Every action was now meditation. It was June, the sun fierce. He’d begun bowing to the holy book, did predawn service in the cold kitchen that smelled of onions and garlic and ghee, and had graduated from a light turban, like an Indian puggree, to a towering beehive. In fact he tied his so high that at times he had to support it and looked like a peevish society lady patting her hair. He purchased the robes and knickknacks of religious life and even worked at growing a beard. He had a fringe of blond fuzz like that of a very old woman.
He continued his yoga, staying in excruciating postures, freeing up the anxiety of past lives. He pressed his fingers over his eyes, phosphenes flowering inside his head: the devoured boy, the bright threads of jacket. He wasn’t sure how to give up the world and still live within it with any certainty, and it seemed messy to attempt both. Nor did he care much for groundskeeping. Each second stooping to move a sprinkler was enough for the back of his neck to burn. Mostly he just sat, sweating in the shade as the ashram green longed to return to the baked pie crust of desert.
Perhaps the silence would have gone on forever, and he’d have become one of those unobtrusive ashram members who laid foundations while the others played, but two weeks after he began, a young man arrived in a BMW convertible. Though mute, Sat Puja wasn’t deaf. Donald was everywhere at once but never in one place long enough to get hitched. Raised by absentee parents in Carmel on a diet of packaged organic foods with a Mexican maid to open them and throw out the wrappings, he was an old study in the art of drawing attention and became the ashram’s heartthrob by artifice alone. Evenly tanned, with a patrician nose that none doubted he would come to own and the coarse beginnings of a dark jaw, he had a physique trained by the popular calisthenic yoga that ashram members held in disdain. They all soon learned his story, which he frequently recounted, as if his arrival at an ashram after two years preparing a double major in political science and philosophy at Yale was as astounding as the conquests of Cortés or the journeys of Magellan. Born into a world of euphemistic money—trading, managing, observing—he’d rarely seen his father, who was among the elite to have mastered the prima materia of the capitalist world, and who could do so easily from his home PC. Like Sat Puja, Donald had had a weak spot for biographies and had noted that a worthy life lay in contradictions. With a profile so like a coin’s he’d found it hard to turn his back on money, but he knew that youth necessitated rebellion or else would pass soundlessly into spongy middle age. The day he’d arrived at Yale, he’d made a spectacle of pitching bed and desk from his dorm windows, a bit of ostentation that the financial office put on his father’s bill. He meditated often, studied crosslegged and slept on a mat he’d bought at the flea market. He received nighttime visits from stoners seeking consolation or God. He was the dorm wise man. Detached, he passed unscathed through campus debauchery and quoted holy texts on the subject of craving, all the while breezing his academics.
Not long after his arrival at the ashram he beseeched the master for a name. Each time someone arrived, the community waited to learn what name and hence what destiny the master would divine. When Harvey had taken his, he’d heard the assistants discussing Puja, whether it meant worship or reverence and that, really, it better suited a girl. Donald, with all the pleasure the ashram youth expressed at his arrival, was expecting something prophetic. The master grumbled, spat into a tissue and said, Jamgoti. An assistant wrote it down. Jamgoti was whispered around the room. No one had heard it before.
What does it mean? Donald asked.
The master laughed roughly. Loincloth, he said.
The ashram soon decided that this reflected an unworthiness that only the master could perceive. Insincerity most likely, many agreed, so that when Donald applied for jobs, he was refused all but the most transient and ended up at Sat Puja’s side. Those who’d resented his popularity, quick wit and expansive learning assumed he’d never use the name. The girls told him that he’d be renamed once he’d proven his devotion. But with a politician’s sense of humour, he began introducing himself as Jamgoti. Means loincloth, he clarified even to those who knew—Can’t leave home without it.
His first day tending the grounds he took up his rake, thumped himself on the chest in mockery of Sat Puja’s silence, then proceeded to talk until well past noon. He was smoothly analytical of what he called the ashram’s pedestrian approach to spirituality. With so much emphasis on being a householder, he said, there isn’t much time for enlightenment, is there?
Sat Puja tried to appear absorbed in meditative silence, but after Jamgoti had discoursed on his precocious mysticism, a youth of Internet surfing for arcana, meditation with a penny on his third eye and on-line spoon-bending societies that had tried to teach him to shift the molecules of cutlery with his mind, Sat Puja cleared his throat, introduced himself and spoke of his own attempts, his fears and yearnings and pain, on and on and often returning to the essential theme of how similar they were, and on, until it was well past quitting time. Those last weeks he’d reconsidered his projection. He spoke with the deepest voice he could manage, from the navel as he’d learned in his college theatre class. There was nothing he didn’t tell and he was somewhat taken aback that he could fit his entire life into an afternoon.
Besides, he said, this job gets you dirty.
They were now sitting under a cottonwood, in its splotch of shadow. Jamgoti chewed a blade of obscenely green grass that probably tasted like hairspray after all they’d done to make it grow. He scratched his calf with a big toe and declared that they needed to take action or drift forever in mediocrity. We must plan, he said. There’s no reason to wait.
Far off, ranchera had begun to play from a hotel terrace in the hills above the ashram as it often did this time of year with all the local weddings. After a while, Sat Puja invited Jamgoti to his trailer and couldn’t believe his offer was accepted.
Jamgoti insisted they take his convertible. They drove in the warm evening, roof down, wind attempting to unfurl Sat Puja’s turban. Jamgoti began explaining the groundwork for a more intensive approach to understanding the divine. But Sat Puja was mute, an invisible touch flourishing in his chest, an emotion that he couldn’t name, like a strange bloom in a vast desert.
Despite his questionable name, Jamgoti maintained a celebrity entourage. He’d fashioned a stylish light turban, though for yoga he preferred shorts and tank tops to robes, his legs being as sculpted as a porn star’s. But little by little he began to refuse invitations, even when they said he could bring Sat Puja.
I’d have stayed at Yale if I wanted parties. Besides, you’re the only one here crazy enough to keep up with me, he said, at once assuaging Sat Puja’s jealousy and arousing a sense of worry.
Jamgoti’s lectures were numerous. He explained how masters used to leave their students in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing and would tell them that they had to find their way back. A medicine man left his student in the middle of Las Vegas, he said. Without a penny.
Sat Puja felt himself being primed.
It’s failure till the end that’s real, Jamgoti told him. Or almost until the end. It’s the love that keeps you from enlightenment that brings you to the true meaning in this world.
But it was on a day that Jamgoti didn’t show up until well past noon that he announced his solution.
Sat Puja balanced his turban and looked up.
Sadhus, Jamgoti said. We’ll become sadhus.
If there was one taboo on an ashram of householders, it was this, and Sat Puja told him so. That the master had lectured severely against those who chose to renounce the world. The sadhu was supposed to near God through deprivation and suffering, but the master set them straight. The sadhu, he’d said, doesn’t marry. He called them tourists in life’s pain.
And I’m sure people say the opposite somewhere else, Jamgoti told Sat Puja. I’m sure others would accuse householders of clinging to worldly security. Just imagine, he said, the power of committing to nothing but enlightenment.
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But Sat Puja wasn’t convinced.
I don’t think you really believe in all this, Jamgoti told him, narrowing his eyes with consideration and making Sat Puja feel not only that he was worth close scrutiny but that he was being dared. You know, I think that most young people who come here are trying to spice up their middle-class existence. Maybe you’re just running away.
Sat Puja had considered this argument a thousand times. Inwardly he chastised himself for spiritual motives that weren’t pure. At community meals, turbaned company directors discussed corporate imaging. Though the possibility that he might someday belong tempted him, he could see all this through Jamgoti’s eyes—that the Sikhs could but tie him to a system, to rules that were, quite simply, worldly. He’d read the work of a Buddhist who said that cruelty came when one’s rule for life failed and that all worldly love or desire for love ended in hatred and pain.
Sat Puja put down his rake and listened. The sprinklers clucked and chuckled. Distance blurred. The sky wavered. What was this place? he wondered. This desert? These weirdos in the American landscape searching for tradition? Would they disappear like the gunslingers and saloons? This was too in the middle of nowhere. The sun seemed to be approaching the earth, the ashram itself. Would it bounce off like a rubber ball, leaving a faint burnt splat, this artificial green desert again?
Their preparation consisted of improvised ceremonies, cutting up credit cards, leaving uneven stacks of books about the trailer park like primitive stone piles. Harvey took his Toyota to a used-car lot. Three hundred, the fat man said, his speckled belly visible between the taut buttons of his shirt. Sat Puja tried to insist on its relative worth, but Jamgoti laid a hand on his shoulder.
As for the BMW, Jamgoti admitted that it was his mother’s and couldn’t legally be sold. Sat Puja imagined running it off a hill or parking it in a bad neighbourhood or selling it for pennies to a Mexican chopshop. Instead Jamgoti called a drive-away service to take it home.
A hip pouch, a blanket, turbans and a pair of baggy yoga clothes were all they agreed on as well as whatever they had in cash, less for themselves, Jamgoti pointed out, than to regale the needy they might encounter. They took a few minor cosmetic objects, a nail clipper, toothbrushes, floss, a needle and thread to stitch rags into cloaks like itinerant Buddhists. Sat Puja was tempted to sneak a credit card or even to withdraw a substantial amount of cash and hide it. He did, however, secrete his driver’s licence and passport, surprised at the power of his instinct for survival.
They set out at the hour of the pre-dawn meditation. This was when mystics went deepest, in the chill, living air. Wrapped in blankets they followed the arroyo on a trail used by dirt bikes. Aren’t we near Los Alamos, Jamgoti asked, where they made the first atom bomb? The moon had set. The stars were a molten path along the sky.
After a while they stopped on a hill to meditate, their breaths controlled like those of divers, their eyes closed as if they were falling back into water. Their blankets and robes had turned red from the dust. Sat Puja felt a tightness in his chest and tried to calm his rushing mind. Jamgoti’s words returned to him—the love that keeps you from enlightenment. He pictured himself gone off to surrender attachments, embittered by the world. What love, what willowy figure, would save him from cold immortality?
Later, when they tried to rest, both were too excited. They headed randomly downhill, surprised to find a path of sorts. By early morning the sun had muscled back the shadows. Surveying the distance from an outcropping, Jamgoti not only resembled Lawrence of Arabia but looked as if he felt like him, too. Finally unable to bear the heat they sat under an overhanging rock, bandits at wait.
I’m thirsty, Sat Puja said. He was thinking about the money in his hip pouch and where they might buy something. Jamgoti suggested this was just nervousness and that it would pass. Dust and heat conspired to make Sat Puja’s eyes water. He felt a shortness of breath, regret that they hadn’t brought drinks. He stared at the fissured earth, an intricate puzzle that stretched infinitely before them. He’d imagined begging for rice at huts, meditating beneath trees, crossing uninhabited distances. The ascetic life was supposed to be purified of all things, but this was the world and then some. He worried that they looked like homeless people.
Near dark they were unsteady on their feet. They’d meditated and napped. A few times, when a breeze had passed over the baking earth, its hot, thin air drying the sweat beneath his clothes, Sat Puja had felt his spirit lift, but only briefly—these were earthly sensations, conflicted and fleeting, not what he’d hoped. When the day had cooled enough, they set out again. Cresting a rise, they saw the highway and the beacon of a Chevron. They started down in a giddy, shuffling run. The man behind the counter watched them, phone ready, finger on the hook. They bought Gatorade and chocolate bars. Moderation, moderation, Jamgoti repeated as they tore through the wrappers with their teeth. The man rang up their purchases with one hand.
Outside again they ate and belched. Sat Puja immediately felt nauseous but too happy to let it show. They headed back out from the gas station across a colourless, lunar plain, occasionally picking their way over forgotten strands of barbed wire. Soon there was only the strange silence of the desert night, disturbed by a distant baseline or the downshifting of a tractor-trailer.
They’d walked long enough to lose all notion of time and had come into view of a mesa’s single turret when, across a range of juniper, a flare rose as if from the earth. It dipped, briefly disappeared, rose again and separated into headlights. A pickup slowed on a dirt road they wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.
You boys lost? a man asked with a faintly lilting Chicano accent. From the shape of the headlights and the grille, the smoothness of the idle, the truck was clearly new. This calmed Sat Puja. The cab light came on. The man had a dark, round face and high cheekbones. He leaned heavily over the door.
Hop in back. I’ll give you a ride over to my place and you can use the phone.
Sat Puja was about to refuse politely when Jamgoti thanked the man and climbed over the tailgate. He hauled Sat Puja up like a child and whispered, Adventure. As they began moving, he explained that they had to let the world take them where it would.
They rode through the still air, now heavy and cool on their bodies. Not far from where they’d been picked up, the landscape descended. They passed the occasional tree, patchy tall grass, and to the side, farther down, undergrowth and a narrow river. The truck pulled into what had once been a farm, sheds and a sagging barn, a house stacked back in ever more rickety additions.
The man driving was at most thirty, and his size would have been imposing if it weren’t for the jean jacket that made him look pinched at the shoulders, his cowboy boots dainty as high heels beneath his big frame. He introduced himself as Danny. He was returning home with a half-dozen new PlayStation rentals.
Another man, slightly younger, met them at the door, and Danny did no more than introduce them as guests. This is my brother, Andy, he said.
You guys prophets or something? Andy asked, tugging at his sparse moustache. If either brother was surprised by the two filthy young men wearing turbans, they hardly let it show.
Jamgoti led them into uncertain laughter by abbreviating their adventure, saying they’d dared themselves to live like holy men.
The sound of coughing came from the backroom, and when Sat Puja glanced in that direction, Danny explained that his abuelo—his grandfather—was sick. Don’t worry, our sister takes care of anything if he needs it.
Danny then told them that they could spend the night on the couches, which they accepted after a few rounds at the PlayStation, at which Jamgoti appeared quite skilled.
Morning came too soon with a yellow, intersecting light. Sat Puja’s lungs felt furry, his eyes pinched and sore. He looked for the bathroom so he could blow his nose.
Danny came into the kitchen with a rifle. Coffee’s on, he said, then went out. Sat Puja watched him go up the driveway, past outbuildings half-
lost in a flame of wild grass.
The night before Danny had explained that for the past seven months he’d been visiting the neighbours, whose cousin from Mexico had gotten his sister, Juanita, pregnant then disappeared. Though Danny confessed to being a softy, he remained volatile in regards to his sister, explaining that their father had abandoned them and that she, not yet born, had been sent along years later. After a few questions from Jamgoti, Danny had told the story, explaining that his abuelo, a hard man in his youth, had been the town constable for more than three decades and had hated drifters and criminals. One day, the grandfather heard that Danny and Andy’s father was dealing drugs, and he drove to the trailer where the young man lived with his girlfriend and boys. The aging constable showed up holding an old leather harness and repeatedly tossed his son to the ground with one hand as he struck. He left him on the trailer’s cinderblock steps that the next owner would have to paint black, and a week later woke in the night to find Danny and Andy, aged three and one, in the kitchen with a garbage bag of clothes and a half-empty box of diapers. Nine years afterwards a stranger arrived in a truck and brought a baby girl into the house. She’d been stuffed naked into the cut-off leg of a woman’s jeans, insulated with cotton balls, a napkin pinned to the denim reading Juanita. The stranger spoke with the grandfather, described the man with the scarred face and so confirmed that this was Danny and Andy’s father. He had breakfast, tried his hand at a few bouts of Space Invaders with the boys, then put on his hat and left. Why the girl had received a Mexican name remained a mystery unless it was meant as a jab at Juan, the grandfather. Danny and Andy had been the first in the family with gringo names, their mother being uppity. Also, the napkin it was printed on came from Denny’s, which Danny had seen as something of an omen, the closest God could come in worldly terms to an edict.
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