Cartwheels in a Sari (30 page)

“All I'm saying is that you better watch it,” Ketan warned, pointing his index finger at me. “You need to clean up. You're hanging on by a thread.”

He then turned off the car and hopped out, joining the other tennis court guards, who, like Ketan, had been waiting inside heated cars, and just now joined the row of shivering disciples who had been positioned along the sidewalk for hours.

A neighbor woman walking her dog, bundled up in a knitted sweater, tried to maneuver a path on the sidewalk as the disciples self-righteously held fast to their spots. Other outsiders, en route to work, familiar with the disciple blockade, sighed and crossed into the street, glimpsing peeks at the now routine morning spectacle. As I shuffled into the line-up, I imagined the scene looked like a training exercise for boot camp, with the troops temporarily halted by their commanding officer. Or it was a human line of prisoners awaiting execution by firing squad to be knocked off one by one. Either way, saris and whites and Guru-blue parkas splayed across the neighborhood, superimposing private faith onto public property.

Beside me, a short new visiting disciple jumped up and down, maintaining her claim to the line. She had spotted Guru. I watched her bounce in eager anticipation. Still a half
block away, Guru advanced toward his human chain of disciples in a comically small Guru-blue two-seater that looked like it had escaped from a ride on a fairground. Afraid to drive anything large, Guru's personal fleet of cars consisted of an entire motorcade that would have been ideal for children and dwarfs. Disciples on both sides of the street stood at full attention, silent with folded hands. It had been hours since the recorded phone hotline announced Guru's meditative drive, and these faithful disciples who had been devotedly standing in one spot were now to get their reward. With a speed so slow that the wheels barely rolled forward, Guru proceeded up the block. Not looking at the disciples on either side of the street, Guru kept his windows tightly shut, not wanting to expose himself, ever so slightly, to the bitter temperature outside. As Guru passed where I stood, for a moment, with only his head and neck visible, I shivered, remembering back to my childhood chills of fear of the lifelike Guru bust that had plotted to strangle me. Back then, it had been my secret that I was not allowed to tell—no one uttered a word against Guru, the person or the image. As I stuck my hands in the pocket of my jacket, the chills I now felt resulted from waiting, endlessly waiting, in the cold morning. Nothing more. The fear was gone; so, too, was that little girl.

Studying Guru cruising in his playmobile, the absurdity of the moment, of the massive, elaborately concocted scam, assaulted me. A myth. A fake. A lie. The truth was that nothing was true. Guru Sri Chinmoy was a fabrication dreamed and designed by a young and churlish Bangladeshi intent on hypnotizing the world. He had manufactured his image as a modern swami, his own presentation, to suit his vision. With subtle modifications along the way, he molded himself to fit
the story he wrote for himself. If Guru was fiction, an invention, I realized, then so was I, for he had created me. My values and truths were all approved, filtered, then injected into me by Guru. No ethics, philosophy, or ideas blossomed organically by myself. I was the creation of the Sri Chinmoy Experiment. I could not imagine that somewhere inside was a real person who could exist wholly unto herself. A fake, created as part of a larger scheme, for nearly twenty-five years, I had absorbed space, heralding a false life and false creator. Nothing around me was true; the emperor wore no clothes.

I didn't know if I had such a thing as my own will, but I did know that I still had control over my own body, and for the first and last time, I was going to use it.

With my head throbbing, I rushed back and scrutinized my small apartment. I needed a finale. I viewed the distance from my windows to the sidewalk below. Even though I was on the third floor, the drop, I concluded, was not far enough to offer a decisive conclusion. I moved from the windows, forcing myself to think of another plan. As I paced across the room, I veered to the kitchenette, surveying it for sharp objects. Never a cook, I owned one dull bread knife, which barely sawed through bagels. I angrily crossed into the living room, lifting my eyes to the ceiling. But without ceiling fans or overhead light fixtures and with the sloping contours of the dormers, fastening a cord from the ceiling was clearly impossible. There was nothing from which to hang, nothing to hold me as an anchor.

I entered the bathroom, positive I had found my answer. I grabbed a pink shaving razor and swiped it across my wrist. Nothing sliced, nothing cut. The blade was nestled inside its protective plastic. I tried to bend it, snapping the blade free,
but it held securely in place. Smashing it against the sink, it nicked my finger, letting out a tease of blood, too shallow for any impact except a small and steady leak. I cursed and threw the razor inside the sink, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, which made me shudder. I couldn't stand to look at myself. To avoid confronting my own image, I thrust open the medicine cabinet. Surely something toxic, life-threatening, existed inside its shelves. I dumped dental floss, a nearly squeezed-out tub of toothpaste, mouth-wash, deodorant, and powder into the sink below. Although the shelves stood bare, I stared into the dusty levels, hoping I had overlooked a perfect potion. I wondered how other people were lucky enough to have vials and bottles of expired drugs at easy reach with which to brew a lethal cocktail. I didn't have a doctor, let alone access to forbidden prescriptions. I grabbed the plastic jug of mouthwash from the sink, hoping to find a warning sign proclaiming its fateful properties, but there wasn't any.

Time was wasting. This was taking too long. I needed something else. Urgently. I needed a gun. All I needed was a gun. I had never seen a real gun and had no idea where to buy one. I split open the phone book, tearing through pages, while my finger left a blood-smeared trail. I followed the prompts from the heading Handguns, to Sporting Goods Suppliers. When I called and asked the lady who answered the phone if they sold guns, in a nasal voice with a thick Queens drawl, she attempted to detail the lengthy process and waiting period required to obtain a gun permit. She was still speaking when I hung up on her. My head boomed with blurry pain. I was soaked with sweat. I could not wait. Nothing
could wait. I hurled the fat yellow directory from my lap, its thick stack of pages cushioning its landing.

I had it, a new plan—foolproof and simple. Leaving everything except a single token, I ran downstairs and headed straight to the subway, energized with queasy hope. I didn't feel the cold air; I was still panting, bleeding, and sweating in overdrive. Ushered through the turnstile, I followed the sounds toward the distant puffing of an approaching train. It churned louder and louder. I raced to the platform, checking to find its direction. What at first appeared as a tiny flashlight soon morphed into the high beam of an approaching express train. I walked myself forward, steps from the platform's edge. This would be quick and easy and of my own volition, free of premeditated or predestined design. The hot air swirled dirt and garbage in wild clouds. I felt perversely light, as if I, too, could be lifted into the maelstrom of tunnel winds. No doubts. No highlight reel of my life screened before my eyes. No tears. No regrets. I literally had nothing to regret. Certainly no prayers. I didn't want the Supreme, Guru, or my own soul involved. I wanted all three of them, for once and for all, to stay away, far away. I did not look in any direction, but I moved forward, always forward, to my finale.

Arms jerked me backward.

“You fuckin’ sick?” A Hispanic man in his late sixties, wearing a navy blue janitorial uniform, dragged me in reverse, with his forearms pressing my collarbone.

The train streaked past, grinding the tracks, excreting a metallic stink.

“You crazy?” he shouted at me, furious.

He wanted an answer. But that was impossible. Even if
could have spoken, I could not answer him or anyone. He held me still; his fingers, like pegs, braced my body. I wiggled my shoulders, jutting out my elbows.

“You speak English?” he demanded.

I kicked my legs wildly, and when he released his grasp, I sprinted toward the stairs out of the station. He yelled, but I never turned around. I did not feel my breath, legs, or arms as I kept running. Too stunned for any detours, I ran until I was in my own apartment. There the sounds of the subway stopped. Just an endless stretch of quiet replaced it. Around me, on all the walls, framed pictures of Guru stared mockingly, confirming their smug knowledge that I could accomplish nothing on my own; everything was ultimately decided and manipulated by him. I knocked the meticulously matted and framed photographs of Guru in various poses off my walls and shrine, hurling them into my garbage. It did nothing. Nothing could be done. I sputtered tears at my foolish entrapment, and at this pathetic and utterly debilitating attempt of ridding myself from my fabricated life. I screamed and screamed, until my throat was stripped sore, and I collapsed on the ground.

ONE WEEK LATER,
the phone rang. It was Romesh. Without any explanation provided, Guru no longer wanted me to be his disciple. I was permanently banned from the Center. I listened, but I was not sure I understood what he said. I kept the phone to my ear, and he repeated himself. Romesh asked me if I had any message to send back to Guru. I sped through years of aching and exaggerated questions, of messages desperate
to be sent and received, but I could not think of anything. He quickly hung up, eager to be rid of his task.

Hours later, I still held the receiver to a silenced line. I peered out my window, expecting a full eclipse or torrential hailstorm, but the sun filtered through the puffy white clouds, as though it were a normal Thursday in a normal week. I sat on the floor, while I tried to remember what Romesh had said. Part of me was unsure he had ever called, and I wanted to call him to double-check. My fingers could not read the numbers on the phone. The digits made no sense, appearing as squiggly abstract shapes. They were a secret code, untranslatable but to all those who were in on the grand scheme. I wasn't. I hung up. And I waited, waited for something to happen. All my life things happened, blessings, messages, scoldings, invitations, proclamations, and expulsions.

That evening, my mother burst into my apartment. She scooped me into her arms, hungering for any sign that I would be all right. I watched her reaction, wondering if I should be feeling like her, but I didn't feel anything. My father, always quiet, finally asked me what I was going to do next. The ease and casualness of his question made me stare at him. Out of everyone, he and my mother should have known that because of their decision decades earlier to find a guru, for my entire life I was never asked or allowed to imagine what I was going to do next. I wanted to let them know that this entire mess was their fault, starting from the day they went in search of a guru. Why hadn't they, like people in the outside world, been able to run their own lives and not need a guru to do it for them? The night, decades earlier, when they surrendered their lives to Guru, they unknowingly
had surrendered mine as well. And I never asked for any of it. Guru had been their choice. They, not I, had sought him out.

To now hear my father ask me “what I was going to do next,” an alien sentiment, as if that question could lightly be tossed to me and fielded back with the ownership of an answer, felt maddening. I wondered if he heard the hypocrisy in what he was asking. There was no “next.” There was nothing. In one month I would be twenty-five, and I had no experience with the outside world. Suddenly I was dumped on the side of the road and meant to have prepared a plan?

My father again retreated into silence, as though he had moved on to a new project. My mother implored me to come to Connecticut for a while. I didn't understand how that would make any difference at all.

Tired of my mother's fuss and my father's silence, I urged them on to that evening's meditation. After changing her mind four times, it wasn't until my father was beeping the horn in succinct patterns that my mother finally agreed to leave me. I told her there was no point in worrying now. While I was sure that Guru's standard menacing threats of vicious karmic attacks delegated by my own soul predicted utter destruction for me, I knew I had stepped outside the angle where any of it mattered. I could not look ahead, even to worry about karmic payback. I could focus only on steering my way through the present moment.

When I closed the door behind my mother, I saw that a note from Ketan had been slipped under my door. In his notoriously poorly spelled and sloppy writing, he scribbled enough sentences to inform me that although he was my brother, he could not support me and my evil lifestyle. He wanted nothing to do with me from that day forward. Suddenly
my new reality landed. On my first suspension from the Center, I had felt its temporary losses. I now faced a permanent and nonnegotiable severance. Family church, friends, beliefs, ideals, identity, nothing was spared. One phone message, and forever after Guru and his mission repossessed everything. It all disappeared.

How easy this had been for Guru to leave me with nothing, to terminate me from his existence. I understood that the Center, Guru's system of beliefs, had only served him and his own purpose. The individuals who followed him were ultimately expendable figures, but I wondered, was he always so detached and cruel, willing to cast off the same soul that he supposedly chose as his unique companion and devotee? Even if the entire myth of my birth was his own invention, a convenience to smooth over the awkward transition from his encouragement of marriage and his subsequent eradication, he was still the one responsible. I did not deny that I had shamelessly broken his rules, repeatedly neglecting my promises and exploiting his leniency. But how was it possible that after all these years of Guru's raising me, from his initial greeting in the hospital's nursery, that he could so easily withdraw me from his life? Regardless of whether he was or was not a God-Realized spiritual leader, an ordinary human being would hesitate and reflect before ordering a full disasso-ciation. I wondered at what meditation or during which video night at his house did he conclude me an unprofitable investment and decide to sell at a loss. Was he weary of his lectures to me? Or had I just utilized too much of his precious time?