Cartwheels in a Sari (5 page)

According to Guru, in his past lives he was also God-realized, but when a person is reincarnated, even avatars have to start their spiritual search over again in order to regain
their oneness with God. The way Guru spoke about his God-Realization made it sound as though it was as easy as locating something temporarily misplaced. In this lifetime, Guru said, he realized God when he was eleven years old. Even though I was nearly six years old, eleven seemed pretty young to have figured out everything. To catch up to Guru, I had only six years. That was stressful enough, but to make things worse, meditation was the only guarantee of God-Realization.

I didn't know how to meditate.

Every night, except Mondays, my parents dutifully brought Ketan and me to the meetings in Jamaica, Queens, where Guru had us sit for periods of silent meditation, lasting anywhere from ten minutes to twenty-four hours. I never knew what to do. Of course I knew I was supposed to sit still with folded hands, and I also knew that I was supposed to enter my heart chakra, leaving my mind behind, but that was where it became foggy. I imagined the heart chakra as a shiny red house, shaped like a heart made from red metal like the slide at the playground. I would pretend to walk up to the house and knock on the big door; it would make a loud, echoing noise and that would be it. I never got anywhere.

I then tried songs—Guru's, of course. When that failed, I moved on to lists; if I was at a meditation, I counted the flowers on the stage, sorting them by shapes. I checked the color of the women's saris: how many blue, how many green, how many white. Then I utilized my fingers to tally the number of stufties that Ketan and I had at home. After that, I scanned the disciples around me, counting how many were asleep, their heads bobbing up and down, then snapping back to
attention when their folded hands fell into their laps or their chins landed on their chests. My father was almost always asleep when I looked over at him.

I never asked my parents what they did during meditation or what I was supposed to do. I was sure that my question was inappropriate. They must have assumed I was a born “meditator.” I was a special soul, and meditation should have just come naturally. I tried to convince myself that whatever I was doing to fill up the time was most probably the correct technique. It seemed to be working. Guru was proud of me, and when Guru was proud of me, the world was right.

Once, I gathered my nerve to ask not just anyone but my idol, Prema, about meditation. Guru had two personal assistants, Prema and Isha. From driving him, to washing his clothes, to typing his correspondence, these women were his closest disciples. Guru let them sit in the front row in the first and second place before his throne, and they arrived and left with him. The female disciples treated Prema and Isha with fawning flattery or wild jealousy. They were Center celebrities, carefully admired and ceaselessly scrutinized. To me, Prema represented pure bliss. Not only was she Guru's special disciple but she was dazzlingly beautiful. Although she didn't like children, she did think it was cute that I admired her, and she, knowing full well my special status, made a slight effort to acknowledge me. Guru assigned seats, and he bestowed on my mother and me the highly sought after seats directly behind Prema and Isha—seat one and two in row two. As a consequence of spending literally hundreds of hours in supposed meditation, sitting directly behind Prema, I studied her as though she were my own private experiment. I noticed how she secured her fine blond hair with narrow
plastic barrettes worn behind her ears in shades carefully coordinated to match her sari, her burst of lily of the valley fragrance that greeted me every time she swept by my row and assumed her seat in front of me, and her precise and motionless stance that she maintained for hours, never shifting even the slightest during meditation.

One evening, during a break, while Guru was in his private chamber adjacent to the altar, Prema was joking with the other women in the second row. I wanted to ask about her meditation secret, but I had to do it subtly. I couldn't let her know that I was really trying to figure out how to meditate, so I asked her how she was able to meditate so well. How come she never moved, coughed, shifted, or even made a hard swallow during meditation? She laughed at my question, causing the rest of the women to laugh too.

“Do you want to know my secret?” she asked, teasing me with her large brown eyes.

“Yes, yes!”

“Well, I take a stick of special meditation gum.” She reached into her white crochet bag and pulled out a pack of Trident cinnamon gum and unwrapped a piece. “I never chew it. I just keep it in my mouth beside my cheek. Here,” she said, giving me a piece. “Now you have my secret.”

I was thrilled. Now I knew. I asked my mom to support my meditations by keeping me sufficiently stocked with Trident, and I toted it with me at all times.

I HAD A
lot of work to do to reach Guru's level, and Silver-mine Elementary School seemed like an awful waste of time. I really needed to be stapled to the floor before my shrine
with Trident gum. However, my schoolteachers were not at all sympathetic to my plight.

Mrs. Wright kept me after school one afternoon for a talk about my obsession with Voodoo and sent me to the guidance counselor's office. The guidance counselor drilled me with questions about my home life, asking if my parents provided me with food and shelter and if they regularly beat me. I found it hard to pay attention; I was too distracted by her coffee mug with a picture of a cow on it. I flashed a big missing-tooth smile as I proudly pointed to the mug, explaining that Guru said both my mother and I were not just regular cows but sacred Indian cows—fancy white ones—in our past animal incarnations. My father, I patiently continued, had been a giraffe, and my brother was a dog. As I left the guidance counselor's office, it was clearer than ever that being in school was an irrelevant distraction.

Ketan, on the other hand, was not at all fazed over how to manage school and God-Realization. In fact, I never heard him mention anything about God-Realization, or even God at all; his one and only concern was the theater. Ketan's Broadway genes came from my mother. As a child she learned the melodies and plots to all the classic musicals. Even though music other than Guru's was officially banned, my mother kept a secret stash of LPs of old favorites that she couldn't bear to part with such as
Hello, Dolly, The Music Man,
and
West Side Story.
Ketan, as if on instinct, found the contraband and claimed the treasures as his own. Instead of punishing him, my mother privately encouraged his forbidden vice and even intervened on his behalf when my father complained about his low consciousness. With the green light from my mother, Ketan quickly transformed our bottom bunk
into a stage, hung a sheet over the front as a curtain, cast roles for our entire collection of stufties—Big Teddy as Tony, Fluffity Bunny as Maria—and designed Playbills.

Because Ketan's theatrical spectacles clearly were not part of Guru's sacred teachings, and would have been viewed as dubious, at best, by Guru's inner circle, my mother deliberately hid Ketan's passions for twirling around our Kermit puppet to the beat of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from other disciples. Her safeguarding of Ketan's theatrical vices was but one of many ongoing issues and major disagreements between my mother and father. When they argued, I slipped away until I couldn't hear them. My mother had the last word when it came to us, because my father was never around long enough to enforce his own opinions. With all the work he was doing for Guru and the Center, he had limited time for us. It gave me great pride that he was busy with matters far more important than our family. I found it heroic and admirable. I, too, longed to be of greater service to Guru's mission.

Guru wanted his own lawyer and, per Guru's orders, my father dropped studying philosophy to complete law school. He passed the bar exam and was now officially Rudra Tamm, Attorney at Law. Guru blessed him by placing a white gardenia against his third eye, then instructed him to get to work. And he did. My father recounted to us that Guru told him that his first official lawyer duty was to obtain all of the rights and privileges afforded to other religious groups and register the Sri Chinmoy Center as a nonprofit, tax-free church. When he had carefully explained to Guru that in order to hold this status, like other churches, there would need to be a board of directors, elections, and transparency of all finances, after
listening to my father, Guru closed his eyes and drifted off into meditation.

Guru finally opened his eyes and said, “The Supreme acts in and through me. You do not question what I do or tell you to do on my behalf. All commands are coming from the Highest Supreme. I
only
take advice from the Supreme.”

My father told us he immediately understood the absurd inappropriateness of a brand-new lawyer carping to a mes-siah about petty and mundane regulations. He bowed his head, recognizing his error, understanding that his years of law school had not prepared him for this unique lawyer-client relationship. My father used this as a teaching story for us, a reminder not to question Guru. I solemnly swore that, no matter what happened, I would never doubt or disobey Guru.

Instead of my father working for a large law firm and having to socialize and network with clients, Guru instructed him to open his own firm. This suited my father fine, for he had always been antisocial, preferring to sit cross-legged reading a book on the Upanishads than chat with house guests. Harking back to his barefoot days at Yale, my father still relished the notion of stark discipline and rigid asceticism. He watched his caloric intake to avoid gluttony, set his internal alarm clock to 4:45 for morning meditation. Working for himself was ideal, for it seemed doubtful that he would have thrived in a corporate, partnered law firm dressed in his thrift-store polyester suit, Guru-blue tie, and sandals.

After searching for inexpensive rental space, my father found a room on the second floor of a brick row house in Darien, Connecticut. The other tenant, Bill, another independent lawyer, needed someone to split the space and the rent.

When Guru came to bless the office, he called for my family to gather for a photograph.

“Samarpana,” Guru addressed my mother. “Your role is to serve Rudra. You become his secretary,” Guru said, then quickly turned away from her.

We stood near Guru, with folded hands and our new positions. My father, freshly accredited, had all of Guru's permission to set forth and build a clientele, to study and argue cases, to interact and have a legitimate and worldly career. He was ready to embark on his split life between days filled defending clients in real estate deals and researching tax breaks, and his evenings reciting mantras on humility, purity, and surrender.

For the photo, my father glowed, dressed in a white dhoti and kurta to mark the special occasion. He seemed unaware of the photographer and on bent knees received Guru's blessings.

My mother, as always, was never called separately but summoned only when Guru sought the full family. She stood slightly behind my father, a fitting spot. Repeatedly Guru had told my mother that Rudra was the genuine spiritual seeker, and her duty was to tend to his needs and desires. Perhaps it was her newly official role of being my father's assistant that seemed to confirm what I sensed she had always felt, that she was a person of nonimportance whose task was to prop and support other people, people who mattered. She took Guru's sudden and public pronouncement of her designated job as a secretary as part of her spiritual
sadhana,
like the ancient tradition of seekers who, to find inner peace, take vows of silence for years or refuse to eat solid foods, denying themselves in order to arrive at enlightenment. Her official duty as my
father's support staff lent credibility to her habit since childhood of blending into the background. And as my mother stood in the photo, with her hands folded and her eyes searching for Guru, she was present but hardly noticed, as she was obscured by the shadow of my father.

Ketan, always trying to be in the forefront, begging for star status, wedged his way opposite my father. With a wide, toothy smile right at the camera, Ketan beamed for the shot.

Tightly posed together with Guru and my family, I felt invincible. I had everything that I wanted within inches from me. It was perfect.

“Namo, namo, namo, shakti pujari…”
Guru started singing, then nodded his head for us all to join him.

We stood with folded hands singing soulfully, while my father remained on his knees in a trancelike state with Guru's palm on his third eye. When Bill, who shared the communal office space, opened the door, he froze, momentarily taking in the scene, then quickly exited with an overpolite series of hand waves.

“BROTHERS AND SISTERS.
May I have your attention?”

It was a Thursday night, and we were in Guru's new church, purchased by the disciples, located in a quiet working-class neighborhood in Bayside, Queens. The acquisition of the church had occurred suddenly, but that was how everything seemed to happen. Now, every night except Monday when Guru still came to our house, my family battled commuter traffic on Interstate 95 from Norwalk, Connecticut, to Bayside, New York. Sometimes it took us one and a half hours to get there, sometimes more. With such a large portion of
our life spent in a hajj to Queens, it would seem logical for us to have a safe, comfortable car, but that wasn't the case. My father felt that part of his
sadhana
was to be in discomfort, denying himself the very basics of food and warmth, and he attempted to make it ours too.

As long as the car could get us to Queens—and many cars didn't, having to abandon them along the way—that was all that mattered. We loaded in and, before departing, meditated for protection on the large photo of Guru glued to the dashboard. The rest of the car ride to see my spiritual master consisted of dining à la carte from a brown bag and silently fighting with Ketan. My parents never said much to each other. It was my father's rule. He felt we should ride in silence, beginning our meditation the moment we left our house. When my mother spoke to my father about mundane matters such as money for bills and groceries, he answered in slight nods, as if to remind her she was breaking a rule.