S. (8 page)

I do hope you aren’t letting the lawn boys scalp that humpy section out by the roses with that extra-wide Bunton. They
should be spraying for aphids now. The peonies should be staked—the wire support hoops are in the garden shed, behind and above the rakes, on nails, in the same tangle that last year’s boys left them in. I
do
hate missing the azaleas—that deep pink is so stunning against the ocean this time of year, all steely-blue and sparkly and bitter cold and dotted with whitecaps and the first brave sailboats.

The cold I left home with is at last getting better. Since you have the address there’s no harm in telling you that the days are so hot and bright your lips and elbows keep cracking, but the nights can be quite chilly still. I didn’t bring enough warm clothes and sleep sometimes in a parka and longjohns and have become quite deft at draping myself in a sari. At first I was assigned to a trailer—the others with me were more Pearl’s age than mine and always wanted to go dancing—but now I’m in an A-frame I share with only two sannyasins, and these suitably mature. The word “sannyasin” originally meant someone who’s become a holy beggar wandering from place to place. Our guru says that we travel most when standing still. We wear purple and pink because those are sunset colors and the world, he thinks, is in terrible decline. Also these are at the “love end” of the spectrum. I’ve become quite brown and my hair quite unruly. You would hardly know your smooth old coefficient in that baby-making wave we together formed twenty years ago. We seem quite sweet in our Brighton apartment as I look back on it—for all of your ugly present noises.

Fondly,
S.

P.S.: If by any dreadful misestimation of your rights and powers you carry out your threat to show up here, please understand that you will be taken into custody by our
ashram security forces, a team of zealous young men I don’t think you will find as cute as I do. They wear lavender uniforms and carry real guns and all graduated in the top third of their classes at the Arizona Police Academy. You will be held in a little detention room filled with pictures of the Arhat while tapes of his discourses play continuously through a loudspeaker. You will be released only when (a) a sannyasin vouches for you as a visitor (b) you find yourself on fire with love of the Arhat and humbly request to join the ashram (c) you make a generous contribution to our manifold good works and promise to go away. Since (a) will not forthcome from me, nor, most likely, (b) from you (though your expertise would be very useful here—the medical services are overstrained and the head of the clinic, a woman called Ma Prapti, seems to be in a gloomy trance most of the time), you should save yourself the ignominy of (c) and stay where you are and take care of our joint property. I assume you will be renting the Cape place this summer. Be sure to send me half the proceeds.

May 26, 1986

Dear Mrs. Blithedale—

It filled me with limitless sorrow to receive the letter of your lawyers inquiring after the whereabouts of the principal amount so graciously made available to the work of the ashram some few years ago. Our accounts fail to show that any fixed term was set for the return of these most precious and cherished funds, nor that any rate of interest was determined. Had interest been your aim, perhaps you should have
entrusted these funds to a federally insured bank, with its glass windows and fashionably attired tellers and total lack of spiritual benefits.

But no, at such time by no means were you interested in the banks: you were interested in the peace that Brahman brings when reunited with your atman; you were interested in samadhi and casting off the sordid claims of our illusory material life. Your legal servants write that you now regret your months as a sannyasin with us and have re-embraced your forefathers’ creed of Presbyterianism—a Calvinist sect which presents earthly prosperity as a sign of divine election. We rejoice if you have thus purchased inner peace. Vishnu has many avatars.

However: we have been carefully consulting your records and conclude that your ascent to samadhi was regrettably arrested at the third, or Manipura, chakra. As you will doubtless remember, this is the “gem center,” whose presiding deity is Rudra, whose lotus displays ten blue petals with an inverted red triangle, and whose subtle-body site is the solar plexus. We now believe that the burning you felt there, which we joyously took as a sign of ascent toward the fourth chakra, Anahata, located at the level of the heart, may have been merely psychic resistance or simple indigestion. Your practice (abhyasana) of the asanas and mudras was ever desultory, Madame Blithedale, and your attachment to the five counterproductive vrittis of the psychomental stream (ignorance, individuality, passion, disgust, will to live) was never—we now sorrowfully feel—disengaged. The cleansing fire of asceticism (tapas) encountered in you an ego (aham) sheathed, as it were, in asbestos. Your vasanas—your subconscious sensations and urges—have stubbornly retained phalatrishna: the egoistic “thirst for fruits.”

Yet we cannot find it in our hearts to condemn you, to cast you out. Such is the lavish scale of our generosity that we would welcome you back. You would rejoice to behold the many practical improvements at Ashram Arhat made possible by the ocean of generosity of which your own constituted but a single small, though infinitely treasured, drop. Our work does not cease, that ocean must flow on! Even as I dictate this affectionate missive, the steel girders of our splendid mandir, our Hall of a Millionfold Joys, are rising and being thunderously riveted together! There is not time nor strength for the backward glance! Come and rejoin us and all accountings will be made anew! Your Presbyterian legal advisers merely cast doleful shadows upon your atman, which longs to be free. As the immortal Utterly Enlightened proclaimed in the blessed Dhammapada, “Sorrow cannot touch the man [or woman, the scribes assuredly meant to add] who is not in the bondage of anything, who owns nothing.”

Your eternal servant,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

May 26, 1986

Dear Mr. Rogers:

It filled me with sincere regret to hear of the loss of your two heads of prize cattle. However, your accusation of theft against the Ashram Arhat because the fence between us had its barbed wires snipped falls upon barren ground, for we are vegetarians at this place and have no need of rustling protein from you. So kindly look for your cattle elsewhere, among
your other ranching friends, who are rumored to relish liquor and gambling to the extent of unhinging their better judgment.

And no, we will not join you in the costs of repairing the fence and reinforcing the same. The fence is your affair, as all who are in our ashram wish to stay in and, unlike underfed steers living under sentence of death, they have no need of barbed wires.

With neighborly affection and esteem,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

May 26, 1986

Gentlemen:

The large unpaid bill for six Lincoln limousines must be a deplorable clerical error. I have referred it to our chief accountant, Ma Prem Nitya Kalpana, who is unfortunately enjoying two weeks of uninterrupted meditation.

With my generous blessings,
Shri Arhat Mindadali, M.A., Ph.D.
Supreme Meditator, Ashram Arhat

/spw

June 2

Dear Irving—

Just a quick Monday-morning note on my trusty office Selectric with its lovely augmented memory and magical erasure
features. I often think of you and assume that Midge has shared at least the gist of the tape I sent her it must have been three weeks ago. Time flies! Things hum along here, though the noon sun is getting so hot now the Master has decreed a siesta time from eleven-thirty to three. People were fainting in the fields, especially some of the girls who have been up half the night absorbing energy at the Kali Club.

Your lessons have really stood me in good stead—a lot of the younger people have complimented me on how flexible I am. They run the Salutations to the Sun at a somewhat slower pace than yours, but then you were trying to fight flab on middle-aged matrons where here the Master is getting us in training for Sahasrara. The adept who supervises our group—Bhava, his ashram name is—
cruelly
emphasizes heels flat on the floor on the forward stretch and not only the throat bent way back but the tongue out just as far and hard as you can do. It hurts at first and feels embarrassing but is the very best thing for the thyroid and even the viscera apparently. Then, on the standard asanas, he likes you to do the Fish out of the lotus position, and the strain on the insides of the thighs is
agony
, plus the ache on the top of your head after a while. And on the Pashchimottanasana I really can’t come near touching my forehead to the floor no matter how wide I spread my legs. But Bhava
loves
my Plough, he says, and I must say it’s always been my favorite: with my knees pressed against my ears and my bottom straight up in the air I always feel so
cozy
, like I used to as a little girl hiding behind the sofa, so cozy and safe and absolutely
me
—I hold it to the point that when I close my eyes I get these things that I don’t know if they’re what they call visualizations but I do feel I’m in another world, or
just
on the verge of it. They like us to hold the asanas, except of course the Locust and the Bow, for fifteen
deep breaths instead of the five you let us off with, you old softie. But some of the people, like this crybaby Vajna who’s in my group, just stop when they feel like it. There’s a lot of that kind of freedom here; nobody is “uptight.” Whatever we do is within the Master’s love, and that gives a great feeling of ease and suppleness. You should see me go into my headstand now—I absolutely
uncoil
and am up in about two big breaths, and using my elbows at the two other points, too, instead of the hands, which I could never bear to lift up before. Such a scaredy-cat! You were right—once you’ve found the zero point the trick is to
completely
relax your shoulders and you can go on upside-down forever. One tip, though—here they always follow the Cobra with the Locust and not the other way around the way you taught us. The Half-Locust (the Ardha-Shalabhasana) makes a very nice transition and the stretching in the abdomen doesn’t feel so violent then when you go into the Bow.

But the main thing I want to scold you about, dear Irving, is—you never told us about Kundalini! I mean, not really. Just hints, and asking at the end of a session if we felt anything at the base of our spines. As if a bunch of middle-aged women full of coffee and bran muffins would be feeling anything much except plain relief at having stopped. The reason I’m so “into” Kundalini suddenly is—do tell Midge—it’s my name! My ashram name. At last I met the Arhat and he gave me my proper subtle-body name.

Actually, for a week or more now I’ve been taking dictation from him instead of just typing out variations on form letters. Alinga, the least creepy of Durga’s assistants, came in and asked me if I could take dictation. I told her I knew nothing of shorthand but she said that didn’t matter since you’re basically there to inspire him. He loves women, not in the
way most men do or say they do but as
energy entities
, as vrittis in the ocean of prakriti. I of course was very nervous going into the presence of
The Master
but in fact he has this marvellous gift of taking you in with these enormous sad bulging bottomless eyes, of seeming to be letting you in on some huge unspoken deeply philosophical secret.

This first time, Alinga, who is very blond and slender and serene and efficient, led me back through the cubicles of the Uma Room—it’s not really a room, it’s a rather higgledy-piggledy arrangement of trailers with doors and walls cut through and welded back together to make a lot of office space—out through a breezeway across a kind of courtyard I’ve never seen before, with these old tan rustling trees that from the size of them were planted years and years ago. They had big bumpy pods hanging down, and smelled of something like cloves. This was the old adobe ranch house, the hacienda before the Arhat came and bought all these acres. There were cats on the veranda and pegs bits of rotten rope and harness were still hanging from. Inside, the air-conditioning began again. The furniture was what we New Englanders might call vulgar but may be the best you can buy around here—heavy squarish matching pieces with a silvery shiny look to the fabric, and plastic sleeves on the chair arms, and a lot of milk-glass and painted porcelain doodads displayed on open shelves, and just the hugest television set I’ve ever seen, the kind that projects onto a curved screen like you usually see only in bars.

The furniture didn’t really give the impression that anybody lived here, if you know what I mean—it was more like the window of a furniture store. But I suppose if you’re moksha you don’t leave the dents on things more sthula bodies do. He wasn’t in this living room but in one beyond, which
he uses as an office, with a lot of off-white padded contour furniture on swivels and casters and a long desk of bleached wood, the kind that looks as though powdered sugar has been rubbed into the grain. Alinga left us and I sat down on the opposite side of the desk and tried to take dictation, my hands all jumpy and the pad trying to slide off the knee of my slippery silk sari. Some rich patron of the ashram was trying to get her money back and that was what the letter was about. It got rather technical about Kundalini and he had to keep spelling things. Several times he stopped and asked me if I thought a certain sentence was funny enough. I hadn’t known any of it was supposed to be funny so I didn’t know how to react at first. But we got through the letter and he seemed pleased. “We will buffalo that old bitch,” he said, and then asked me if that was a correct American expression, “to buffalo.” I said it was and he smiled his beautiful warm sly smile, so detached and sweet. He has this darling little gap between his two front teeth. His purple turban is just as it is in the posters, only woolier, somehow, with a nap that takes the light differently as the strips of it twist. His robe I think was a very pale peach, so shimmery it looked white, and on his hands he had all these rings that I’m sure were very expensive and authentic jewels but reminded me of those paste things people at fairs used to fish for by operating a little bucket crane, after putting in a dime.