by Smith, Skye
Ajay walked up to them. He was getting used to being around these two women and their habit of shucking their clothes off at every opportunity. What had Maya called it. Spontanudity. He no longer looked away in embarrassment. When life hands you a painting by Gauguin, you would be a fool not to look at it.
"I am not discovering anything." he said in his ethnic sing song. "No one is wanting to talk about the old guru. I am supposing that most of them never knew the man, and the old ones who did... well they have clammed up like, well clams."
"Try checking in," Maya said, "She reached into the pouch attached to her skirt for a credit card. "Here, use this."
"Check in. But this place is most dear. There are many other guesthouses for much less."
"Just for one night," she cut his rant short, "so we can find out about the guru. That is why I must pay. It is my quest. Besides, you two need to share a bed tonight." He stopped arguing and took her credit card and headed back to the office.
The old gardener was getting closer, and Maya decided to try something. She put her hands together in prayer and strengthened her aura. When the old man bent over the adjacent flower pot with his watering can, she lifted her left hand and pointed the palm towards him. Then she covered her nipples with her right arm and grabbed her left arm. It was the Pushing Pizza pose that looked a bit like an Italian curse. She closed her eyes and emptied her mind to allow her aura to reach out from her left palm. Bingo. Her aura was pinging, and finding another aura. The old gardener also had an aura. She knew it.
She opened her eyes and smiled to herself. That was why it looked familiar. He was doing the same thing that she and Erik would do on Vancouver's nude beach. On that beach they would wait until people stood up, and then they would walk near to them to scan them for auras. That was exactly how she and Erik had first met. He had been trolling for auras and had hooked hers.
The poor old peasant in his filthy dhoti was looking around confused. It was cruel to play with him, but she couldn't help herself. It was so naughty. When he turned away from her, she pointed her palm at him again. He almost jumped. To feel the auras in other people usually meant two things. They had to be almost naked, and you had to pass within inches of them. He was looking around. There was no one within three feet.
Now she understood why his meandering had seemed so familiar. Whenever some mostly naked guest stood up, he would move to another plant pot and just happen to almost brush up beside them. It was time to be kind. She stood and walked over to him and whispered into his ear. "Are you looking for me?"
"I am sorry madam," he said keeping his head low and being subservient. "I do not speak well the English, and I do not understand."
"Ah, then you didn't just feel my aura. To bad. I was like, hoping someone else in this place would have an aura. I was told that at one time this ashram was thee place for auras. You know, like fifteen years ago." She put her right hand out so that it was hovering over his heart and then she crossed her left arm over her nipples to focus her aura along her right arm and into his heart.
He straightened his old back a bit until he was eye to eye with her breasts. "Jezebel," he whispered. "You show off your breasts to those slobbering fools at the bar. You have the power of a goddess within you. Cover yourself up."
"Ah," she said, "then you do speak English. I bet you aren't even a gardener."
"We are all of us gardeners. That is the purpose of mankind on this earth, and no other."
Ajay walked up to them leading an older European man in a suit. "No walk-ins. They say they do not take guests without reservations, unless that is, we want to pay for a VIP bungalow. That is over five hundred dollars a night with a two night minimum."
Maya and the gardener turned towards him, both annoyed at the interruption. "Is that the Vegas-style VIP price, like, all inclusive of VIP hostesses?"
The suit became flustered immediately and asked her to moderate her volume when speaking of such things. The old gardener limped up to the suit and whispered something to him and then limped away with his watering can.
The suit raised his voice so that all of the guests around them could hear. "I regret this misunderstanding by our reservations department. May I invite you to stay in one in one of our luxury bungalows at our expense for the duration of your stay." He held out an arm to motion them to join him. "I will show you to your bungalow, right now, if you please."
The three friends picked up their stuff and followed the suit through a group of overweight Mumbai business men wearing too few clothes and too much gold. "I am most surely confused about what just happened," mentioned Ajay in his sing song accent. "It is such a reversal of attitude."
"What happened?" Marique giggled knowingly. "Maya happened."
"You don't think those fat guys are paying five hundred a night to go to a sales conference, do you?" whispered Maya. "They have been promised white meat. Prime rib blondes."
Ajay looked at Maya and tried to translate her slang. Marique pulled him close and said, "They come to make time with the Euro tourist women. Success is probably guaranteed."
"Ahh, then this is accordingly a singles resort," he sing songed. "I begin with understanding."
"Well don't you be chatting to any of those women by the pool," replied Marique, "We have some unfinished business and I don't mean another quick 'ump in a damp cave."
* * * * *
It took them less than a half an hour to move into their bungalow and make themselves comfortable. It was a classic British India bungalow with two bedrooms, a common lounge, and a large and shady veranda. A tea tray was delivered by a young western woman. In fact, most of the workers seemed to be young western women.
As the sun set, they joined in the communal evening meal, which was a vegetarian affair. Both guests and workers shared the tables and the majority of both were women. The meal affair stretched on pleasantly for hours with a lovely mix of gossip and stories, with one woman with a voice of a nightingale singing to the tinkling of a sitar, while another woman swirled a dance of veils and ankle bells.
The evening was gentle and tropical, filled with the songs of crickets and the scent of tropical flowers. While inside Marique and Ajay exchanged whispers and gentle caresses and bodily fluids, outside on the veranda, Maya exchanged pleasantries and shared the tea tray with an elderly gardener.
"So you are Shree Rashraj, then?" she confirmed.
"I am simply Sanjay the gardener."
"If you were the Shree, then I was sent to find you by two of your students from fifteen years ago. Erik and Karl. Do you remember them? They both had auras. They have been training mine."
"They have trained you well. Your aura is as strong as I have ever felt." He looked at her over top of the rim of his cup. She was somewhat attractive, though her breasts were not as large as he preferred. After all these years, or perhaps because of them, he still enjoyed savoring the beauty of youth. Especially young women. They were like colorful flowers put on earth to be viewed and to be enjoyed, and to be cared for and to be fertilized.
"When was the last time you like, felt anyone else's aura?" she asked pointedly. "I watched your reaction when you felt mine. How long has it been? A year, five years?"
"They are rare, I admit, but I am a beacon that they all flock towards. You may be special to your friends, but to me you are just yet another."
"They sent me to you to learn about my aura." She paused for a moment to think of an innocent question. "For instance, why does my aura effect quartz crystals and why does it gain strength when I am near them?"
"I do not answer the questions of disciples. It is their duty to learn, not mine to teach."
"And I would beg your forgiveness, if like, I was your disciple, instead of a guest at your hotel."
"You are an ignorant girl," he scolded. "This is not a hotel it is an ashram, and it is no longer mine. I cannot hold wealth in my own name otherwise the tax man claims it."
She didn't have time for such stubbornness. "Pleas
e take off your shirt." It was actually a cross between a shirt and a jacket, made of heavy white cotton. The Sunday best of a laborer.
"And why would I do such a thing for the whim of an ignorant girl?"
"I will take mine off if you take yours off." It was enough to convince him and they both bared their chests. As she suspected, he was wearing a lovely long quartz crystal at the end of a lace. She slowly reached forward and pulled the lace up and over his head and hung the crystal over the arm of her deck chair. Then she pressed her palms together and closed her eyes and raised her aura. It leaped in strength. It was eager to touch another aura.
She opened the lotus underneath his crystal and emptied her mind so that it did not interfere with the aura. Inside her mind the aura's light went quickly from white to bright to blindingly brilliant, and then she grabbed her elbows to calm it, and then opened her eyes.
He was no longer staring at her breasts, but was transfixed on his crystal. She picked it up by the lace and reached forward to put it back around his neck. When her lips were closest to his ear she whispered, "If you do not cooperate with me, then tomorrow morning I will leave this place and you will never see me again."
He held his palm against his crystal and pushed it against his chest and sighed. He felt still and calm inside. He almost touched the saintliness he used to feel every day, back before his worldly troubles had trapped him as a laborer. "So be it, but not as teacher and student. I suggest that we exchange our knowledge of auras." He stared at the woman’s breasts longingly. Memories of other breasts, so many other breasts, filled his heart with a sadness for good times long past.
"Then you owe me an exchange," she said, "for I doubt very much that you have ever before seen the opening lotus used to charge crystals." To interrupt his stares, she pulled her shirt back up and buttoned it, and then wrapped her colorful Indian sarong from her Mumbai shopping trip, around her shoulders like a shawl. It was cooler at night up here in the hills than down in Mumbai on the coast.
"Ah, so you call that the opening lotus. Let me see if I remember. You go from meditational praying to opening the fingers and it what, concentrates the aura through the palms and towards the fingers. Ah yes, so anything suspended between your fingers receives a focused aura." As he spoke, he pulled his own shirt up and did up all the buttons. The cold bothered him now that he was mid seventies. "Now sit back and clear your mind of your western prejudices and listen to what I exchange for your parlor trick."
He dropped his voice both in volume and in tone. "Way back before there was clothing, or verbal language, the human animal was already highly evolved. The movies that show cavemen as ragged and scraping out a living, are foolish to the extreme. Humans were the top of the food chain because of their reasoning skills, their memory, and their hands. They were sleek and healthy and fit.
They communicated amongst themselves long before there were verbal languages. Before they covered their skins with clothing, their proximity senses were as acute as any other animal. Their physical survival, their communal survival, depended on these senses. The aura sense is one of the proximity senses, like touch and smell."
"All this Erik and Karl taught me," Maya said. "Fast forward a bit."
He stared at her wondering what fast forward was. Perhaps a cricket term. "As with touch and smell, auras were used in communication. I don't mean communication such as who won the cricket game, or the price of tea. I mean empathetic communication." He searched her face looking for understanding. Not yet.
"Some have called me an empath before. They were Trekkies though." Maya replied.
He stared at her wondering what a Trekkie was. "The aura is an empath sense. It can reach into another body and feel what it is feeling directly. This is why auras are strongest between mothers and babies, or at least it was before the invention of clothing. Now just the babies have them."
"So that would explain why I can sense dis-ease in others," Maya reflected.
"Yes, it is empathy on a sensual level. You cast your aura and thereby your body empathizes with theirs, and your organs tell you when there is something wrong with theirs. Liver to liver, kidney to kidney, heart to heart."
"Since you mentioned heart ..." she interrupted.
"It is easier to listen with your mouth closed," he scolded. "Where was I. Ahhh. Any skill that is not used, weakens, and eventually becomes useless. It is the same with auras. Babies are born with the sense but as soon as we wrap the baby in clothing, especially synthetic clothing, then we cut off his aura and his aura begins to wither.
Have you ever wondered why twins seem so connected? It is because as babies, twins spend long hours close together and naked. They use their aura sense naturally. Before verbal languages and clothing, our empath communication would have been rich and taught to babies by their mothers. Nowadays it is at the simplistic level of twin babies, like a secret language between them."
He paused and searched her face for understanding. A bit. "In other words, shorter words, your aura was not given to you. You were born with it. Yours, for some reason, has not yet withered. Were you born a twin?"
"No," she said.
"So you, my ignorant child, have been lucky enough to hold onto your aura as you grew up. It is unusual because you are not a twin. Twins reflect their auras back and forth and thereby exercise them and keep them from withering. Sadly, in our modern world, even twins eventually lose their auras, their empath powers."
He seemed to drift away into his memories, but then snapped back. "You are not a twin, but there are other things on this planet that reflect auras, just as mirrors reflect our images. Quartz crystals are like mirrors that reflect our auras and thereby exercise them. There is a difference. When you walk away from a mirror, so does your reflection. With a crystal however, you can walk away and it retains your aura's reflection for many years."
"So the crystal not only reflects it but stores it like a memory," she said looking at her own crystal.
There was a look of disbelief on her face. He hurried to explain. "Why is this so hard for you to believe? Humans have always had a love affair with crystals. We have always adorned ourselves with rare and colorful ones. In modern times we have learned how to make sparks in cigarette lighters from crystals; and how to concentrate light using crystals to read CD's and DVD's; and even how to amplify and store electrical charges using crystals."
"So since I am not a twin, I must have hung around crystals as a kid. Not that I recall," she reflected.
"That is my belief, yes. If an adult has an aura, they were born a twin, or have grown up around quartz crystals. That is the end of my exchange. Tomorrow I will take you to the place that kept my own aura functioning. "
He pointed to the empty tea cup and savored her graceful moves as she poured more tea. "You have an aura stronger than I have ever felt. It was foolish of me to deny it before. I rarely feel other auras anymore because people with auras no longer seek me out. I am no longer a Shree, a Beacon. I am just a gardener."
He caught her eyes for a moment, and saw flecks of different colors in the iris. "Now please show me again this opening lotus and then let me try it while you watch."
Once he had tried it, she told him to go and practice it where he could be alone with his aura. She watched him limp away and couldn't help thinking that he was just another nasty old man. The world was full of them. As their bodies fell apart and as they were forced to live with the pain of old age, they turned sour inside.
Her scribbler was on the table and she decided to write down everything that she had learned from him. No, she would write down everything that he had said, whether she understood it or not. She would keep an aura log, and if she could ever find a full keyboard, instead of her blackberry, she would type it all into an email to Erik.
After her notes were written, and reviewed, she went into the bungalow and walked towards her bedroom turning the lights out as she went. Her bedroom was the smaller of the two, with the smaller bed. While in the b
athroom, watching herself brush her teeth in the mirror, she decided that she really, really did not want to sleep alone tonight.
Not tonight, not after such a momentous day. A day spent driving though wonderous countryside, where she had stood inside an ancient temple. Where she had discovered a humongous and hidden quartz geode. And now she had found the aura guru whom she had been sent to find. All in one day.
By the light of the bathroom, she peered into the bigger bedroom where Ajay and Marique were spooning and sleeping. She turned the light off and then crawled in on Marique's side and curled up to wait for sleep. It was a long wait but she didn't mind.
The night cicadas were singing and the air through the window screens was soft and fragrant. This was the tropics she had read about, and had feared did not really exist. It did exist, and she was revelling in it.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - the Ashram by Skye Smith
Chapter 12 - Ashram in Pune, India
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. - Mahatma Gandhi.
The morning came early into a bed that was rocking, where hushed voices that were giggling. Marique was whispering, "Alors, get that thing away from me. I must pee first." Marique slipped down to the foot of the bed and headed to the bathroom. Maya turned over and opened her eyes and looked at Ajay. He looked back with a sheepish grin.
Finally Marique returned and now it was Maya's turn to pee. She had barely closed the door when she heard them giggling from the bed. She put on her robe and snuck by their bedroom, and went outside to listen to the morning birds. A very young western woman was walking towards her carrying a tea tray. "I brought your morning tea," she said with an American southern drawl.
The sounds of giggles and moans wafted through the bedroom window. "They will be a while," Maya told the girl, taking the tray out of her hands. "Why don't you join me for tea?"
