IMPOSTER by Sharon Solwitz
Split philodendron, spill of leafy hands. Caladium leaves wide as placemats offer shelter in the rain, which falls every afternoon from three to five. In the inscrutable depths of the greenery there’s a bird of paradise, a startling bright bloom with the bulk of a parrot. Actual parrots flap by, Day-glo green and common as robins. A young woman in a sari the color of baby aspirin sets a bucket down on the garden path and smiles anxiously. A bird alights on the top of her head. She has a narrow face and light brown hair, in a low ponytail. She thinks, not for this first time: am I in the right place?
It’s the courtyard of a well-appointed ashram in northern India, financed, along with the gold-leaf on the sanctuary dome, by wealthy Maharashtrans who don’t want to reincarnate as cats or rocks. They come for darshan with checks for Baba, walking behind him through the garden toward the audience chamber. They kneel down on the flagstone path and touch where his feet have trod.
The young woman and her boyfriend donated a hundred rupees, all they had when they stepped down from the third class bus from Bombay. That was two weeks ago, though for the woman – Janis – time has become cloudy and pointless. Today Webb is at a bank in Chakrapur trying to get his father to wire them money to fly home. She and Webb will be at odds about this though he doesn’t know it yet. Men and women sleep separately at the ashram, and they are disallowed all but essential exchanges. For access to the mind of God strictures are required. Janis has labored to accept the idea while Webb disallows strictures of any sort, one of many things she admires in him. She is twenty-three years old. Her married sister, beacon of efficiency, is studying for the bar and pregnant to boot. Janis has no interest in law or children (now) but in a different epoch she’d have married Webb, or wanted to. Admitted to wanting.
But it is 1969. In mostly Jewish St. Louis Park, Minnesota, in the 4‑bedroom ranch-style house where Janis grew up, her mother has had a mastectomy, she has started chemotherapy – freaky words. When Janis announced her open-ended trip to India with her live‑in boyfriend, she said Go. Live your life. Not even trying not to sound bitter. She doesn’t wear her prosthesis, as if to proclaim her loss, throw it in your face. No one else’s mother has breast cancer (no one she knows!).
With only $1000 between them in twenty-dollar traveler’s checks, Janis and Webb flew to London and headed east on the automotive kindness of strangers. Hippies of different nationalities drove them fifty, a hundred miles. They smoked the pot of their hosts, dined on bread and cheese, and the low-priced wine of whatever region. Janis, whose fear for her mother was trumped only by the same on her own behalf, sent weekly letters home annotating the sights conscientiously downbeat: the Doge’s palace in Venice (damp and dim. No one turns on lights); the Acropolis (spooky, with modern Athens down below). In the Middle East rides were farther between, but sights continued: the market in Damascus (rose petal tea sounds good but tastes nasty). The streets of Baghdad (no flying carpets, not to mention women). The Taj (see postcard). In Bombay at the American Express office there might have been news from home, but all she wanted was to get to the ashram. They had been on the road almost three months.
The last time she saw her parents was in the breakfast room of the St. Louis Park house. It was winter, a white, bright day, sun shining on the lazy susan in the middle of the table. Her father had tears in his eyes. The back of her mother’s hand was black and blue where the needle went in. Her hair was supposed to fall out so she had cut it short, like someone going to the electric chair.
But this is not a nourishing thought. She sinks to her hands and knees on the paving stones, dips her rag in the bucket, starts scrubbing, labor designed to bring her to the place of mental quiet that precedes satori. Assiduous with rag and bleach water, she allows thoughts to pass, sad and happy, allows images to spark then fade from her mind like the rashy patches of lichen under her scrubbing. Sometimes she digs with her fingernails, though the red stuff will be back the next day, and Uma, in charge of resident females, will not inspect. The product doesn’t matter, only the work, an act sufficient unto itself like eating or breathing. It would be easier if she had jeans on instead of a sari. The good thing about a sari is that it dries overnight, even in humidity. Bad thing, the thin cotton affords no knee protection. Thin herself on the ashram’s vegetarian diet (though it may be amoebic dysentery), she feels the bumpy surface of the stone as if against bone. But it’s what they came for – self-transcendence. What she at least remains bound to. She thinks of her mother’s curly red hair holding firm against the chemo. Janis’s hair – brown, bone straight and on the thin side – she rubber-bands behind her neck so she doesn’t have to think about it, and so why is she thinking of it? She takes a cleansing breath, wrings out the rag. Om nama shivaya.
A Jewish prayer comes to mind though she was raised, and feels, only nominally Jewish. All she knows is the Shema, a proclamation of faith in One God, and why is one god better than many? Is a king better than a council of elders? Federal government better than that of the States? Her grandmother made her say it at bedtime, and Janis, once, giddy with ten-year-old whimsicality, said the Christian prayer, Now I lay me down to sleep . . . Oops! Her grandmother didn’t laugh. She misses her grandmother. Shema yisrael adonai elohenu adonai echod. And now her thoughts are straying again, to a weird little boy she once babysat for who didn’t answer to his name and threw his toys out the window, and to her mother, who read The Second Sex and raged at the world of men but now seems to have lost all her new, independent energy (but how not, being sick), and Janis is not being mindful, she can’t stay in the moment for a split second.
She has reached the end of the path and of her work assignment – too soon, the gong hasn’t rung – remembering her normally fastidious mother vomiting at a restaurant – into a cloth napkin at their restaurant table, apologizing to the waiter who came by to remove the soiled white cloth and proffer another – when two young women emerge from the kitchen with a tub and some straw baskets. Like good disciples the women squat down on the terrace without looking at each other, dip their baskets into the tub, tossing the contents into the air. They catch what falls while clouds of dust form over and around them, profound and pointless like everything.
The women are Americans but called by Hindu names: Lakshmi; Kali. The day Janis arrived, Lakshmi, appointed her guide, took her to the women’s dorm and wound her into a sari. Lakshmi looked at home in hers though she had freckles and coarse brown Western-girl hair like Janis’s sister (Judith). Lakshmi was from Cleveland. She was born Eileen. She has been here fourteen months. The red dot in the middle of her forehead didn’t seem an affectation, simply a cosmetic choice. Three years younger than Janis, Lakshmi seemed her age or older, perhaps because, like Judith (formerly Judy), she was so sure of herself. She sat down on the cot beside Janis’s assigned cot and described the connection she’d felt with Baba just from looking at his picture in The Plain Dealer. She didn’t even get to see him in person though she’d waited outside the hall where he was speaking, but the morning she arrived at the ashram he gave her a jade bracelet. As if he had been expecting her. Lakshmi held up the circlet on her wrist while Janis tried not to feel jealous (and infantile for feeling jealous) at the thought of Baba’s impersonal welcome of her and Webb. Lakshmi went on, naming disciples of Baba’s whom he did or did not seem to honor. Kali, here two years, had yet to receive a gift. It might seem cruel but it’s his way of teaching, Lakshmi said. He gives each of us what we need.
That first evening Janis pondered whether Lakshmi’s self-assurance gained nourishment from Kali’s frustration. Janis’s B.A. was in Psychology; thus she ordered her emotional chaos. She felt sorry for Kali (whose birth name she never learned), and leery of Lakshmi for elevating herself at Kali’s expense. But as she entered into the ashram routine she noticed that at darshan and satsang Lakshmi sat to the immediate right of Baba’s raised dais, obviously high in the ashram hierarchy, and Janis was glad for her personalized sketch of the new social system. It was not unpleasant to feel sorry for Kali, the kind of woman, tall and lean with a long, haughty face, who ordinarily would have intimidated her.
Sadly for Janis, the feeling of superiority soon fades. Their days are routinized, personal chitchat discouraged, and the talk with Lakshmi becomes her one personal communication since her arrival. And today, two weeks in the ashram’s oddly estranging community, speaking to Webb only in rare bursts, her sense of her place in any community is eroding; she regards both women timidly. Their task seems magical, what goddesses do. Janis wipes her damp hands on a fold of her sari.
She is staring like an idiot when Lakshmi beckons her over. How’s it going? Lakshmi’s voice is so warm that Janis’s eyes tear up.
Can we talk while we work?
Kali’s labors go on without pause, garlands of rice rising into the air and falling back into the basket, leaving behind a suspended cloud of chaff that seems uncertain what to do with itself. If it’s in the spirit of bhakti, Lakshmi says gaily, even wryly. Janis feels a pulse of warmth toward Lakshmi and womankind. She squats down so that she and the two other women are at eye level.
It’s like I just got out of jail. I mean, just sitting here with you guys. Can I help?
Lakshmi hands her a basket. Janis tosses up the rice and after some spills learns to catch most of it. They work in silence which feels almost companionable. High above them the golden dome glitters in the sunlight, though it will rain later. Over the door to the kitchen is an arc of spidery Sanskrit, loops hanging from a bar. Lakshmi: Tat tvam asi.
Which means?
This is this! Lakshmi laughs without irony. You don’t have to whisper.
Janis nods emphatically. It sounded like Hebrew though, as she has moved farther and farther east, even English sounds like Hebrew sometimes. Adonai echod. Tat tvam asi. The Lord is one. Janis, who hated Sunday school and wasn’t bat mitzvahed, repeats the three declarations, to ignite the tinder of her ordinary thought into a blaze that will lift her skyward, though last night when she asked Webb if he had a mantra he said Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot! Or Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco?
Then Janis is chattering away, telling the two women the history of her love for Webb, and his for her, which she has begun to doubt, though she distrusts her doubt. Webb is comfortable with strangers and she so shy, she has to work not to be jealous! Words come easily. It was like being back in college. We’re like the witches in Macbeth! she offers. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble? Lakshmi nods sympathetically. Janis casts a glance at Kali, whose fingers are long and graceful on the basket of rice, not a grain of which hits the pavement. You’re so good at that, she says to Kali.
Without a change in expression, in one swift, graceful motion Kali rises with her basket and goes inside.
Suddenly Janis feels faint. In the world she came from, she and Lakshmi would have rolled their eyes. Mutual recognition of a third party’s peculiarity would have allowed her to dismiss it. But here in Chakrapur her heart is beating so loud that even if Lakshmi tried to reassure her she couldn’t have absorbed it. She’s afraid to look at Lakshmi for fear she might have aligned with Kali, an obviously perceptive woman who fled the void in Janis, the central ugliness that Janis can’t help now but see in herself. That these thoughts are neurotic she knows, but not whether it’s a new state or her essential self, come suddenly to light after being suppressed for twenty-three more or less reasonable years. Do Hindus have essential selves? Janis rubs her damp forehead, which has been damp, it seems, ever since they started this trip – envisioning a Red Cross airplane flying her from Bombay to an asylum in the Minnesota woods.
No one wears a watch at the ashram but there is a schedule, implemented by the soft-voiced gong. After work comes a rest period then the first meal of the day, followed by chanting, meditation, darshan or satsang, more rest, kitchen work, then the second and last meal. When the gong signals the end of work hour, disciples move about slowly and mindfully, the men in white, the women in orange, a languorous Hindu do-si-do. Janis heads as usual for meditation, fast track for enlightenment. Tat tvam asi. Advance to St. Charles Place. She’s about to enter the small room when Webb taps her shoulder.
Mission accomplished.
He talks as if they’re alone. His parents are sending money to American Express in Bombay. For two airfares and a night on the town, not that a night out around here will cost much! He’s proud of his success, neither of which (pride; success) is esteemed at the ashram. He’s ready to go tomorrow, but if she wants they can wait a few days. Drag it out. He’ll do that for her!
Lower your voice, she says.
Why? Will I wake the baby?
Talking to him she feels her normality return, although Kali’s apparent rejection still roils. How will we get to Bombay? she says.
I don’t know. Walk? He laughs. He smells like town. – Hitchhike? Or we can borrow a few rupees from Baba. He seems well-fixed. He laughs harder, he’s full of himself, a state he rises to in a crowd of people. God will provide.
Are you high, Webb?
Yeah right. I copped a lid from the long distance operator.
She examines him, his sturdy, quirky self that suddenly has no need for enlightenment. He puts an arm around her. She would like to feel held. But there was that ride out of Istanbul, his hand on the knee of a girl sprawled with them in the back of the van, so much spiritual work not to feel jealous. Her parents don’t like Webb though they’ve never said so. She used to think it was because he wasn’t Jewish. What if, she says, I want to stay?
Are you crazy? This place is so phony you can smell it. Baba probably fucks little girls!
Please be quiet.
No one is looking at them. The few disciples in hearing distance show no sign of disapproval, and she knows intellectually that the content of other people’s minds has no bearing on her spiritual progress, but she is frantic. She yearns stupidly for St. Louis Park – last fall when her mother was healthy, a competitive player of bridge and golf. Who would visit their cohabitation near the U but refused on principle to imbibe even a glass of water there (as if like Persephone she would be forbidden to leave), and Webb got crazy stoned all weekend because on Monday he’d have to face his class of surly sixth graders. The image throbs in her brain, pitiably, like the thought of home to someone sentenced to life behind bars.
She turns her back on Webb and enters the meditation room.
Meditation requires self-control, which in some opinions Janis lacks. But tonight she is resolute. Alone in the small room she flings herself on a cushion, crosses her legs, straightens her spine. The room is narrow, a scattering of cushions, a censer gone out. Three candles burn. Old incense and mildew – the smell has become familiar. Soon the chill of isolation abates. There is something she needs to understand as if her life depends on it. Something to lift her out of the slough of ordinariness – mediocrity – that she fears is her essential self. Compared to Judith, she is of course mediocre. But so is everyone next to Judith.
The practice here is bhakti yoga, nirvana through love of the guru. To this end she brings Baba’s round, caramel-colored face to mind, focusing on it with all the intensity of her mounting fearfulness. How to make yourself love someone? It seems harder than making yourself fall out of love. She envisions the people she loves, her parents, Judith (at times), her best friend from college, and above all Webb. But as these beloveds assemble in her mental corral, she can summon no feeling for them. They’re like once-cherished dolls from early childhood, faces dusty, generic. Or she has confused her doll with one of Judith’s that she’d coveted. Who is Webb? The thought lopes through her forcibly opened mind that the man she has spent nearly every one of the past thousand days with is an imposter. They both wanted to come to the ashram, he as much as she, and after two weeks he changed his mind. Perhaps he had his own private satori, leaving her on the wheel of birth and rebirth. In September he slept with the bookkeeper at the school where he’d started working. Just once. It was a mistake, he was a nervous new teacher trying to make himself feel better – the wrong way, he knew; it was Janis he loved. She believed him, and still does. For better or worse he doesn’t lie. Their three years together is longer than his father stayed with his mother.
No, she is the imposter.
She breathes steadily against the whirl of thought that supposedly torments every trekker of the path she has chosen. She must disregard it, let it play on the screen of her perfect mind like the illusion it is. When she sees The Clear Light, not only will Kali’s curse dissolve but she and Webb will love each other as they did in college, she will become more attractive to men and women alike or else it won’t matter; she’ll look upon people and human aspiration with sorrow and pity. She’ll take her GRE’s, which she has avoided because she doesn’t test well. She’ll get a master’s degree; a Ph.D. Dr. Janis Rubin. Then there is only the candle flickering in front of the photo of the big-bellied elderly baby who is the guru’s guru, and the musky smell of incense combined with the smell of urine, an odor she has come to associate with India and does not resist.
When the gong rings the approach of the first meal she is almost tranquil. In the courtyard the bright sky stings her eyes; the garden breathes with indifferent life. With ten free minutes she walks away from the dining hall toward a life-size statue of Shiva holding Shakti on his lap, eight arms between them. Around the statue is a low circular stone bench, and seated upon it is a young man in Western clothes, at his feet a new nylon backpack. He wears a look of mild embarrassment, nothing spacey, just the kind of pain that Western kids bring for Baba to assuage.
She squats beside him like a yogi and listens to his story. Thirty hours ago in Long Island his mother had made him spaghetti and meatballs. His father called him a bum and wouldn’t drive him to the airport. You’re making the biggest mistake of your life. The newcomer puts his shaggy head in his hands.
Janis feels sympathy, an airy, agreeable emotion. She wants to pat his arm. It’s a shock at first, being here, she says. It’s a completely different world. Her words clunk in her mind, overwrought and phony, but she pushes on, telling him about their college friend Lonesome Bill, a formerly abrasive, nail-biting math genius in whose company it was hard to spend more than half an hour. Last summer Bill studied with Baba, now he lives on a commune near Hayward, Wisconsin. People come to him for spiritual advice or just to sit in the grass outside the yurt he built. She speaks more vivaciously than she has in weeks. Bill is why we came here. For transformation. It can happen.
This she knows is true. The newcomer nods, still bewildered. He has a beard most guys can’t grow till they’re out of college but his face is round like a baby’s. His eyes are shiny and sad. Through his eyes Janis sees herself as an insider and feels warmth from his need for her. She sits still, breathing softly so as not to disturb the warm place in her chest.
During lunch the thirty or so devotees, mostly American and European, sit on one side of a long narrow mat facing a bare white wall. Food will be proffered, dahl, vegetables, rice, puris. What you point to will be placed on the wide flat leaf that is your dinner plate. You aren’t supposed to talk and you must finish what you have chosen. Those are rules.
Janis is walking her new friend up the three steps to the dining room when Webb hails them. There’s a thinning of the atmosphere of heat and anguish. Facts emerge: He’s Marcus Carlucci, from Watertown, Mass. He dropped out of engineering school and lost his 2‑S. Webb commiserates, having given up his teaching deferment. Back in the States Webb will have to apply for a C.O. whether or not he’s a genuine pacifist. They agree: It’s a moral dilemma.
Janis marvels at Webb’s social skills with an underlay of resentment (she herself seems to have lost the few she had). At the door to the dining room Marcus is commandeered by more senior male devotees. Webb touches her arm. I have to get out of here, even if I have to go alone.
With godhead on the line she maintains detachment. Where will you go, back to Minneapolis?
Who knows, Nepal? Amsterdam?
You’re such a jerk, she wants to say. She says, trying not to whine, We always do what you want to do!
He snorts amazement. That’s completely false.
It’s not! You have all the power in this relationship, do you deny that?
He looks at her as if she’s nuts, and though she believed what she said when she said it, she is now less sure. He goes in to eat. A throng of Westerners in Indian dress envelop her on their way to lunch. She is surrounded. Abandoned.
Having no desire for food she returns to the bench in the garden, looks up at Shiva and Shakti and the flowering boughs over their heads. Her thoughts circle like donkeys around a mill wheel, not that anything useful like flour is being produced. In college with Webb their joined lives had felt significant. Their friends, continually forging and breaking alliances, esteemed them as a couple. Holy, someone had said of them, which was perhaps excessive. But she had loved the feel of him – smell, taste, touch; hair and skin – and the sweet shiver in every organ in her body at the sight of him. He once confessed to her that when she walked out of the room he felt a little shaky. Good, she had said, So do I, envisioning their hand-in‑hand walk along continually glittering pathways. And now? Now her mother is sick. Now Webb is different. Or she is different. Fear is the floor she is standing on, under which are other layers of fear like flooring in an old house that you keep pulling up: Carpet, linoleum, older linoleum, then a layer of sticky tar over what isn’t even good wood.
Almost fainting with terror she returns to the meditation room. She will stay here, she will neither eat nor sleep till she beholds the Void or the face of God; she can will it. Just before they left Minneapolis they saw a movie in which starving Depression-era people competed for a money prize by dancing until all but one couple was on their feet. She could win that prize.
She sits with crossed legs and a stiff back, trying to rise on simple willpower beyond memory and time – then to her mind comes the image of her mother’s naked chest. In actual fact, she hasn’t seen her mother’s chest since the surgery, though others have, including Judith. She has never seen anyone with a bilateral radical mastectomy, bilateral radical mastectomy, a phrase that shoots little pins into her brain. The dream image is sharply lit and feels like life: from armpit to armpit across her mother’s featureless chest is a long, whitish, not quite straight line like a badly sewn zipper.
Janis waits for the image to give way as always, but this one persists. Her mother’s face is young and fresh, as it looked in her wedding photo – in a pale blue Forties suit with a long fitted jacket that accentuates her full bust and tiny waist. Janis loves that picture. Her mother’s hair waves back from her forehead in a pompadour, at the midpoint of which a tiny, downward-pointing carat of hair makes what is called a widow’s peak giving her face the shape of a heart. Janis too has a widow’s peak, though it doesn’t show since she parts her hair in the middle. Engrossed by her mother’s face, she avoids for a moment the ruined chest – then as if stung by some horrible Indian insect she bounds out of the meditation room, though she can’t outstrip what she has just perceived: The face over the mutilated chest doesn’t belong to her mother; it is her own.
Satsang is an hour-long weekly session in which Baba answers his devotees’ questions, translated by a lean, fortyish Indian man called Professor. Last week, although silent, Janis had enjoyed the hour, a welcome change from the tension of self-scrutiny. It was like school where, though not a star, she had been comfortable. Now she drifts into the room in a daze of anguish.
In the melange of white and orange – saris and dhotis – she finds a place between two women from Scotland, Durga and Ganesha; she doesn’t know their real names. No lights are on, and the one high window transmits only the grayness of the gathering monsoon. Should she ask for an Indian name? Her freshman year changing Janice to Janis she felt momentarily glamorous. She bought a guitar and learned to play, and sang while she played, though her voice was nothing like Janis Joplin’s. More than one guy had said she was pretty, she remembers (pathetically) as an old woman remembers the days of her youth. Across the room she looks in the blur of ashram white for Webb and Marcus Carlucci. Then Baba walks in, loose-jointed like a cowboy, his skin the orange-brown of his knee-length robe. He seems to glow in the dim room. Could she feel love for this person?
While the devotees around her raise their hands she labors to shape her confusion into a single question for him to answer. Do I belong with Webb? Should I go or stay? Why do I feel so bad?
Bad hardly describes it. Her body seems to be dissolving, cell walls thinning, molecules loosening their bonds, as if she were gravely ill. She considers, optimistically, the sensation of physical decay as a metaphor, or even Step One in the dissolution of the ego that is satori. Beside her, Durga’s hand goes up; Janis tries to pay attention. Durga is interested in the place of women in the Hindu religion. Are there female gurus? Baba claps his hands – he likes the question – though when the discussion has concluded, it isn’t clear what his answer was. Another devotee has qualms about the mental state called nirvana. What does it mean to experience utter bliss when there is suffering in the world? Professor’s translations roll out into the room in his lilting but crisp English – The Enlightened One is fully contented within himself. He knows the perfumed breath of a baby and the stench of a rotting corpse. There is no contradiction.
Guru and aging disciple smile at each other. Across the room Webb is rolling his eyes. She shakes her head at him (don’t be an asshole) though she has forgotten what he’s mocking. Abruptly rain starts to fall – a sudden loud drumming like a million pebbles beating on the roof. Baba smiles in a way she thinks Webb would call smug. Then Baba is laughing. Having missed the question she listens hard to Professor, trying to figure out what was asked.
Oh, that is clever. But cleverness is not required for the self-contentment in which the guru abides, in fact it is contraindicated, that is a medical term, yes? Professor’s voice reflects the amusement in Baba’s face: Between guru and disciple there is no difference. It is so. As in the matter of the stinking corpse and sweet baby there is no difference, the guru as always remains self-contented. Nevertheless when the guru, being self-contented, becomes pleased with the disciple, then the disciple by his grace receives all powers and all knowledge!
Baba makes a circle with thumb and middle finger then opens his hand.
More questions are asked and answered. But Janis is fixed on what she had just heard: The disciple by his grace receives all powers. By whose grace? she wonders. Lonesome Bill had described meditating with Baba and feeling or experiencing – there was no exact word – what was called enlightenment (that word too was misleading, he said). The process was called shaktipat, meaning a transfer of divine energy. She stares at Baba, trying to imagine divine energy coursing across the room from him to her. Bill hadn’t explicitly said, but it must, she thinks, have happened to him, Lonesome Bill Fradkin, neurotic, Jewish, ambitious nerd.
Janis rarely lets herself act on a whim but her impulse now will not be suppressed. She waves her hand back and forth till she is acknowledged. She stands though she might be higher than Baba on his raised dais (hoping it isn’t a violation). She lifts her head high on the stem of her neck: You said if we please you, you can give us enlightenment, is that right? Or help us attain it? The man’s face is blank but she will not falter. She looks right into his caramel-colored eyes. I have to ask (I need to know) what pleases you. Maybe it’s hard to describe (is it?). But my boyfriend wants to go home. I want to do what’s right. Can you help me?
Professor translates for Baba, as with the other questions. Baba’s reply is brief, and no more extensive in translation: You should go with what you came with.
The words cease almost before they have begun, leaving silence in the dim, low-ceilinged room. Baba is looking in her direction but she can’t tell if his gaze actually rests on her. She looks from him to Professor and back again. Compared to the other responses, this one, so brief and concrete, is like a gate latching shut. Naturally her feelings are hurt. But in matters of life and death one can transcend ego. Although no one else had asked a follow‑up, she says – loud, to keep her voice from trembling – I’m willing to do anything, Baba. I want to divest myself of what blocks me. I’m serious, I meditate all the time –
Professor and Baba do not look at each other but something seems to pass between them. Professor helps Baba to his feet. The two exit the room. The session is over.
She has had no food since dinner last night, and she performs her kitchen duties swallowing saliva. Webb hisses in her ear, You’d put our lives in the hands of that asshole? I thought you were smarter than that! – but she’s too light-headed to take him seriously. As devotees stream toward dinner she walks through the dwindling rain to the meditation room. She doesn’t need Webb’s love or Baba’s shaktipat. She will use hunger to focus her concentration. She will fast like a good Jew on Yom Kippur, and she won’t quit after twenty-four hours. She will sit on this cushion till she knows what she has come to know. Till satori dawns or she falls over, dead.
At first her thoughts run like a freight train. Go with what you came with? Bullshit! She doesn’t respect this guru enough to be hurt by him. She might leave with Webb, or stay, as she wishes. Either way it wouldn’t be for Baba or Webb but for herself (although ego is illusion). She might go home and apply to medical school. She’d have to take organic chemistry and study for the MCATs. But if she were a doctor, with supposed power over life and death, people would gaze respectfully as she entered a room. She could go into cancer research, find what makes cells run amok. She pictures an awards ceremony, Mom (cancer free), applauding in the front row seat she reserved for her. Then her crossed legs begin to ache. Her back is cold in her damp sari, which seems to emit a sour smell. Doubts come. Her patients die. Their spouses sue. That is, if she got into med school, which is far from certain.
For a while her thoughts thumb their mocking noses at her. Curses she would like to suppress and doesn’t mean (or does she?) wriggle into her mind and lay their eggs. Judith dead in childbirth (the mind can go anywhere). She imagines herself giving Baba a blowjob while Kali caresses her breasts – letting images do their dirtiest, careful not to quell, because quelling just sharpens the thing. And she is walking a tinker-toy beam leading stick upon stick to the point or pointlessness of which she is the center and the galvanizing force. She spreads her arms, straightens her spine, inhaling the air in which her body abides to keep her knees from shaking (in high school gym she was bad on the balance beam). She must stand still and calm over what is happening below: A funeral service. A coffin, its half-lid open on her mother’s dead face. The drive to the cemetery then back to the house. Shiva (Hebrew not Hindi), seven days of consolation and deli trays. And she, balanced high above calamity, because if she falls there will be no end to her falling.
Then, after the coffin fades from her mind and before the mean-spirited hope can arise that Judith will fail the bar exam, she feels a sharp prick on the underside of her ankle, similar to the bite of a horse fly. Instead of abating, the pain augments. She tries to uncross her legs, which seem suddenly loath to move. She pulls back her sari to see the wound, but the room is lit only by candles and a small Krishna lamp. To her fingers her ankle feels slightly swollen. It itches and hurts simultaneously. With both hands she unlocks her crossed legs, pushes off the cushion, and catches out of the corner of her eye a glint of movement, something small, yellowish. A squeal swells in her throat but there is no sound. She hurls herself out the door.
It’s near dusk and the rain has stopped but the flagstones are beaded with water, the air for once almost cool. She tries to stand but her leg won’t bend. On her hands and a single knee she creeps toward lights at the end of the garden, remembering the bus station in Bombay and a boy of thirteen or so with a single leg, bent the wrong way and thin as a spider’s leg. Torso on a wheeled platform, he propelled himself along the floor with his hands, smiling at everyone whether or not they gave him money. His smile seemed genuine. She essays a smile in the dark; feels demented. Help? The cry forms in her mind but her lungs and diaphragm take no action. She pulls herself up onto the first step to the women’s dorm as water drips from leaves and gutters, and fireflies collect on the trees and bushes in clusters, bouquets of little lights, so much thicker than in her childhood backyard. Webb? She tries to shout his name and emits a faint squawk.
The first person to find her is Marcus, the new disciple. In his loose white ashram clothes he looks thin, thin enough to avoid military service, she thinks irrelevantly. Unable to speak, she taps her leg which extends straight out in front of her, a log from ankle to thigh. He asks if she sprained it and she shakes her head no. Her teeth are chattering.
Hold on, he says. I’ll get someone.
She’s afraid to let him go. Hot. Feel? She places his hand on her ankle.
Holy shit! He yells out, Hey! Anybody! We could use a little help! into the damp, green Indian night, and she holds his hand, remembering a movie in which a man saved his son from a rattlesnake bite by cutting across the wound and sucking out the venom. He could do it if he had a knife, she thinks. She would love him then.
Eventually Professor arrives, Baba sauntering behind him. Devotees carry her to the stone bench beside Shakti and Shiva, where a gas lamp sheds a wavering light. A parrot on Shiva’s shoulder flutters its wings but remains perched. Meanwhile Baba has slipped off his sandal. The parrot watches with one eye then the other, as if it has its doubts, as Baba places his bare sole upon her ankle. Then it’s as if she can see what of course she can’t, her parents’ house in St. Louis Park, cellophane-covered lamp shades, white brocade couch. Another couple is visiting for bridge, and the phone rings. Her mom runs for it; neither parent can ignore a ringing phone. It’s Judith: Just wondering what our prodigal is up to, while here in the garden Baba is patting her on the shoulder. He says something she doesn’t understand and walks off trailing disciples. Professor helps her to a sitting position. –It is the bite of a scorpion. They can be injurious. Then he too is gone. Syllables wrap around her spine: scor-pi-on. She laughs tremulously, looks at Marcus and laughs again. They regard her leg, whose swelling is gone, it seems. In the gas lamp light it looks almost shapely, just a mark the size of a pencil point near the anklebone. The talus, she thinks. Funny, pretty word. She welcomes it to her mind all the way from freshman biology. Thank you, she says to Marcus, and to herself: Could I love this man?
I didn’t do anything, Marcus says softly, eyes alight but not for her. You know, that guy is for real.
Later that night she tells Webb about Baba’s magic and her plan to stay another month at least. Naturally Webb is outraged. Let him cure twenty scorpion bites and terminal cancer! She’s sending him back alone, to sixth grade kids who despise him, and probably a letter from his draft board sending him straight to Viet Nam! Outside the entrance to the women’s dorm where Janis plans to lie on her cot contemplating the miracle, he takes her by the shoulders, shows her his wet, enraged face, tears he blames on her. Is this what you want? Do you feel powerful now?
She shakes her head no. She feels the opposite of powerful. She wants to talk to her mother. Get her to fly here.
Years later, divorced but not from Webb, Janis will google Baba and ashram and the name of the town (not Chakrapur), and learn of Lakshmi’s memoir, out of print and disputable, accusing Baba, among other things, of sexual misconduct. Was it true? It didn’t seem to matter. Baba died a few years back while Janis’s mother was still going strong, winning at duplicate bridge, running half-marathons, without benefit of Hindu sorcery.
In 1969, however, the day after Marcus from Watertown became one of Baba’s most fervent disciples, Webb took the bus back to Bombay and Janis does what she planned, walks down to the village of Chakrapur and phones home. Her mother accepts the charges, shrieking with relief at the sound of her voice then with rage at her selfishness. Did Janis think time stood still while she went to hell and gone? Her sister’s bar exam is coming up! She, happy grandma, is up to her ears in babycare! Janis is an aunt, if it matters!
At first Janis tries to defend herself. If you knew what just happened! She tries to find better words to tell her story, something to propel her mother onto a plane. He could save your life! Listen to me! Again she pities herself, the less remarkable child, the one her mother doesn’t brag about on the phone, when she remembers something her mother said to her years ago. Janis had once raged, weeping, that she was jealous of Judith, to which her mother replied, Oh she’s jealous of you too. And although Janis didn’t believe her then, and still doesn’t, she feels, hanging up the long distance telephone in the small whitewashed room in Chakrapur, what she didn’t feel in her mother’s kitchen in St. Louis Park – a swelling of love for her mother. It is followed quickly by terror, and the two feelings seesaw on a mental playground from beyond which she regards the Indian street, riksha taxis drawn by skinny barefoot men, the crowd of wide-eyed children and adults that has suddenly materialized outside the door to the office. They aren’t begging. As if they know she has nothing to give them. Or else they’re simply content with the novelty of her presence in their village. The sky is the pale blue of late morning. She smells flowers and shit.
There are more things in heaven and earth, she thinks, trying to remember the end of the quote, awash for a moment in the benign malice of things. There is no path to the heart of it.
Sharon Solwitz is the author of the novel Bloody Mary (Sarabande Books, 2003) and the short story collection Blood and Milk (Sarabande Books, 1997). Her short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Mademoiselle, and The Best American Short Stories 2012.