirty-one, a physical education instructor, recently separated from his wife, living in New York City. He was in a strange loft with several hundred people to see a man from India who Robert said had changed his life. This information was all very interesting to him, but whose body was that rocking back and forth on the floor?

He felt Robert’s hand on his arm. His friend’s eyes regarded him with warmth and gentle concern. He looked up at Babba. The guru had assumed yet a different mask, as though he had aged fifty years. He seemed to peer down from a mountain top. Martin wondered how he could ever have felt that the two of them were one thing, interchangeable parts of some unspeakable whole.

“There is sorrow,” Babba said.

Martin nodded, but already he was retreating inwardly. He felt he had exposed too much of his feelings, and wanted to cover himself up. Also, he was translating his withdrawal into a judgment on Babba.

Sure there’s sorrow, he thought, the hokiest gypsy fortune teller can tell you that.

“You are unhappy,” Babba went on. “Why have you come?”

There was a buzzing in the crowd. Robert was leaning close. “This is very unusual,” his friend was saying. “Babba almost never talks to people the first time they come. And even when he does, he never insists the way he’s doing now.”

Martin realized that he had dropped his head and was staring at the floor, refusing to look at the guru, and that Robert’s explanation was by way of telling him that he was being given an extraordinary and rare opportunity. How could he continue to behave like a sulky child? And yet he did not want to give anything to Babba. He did not trust the man. His feeling was so strong that it surprised him, for Babba had not really done anything, and on what basis could Martin form a judgment of trust or distrust?

Slowly, Martin raised his eyes. Babba had not removed his gaze. Now he looked like a standard picture of a wise man. The white robes, the white hair, the cross-legged posture, the piercing glance, the air of composure. Martin took a deep breath and straightened his back. He looked back at Babba, waiting for another round of hallucinatory pyrotechnics to be shot off. But Babba became very still, and his image did not flicker as much as a candle flame in a windless room.

Then, in a clear, full, distinct voice, he said, “Divorce is death.”

The words hit Martin like a fist across the temple. The calculating portion of the brain advanced and rejected a dozen hypotheses about what the words meant, all within a fraction of a second. The successful interpretation, the one that registered, manifested in the form of behavior, however, not thought. Martin turned to Robert and, without hesitation, said, “You told him about my marriage problems.”