The Empty Chair (19 page)

No arrangements had been made for a car to pick us up at the airport. So there I was, plunged headlong into the middle of that amazing LSD trip called India—thank God I was acid-free at the moment!—with the
padrone
fading fast. My 17-year-old Great Mother instincts kicked in; finally, I got to take care of
him
. I have no memory of how we got to the Taj—our hotel. All I know is that for a few days I was a pint-sized Patton. A real rite of passage.
Man.
We were up half the night. Kura's temperature was crowding 105° but he refused to see a doctor. I fell back on junkie survival skills and rang for ice. The bellboys brought up bucketsful—they were all in love with me. O Jesus, by the time I left Dodge, I had that hotel
wired.
I whined and wheedled and finally shoved Kura into the bath. He whinged
and whinnied and threw mini-tantrums, fought me all the way. That did the trick though. His fever broke at last.

Satsang was at 9:30 in the morning. It was already dawn and neither of us had slept a wink. When I suggested we put it off till tomorrow, Kura had a hissy fit. I argued my point: the Great Guru did his “questions and answers” seven days a week, year-round. What was the rush? But he was adamant.

Our car never showed. (Of course it didn't.) We hung around the lobby like resentful drunks, half-hypnotized by the remorseful staff's honeyed apologies and assurances this grievous error would soon be rectified. The longer we waited, the deeper we sunk in the comic quicksand of penitent, sacred hospitality. To save us from being swallowed up completely, I demanded a cab.

I know madcap taxi rides through India are an awful
cliché but
that
one I'll never forget. On the other side of my window there was some kind of full-tilt Halloween/
Carnaval
goin' on: a blurry burlesque of the undead, hands outstretched for flesh and candy. Whenever we stopped to make our way around some road-blocking cow—the latter apparently being the only living thing the municipality gave a shit about—the zombies pressed against the glass anew like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. Kura compulsively checked his Patek, the perfect way to remain oblivious to our motorized rampage. I'll admit my mordant fascination with the hairs-breadth escapes of those on the street whom the driver seemed determined to kill caused me to drop the ball on consulting the map the concierge had painstakingly notated. In a short time, we were lost. Kura sat as if frozen to his seat, his forehead too-warm to the touch. Soon we ground to a complete halt, with nary a cow in sight. I couldn't help but ask the driver why, knowing his answer would be as meaningless as my question.

“Accident,” he said, through a jubilant slash of a mouth. A chorus of bobble-headed Ganeshas on the dash shook in exuberant affirmation.

Without warning, Kura bolted out the door, through the protozoa and into the festive ooze. I threw sodden rupees at the driver and gave chase.

I yelled after him but the
padrone
didn't respond. When by some small miracle I finally caught up, I shepherded him into a grimy cafe. The return of his fever rendered Kura somewhat docile. I begged him to stay put while I went for directions. I paid the harpy who ran the place for a Coke twenty times over, for which she expressed time-sensitive gratitude. It was like some fucked-up hockey game—I'd probably bought about 15 minutes of bench time for Kura before heading back to the ice to get my nose broken.

I lurched into the street. I had no intention to seek help from pedestrians (if that's what one could call them) and decided my best chance was a soldier standing in the middle of the street. He wasn't directing traffic; his main function, it seemed, was to sweat and scowl. He had a machine gun slung over his shoulder. I got in his face and pronounced the name of the Great Guru. His response wasn't so much cantankerous as outright hostile, with the implicit threat of pending violence to my person. I wondered if he harbored ill feelings toward the
siddha
but concluded it more likely that I'd violated a cultural code with my pretty young Western thing's pushiness. I wound up back on the sidewalk, where pleas for money crashed against me like insects on a windshield.

Hangdog and defeated, I rejoined my man. Kura was nursing a cup of tea our hostess had thoughtfully prepared—and why shouldn't she have? She smelled a tip that might conceivably cover a few months' rent. I
was
glad to see Kura hydrating and my only hope was she'd kept the kettle on long enough to evict the tap water's microbial tenants. (Though I figured what Kura already had was probably enough to kill whatever was in the water anyway.) I was about to announce the plan: to call it a day and return to the Taj for a much needed rest. Tomorrow, we'd have a proper car and driver and bring a porter along to make sure we reached our destination.

Then he spoke, for the first time all morning.

“The proprietress knows how to find him.”

He looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, like they'd become engaged while I was gone.

“Apparently,” he said, “his shop is just round the corner.”

A freakish serenity overtook him as we ambled onto acrid Mogul Lane, for we'd entered a world of myth that belonged as much to Kura as it did to Bombay. His eyes dilated and the color returned to his skin. We strolled along the broken spine of a vendor-choked passage already so familiar from the photographs that graced Kura's collection of books by and about the Great Guru. He walked stealthily, almost regally, to his destiny—toward the man he hoped against hope would consent to become his teacher. The man he was certain would see through him, then see him through . . .

In the years leading up to our sojourn, Kura spent countless hours in his library inhabiting the jostling panorama of Mogul Lane, memorizing—
memorializing
—all its parts, re-creating shadowy and sunlit corners, summoning smells aroused by the baked-on heat of the Indian sun, flipping back and forth from
The
Book of Satsang
text to the tattered visual archive of the boulevard's temples and buildings, loitering amongst the shapes and forms of his pictorial montage with enormous patience and
intent
,
so when at last he found himself in the actuality
of it (en route to the tobacconist's) he was like an avid child dropped down to Narnia, in hot pursuit of Aslan's lair.

And as in a fairy tale, there came that time when the road took one no further. For today, all of Maharashtra seemed congregated in that mangy Mogul corridor and the throngs blocked our passage. Kura was undeterred. I held on to his coattails while he employed that extraordinary assassin's energy, feinting and dodging his way to nirvana. In just a short while, we'd cut to the head of the line of the shop with the TOBACCO sign (in English) . . . but we were still outside, VIPs without backstage passes. Two weaponless military men graced the door. While their presence seemed mostly ceremonial, entering the shop didn't look feasible. It was so crowded in there, it may not have been humanly possible—I doubt we'd have been able to squeeze in, even if the guards themselves gave us a shove.

Something was wrong with this picture but we were just too frazzled and sick to notice. (My turn to be feverish.) The Great Guru gave satsang every day, which by anecdote and definition was a dignified, orderly affair. Then how to explain the unruly, chaotic scene that presented itself? Kura's investigations had informed that no more than 30 to 35 devotees showed up on a given morning; the energetic integrity of a true Master
saw to it there were never too few disciples, nor too many.

But
this
mob was off the hook.

I watched Kura intently. I'd seen that look of laser-like determination before. He espied a pole and sprang into action. He ascended about 10 feet before stopping short at the bottoms of the bare feet of a gaggle of men who clung at the top like monkeys on a swizzle stick. Like them, Kura could now peer over the heads of the storefront lookee-loos and straight into the shop itself. I read his lips: “His
chair!” he said to himself, in transport.
“His chair . . .”
I wondered if the fever was returning and I suppose it was, in the form of obsessive devotion. He was utterly fixated on storming the sanctum sanctorum. I saw the algorithms of egress play across his face, rippling its features . . . when he signaled, I met him at the base of the pole and we exchanged places—and thank God, because all I wanted was to get to higher ground. In that moment I remember acquiring
that itchy, creepy case of nerves one can catch in a faraway place on too little sleep. I shimmied up, found my footing on some sort of electrical box, then turned my eyes to the crush of spectators. They didn't
look
very spiritual—
au contraire.
Not
like seekers and disciples, anyway. The way they were decked out, they might as well have been auditioning for a Bollywood musical
.
In the photo montage Kura put together in Paris, the pilgrims of Mogul Lane wore a wide array of costumes but the emphasis was decidedly on the modest, the simple, the austere.
Some
were “dressed,” but we're talking Sunday best, nothing glam. You didn't need Emily Post to tell you satsang etiquette skewed toward less is more. (Bless
is more?) But
these
folks . . .
these
folks were bejeweled, bedizened egos on parade. Of course the Great Guru never wore anything but a threadbare kurta—at least he didn't wear a
nappy
, which definitely would
not
have been okay!
[laughs]
Not a big fan of the Gandhi look. What I'm saying is, to sit at his feet dressed to the tits was gauche. You're in the man's
home
, for crissake, not the parliament building. And even then. At the time, the discrepancy meant nothing to me. I was just a decadent trespasser, a cultural interloper, a wannabe seductress—a pole girl!—an American expat junkie runaway with three kinds of VD by the time she was 13. But I'm sure I found the fashion show enthralling. I must have interpreted all the finery as part of just another holiday. You know,
Indian Holiday #6,342
.

Below me, the untouchables were being pushed, whisked and twirled into the street by fresh packs of snappily dressed cops. I'd seen many soldiers in the short time since we'd arrived but now it seemed like whole dragoons were being summoned to Tobacco Road. Jostled from multiple directions past women in glittering saris, the disenfranchised surged to the sidewalks where they received further prods from handsome householders in gold-embroidered sherwanis, the goal being not just to herd them from the shop's entrance but to whirl them out of existence. In the midst of my surveillance, I saw a figure improbably squeeze through the bottleneck at the door of Satsang Central.
Kura!
The bouncers missed him completely, as they were busy hassling with a clutch of urchins that delighted in a game whose main objective was to make a big show of rushing the door and then swiftly retreating
just in time to elude the authorities, a maneuver which scored the most points if finessed without being kicked, grabbed, molested or otherwise apprehended. The most adroit of these mischief-makers found time to brazenly ape the look and mood of the policeman who had given chase or whatever fancy onlookers expressed disdain. To escape capture, the dirtball scalawags took impressive, flying leaps into a mosh pit of their peers that extended into the street, ruffling a few feathers and unraveling more than a few
dhotis
of the hydra-footed gorgon of perfumed devotees waiting peaceably on line.

I redirected my gaze. The sun no longer reflected on the glass. The inside of the shop, a-brim with those awaiting satsang, was totally visible. To my astonishment, Kura had already reached his goal: breathless and illumined, he stood before the Great Guru's humble throne, beautifully surrendered. He brought the palms of his hands together in prayerful salutation, touched them to his forehead and crumpled into a lotus, neatly filling the spot that only seconds before barely contained the fidgety blob of an obese woman who, in a seizure of urgency, had decamped to answer nature's karmically ill-timed call. Kura's assured, brazen, somehow dignified arrival caused nary a stir. Befittingly, he now had the best seat in the house.

I will never forget that princely, boyish head swiveling, eyes trying to find my own. He squinted through the window, scanning at street level before remembering where he'd left me; his gaze lifted and caught me on my roost. A sunshine smile split open his face because he knew I'd bore affectionate witness to his mystic, acrobatic victory.

I still think now what I thought then—in spite of everything that was to happen, Kura had come home.

The next day, we ate a late lunch.

“Wasn't that delicious? The chef's from Morocco. Are you sure you had enough food? . . . I know it's cold, Bruce, but I'd rather do this outside. They'll bring heaters and it'll get toasty right away, I promise—and some coffees and candies . . . Esme? Can you bring two cappuccinos? And a shitload of agave . . . some fruit and cheese? And those faboo little pastries? And more wine! Thank you, Es!”