Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  A buzz of excitement moved through the crowd. Everyone swiveled toward Baba as he rolled across the stage, occasionally tossing out handfuls of flower petals. Hundreds of arms reached toward him, holding out scraps of paper. “The marigolds come from nowhere,” said Ginger. “See? No baskets. He just materializes them. See the sparkles in his hands? He’s manifesting jewelry for people.”

  The whole thing felt curiously anticlimactic. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “Feel the energy?” asked Ginger. Her eyes were closed. She was swaying from side to side. “Feel the divine power?” I closed my eyes and tried to feel it, but I wasn’t getting a thing. “Mmm,” I said, not wanting to disappoint her. “I do think I feel a little something.”

  But in any case, the event appeared to be over. Baba was exiting through a gate on the other side of the courtyard. Everyone was leaving. “Breakfast,” said Ginger, and stood up. “Do you want scrambled eggs at the Western kitchen? Or idlis and dosa at the Indian one?” I crumpled up my letter in my hand and stuck it into my pocket, and we made our way out the door. “You see,” said Ginger triumphantly, and pointed to the ground, as if presenting incontrovertible evidence of Baba’s divinity. “Do you get it now?” Here and there, on the dirt, were the trampled petals of marigolds.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I stood in my bathroom, washing my face in the sink. I’d just thrown up again. Ginger had gone out to wait for Hari Baba’s afternoon appearance. I had told her I needed to stay back and meditate. But instead I lay down on my bed. I was so tired of being filthy: lines of grime around my neck, clothes stained and unwashed, fingertips dry and papery, the soles of my feet cracking and brown. I pulled out my notebook and tried to write, but all facts seemed to swim in a sea of rumor. Hari Baba had founded schools—how many? Hari Baba had founded orphanages—where? There was a planetarium nearby—why? He occasionally rode on an elephant—where was it kept? There were five thousand people at the ashram today—or were there two thousand? Or ten thousand? Over Christmas, Ginger said earnestly, there were half a million—“and Baba fed them all.” Where could I check any of these facts? Where could I go for answers?

  I closed my eyes. Maybe I should go into town and buy a silk scarf, or a sandalwood Ganesha. I had seen some beautiful ones in a shop by the main gate. I pictured myself back at home, my room hung with embroidered silk tapestries, my Ganesha on my altar. I picked them up at the Hari Baba ashram, I am telling an admiring visitor. He’s a manifestation of God himself, you know.

  From a distance, I heard the tinkling flute music again: Baba must be making his appearance. I shut my eyes and tried to empty my mind and wait for Baba to answer my questions. But all I got was the sound of a whisk broom down the hall.

  The span of human life is a hundred years. Half of this is wasted by a person lacking self-control, because he sleeps stuporously in the dark of night. Twenty years go by in childhood, when one is bewildered, and in youth, when one is preoccupied with playing; another twenty years go by in old age, when one is physically impaired and lacking in determination. The remaining years are wasted by that person who, out of great confusion and insatiable desire, is madly attached to family life. How can a person who is attached to family life, with his senses uncontrolled and bound by strong ties of affection, liberate himself?

  —Bhagavata Purana, ca. AD 900

  CHAPTER 12

  WE’LL HAVE TO get the blood work back to be certain. But judging by the size of your cervix, I’d say you are about nine weeks pregnant.”

  Dr. Gita Rao sat down in the chair across from me, looking down at the folder of paperwork in her hands. She was a young woman—in her midthirties, I guessed—with her hair cut short in a sleek, jaw-length style; her slim figure was concealed in white medical scrubs. Between the twin plucked arcs of her dark eyebrows was a red bindi: the cosmetic symbol of the third eye, the seat of the soul, the center of intuition.

  I was perched on her examining table, still dressed in a paper robe tied together at the back; my skin was goose-bumped in the blast of the too-cold air-conditioning. A poster on the wall depicted a diagram of the female reproductive apparatus, with labels in Hindi, Kannada, and English. On a wicker bookshelf sat a pink plastic pelvis with a plastic baby curled in a fetal position inside it.

  Dr. Rao’s office was in a high-tech ob-gyn clinic and birthing center—next door to a six-story medical complex—that primarily catered to upper-class, educated Indian women and Western women living and working in Bangalore. Dr. Rao worked here three days a week, she’d told me. The other two, she volunteered for a charitable organization in the Bangalore slums, educating women on reproductive health and offering free medical care.

  I’d poured out my whole story to her in a torrent as I lay on her table: the pregnancy, my book, Matt, Devi Das, enlightenment, Mr. Kapoor, Hari Baba…I hadn’t realized how desperate I’d been to confide in someone, anyone. I didn’t know what I’d expected—sympathy? Scolding? Advice? Cookies? But so far, her only response had been calm and clinical, as she drew blood and conducted my exam with cool efficiency.

  “Are you feeling any nausea?” she asked.

  I nodded. “A lot. And not just in the morning. It’s pretty much all day long. I thought it was just the food.”

  “That will go away in a few weeks. Until then, just eat whatever you can keep down.” She handed me a small bottle. “Here are some good prenatal vitamins. I wouldn’t trust the ones from the pharmacy. Any food cravings?”

  “Oh…buttered toast. Spaghetti.” Actually, my memory was spewing up visions of all the food I myself had eaten as a child, as if accepting take-out orders from a younger version of myself: macaroni and cheese with hot dogs cut up on top of it. Grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. A casserole my mother used to make out of canned chili poured on a bed of Fritos, topped with bag of pregrated Kraft cheese. “Cheeseburgers, even though I don’t eat meat any more.”

  “Well, treat yourself to anything you want. You can drop by one of the big hotels and get Western food. They have an excellent brunch at the Oberoi; I go there myself sometimes when I get a sudden craving for pancakes and eggs.”

  She plucked the plastic baby out of the plastic pelvis and began running her hands over its smooth, shiny head. “It is good to eat familiar food when you are carrying a child, at least once in a while. I remember when I was pregnant with my son. I was in the United States, in Boston, in my last year of my medical residency at Harvard. It was cold, so very cold! I’d never imagined that any place could be that cold. I was so nauseous and the only thing I could imagine eating were masala dosas, the way my mother used to make them, stuffed with potato and spinach…or idli with sambar. I’d go to the Indian restaurants and try to find them, but the spices were all wrong. I remember sitting in the cafeteria after my shift at the hospital, weeping, thinking, I should just go home to India. Give up my dream of being a doctor. How can I have a baby in this strange land, so far from all of my family?”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I finished my residency and had my baby there one month later.” She gestured at a framed picture on the bookshelf, a smiling boy about three years old. He was wearing a crimson sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan “Harvard Class of 2025.” “It was very lonely and hard. But now I have realized both dreams: I am a doctor and a mother.” She picked up a white wand, attached by what looked like a telephone cord to a small box with a speaker. “So now, would you like to try to hear the baby’s heartbeat?”

  “Can I really hear it this soon?” I lay back on her table.

  “It’s early, but it’s possible, with luck and a little help from the Doppler.” She smeared my belly with a cold jelly, placed the wand on it, and began moving it slowly across the surface. “You’re very slender, which makes it easier. Listen—there it is. You can tell it’s the baby’s, not yours, because of how fast it is.” From the speaker came a rapid patter. My baby’s heart! My hand flew to my belly. I saw tiny fingers curle
d around mine; cheeks soft as flower petals; big eyes looking up at me trustingly. I looked at the picture of Dr. Rao’s son. “So…do you think that I could stay in India for my pregnancy, just the way you stayed in America? Try to finish my book? Or is that crazy?”

  She shook her head. “That decision I cannot make for you. It is yours alone. I can tell you what I know is important: good nutrition. Lots of rest. Regular medical checkups and good medical care. Reduced stress. A calm life. These are things you can get in America or in India, or not get in America or India.”

  Involuntarily, I glanced at the window. We were on the third floor of an office building; I couldn’t see into the streets below. But I remembered the rickshaw drive over here, careening in and out of traffic with my hand clapped over my nose and mouth in a futile attempt to screen out the fumes. At our hotel last night, a blocked drain in the shower had flooded the floor of our room—when we complained to the manager, he’d sent an eleven-year-old boy to fix it, who had climbed out the fourth-floor window and dangled there, banging at a pipe with a hammer.

  The heartbeat galloped on. Dr. Rao smiled at me, as if reading my mind. “Correct me if I am wrong,” she said gently. “But I have heard that ashrams are often very tranquil places.”

  An ashram. Not a giant Hari Baba institute: a small, intimate ashram, just a handful of devotees and an enlightened master who personally guided their every movement. I closed my eyes, imagining myself in a nun’s cell, white robes draping my enormous belly.

  “For the birth itself, of course, you would want to be at a Westernized hospital,” Dr. Rao said, as if reading my mind. “I can recommend several good ones in Delhi, or Mumbai, or right here in Bangalore. Or you could go back to the U.S. as the time gets near.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t envision it. Instead, I saw myself leaning against a tree, like the Buddha’s mother. An oxcart waits nearby. A thunderclap splits the sky. My baby pops out of my side, takes three steps, lifts his chubby hand, and announces: I am the world-honored one.

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  I only have three things to say to you: (1) You’re insane. (2) You’re insane. (3) You’re insane. I know how much this book contract means to you. I know how much your spiritual practice means to you, too. But we’re talking about your BABY, for God’s sake! Are you really willing to risk your baby’s life—and yours, too, I might add—by having it in some second-rate third-world hospital? Not to mention, what if you get sick during your pregnancy? What if you get hepatitis, or parasites, or malaria, or dengue fever, or one of those nasty worms that starts in your stomach and ends up crawling out your nose? Did you know that a thousand people get killed EVERY SECOND in Indian traffic accidents??? You can’t just think about yourself, any more. You’ve got someone else you have to take care of.

  “SO TELL ME again how this works,” I said to Devi Das. “This guy is a kind of fortune-teller?”

  The day after my appointment with Dr. Rao, Devi Das and I were seated in the backseat of a small taxi, making our way through traffic-clogged streets on our way to visit a swami who Devi Das informed me was a “palm leaf reader.” Attached to the dashboard by rubber suction cups were three plastic figures with clownlike faces, which bobbed and flailed as we careened around corners: a trident-wielding Shiva, a blue-faced Krishna, and a beatific Jesus with a scarlet heart emblazoned like a bull’s-eye on his chest. Covering his bases, I thought, as we swerved around a bus and through an intersection, horn blaring, narrowly avoiding knocking over a wooden fruit cart as one of our wheels lurched up onto a sidewalk. On roads like this, it’s probably a good idea.

  “He’s not really a fortune-teller. More of an interpreter. Four thousand years ago, the story goes, God dictated predictions to a group of sages, who wrote down everything he said on palm tree leaves. The leaves have now been turned into a library full of books that are kept for safekeeping at this temple in Bangalore. You tell the interpreter the exact date, time, and place of your birth, and he will look you up in the palm leaf manuscripts and tell you what God said about you.”

  “A bunch of Indian sages took dictation about me? Four thousand years ago? That must have been entertaining for them. I thought Bangalore was supposed to be the Silicon Valley of India. Haven’t the palm leaf interpreters all been replaced by websites? Predict your future at palmleafbook.com?”

  “It sounds far-fetched, we know. But it’s amazingly accurate. We went there ourselves, a couple of years ago. The interpreter told us that we were on a spiritual path that would lead us either to enlightenment or to insanity.”

  I looked at Devi Das. That morning, he had gathered all of his dreadlocks into a kind of topknot, which sprouted from the top of his head in an untidy fountain. “Gee, I wonder how he figured that out.”

  “But he said all kinds of other things that he couldn’t possibly have known. For instance, the palm leaves mentioned our identical twin brother.”

  “You have a twin? You never told me that!” One Devi Das seemed improbable enough; I couldn’t imagine a second one. “Where is he? Meditating in a cave somewhere?”

  “He died when we were a teenager. We don’t talk about him much.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what to say. It struck me that I really hadn’t tried to get to know Devi Das very well, although we’d spent almost a month and a half together. I’d been so absorbed in my own drama that I hadn’t even bothered; he was just the backdrop to my own adventure. “Were you very close to him?”

  “We were inseparable. Even our own mother had a hard time telling us apart.” We were paused at an intersection; an old man hammered against the window of our car, holding out his hand, one eye a red and oozing hole. “We had our own private language that nobody else understood.”

  We. Suddenly Devi Das’s plural resonated with a new meaning. Two red-haired babies, nestled back to back in the same crib. Two red-haired boys, flying model planes in a meadow. “How did he die?”

  “There are sometimes inaccuracies when translating from the ancient Sanskrit. According to the palm leaves, it was a chariot accident.” He looked out the window. “Look, we are here.” The cab had pulled up in front of a small, squat temple built out of brick and painted white. On the roof was a giant, crimson-painted statue of Shiva dancing in a ring of fire.

  We got out of the car and Devi Das handed the driver a handful of rupees. I got out too, still fumbling for words. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

  He looked at me the way my mother used to look at me when I asked about my father, a look I had learned to respect. It was a look that said, If I begin talking, I will break into a thousand little pieces, and you will spend the rest of your life trying to put me back together again.

  “We don’t think about it much. For us, it is as if it happened in another lifetime.”

  “ACCORDING TO THE palm leaf manuscripts, this prophecy is to be given to you on the day that your age is twenty-nine years, eight months, and twenty-seven days,” pronounced the palm leaf interpreter. He was a white-haired man, dressed in the orange robes of a swami, as small and thin-boned as a bird. He perched on the other side of a rickety wooden desk. “So I see from your birth date that you have come to me on exactly the correct day.”

  “It’s nice to be on time for once.” I was starting to feel a little light-headed; I wished I had eaten in the car. There was a paper cone of peanuts in my backpack, but I was pretty sure it would be rude to pull it out and start munching while receiving a prophecy.

  He nodded. “Indeed.” He bent over a small bound book, crumbling at the edges. “You were born in a distant country, far from India. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “According to the leaves, you have been born in India many, many times before. You have lived many past lives devoted to yogic disciplines.”

  Well, okay. Maybe this guy was worth listening to, after all.

  “For most of those lifetimes, you were a man. And so you hav
e had the opportunity to study with many of the greatest gurus of India. But in your last incarnation you would not follow your teacher’s instructions. You ran away from the temple and became a merchant and householder. Because of that disobedience, you have been incarnated as a woman.”

  Oh great. So this is my first time in a female body. No wonder I’m having a hard time figuring out how to do it. “You mean, being a woman is supposed to be some kind of punishment?”

  “Not a punishment,” he said. “Just—a consequence.” He peered at his book again. “Your romantic life has been…troubled. You have had difficulty forming lasting attachments. By the age of thirty, you will not yet be married.”

  I glanced at my ringless finger. “Um—how about by the age of thirty-five?”

  “The leaves indicate that you are on the verge of a great change in your life. At the age of thirty, you will meet a great spiritual teacher. This teacher will be a reincarnation of the master you ran away from last time. This is why you have come to India. This will be another opportunity for you to recommit to the teacher you studied with last time around. But in this case, you must surrender completely. If you do not, you will miss your opportunity for enlightenment.”

  He leaned back in his chair, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose so forcefully that I was afraid he would blow himself out of his chair. “Do you have any questions?”