Coattail Karma

by Verlin Darrow

  The next time I tried to put the taxi in first gear, there was no problem at all. I cautiously tooled back to the main road and waited several minutes for a reasonable-by-US-standards gap in the traffic. Then I pulled out and accelerated through the three gears, getting up to speed very gradually in the underpowered vehicle—to the annoyance of everyone behind me.

  Driving was even more terrifying than I’d imagined. My Indian counterparts pulled out to pass one another, and then played chicken with oncoming traffic. Most of the time, they veered away at the last possible instant—back into their lane, onto the shoulder, or even off the road entirely. Sometimes cars that had just been leapfrogged passed the cars that had passed them. Other times, it seemed certain that two stubborn chicken participants—vehicles simultaneously passing from each direction—were doomed to die in head-on collisions. But somehow they all managed to stay alive and torment me further. Perhaps there was a sort of traffic-based Darwinism in effect—the less adept practitioners had died off over the years.

  Fortunately, it was only a forty-five-minute ride to Ahmednagar’s city limits. I just barely recognized the sign I was watching for. It was surrounded by bilingual and trilingual billboards advertising restaurants, hotels, and a “world-class destination grog shop,” whatever that was.

  I turned right at the designated traffic light onto a busy city street. Now I saw many more bicycles, mopeds, and motorized tricycles than cars. All of these played chicken, too. Why would an elderly woman on a bicycle pit herself against a truck?

  Within a couple of blocks, I spied an old man in a blue turban sitting cross-legged by the side of the road. I was watching for one, based on Marco’s message. His long white beard was wispy on the ends, and he wore clean black slacks and a light-brown, short-sleeved shirt. His back was up against a low, pale-pink stucco wall, which marked the boundary of a small park. This patch of green was almost completely covered with unsupervised young boys. They careened in waves, knocking each other down, wrestling, and generally raising hell.

  Miraculously, I found a parking spot just past this scene, pulled into it, and shut off the engine. I felt a great sense of relief.

  I checked on Burt. When I leaned in and drew close, his eyes fluttered. When I touched his shoulder, they opened. His pupils were dilated, and he couldn’t seem to focus on me. I watched him try to move, but he couldn’t do that either. None of this seemed to alarm him.

  “Everything’s fine,” I told him, hoping this was true. “You just rest.”

  He closed his eyes again, and his body went slack. He was back asleep—or whatever he’d been doing.

  As I approached the elderly man we’d passed up the street, he stared at me with eyes so dark they were nearly black. Despite his white beard, his eyebrows were gray, and the few stray tendrils of hair that escaped his dark blue turban were even blacker than his eyes. His skin was dark leather, with a multitude of deep grooves—they were more pronounced than wrinkles. His nose dominated his face. It was slender and straight, but it ran from above his bushy eyebrows all the way down to his low-slung thin lips.

  His gaze was intense. I got the sense that he’d known I was coming—that he knew who I was. The kids behind him in the park continued their wild play. It was distracting.

  “Good day,” the man said in a crisp high-pitched voice as I drew closer. His English was very English.

  I couldn’t sense his energy at all, which was strange. “Hello,” I said, squatting down beside him.

  “Are you Marco’s boy?” he asked, swiveling to face me. “You have his energy.”

  “I guess I am,” I said. “You can sense people’s energy? I usually can, but you don’t seem to have any. How is that?”

  “That’s an impertinent question,” he replied sharply. “I shall answer the first part as a courtesy, but you are certainly not entitled to know me—to know my energy. Who do you think you are?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m new. I don’t know anything.” I converted my squatting to sitting. About three feet of distance, fifty years, and a radically different culture separated us.

  “I can see that. Here’s the answer to your first question. I see auras. These are the visual aspect of personal energy.”

  “Oh, I see. Thank you. My name is Sid Menk.”

  He looked up and to the right briefly. “No, it isn’t,” he said. “My name is Faroud.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m not Sid?”

  “No.” He peered at me with his liquid, dark eyes. He could’ve been x-raying me. I could feel his gaze inside me, scanning me. “You’ll find out,” he said. “It’s better to be surprised. Life needs to sneak up on you like a tiger in a river.”

  “I thought cats hated water,” I said.

  “Bengali tigers are excellent swimmers,” he told me. “This is well known.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  A small rock hit me on the back of my shoulder. I pivoted, and a gaggle of boys laughed and pointed at me. All of them were very dark-skinned, more so than anyone I’d seen in India so far. In fact, they were darker than almost any African-Americans I’d ever met. They wore raggedy khaki shorts and various T-shirts with American slogans on them. I saw one that read “Just Do It,” and another one proclaimed “Elvis Is Still The King” in silver glitter. I decided to ignore them.

  “I’m supposed to ask you for directions,” I told Faroud.

  “To anywhere in particular?” His scowl and his glare competed for preeminence.

  “I’m sorry. To Meher Baba’s pilgrim center—the one near his tomb.”

  “Ah. Of course. Marco is there. And others,” he said. He looked up and away again for a moment. “It will be very interesting for you,” he continued. “Difficult, but interesting. Perhaps you would like a blessing?”

  “Sure. But first, who are you?”

  “I have told you all you need to know in words. My name is Faroud. I am this man you see before you.” His gaze was fierce. I got the sense that it always was, whether I was there to annoy him or not.

  He ducked, and a pebble whizzed through the space his head had just occupied. He adjusted his blue turban as he sat back up. His facial expression never changed.

  “Have they ever managed to hit you?” I asked, turning to watch several boys run away.

  “Not so far.” He smiled for the first time, revealing brown, broken teeth. “Close your eyes,” Faroud said.

  I did. He touched me on the forehead—on my third eye—and an incredibly bright white light burst into view. There could be no purer shade of white. I couldn’t imagine anything brighter, either. Would I be blinded by it, even with my eyes closed?

  The experience continued for some time—I had no idea for how long. Eventually, I realized Faroud wasn’t sending me the light as some sort of transmission. Faroud was the light. He was revealing himself to me in his own way. The blessing he’d offered was the opportunity to be with his essence—to commune with it, to know it firsthand. The light lived in a Faroud suit.

  Then the phenomenon stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I opened my eyes, and the world was more detailed now. The difference was subtle, but noticeable. Who knows what else he had done? I also felt fully rested, as though I’d had a full night’s sleep.

  “You decided to let me know who you are, after all,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. By the way, small boys have taken all the things out of your pockets,” he told me.

  “What? Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “I am not a policeman.” He gazed at me evenly, seemingly indifferent to my concern. “Do you want directions or not?” he asked sharply.

  I was surprised by his tone. And very annoyed. I understood why he found me impertinent and ignorant at first. But this was different. I was supposed to not care that I’d just been robbed? Who wouldn’t care?

  “It was a new phone,” I said. “A very expensive phone.”

  “Oh, what good fortune for the boys!” Fa
roud said, clapping his weathered hands together. “They’ll be so happy when they find out how much money they can get.”

  “Do you know them? Can we get my stuff back?” I asked. I turned and studied the crowd of boys in the park. They ignored me.

  “Why are you obsessed by this turn of events?” Faroud asked. “Your things are elsewhere now. Life goes on.”

  I sighed an ungracious, theatrical sigh. “Fine. I’d love directions, please.”

  He rattled off a litany of distances and turns based on obscure landmarks. The Chennai Tower? The Aghani mill? The Temple of Satisfactions? I had no hope of following Faroud’s directions.

  “I can’t remember all that,” I said.

  “You should have written it down,” he said. He didn’t care at all.

  “Maybe you could repeat it more slowly,” I suggested. What will I do if this guy wouldn’t help me?

  “No.” He smiled again. His ruined teeth were painful to look at.

  I stood up and considered my options, patting the travel pouch that was hanging around my neck under my shirt. At least I still had my passport and the credit card I’d managed to hang onto throughout my ordeal. Perhaps I could simply ask someone else how to get to Baba’s. After all, how many saints’ tombs could there be in Ahmednagar?

  “The man in your taxi is coming,” Faroud said.

  I turned. Burt lurched toward us, so I hurried over and grabbed his arm. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. Very well. Very, very well.” He eyed Faroud from several paces away. “Who is this man?” he asked.

  “I have no idea, really,” I said.

  “I am Faroud,” Faroud said.

  “Namaste,” Burt said, shuffling forward and bowing.

  “Namaste,” the older man returned. “You don’t need a blessing today,” he added.

  “No,” Burt agreed.

  “Go now,” Faroud said.

  “Okay.”

  The old man turned away from us and tilted his face to the clear sky. He closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. It was as if he were tuning into a metaphysical radio station that we couldn’t hear.

  “I’ll drive,” Burt said, setting out very deliberately toward the cab. “I’m fine. I know the way.”

  He was unsteady, but I let him walk on his own as an audition for his return to his role as driver. By the time we’d traversed the half a block to the taxi, his motor skills had markedly improved.

  I handed him the keys. All in all, an impaired professional Indian driver was bound to be a safer bet in city driving than I’d be.

  “Promise me you’ll let me know if you have trouble driving,” I said.

  “No. I will make no such promise. You may be my spiritual better. You may send energy. You may know everything, and you may be right about everything. I don’t know. But you’re not my boss. I will do as I choose. If you don’t like it, you can get out of my taxi and walk.”

  He was back, all right. Good old Burt.

  ****

  He maneuvered us through a colorful urban landscape and then down a winding rural road. Chris and Marco stood waiting for us in the pilgrim center’s dirt parking lot. The pitted driveway we’d navigated to get there wound through well-tended grounds and gave us a view of the main building, which was a low brick structure with a wraparound, porticoed porch. From the front, it appeared to be about the size of an elementary school in a small town. The energy of the place was strong but not intrusive.

  “Did you have a nice adventure?” Marco asked when I’d climbed out of the passenger seat. Burt remained behind the wheel.

  “Nice? Was my ‘adventure’ nice? Sure, let’s call it nice,” I answered.

  He wore one of Chris’s less loud Hawaiian shirts. I recognized it—koi swimming in a cloud-strewn blue sky. He also wore a wide-brimmed straw gardener’s hat—at least the gardeners in Santa Cruz wore them—and a pair of dark, metal-framed sunglasses. He needed a shave. I was struck by how much he looked like a perfect cross between an Italian and a South American.

  “I’m incognito,” he said, noticing my attention. He reached out and hugged me, and his energy merged with mine. Chris stood to the side and waited, wearing a plain white T-shirt and baggy, olive-green cargo shorts. Lucy was nowhere to be seen.

  Marco’s energy was much stronger than mine, of course, but it felt like my own otherwise, which was reassuring. I absorbed it easily and then stepped over to Chris and hugged him, too. I’d forgotten how hard it was to get my arms around him. If anything, he’d gained weight since arriving in New Zealand.

  “Hiya, bro,” he said. “I’m incognito, too. We’re blending.”

  His black hair was a crinkled mess, and his bushy beard was listing to starboard—no, make that port. His dark skin gleamed from the layer of sweat we all wore. It was probably in the mid-nineties and very humid.

  Chris’s energy was subtle—I had to hunt for it. It was like a low-pitched, throbby V-8 motor at idle in a garage. It seemed capable of producing power, but only if he figured out how to get the garage door open, put it in gear, and let it loose. He might need the equivalent of a chi gas station, too.

  “Whoa,” Chris said after we’d held each other for a moment. “You’re like Marco Junior now, huh? You’re vibrating big-time.”

  “I guess.”

  “What number am I thinking of?” he asked. He looked upward as though he were having trouble coming up with one.

  “How would I know?”

  “Six hundred eighty-five,” Marco said.

  “Long live the King!” Chris proclaimed. “Now let’s try Baltic folk songs of the 1950s for $400.”

  I laughed, let go of him, and stepped back. “I’ve missed you,” I said.

  “Of course,” he replied. “What’s not to miss?”

  “Where’s Sam?” I asked Marco. “Chris said she was okay. Is she?”

  “She’s been delayed, but she’s fine.” He spoke more slowly than I remembered, or maybe he was just tired.

  I studied his face and reassured myself that Marco’s word on this was sufficient. “And Lucy?”

  “She’s around here somewhere,” Chris said. “Unless villagers have eaten her or sacrificed her to some volcano god.”

  “I don’t think they have volcanoes in India,” I said.

  “That’s because of all the terrific sacrifices people make here. It’s the unsuccessful sacrifices that create places with all that lava like Hawaii. Those gods are totally unappeased. They don’t want those pigs and goats and hula hoops they get. They want beagles and bassets and corgis.”

  Marco watched us, a wry smile on his face.

  “How did you manage to fly Lucy into the country, anyway?” I asked the older man. “Don’t they have regulations against pets because of diseases?”

  “Talk about a maestro,” Chris answered. “This man could corrupt the Pope. He just bribed everybody. Everywhere. He’s slick.”

  I looked at Marco. He shrugged. “Let’s get out of the sun,” he suggested.

  Burt stumbled out of the taxi at that point. I don’t know what he’d been doing in there. Maybe Marco had been holding him in his seat energetically. Maybe he was still dazed. He’d driven just fine, but his walking had devolved—he was shambling again.

  “Who are these people?” he asked me.

  I introduced everyone.

  “I need to go lie down,” Burt said. He certainly did. He was swaying and wobbling.

  “Perhaps Chris can show you where you can rest,” Marco’s said. “Chris?”

  “Hey,” Chris said. “You’re not the boss of me.” That sounded familiar. Perhaps Chris and Burt would get along just fine.

  Marco gazed at him impassively. It was a gentler version of what I’d just experienced with Faroud.

  “But maybe you need some time alone with Sid,” Chris said to him.

  Marco continued to look at him.

  “And maybe you’re kind of the boss of me,” Chris said. He turned to the Ind
ian man. “Come on, Burt. I’ll show you where the men’s dorm is. You can check in later if you want to stay, but for now there’s a spare bed next to mine.”

  Burt nodded, and they left. Marco pointed to a bench back behind him under an unfamiliar variety of shade tree. It was to the right of the main entrance, away from several groups of people on the long, wide porch. As we walked over to it, I asked him if Chris was driving him crazy.

  “Not at all. Sit.”

  I did. It was much cooler under the tree, and the air was redolent with floral aromas, although I didn’t actually see any flowers. The bench itself was very buzzy. Marco noticed me noticing this.

  “There are energy hot spots all around the property. That’s why we’re sitting here. This bench is built out of wood that was salvaged from an outhouse that Meher Baba used for decades.”

  “Really? It’s butt energy?”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Marco said.

  “But it’s real? All this energy stuff is for real?”

  “Of course not. None of it’s real, Sid. Not even the energy. But energy—consciousness—precedes form. There’s a relationship between the two unreal realms—one seems to come first. It’s actually an unreal sequence of unreal events, though. There are no gradations of non-reality.”

  “I think I’ll just try to forget I know the word ‘real,’ ” I said.

  “That might be more helpful than my explanations, eh?”

  “Exactly.”

  I sat quietly then, content to be with him on the bench. Why had I ever doubted him so thoroughly? When I was with Marco, everything was just fine. When I wasn’t with him, though, I only had the concept of Marco to hang onto. This was so outlandish, I was vulnerable to the sort of deception that Raj and Jal had mounted.

  A complicating factor was that he wasn’t quite likable in the ordinary sense of the word. If he’d been a coworker or neighbor, I’d have described him as arrogant and controlling. I’d seen him demonstrate social graces out in the world, but he didn’t hesitate to lie or be rude to me as he saw fit.