by Anne Cushman
“It sounds idyllic.”
“It was actually unbelievably tedious. I remember one afternoon I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie aloud twenty-seven times. I could probably still recite it to you.”
Truth be told, I’d been a marginally competent nanny, scrambling through my days in a sea of lost socks, spilled juice, forgotten lunch boxes, missed playdates. I routinely sent Sam to school in his pajama top. Often I was so bored and irritated I’d wanted to flush them both down the toilet. One afternoon I’d played hide and seek for about two hours, “finding” Sam and Tamara over and over again in the same obvious hiding place under the comforter on their parents’ bed. I’d wanted to shout, “I see you, you morons! Your feet are sticking out! And there’s a big lump on the bed, besides! What kind of a fool do you think I am?” I’d wanted to run screaming out of the house and into my future, that exotic continent of romance and adventure. So why now—riding a train through India, inhabiting the future that had been my fantasy then—was I suddenly filled with nostalgia? For a moment, it seemed that I would give anything to be safely back there, flattening peanut butter cookie dough with a fork.
“So why did you quit?”
“The kids were getting so attached to me. It was like I was their mother.” We flashed past a yellow billboard with red letters proclaiming Om Hari Ram. Help ever, hurt never. Hari Baba. “When their actual parents came home, it was like they didn’t even know them. Usually, Tamara was already in bed, anyway. But one day, they came home early, so I left when she was still awake. She started screaming and throwing her arms around me, saying, ‘Manda don’t go.’ I was always there when she went to bed, there when she got up in the morning. Turns out she hadn’t even known that I didn’t live there.” Outside the window, a white buffalo pulled a cart down a dusty road. “So the next day, I called in sick. And the next. At the end of the week I quit.”
“You quit?” Devi Das looked at me, his dosa halfway to his mouth. “What about the kids? Didn’t you miss them?”
“My days were numbered. I saw the look in the mom’s eyes.” She stood there in her gray wool jacket, clutching her leather handbag, looking at her little girl weeping and clinging to another woman’s leg. In the next room, her husband had already turned on CNN. “If I hadn’t quit, I’d have been fired. I’d rather be the one to walk away.”
Devi Das didn’t say anything. He had finished his dosa and was just sitting there, a stranger with whom I happened to be sharing a train seat, a spiritual journey, a pregnancy.
“Don’t look at me like that. I was just the babysitter.” Tamara must be six or seven by now; Sam must be eight or nine. I wondered what nanny took my place in their life. I wondered if either of them ever woke up in the night, crying, and wondered where I went. Or maybe they didn’t even remember me. Perhaps my only legacy was a persistent feeling of insecurity, the nagging sense that it wasn’t safe to count on anyone at all.
I’d told myself that I was getting out before I was thrown out. But in truth, I had been afraid that if I didn’t leave then, I never would. I’d been afraid I would be sucked down into the quicksand of domesticity. The mother would sail away into her world of power lunches and power suits, and through some mysterious alchemy I would in fact become the children’s mother, trapped forever in a world of spilled flour and leaky diapers and infinite hours spent pretending to look for what was hidden in plain view.
I put my hands on my belly and closed my eyes. Maybe what I needed was a nanny of my own. Someone just like me, only more competent, to raise my child and do my laundry while I got enlightened.
“Excuse me,” lilted a fluty voice with a refined British accent. I opened my eyes to see a willowy woman standing in the aisle next to me, with pale skin, immense blue eyes, and a cloud of red ringlets around her face. She was dressed in a peach-colored sari, swirling around her, which made her look like Glinda the Good Witch. “I’m Ginger. Are you on your way to see Hari Baba?”
“No, we’re not, actually,” I told her in what I hoped was a polite but unencouraging voice.
“Then why are you on the train to Bangalore?” She said it as if the entire city of seven million people existed for the sole purpose of ferrying devotees to the Hari Baba ashram.
“Um…” I couldn’t think quickly enough to lie. I glanced at Devi Das, hoping he would bail me out, but he was tipped against the window, his mouth slightly open, his eyes shut. He looked like a wilted dandelion. “Medical reasons, actually. We’re going to see a doctor.” Perhaps she would think I had a communicable disease and flee.
“Oh, are you sick?” She sat down on the edge of the bench next to me. “Baba can heal you. He is the ultimate doctor. My best friend went to him with thyroid cancer. She spent two days there and”—she snapped her fingers—“it was gone immediately. When she went back to the hospital, they said she didn’t even have a thyroid anymore. If you stay with Baba long enough, all your internal organs turn to pure light anyway.”
“Well, as soon as I go see the real doctor, I’ll probably head up there.”
“Oh, no, you must go right away.” She seemed to feel that my hesitation was a personal affront. “Baba will only be there for a few days, then he is leaving to go into seclusion for three months.”
“I’m sorry, but I really need to go to—”
“Here, take this.” She shoved a pamphlet at me. She reminded me of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who used to come by my house in San Francisco—earnest young men with short-cropped hair and wide eyes, dressed in suits. One of them had buttoned his shirt wrong, so it bunched up around his neck in an endearing way, like a toddler’s. You have a God-shaped hole inside you that only God can fill, he told me. I looked down at Baba’s bald head, his chubby, snub-nosed face. He reminded me of the pig in Alice in Wonderland.
“Okay. I’ll think about it.”
I began flipping through the pamphlet: “Sri Hari Baba is a spiritual master who inspires millions of people throughout the world to lead more kind and moral lives.” Nothing to object to, there. “Sri Hari Baba communicates with all people heart to heart. There are no go-betweens between Himself and those pilgrims who yearn to taste God.”
Maybe Hari Baba was the key to my whole book. I could go see Hari Baba, experience God, and then go home before I’d even hit the second trimester. I could get the rest of my advance to pay for the midwife. I’d be a fully awakened yogini with a bestselling guidebook and a baby. I’d bring my baby with me on my book tour, signing autographs with her slumbering in one of those denim frontpacks. Yes, I’d say modestly, I had a little bit of morning sickness, but it all went away as soon as I got enlightened.
The train was pulling into the Bangalore station. My knee throbbing again, I limped out of the train with Devi Das into a cavernous waiting room with dark mold creeping down the cinderblock walls. Off to one side I saw a restaurant with a dirty linoleum floor and wooden tables lit by the glare of fluorescent lights. I felt as if I would pass out if I didn’t eat. I’d never known hunger like I’d felt since I got pregnant—fierce and urgent, as if the creature inside me were saying, Get me food or I will kill you.
“Just get some food into me and then we can take a rickshaw to the clinic.” We walked into the restaurant and I sat down at a table. Weird how I had started to order Devi Das around as if he were my husband. He was probably more amenable to it than Matt would have been, actually. Matt hated the casual familiarity with which longtime couples treated each other: the way they’d sit across from each other in the corner café, reading different sections of the same paper, hair un-brushed, not even talking. Whereas I had always envied it. What must it be like to be so sure that someone wouldn’t leave that you could stop entertaining them for a while?
Devi Das fetched me a metal plate of idlis—steamed rice cakes in a soupy orange sauce—and some lumpy, sour yogurt in a metal bowl. I ate it it greedily. High on the wall, above the door, hung yet another picture of Hari Baba, draped with a garland of plastic flowers. Bl
inking neon lights ran in circles around it. On the opposite wall was a neon Pepsi sign, also blinking. Were these twin emblems a sign I was supposed to go see Hari Baba? Or just a sign I was supposed to drink a Pepsi?
I swallowed the last bite of food, wishing there were more. Then a wave of nausea hit, and I wished I hadn’t eaten anything at all. How could I trust my decisions about something as important as having a baby? I couldn’t even decide what to eat. I could see the appeal of having a guru tell you what to do. It was permission to take your hands off the wheel for a little while. Eat nothing but bananas, they tell you, and you do. Don’t have sex, and you don’t. Stand on your head for ten minutes a day. Breathe through your left nostril before you eat. The path to liberation clear and simple ahead of you, the burden of doubt and responsibility lifted from your shoulders.
“Excuse me?!” Ginger was standing next to me, Tinker Bell in a sari. “You’re about to miss it!” She handed me two slips of paper. “Here. I tuned into Baba. He wanted me to buy you tickets.”
Suddenly, I was too weary to argue. Hari Baba. Sure; why not? Maybe he would shed some light on my situation. I looked at Devi Das. “Should we?”
Devi Das smiled. “Ram’s disguises are infinite.”
“HARI RAM, MADAME, but Hari Baba does not care about your book,” snapped the Indian woman behind the scuffed wooden counter at the ashram’s Public Relations–Foreigner Registration Office. She was a short woman in a white sari, with a birthmark on one cheek shaped like the palm of a hand. Her office was in a tiny lean-to just outside the massive iron ashram gates, where the three of us had gone as soon as we got off the train, at Ginger’s direction, to register our passports and request a room for the night. I had made the mistake of telling the registrar about my book in the hopes of getting some sort of journalist’s pass, perhaps even access to an interview with Baba himself. But far from endearing me, the information seemed to have enraged her. “Hari Baba does not need your publicity,” she spat.
“He knows that I am telling you this at this moment. He knows that you are here. If I expel you from the ashram for trying to compare him to other teachers, when he is in an uncomparable category shared only by the gods, that is his wish as well.”
As I start to protest, Devi Das stepped forward. “Hari Ram, auntie. We know we are here only at his bidding. We expect no special treatment.”
She looked at him hostilely. “Hari Ram. Ladies and gents must not associate together, unless they are family. You will be required to stay in separate buildings. You may not stand together or talk together or sit together.”
“Oh, but we are indeed family. These are our sisters. They have come all the way from the United States for no other purpose than to be in the presence of Baba himself.”
She grudgingly stamped our visitor’s passes and handed them to us. “Hari Baba has come to help people realize they are divine. And to teach them to lead the good life. The joyful life. That is all.” She spat the words out. “The miracles are not important. He doesn’t care about the miracles at all. He only performs the miracles to attract people to God. Hari Ram!”
We walked out of the office. The street outside was jammed with beggars, holding out deformed limbs, lifting blinded faces at us, and crying out, “Hari Ram! Hari Ram!”—a phrase that I was beginning to realize could be used, at this ashram, to mean anything from “excuse me” to “glory to God” to “please give me money” to “screw you.” “Hari Ram,” I muttered, apologetically, filled with the usual mixture of guilt and repulsion, and we pushed our way through the ashram gates, flashing our pass at the uniformed gatekeeper.
The ashram, it turned out, was like a small city in itself—an enormous complex of temples and cafeterias and dormitories and apartment buildings, the whole thing painted in pastels of peach and baby blue and pale yellow, sweet as an Indian dessert. Towering over it all was a fairy-tale temple, with rosy-tipped minarets rising like giant nipples from buxom domes. The pathways were swarming with visitors, mainly Indians, although I caught a glimpse of the occasional Westerner as well.
“Should we worry about being kicked out?” I’d come a long way out of my way to meet Baba. I didn’t want to be denied a divine visitation on a technicality.
Devi Das shook his head. “She doesn’t care if we stay together or not. She only wants us to admit she has the power to say if we stay together or not. She is a junior devotee. This is the only power she has, and it is important to her that we acknowledge it.”
“We must have compassion for her,” Ginger said, flitting along beside us. “It’s well known that all of the people who work in the foreigner’s relations office are incarnations of evil demons from the time of Rama. In return for their services, Baba has promised them liberation from their karma in this lifetime.”
We made our way through the throngs of people to the lodgings we’d been assigned, a four-story brick building painted the fleshy pink of calamine lotion. We climbed the stairs to our fourth-floor room, a bare cinder-block box. There were no beds, just a few thin cotton mats piled in the corner. Through a doorway with no door, I could see a small bathroom with a squat toilet and a sink.
“Where’s the shower?” I demanded, as if I expected Hari Baba to manifest a Japanese sunken tub with a wave of his hand. If he’s everywhere and knows everything, doesn’t he know that I’m pregnant? Doesn’t he know that I need a hot bath?
“Once you get to the ashram, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what Baba wants.” Ginger pulled a mat off the pile, laid it on the ground, and began spreading her pale green shawl prettily on top of it. “Actually, that’s how it is all the time. But when you’re here, you realize that fact.”
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
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Hi Amanda, just checking in to see what sort of progress you’re making on this enlightenment thing. I’m wondering if there’s any way you could link it in to any kind of fashion or beauty statement. Like, what are enlightened people wearing this year? That way we could get some good promo coverage in Vogue and Vanity Fair.
* * *
Enlightenment for Idiots: Sample Chapter Draft
Be sure to get to bed early, because you’ll have to get up bright and early—well before 4:00 a.m.—if you want a chance to see Hari Baba! The mere sight of a being on this level is supposed to bring great spiritual blessings. Line up outside the gates to the temple courtyard, men and women separately. At 4:30 a.m., the gates to the temple courtyard will open and you’ll be let inside. Don’t be tempted to sleep by the temple in the hopes of getting into the courtyard in the front row; the rows are selected to go inside in a random order to prevent precisely that sort of scheming. Ashram officials say it’s all based on your karma from a previous life!
* * *
MY KARMA MUST have been neither good nor bad, because when Ginger and I filed through an airport-style metal detector into the packed courtyard the next morning, we were right smack in the middle of the crowd. I scanned the men’s side of the courtyard, looking for Devi Das, but I couldn’t see him. It was chilly; I pulled my wool shawl tight around my shoulders. Ginger and I sat cross-legged on
the cobblestones, squeezed knee to knee with the people around us: a plump Indian woman; a couple of older women dressed all in white, talking to each other in German; a doe-eyed Indian girl, hardly more than a teenager, who was too shy even to meet our eyes.
Ginger handed me a scrap of paper and a pen. “You can write Baba a note with a question on it. If you are lucky, he will take it from you.”
I looked skeptically across the sea of people at the stage in the front, where Baba would appear. “He’ll never get it.”
“But that doesn’t matter. If you tune in, he will answer the question in your heart.” She began to write. I looked down at my paper. I could think of nothing to say. Dear Baba, Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Dear Baba, Any chance you would consider putting a bathtub in every room? Ginger nudged me again. “Just write,” she hissed.
I start writing: “Dear Baba: Should I go back to California to have my baby? Or stay in India and seek enlightenment?”
A hum of excitement moved through the crowd, although nothing appeared to be happening. The people in front of us stood up. Ginger remained seated, but I stood, straining my neck to see: Was Baba coming? But no—the people in front of me were sitting down again. I tried to sit down, too, but one of the German women behind me had moved into my spot.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but that’s my seat.”
“You stood up,” she accused. “You gave up your seat. You must go to the back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meekly. “It’s my first day. I didn’t know what was happening.”
“Yes, it’s hard at first.” She didn’t move. “But you have to learn.”
I shot her a dirty glance and crouched down anyway, squatting just above her sandaled foot. My knee twinged in protest. Music started to play from big speakers on the side of the courtyard—a lilting flute melody, Baba’s theme song. A side gate opened and two devotees walked in, pushing Baba in a wheelchair. In person, he looked even larger than his photos: he must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. His neck bulged in folds of fat from the bald dome of his head. “It looks like he’s gained weight,” I whispered to Ginger. “No, he hasn’t,” she whispered back. “It’s an illusion. He’s always changing form. Sometimes he’s large, sometimes he’s small. Sometimes his skin is light, sometimes dark, sometimes blue. It’s all just a game to him.”
