The Guru Looked Good: An Impious Memoir

In the Backseat

I am squeezed between two people I don’t know in the backseat of someone’s car. I just met these people, got their number from the notice board at the ashram, the huge yoga complex in the Catskills, where I’ve been visiting my sisters all weekend. The four guys with the car were going my way — back to New York City — and said they’d be happy to take me along. It was one of the things I liked so much about the ashram.

People were always helping each other, like we were all on the same team.

I don’t talk much in the car though. Instead, I wear my new Walkman headphones and play the tape that I bought this afternoon over and over. It’s a tape of just one voice singing Sanskrit syllables over and over — four notes up, four notes down — not a real melody, but the dull rhythm keeps my thoughts kind of frozen, where I want them. It’s Gurumayi’s voice chanting, her clear, unvarnished voice echoing in my head. She’s chanting the mantra, Om Namah Shivaya, and I hold onto her voice and the words that everyone in the ashram says are sacred. I grip them as if they could save my life.

I don’t want to go where I’m going, back to the apartment, back to Jeffrey. He will laugh if I try to tell him how great the weekend was. I wish I could just go someplace by myself where I could get up early in the morning and meditate and chant and do all the things that Gurumayi says you need to do to be happy. I’ll do anything to be happier.

But Jeffrey will be furious if I say any of this to him. Maybe when I walk into the apartment I’ll forget all about it. Maybe the smell of dinner cooking and pot smoke, the familiar sound of baseball on TV will make me remember what a great life I’ve got. Maybe that huge fight we had before I left — or that whole week of fights, really, when I felt myself transforming into an old woman I felt so dead and miserable — maybe that was no big deal.

I think back to just a few hours ago. The ashram was so soft. I think of those plush carpeted meditation halls, lit by small candles, that delicate scent of incense. I remember sitting in thick dark silence. I remember how people ushered me from one part of the day to the next — from the pre-dawn shuttle bus to the morning chant, then into breakfast, then over to the spacious laundry room where I folded white cotton sheets with twenty other people until lunch. I thought of the Amrits — cozy places scattered throughout the ashram where you could go for coffee and elaborate pastries baked that very morning by people who got up at 3 a.m. to have them ready. Amrit meant nectar in Sanksrit someone had told me and it was true. Everything in Amrit tasted of ambrosia.

Everything was so prepared and orderly in the ashram. In some places, gorgeous and elegant — with chandeliers and marble and fountains. In other, less public places the ashram was plain as if there wasn’t really enough money for all those buildings and dining rooms and meditation halls and gardens — but everything was done as if someone cared and was paying attention, like the way every dorm had a cardboard box filled with folded cleaning rags. Even the stack of clean trays waiting at the head of the lunch line looked beautiful to me. Same with the vacuumed corridors, every window ledge wiped clean, and the wooden bunk where I could sleep without worrying what anyone else was thinking.

People seemed to like each other up in the ashram. See God in Each Other is written all over the place.

At home things are different. Jeffrey only likes people who are witty and talk fast, and it’s better if they grew up in Manhattan, like him. His stereo equipment has to be top-of-the-line and he won’t go to a concert unless the seats are good. He takes pride in eating very rare steak and ice-cold water. He talks on the telephone and watches TV at the same time. He’s good at backgammon, buys cocaine on Friday nights and doesn’t go outdoors unless he has to. He used to want to be a writer. Now he works at his father’s mail-order jewelry company.

We’re almost the opposite in everything. The thing is, he’s the only person I can count on who — no matter what happens — will always say he loves me and convince me of it.

Thirteen years ago when I was eighteen Jeffrey was the first real boyfriend I liked, the first one I went to bed with, the first one I moved in with. We lasted five years. Then I left. Then I met Natvar. He was a yoga teacher. He gave me a bear hug when I came to class and told me I was wonderful. I quit work. I moved into his school. I wanted to help him be successful with the wonderful yoga that he taught. And then he became my master. He said he knew what was wrong with me and I believed him.

It took me seven years to get away from Natvar. I have sworn I will never do anything spiritual again. Jeffrey came to visit me last year in London as soon as I told him I’d gotten away. It was like a honeymoon. We had sex and ate steak and went to Dylan concerts and smoked pot— all things I hadn’t been allowed under Natvar. I felt happy for the first time in a long long time. I thought I’d never get depressed again.

It was my idea to come back to New York, to Jeffrey, my first big love and move back in together. I thought it would be like a Woody Allen movie: I’d be Annie Hall with a real we’re-in-love lover and the phone ringing with invitations, and I’d make a long plywood desk in the spare bedroom and write.

I’ve been back in New York with Jeffrey for six months. Instead of a dream come true, though, it’s been violent and bitter. We fight a lot and it is getting worse. We hit each other sometimes. I slammed a door last week so hard I smashed a hole in the wall. I feel my old depression — that I promised Jeffrey would never come back because I really thought it wouldn’t — I feel it creeping in. I mustn’t let it. This huge move back from England was my defiance, my creation, my chin-up to the world that I could be happy. And now I am getting lost again.

It was a relief to go away for the weekend. But I didn’t plan on liking the ashram so much. I only went because my sisters invited me.

I disappeared four years ago with Natvar and a handful of his ardent supporters. We lived in Greece and then in London. My parents and sisters never knew exactly where I was.

When I got away from Natvar last year I wrote to my two sisters, explaining where I had been, what had been going on. I wanted them to know that it wasn’t me who had disappeared on them. That was Natvar’s servant, I said, someone whose soul had been kidnapped. I told them a little of what it had been like — the violence, the sadism — but mostly I came humbly, as a supplicant, someone who had done wrong and needed to be forgiven. My two sisters made a show of welcoming me back, but I knew they weren’t too sure. I had to prove myself if I wanted their real friendship to return.

With Jeffrey too I felt I had to prove something. As if those years with Natvar show there’s something wrong with me. Jeffrey never would have done that, given everything up to be ground under the heel of someone else’s shoe. I don’t know why I did it. I won’t do it again. I want a life that I can show off to other people, not one I have to hide.

Since I’ve been away my sisters have both really gotten into the ashram and its guru, a woman they call Gurumayi. It started when they visited me years ago at Natvar’s yoga school. Now one sister, Durga, has just gotten back from six months in India and is on staff up in the Catskills, meaning she lives and works there full-time. Agnes, the other sister, is in college out west but always comes and spends her summers in the ashram. My mother said she used to visit the ashram while I was away just to see Durga and Agnes, but now she goes just because she likes it. Even my father, I’m told, has visited.

Maybe the things I heard up at the ashram this past weekend are true. Maybe life will go better if I start meditating, chanting, saying the mantra again. I did all these things with Natvar. At least, in the beginning. Baba Muktananda’s sweet old-man face, displayed all over the ashram, seemed to welcome and beckon to me like an old friend. Natvar had been Baba’s disciple and for a long time I had thought of Baba as my guru. The new guru, Gurumayi, I am not so sure about. But Baba Muktananda I still like even though he’s not alive anymore. Maybe I have to give up on this writer-in-New-York-City idea again. I fail at it every time I try. Maybe I should just accept that I am not a real writer.

Just the thought that I am not a real writer makes me feel like I will slip off the ledge again into that dark dark place I thought I was safe from. It terrifies me that depression could be so close again. I must not return there. Better to reach for one of Baba’s books where he says all I need to do is meditate if I want to be happy. It sounds right. Maybe, without Natvar this time, it will work.

The car I’m in finally pulls up near Washington Square Park at the ugly but fancy building Jeffrey and I live in because his family gave him an apartment there. The four guys in the car all wish me well like they are my brothers. They have been so easy to be with.

I keep the headphones on until I am just outside our front door up on the fourteenth floor, which is really the thirteenth, and then I take them off and go inside. It’s about 6 o’clock and there it is, all before me, the cozy dinnertime scene that feels like home. The aroma of pot smoke. Jeffrey is sitting on the couch, leaning back in jeans and a tee-shirt, watching television and making dinner as he always does, using a wide atlas from his childhood set across his lap as a counter top. He’s skinning chicken with a pair of scissors in his left hand, flinging scraps of raw skin over to Golem, the black Manx cat poised at his side. I could just ease on in here and everything would just keep going as it always has.

Hi, Jeffrey says, glancing my way. How was it? He tilts his chin up for a light kiss.

It was good, I answer, sitting down beside him. I had a great time. My words sound flat. They fall into emptiness as if I were talking to myself, or rehearsing lines alone in an unfurnished room. But I keep going. It was a lot better than I expected.

Yeah? says Jeffrey. What did you do with all those peaceful vegetarians? He picks up the channel changer as he asks.

Oh, I got up early. I meditated. My words don’t connect with the pictures I have in my mind of sitting on stone steps in the warm dawn air, drinking hot sweet tea, chanting with crowds of people, hearing a monk say into a microphone that anyone who wants to can feel profound joy all the time, no matter what.

Jeffrey says he’s been shopping. I follow him into the bedroom where he shows me a green and orange ceramic frog, the latest member of his frog collection. I say it’s great.

I finger the string of small white pearls on my wrist. Jeffrey hasn’t noticed them. They’re new. They were a gift. They are part of this past weekend that seems so important right now.

I can’t imagine that things will get much friendlier tonight and besides I can’t keep talking without saying what I am thinking. I might as well go for it. You know, I begin, I’d really like to keep meditating. Okay, he says, flopping back down on the couch. I guess I could live with that.

I mean seriously. Like every day, early in the morning. Maybe, I say, I should sleep alone, just for one month, in the second bedroom. It would make getting up early easier.

That does it. The bedroom part. Jeffrey explodes. If that’s what you want, why the fuck don’t you leave right now, he shouts.

All right, I will, I yell back. I knew it. Every time I have my own idea of what I want to do he doesn’t like it. I head straight for the door. I am ready for this. He thinks it’ll be like every other time, that I’ll be back in a day or two because I have nowhere else to go, but he is wrong. This time is different, this time I have something waiting for me, a world with people and meaning. I’m sure of it.

I pick up the bag I just recently put down and slam the metal front door. I put the headphones back on, the rhythmic drone resumes. I need the sound of that chant to keep my feet moving, to remember what I am doing. Because that’s what’s frightening. I’ve slammed the front door a million times and never been able to stay away. Even after seven years with Natvar, I came back. Only these headphones — that voice — make it possible tonight, telling me Keep Going, Keep Going, You’ll Be All Right.

In God’s Presence

All weekend I had been on my best behavior, trying to win back my sisters’ trust. They seemed like they had become best friends while I’d been away. I wasn’t sure there was room for me. I felt like the unpopular kid — the wallflower — trying to get back with the in-crowd. They were both younger than me. And it hadn’t always been like this. Not at all.

When we were little, Durga’s name was Liz. Liz had been my first little sister. She was like my mother, I thought. All the grown-ups said so when they visited. To me, this meant she was awkward, shy, and didn’t have many friends. I didn’t want to be like her any more than I wanted to be like my mother, and I never thought I would be. I was like my dad, I thought, success came easy to us.

Agnes came along later, cute and looking up to me like I was a movie star. It was easy to like Agnes. She was my baby sister, someone I took care of.

But then Liz swallowed a bunch of pills and it wasn’t so easy to dismiss her. She was fifteen and I was eighteen and as we both moved out of childhood and began talking to each other more I thought with surprise that we might be friends. Little by little, I watched as she transformed from a kid on the sidelines to a confident girl with very short hair, bicycling around Boston, making 16mm films, enjoying her lovers. I wondered, back then, how to get a life like that, one that made me happy. Maybe I had been wrong about her. And about me. And about who was better, my mother or my father.

Liz said she’d always hated her name and now she wanted us to call her Durga, the Sanskrit name that Gurumayi had given her. To me, that weekend, Durga seemed very at ease in the Catskills ashram where she worked in the Art Department, learning to computer typeset. She was still quiet, like she’d been when we were kids. Now in her late twenties, she’d given up on the filmmaker ideas she’d had when in college, but the awkwardness I’d seen in her when we were kids had an eccentric appeal now. My parents had always called her the artistic one. Next to her I felt second rate, a failed writer who had spent too much time selling out as a secretary. It was a little strange, seeing Liz with permed hair and painted nails, but the ashram was a pretty dressed-up place.

Agnes, young enough to still be in college, was always laughing and making jokes for the small groups who joined us for tea in the Amrit. She too seemed at home here amongst people she’d been visiting for years. She entertained with stories of cleaning houses and going to school in Tucson. Just like Durga’s Boston life years ago, Agnes’s life now sounded so much better than the mess I had back in Manhattan with Jeffrey — not to mention the mess with Natvar before that and a few more I could think of. I couldn’t remember being happy since I was twelve. My sisters had something I didn’t: some secret knowledge about how to have a good life.

All weekend I was surprised by how often Agnes and Durga brought Gurumayi into the conversation, even when talking about the most ordinary things. It made me squirm to hear Agnes say as we waited on line for breakfast, Gurumayi was in my dream last night. She said the name Gurumayi as if she were referring to a god. Durga carried a notebook with Gurumayi’s photo glued to the cover.

There were pictures of Gurumayi everywhere, her large brown eyes looking at you from big framed photos hung on walls in corridors, in the Amrits and dining room and all the different meditation halls. She was pretty, just a few years older than me, dark-haired and Indian and always dressed in red because she was a swami, a monk.

I had seen quite a few regular swamis around the ashram, most of them men, all dressed in different shades of red and orange. Baba had ordained the swamis years ago and given each of them a long Sanskrit name. I knew the swamis had taken vows of celibacy. Some of them were teachers and public speakers. Others were sort of background figures, doing more ordinary sevas. Seva was the word for the work you did in the ashram. It meant service and you were supposed to think of it more as a form of prayer than as work. At least, that’s what Natvar used to tell us.

More than anything else that weekend my sisters wanted me to meet Gurumayi. She came every night to the evening program and at the end of it everyone could go up and meet her. My sisters told me to dress up and hurry. They said that if we got there early — since it was my first visit and we were sisters — the hall monitors might seat us up front. They said they’d never been seated up front before.

The three of us stepped off the shuttle bus in the soft summer evening light and began following the crowd towards the huge, glass-walled pavilion called The Mandap. It means ‘temple’, Agnes explained. The Mandap stood with its strange bubblegum-pink dome at the bottom of a paved, tree-lined drive surrounded by sweeping lawns and tended gardens. The Mandap wasn’t open yet when we arrived, but lines were already forming, snaking back up the hill: one line for women, one for men. The women’s line was three times as long. Everyone was carrying something to sit on. Some people held tidy tote bags or just a cushion under their arm. Others were weighed down with messy collections of pillows and folding meditation seats. Mostly no one was talking. Hall monitors — women dressed as perfectly as Barbies — stood on duty every few yards, watching over the lines of people waiting to get in. I had seen hall monitors at every chant, making sure people sat where they were supposed to sit. They were usually women and always looked so efficient — with sleek hair tied back with fancy bows, blouses tucked in, everything matching as if they’d been born with clothes on. Usually, hall monitors were smiling and gracious. Sometimes they looked angry as if it was very hard to be so polite all the time.

With the confidence of a staff member, Durga ignored the lines that night, walking right up to the front where she spoke with a hall monitor dressed in a streamlined red suit and white panty-hose who nodded and beckoned for us to follow. We left our shoes tidily stacked on one of the long shelves at the entrance and stepped into the huge almost empty pavilion. It was like being in an airplane hangar, the ceiling so high. The walls, reaching up into the lofty wide-spreading dome, were of glass looking out onto more gardens and lawns. We walked across an empty expanse of smooth green marble, up to the front where about twelve musicians were clustered, tuning instruments and adjusting microphones. With a gracious movement of her arm and another smile, the hall monitor gestured for us to sit.

As soon as she left my sisters showed their excitement. It’s auspicious, they whispered, setting out their cushions and then their asanas, rectangles of white wool that everyone here meditated on because that’s what Baba Muktananda had recommended. My sisters had long since abandoned the plain asanas I’d given them years ago from Natvar’s school. Now they had more elaborate ones from the ashram bookstore. The asanas the ashram sold were expensive, beautiful, thick and plush with gorgeous embroidered silk borders. Durga had told me the bookstore asanas were made by the staff in the Sewing Room. Somewhere here there was a Sewing Room.

Durga and Agnes settled into cross-legged positions next to me and closed their eyes, their full cotton skirts spread over their knees. I spread my skirt over my knees too. Durga had told me before I left the city to bring skirts you can sit in and only shirts with sleeves. Sleeveless things aren’t allowed. We weren’t supposed to wear shorts either. I didn’t mind a few rules. If this place could really show me something new and different it would be worth it.

I sat on my borrowed cushion and looked around. Just a few yards from me, Gurumayi’s chair, oversize and made of clear plexiglass, stood on a carpeted platform with two or three white marble steps leading up to it. I’d be able to see Gurumayi very close up. Behind her chair was a high wall of small dark green tiles at the top of which were the words Om Guru Om spelled out in chunky brass letters. Above her chair, suspended on invisible threads, hung a large framed photograph of Baba Muktananda, Gurumayi’s guru, looking down over everyone.

On either side of Gurumayi’s chair stood matching end tables, made of the same clear plexiglass as her chair. On the table on the right sat a small framed photo of Baba Muktananda and on the table on the left was a small framed sepia photo of Baba’s guru, Bade Baba. I remembered how Baba Muktananda had always spoken with huge affection and respect for his guru. He said he owed Bade Baba everything. There was a temple dedicated to Bade Baba just a few steps away from the Mandap.

Twenty minutes later the Mandap was almost full. People had been filing in while hall monitors moved quickly up and down the aisles in their stocking feet, quietly organizing people into crowded rows, all the men on one side of the giant hall, the women on the other. There were hundreds of us. Though hardly anyone was speaking there was a buzz of movement and hushed voices. A chanting tape was playing now through loudspeakers. Most people were sitting on the floor with their eyes closed. Every now and then I looked around, but mostly I too was trying to be quiet inside so that I could receive all that this program with Gurumayi and then my anticipated meeting with her might hold. I wasn’t sure I wanted all this, but I was going to give it my best shot. And if my sisters liked it so much, there must be something to it. At least it wasn’t Jeffrey’s world with his insistence on quick and easy pleasures.

Agnes and Durga had told me they would take me up in darshan at the end of the program. That’s when they would introduce me to Gurumayi. From my years with Natvar I knew that darshan was the time when you went up to the guru, offered a gift and bowed down to receive her blessing. I’d heard that sometimes the guru spoke to you, or looked at you. It was a moment of closeness when something direct might happen between the guru and the devotee. I hoped something would happen between me and Gurumayi.

All weekend I had heard people telling dramatic stories during mealtimes or while we were folding all those white cotton sheets. Some described seeing lights in meditation. One or two told stories about how the guru had proved she knew their secrets. It would be nice to have a tangible experience like that, some kind of proof that something was actually going on here. I hoped Gurumayi would notice me. I had brought a yellow rose to give to her in darshan because I remembered that it had been Baba’s favorite flower. I hoped the yellow rose would signal to Gurumayi that I used to pray to Baba, her guru, that I’d kept a copy of one of his books under my pillow for years, that I was not brand new to all this.

A hall monitor padded up behind us and was gently touching Agnes’s shoulder, whispering in her ear. We had to move, she said. She was so sorry. There was a mistake. We couldn’t sit up front after all. We gathered up our cushions and asanas and were led down the aisle, all the way to the back and onto the grass outside the pavilion to the overflow crowd. I didn’t mind, but my sisters were crushed. I thought that was too good to be true, sighed Durga.

The music from the chanting tape faded. People opened their eyes and looked forward with straight spines and expectant expressions. A man with a big smile and a tailored suit stood up on a small carpeted platform at the front of the Mandap, to the side of Gurumayi’s empty chair. I could see him close up on one of the TV monitors. He leaned forward into a microphone and said his name, and that he was from San Diego, that he was a financial consultant and had been practicing this yoga — Siddha Yoga — for 11 years. He looked a little too clean-cut, a little too cheery for me, but I hastened to correct myself. I was probably being too cynical. I tried not to imagine what Jeffrey would say if he were here.

One by one, the man up front introduced a series of speakers all of whom were upbeat and sure of themselves. They each told stories of how meditation had made their lives better or of some amazing encounter with Gurumayi. One woman read a story about a seeker who struggled for years cleaning pigpens in the home of his guru and how he’d become enlightened because he never questioned his guru.

Finally, a balding swami stood up at the microphone wearing dark orange robes. He spoke about the wonders of chanting. All you had to do, he said, was give yourself to the chant fully and it would transform you through the power of its mantras and the guru’s intention. It wasn’t a process you had to understand, he added. It was just something to participate in wholeheartedly and to trust. Let the guru do the rest, the swami urged in a gentle, kind voice.

The musicians began to play, people closed their eyes and some began to sway. We began to chant. I liked it. It had a good tune and a crisp rhythm. My own voice disappeared into the wall of sound created by hundreds of people chanting in perfect unison. I tried to think of nothing else, to fill my mind simply with the syllables, the music and my own yearning for something to happen.

For a moment I opened my eyes, just in time to see her. Not everyone noticed Gurumayi pausing at the back of the huge hall to step out of a pair of soft red shoes. It almost felt like a private moment between her and me. And then she was gliding up one of the aisles to the front. Her body was draped in red — long sleeves and a robe of soft fabric that fell to the ground. She wore a red pillbox hat on her head, almost a cap. Her hair was dark and short, like in the photographs I’d seen. She looked poised and elegant. As she passed, some people brought their hands together in prayer and gazed up at her. It seemed kind of drippy and pious to me.

As the chant continued, I watched Gurumayi ascend the three steps to her chair. With her back to us, she stood for a moment, looking up at the photograph of Baba. She bowed, touching her forehead to the seat of the chair, turned and tucked up her legs under her skirts, sitting cross-legged. She leaned briefly over to her right where a pretty teenage girl was kneeling, ready, by the end-table. The girl nodded as Gurumayi said something into her ear. I wondered what it could be. What kinds of things did Gurumayi whisper to her assistants?

In the meantime, a man in a suit had brought forward a microphone on a long boom and respectfully positioned it near Gurumayi’s mouth. Her voice joined the chant, loud, adding a whole new element of importance to the moment. She was here.

The chant got faster and faster, the syllables running together, the melody racing up and down. I could see on the screen a close-up of Gurumayi smiling broadly now as if she could not contain herself, looking out over the crowd with delight and raising her arms into the air as if to carry everyone a few planes higher. Lots of people were lifting their arms too as the chant soared, as if they couldn’t help themselves, as if they were abandoned to the spirit of the music. And then, as the chant reached a peak and a crescendo, it began to slow down, little by little, until finally it came to a hushed end. For a few moments the silence pulsed as though the whole world was waiting, suspended in the lingering memory of the music. My eyes were closed, my spine was straight. I felt alert and still, ready to receive anything.

Gurumayi began to speak, her voice seeming to take the silence and shape it into words. She said what I remembered Baba saying in old videos when he began to speak, that she welcomed us with all her heart, with great respect and love. You know, she began, a lot of people ask me why we aren’t going out and helping poor people instead of sitting around and meditating. Shouldn’t we be fighting political corruption and poverty and war? Gurumayi paused here and sighed. Some people in the audience giggled as if they already knew the answer to this one. Don’t you know, she went on, her voice deep and like honey, that what you do here in Baba’s ashram — your meditation, your chanting, the selfless service you perform — all of this is worth far more than any other work in the world. To know your own Self is the greatest social work there is.

I liked the sound of that. It made sense to me. If I knew myself — or my Self, as they said here — wouldn’t I be a better person, more able? More functional? Not a tangled knot of depression and uselessness, someone who didn’t seem capable of accomplishing anything? Maybe this was the way to go.

Gurumayi spoke for some time, glancing down now and then at the white pages that lay in front of her on a clear plexiglass stand. Mostly though she looked up at us. I was taken by the richness of her voice, her accent pleasant and unusual. She never mangled her words, but pronounced every syllable deliberately and carefully. She told stories of what it was like being with Baba, how strict he had been, how rebellious she had often felt, but how always it was Baba who was right in the end, Baba who knew best. I miss him, she said, her voice breaking just a little. But I know he is here with me, with you. One thing you can be sure of, the guru never leaves you.

She closed her talk as she had begun it, with Baba’s words: With great respect and love, I welcome you all with all my heart.

It felt good like someone was saying, the way Baba had said to me years ago in his books, I see you, I know you. You want something important from life. Here it is.

Then the cheerful MC was back and inviting us to come forward for darshan in an orderly fashion. Everyone seemed to stand up at once and what had been tidy obedient rows became a moving throng. The musicians launched into the chant again. Come on, said Durga, standing up. Stay close, she added as we joined some kind of mass line that hardly seemed to move.

We waited, creeping forward by tiny increments every few minutes. Gurumayi might ask you what you do, Agnes whispered. You should think of what you’ll say.

God, I hope not, I answered and Agnes giggled. I hated that question. For the last six months since I’d been back in New York, I’d been a secretary again, but I loathed that answer, symbol of my failure. I could not say I was a writer. That was just something I had always wanted to be. I’d only written scraps, here and there. It didn’t count. I thought Gurumayi would dismiss me if she thought I was just a secretary. I hoped she would not ask.

As we inched closer I could see above the heads of the crowd to Gurumayi up front. She was still cross-legged on her wide chair. She’d been in the same position for almost three hours. I knew I couldn’t sit like that for so long, but to Gurumayi it seemed effortless. She was laughing a lot up there and I noticed that when she laughed everyone around her laughed too and people craned forward to see what was going on as if they didn’t want to miss a thing. The lights were bright, the music loud, activity everywhere, everyone dressed carefully, many in fancy clothes I could never afford.

Everything focused ultimately on Gurumayi in her huge chair, leaning down to greet the crowds. In her hand she held a long thick wand of dark blue peacock feathers bound together with a velvet handle. She used the tips of the feathers to touch each person as they bowed to her in a row of about five or six at a time. She brushed the feathers along people’s backs, sometimes bouncing them lightly off a person’s head, switching the wand from one hand to the other every few minutes. This was how Baba used to give darshan. Sometimes she leaned forward to listen as someone spoke to her, someone who was kneeling at the bottom of the steps and craning up to be heard. I could see Gurumayi nodding and gesturing to the assistants that clustered on either side of her chair and its side tables. For awhile she cuddled a baby on her lap. Sometimes she just looked serious and in her own world. But the feathers always kept moving, brushing people’s backs and bouncing lightly off their shoulders.

Hall monitors stood at the front of the lines, near the base of the marble steps, ushering people forward. Most people did not kneel for long. They glanced up at Gurumayi, hoping to catch her eye. They placed a gift on the steps or money into a basket. There were a lot of stuffed animals scattered at Gurumayi’s feet, some elaborately wrapped gifts, potted flowers, and always coconuts, the traditional gift. I knew that giving the guru a coconut was considered a symbol of offering up your ego, your rigid sense of who you were. The coconut had a hard shell, but when that shell was broken there was sweet milk inside. That was the idea. You offer the guru your tough outer shell and she breaks it to reveal your inner sweetness. My sisters told me how the deli next door to the ashram that sold milk, Wonderbread and cigarettes, was shrewd enough to keep fresh coconuts on hand for devotees.

When gifts accumulated around the chair I watched as a few of the younger helpers — some of them just little kids, proud in their Sunday best — gathered them up and disappeared quickly — as if they were very busy — behind the wall of dark green tiles. I wondered what went on back there. There were so many mysteries in this place.

Finally, it was our turn. With a sister on either side of me, I stepped forward and knelt down. I couldn’t bring myself to bow down even further, but my sisters bobbed their foreheads to the floor. I looked up, holding my yellow rose, Baba’s favorite, symbol of my years of yogic history. Gurumayi was looking down. Her expression was gentle and slightly searching as if she sincerely wanted to know how we were. She brushed the feathers across my face. They were soft, like a gentle caress, and fragrant. I placed the rose in a basket. Durga and Agnes were leaning forward with big smiles. They each had an arm around my shoulders. This is our sister, they were saying. Gurumayi looked at me. Her eyes were brown and gentle. It felt like she could see everything, that words were unnecessary, just a formality.

Three sisters? she asked, laughing as she raised her right hand, the one that was not holding the feather wand. She linked her thumb and forefinger in a circle, letting the other three fingers stand up straight in the classic A-O.K. gesture. I’d seen statues of gods and goddesses with their fingers in that position. I thought it might mean something. My sisters were nodding and we were all laughing as Gurumayi laughed. I wasn’t sure