Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

“Well, it’s not a hundred percent accurate unless we do an amnio, which there’s no reason to do in your case. But we can usually be about ninety-nine percent sure.”

  This was all happening too fast. I looked at Devi Das. “We’re the wrong person to ask,” he said. “We peek at hidden Christmas presents. We read books from back to front.”

  “Um…” I studied the image on the screen, which now resembled a poodle: ultrasound as Rorschach test. “Sure, go ahead and tell me.” And then, changing my mind, I said, “Actually, don’t!” while, at the same time, Dr. Rao said, “It looks like he’s a little boy.”

  A boy. A boy? “Wow,” I said. Dr. Rao was looking at me expectantly, so I repeated myself, with more enthusiasm this time: “Wow! A boy!”

  “A boy!” echoed Devi Das. “You can name him after us!”

  The truth is, I was going to need some time to get used to the idea. I hadn’t even realized it till this moment, but all along I’d been assuming I was carrying a smaller version of myself, tucked inside me like one of those Russian nesting dolls. Instead, I was incubating a little creature who would someday forget to return some girl’s phone calls; who would say “That was fun” instead of “I love you” while getting out of bed with her; who would surf the Internet while she was on the phone trying to talk about their relationship, then try to make her feel better by driving her up the coast to a bed-and-breakfast, ruining the effect by listening to his iPod through headphones the whole way.

  “And here are his feet…see the little toes?” Dr. Rao had moved on, but I was still stuck. A boy. What did I know about boys? Cacophonous drum and bass blaring from a bedroom, pizza crusts on the kitchen floor. I would try to talk to my teenage son, but I wouldn’t know what to say, and he and his friends would roll their eyes and ignore me, and it would be exactly like being back in high school.

  The ultrasound was over. I wiped the jelly off, sat up, and pulled down my shirt. Dr. Rao was still talking—nutrition, kick counts, Braxton Hicks contractions, epidurals—but I could barely focus. She handed me a stack of pamphlets. “If you have any questions about what we’ve been discussing, these should help. I recommend that you come back for another checkup in about a month. Where are you going after this?”

  “To an ashram by the ocean in the south.” I flipped through the pamphlet on the top: What You Should Know About Circumcision. Yikes. “There’s a woman guru there named Prana Ma who’s supposed to be an incarnation of the Divine Mother. You know, the goddess who made the whole universe.”

  Dr. Rao raised her dark eyebrows. “I see mothers all day long. To me, they are all divine. What could be more powerful than bringing another human being into the world through your own body?” She turned to the printer in the corner. “But many of them are just coming to the clinic for the ‘sex test.’ If they discover that they are carrying a little girl, they abort her rather than bringing another woman into the world. Last week at the free clinic, I saw a pregnant woman with burn scars all over her face and body. Her husband had doused her with kerosene and set her on fire because her family failed to provide a sufficient dowry. And this is not unusual. What is unusual is that she lived.” The printer started up with a whine. “If half of the people who are so thrilled about visiting a Divine Mother were to turn their attention instead to taking care of some actual mother right in their own village—maybe right in their own house—India would be a better place.”

  She turned back to me, holding out a small stack of pictures. “Here you go. These are a few of the images from your ultrasound.”

  I took one and looked at it: a space alien with immense eyes, a bulging forehead, a tiny mouth budded with teeth. He was looking straight at me, one hand lifted, as if he were greeting me from across a galaxy.

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  That’s fantastic! Boys aren’t all hopeless: look at Joe. You just have to make sure you housebreak him properly. I read somewhere that if little boys challenge your authority, you have to do this thing called the “alpha takedown,” where you throw them to the ground on their backs and stick your face up close and yell in their face. Oh, wait, no, maybe that’s dog training I’m thinking of.

  THE FERRY RIDE from the train station to the ashram took all day, a dreamlike glide through lush backwaters. Our boat was a small barge with no chairs, just a few patched blankets tossed on the rough deck. It churned through coconut groves and rice paddies, along banks dotted with huts thatched with bamboo. Outhouses woven out of palm fronds hung over the water.

  Around us glided dugout canoes and fishing boats with hooked prows—carved from jackfruit wood, Devi Das told me, and tarred black to make them waterproof. They were poled by wiry, stern men in white lunghis. Women in saris blazing with color—vermilion, turquoise, lemon—waved at us as we glided by. Naked children dove in and out of the water like otters.

  Half of the deck was covered with a tattered awning, but for now I just lolled in the sun, my wide-brimmed straw hat shading my face. The passengers were mainly Indians, with a few Westerners I suspected were also ashram bound: a woman in Birkenstocks and a turquoise sari whose dirty-blonde hair fountained from a topknot; a shirtless guy in a ponytail and khaki shorts with a blue-faced Krishna tattooed on his hairy chest. Devi Das sat beside me, eating mango after mango that we’d bought from a fruit seller at the dock. At twenty weeks pregnant, my body felt swollen all of a sudden—nipples puffy, breasts blue-veined and tender. That morning, I had noticed that a dark line had appeared down my belly from my navel to my pubic bone. The baby danced inside me. I felt lazy and ripe—a banana tree laden with fruit, an ocean bursting with fish.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to have a son,” I said to Devi Das. Now that I’d gotten used to it, the idea enchanted me: A toddler in overalls, digging for worms. A boy with a mop of curly hair shooting baskets in my driveway.

  “Well, technically speaking, you already have a son.”

  “I guess so. Wow. So does that mean I’m already a mother?”

  He patted me on the back. “Congratulations, Mom.”

  Mom. I rolled the word around in my mind, trying to make it apply to me. Mom. A person who could be counted on to carry Band-Aids in her purse, frost and decorate cupcakes, construct toy airplanes out of paste and popsicle sticks. Not that my mother was ever like that. If the Divine Mother were anything like my mother, the world would be half finished—mountain ranges partially dusted with trees, then abandoned; oceans boiling away untended until all the water evaporated and the ocean floor was burned black, like a forgotten teakettle. Come to think of it, maybe that was what was wrong with the world these days. The Divine Mother had gotten distracted, wandered on to some more compelling project in some other universe. Sorry, darling, she was saying, looking down at Earth tugging at her robes. I lost track of time.

  “Were you close to your mom?” I asked Devi Das.

  He shrugged. “Our mom wasn’t what you’d call close to anyone, except maybe her shrink. I think she had some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. She had a C-section just so she wouldn’t have to deal with the sloppiness of giving birth. The main thing she noticed about us and our brother was how messy we made things.”

  “Do you keep in touch at all?”

  “We send her a postcard every once in a while. And every Christmas she sends us a check for $457.43. I think it’s some formula her tax accountant figured out.” He pulled another mango from his shoulder bag and sliced into it with his knife, tossing the peels over the edge of the boat. They bobbed on the waves, gently falling away behind us. Silver fish broke the surface, snapping at them. “How about you? Have you told your mother you’re pregnant yet?”

  “Not yet. I’m still getting up the nerve.”

  “What are you afraid of?” He offered me a slice of mango, slick with juice.

  “I guess I’m afraid she’ll make it all about her, somehow.” I popped the fruit into my mouth, slippery and luscious. A boat glided past: an
older man in the prow poling it along, a young boy in the back casting a rope net into the water. “There was only room for one drama queen in our house, when I was growing up. And my mother always made clear that that was her.”

  The couple of times I’d brought home boyfriends to meet my mother, she’d alternated between manic charm and outright hostility, as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to seduce them or obliterate them. I remembered one year, shortly after Matt and I began seeing each other, when he’d come home for Christmas with me. It was not a home I’d ever been to before: a studio apartment in Santa Barbara, overlooking a parking lot, where my mother was trying to start a new career as a real estate agent.

  “The market is booming,” she’d told us. “One big sale, and I’ve got the down payment on my own place.” My mother had ordered Christmas dinner from a gourmet deli up the street. Matt and I sat at the table with her, opening white take-out boxes and dumping their contents into pottery bowls and platters she’d fired herself the week before, while she drank glass after glass of Gallo chardonnay and told us about her latest boyfriend’s experiments with Viagra. “When he turned fifty, he went out and bought himself a motorcycle,” she had told us, pouring another glass of wine. “As if I wouldn’t notice his little problem if he rode up on a Harley.” I heaped mashed potatoes into a white serving bowl with a nude, winged goddess painted on it, carefully burying a triangle of purple pubic hair.

  When Matt excused himself to go to the bathroom, I screwed up my nerve to tell my mother that I’d prefer she not discuss her intimate life in front of my boyfriend. She flew into a rage and stormed out of the apartment. After waiting for an hour, Matt and I started to heat up the food in the microwave, but of course my mother’s bowls weren’t microwave proof. The naked goddess shattered, spewing mashed potatoes and gravy mixed with particles of ceramic. My mother didn’t come back until morning.

  Still, when things didn’t work out with Matt and me, my mother was upset, as if our breakup was a personal rejection of her. You should have fixed yourself up a little more, she told me on the phone; you should have been more tolerant. Men need a long leash. She called back an hour later. No, you should have been firmer, laid down the law right from the beginning, let him know how things were going to be. Your road or the high road. My failure to keep Matt was just another way that I had fallen short—and another way that men had let her down, yet again.

  “It’s as if every drama in my life had to become her drama,” I said now. “I don’t want this to happen with my pregnancy. Whenever I tell her about something, it becomes hers. And then she retells it and reshapes it until I don’t even recognize it any more.”

  “Well, this is your baby, not hers. How could her knowing about it make that any different?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I’m so different from her. But still sometimes I don’t know where she ends and I begin. It’s like she’s inside me, commenting on everything I do. And it’s hard enough for me to tell what I think about this pregnancy. I don’t want it to get all mixed up with her feelings about it.”

  After the incident with Matt, I’d erected a kind of firewall between me and my mother: going home as little as possible, and when I did, telling her as little as possible about my life. Now I put my hands on my belly. A mother. I’m a mother. The thought was terrifying.

  I wasn’t just afraid of becoming a mother. I was afraid of becoming my mother.

  * * *

  Enlightenment for Idiots: Sample Chapter Draft

  In Hindu mythology, the great goddess manifests in countless forms: the bloodthirsty destroyer Kali, with her long red tongue and the garland of skulls around her neck; the toothsome Parvati, the consort of Shiva; the mighty Durga, who annihilates the demons of ignorance with her own ferocity.

  Now hundreds of thousands of people around the world believe that the Divine Mother has incarnated as Prana Ma, a plump, radiant Indian woman whose ashram in southern India hosts thousands of devotees every year. In her “darshans,” or face-to-face blessings, Prana Ma blows on the forehead of each one of her followers—a “breath of life” that is believed to lift the devotee to a whole new level of spiritual existence. To date, according to the ashram brochure, she has blown on over 20 million people around the world.

  Prana Ma is a fountain of divine maternal love, which may be particularly healing to those whose own mothers lacked

  If the image of mother love isn’t a particularly soothing one to you

  Dear Mom—I know you’ll be as excited as I am to hear my wonderful news

  * * *

  “WHEN I MET Prana Ma, I was nineteen years old.” The woman on the sleeping mat next to mine peered at me through the veil of mosquito nets that separated us—a waif with stringy hair and worried eyes, dressed in a white salwar kameez. She was clutching a stuffed doll to her chest. Her name was Kalyani, which she had informed me was a Sanskrit word meaning “blissful.” “I was working in a diner in Albuquerque, cracking eggs into a bowl, when a friend of mine walked in and said, ‘I just heard about an avatar in South India.’ And all the hair on my body stood on end.”

  “Mmm.” I tried to communicate as little interest as possible without actually telling her to shut up. My head pounded; my lower back ached; my eyes were swollen and itchy from dust. I could hardly hear Kalyani over the wail of the bhajans playing from the speakers in the courtyard outside, endless hymns to the Divine Mother that made my head throb even harder. Kali Ma, Durga Ma, Kali Kali Durga Ma…

  “That afternoon my boyfriend left me,” Kalyani continued.

  “Two days later, my puppy died. Next week, my cat ran away. Then the restaurant folded. Within a month, I was in India.”

  “Mmm.” I closed my eyes. Was there anywhere in this ashram I could find a Motrin?

  “When I first met Ma, I put my head in her lap and cried. Three days later, I saw her heal a leper, and that was it.”

  Kalyani and I were in the women’s dormitory of the massive Prana Ma Ashram—really just an huge, unfurnished room on the tenth floor of an apartment building, jammed with devotees, where you could roll out a cotton mat from a stack in the corner. I’d tried for a private room, or even a double, but the ashram was packed with thousands of pilgrims in anticipation of an upcoming festival, an annual extravaganza in which Prana Ma was apparently going to appear as the Divine Mother in all her glory. So I’d tried to carve out the illusion of personal space by attaching one end of my mosquito net to the corner window ledge behind me, the other end to the straps of my backpack, which I’d laid at the end of my mat. But a few mosquitoes had still managed to get in—they zoomed around my head, fat and bloodthirsty, whining death threats.

  “I’m sorry, but I need to be quiet for a little while,” I told Kalyani. “I’m really not feeling that great.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She thrust out her rag doll toward me: a squat little figure whose face I recognized from the flyers lying all around the ashram. Its red mouth was pursed in a whistle. “Would you like to hold my Prana Ma doll?”

  “Uh—no thanks.” I pulled out a yellow leaflet and studied the schedule printed on it. Bhajans…meditation…work…darshan…more work…scriptural study…more bhajans…I rolled over onto my side. “I’ll just take a little nap until dinnertime.”

  “If you’re feeling tired, the best thing to do is go to darshan and get blown on. It will give you all the energy you need.”

  I was going to strangle her. I truly was. “I’m sure I’ll appreciate it more after a little sleep.”

  “Prana Ma never sleeps. She’s plugged into universal energy. I went on tour with her last year as one of her personal assistants, and it just about killed me. She was up until four in the morning blowing on people, every night, and all of her assistants had to stay up with her. Then she would sleep for two hours and get up and do it again. After the tour was done, I had to check into a hospital for a week. That’s how powerful her love is.”

  Maybe if I just lie here,
she’ll go away.

  “When Westerners come here, our heads are so full. We are so dry. That’s why Mother doesn’t talk much. There’s this aching wound in us, this longing for love. That’s what she gives us.”

  Then again, maybe she won’t.

  Kalyani sat up and looked at her watch. “Oh, look at the time. We better go or we’ll miss darshan. Besides, in just a few minutes the work practice crew will be coming through here to mop the floors.”

  I give up. I sat up. Okay, I’d go get blown on. Who knew? Maybe Prana Ma would blow me all the way to enlightenment, and I could go home to California and have my baby.

  DARSHAN TOOK PLACE in an auditorium with doors and windows open to let in the humid breeze. Kalyani and I joined a queue of hundreds and began inching toward Prana Ma, who sat in a padded armchair on a stage at the front of the room. I did the math in my head: Let’s see…roughly three hundred people ahead of me…Let’s say each blow takes ten to fifteen seconds…that means I’ll get mine in about…an hour and a half? My feet ached, my shoulders ached, my pubic bone ached. But as I flipped through the pamphlet I picked up at the door, I began to get excited. Prana Ma’s breath on your face was like diving into a pool of infinite love and compassion, her devotees claimed. Your mind went still. Your heart bloomed open. You fell into infinite darkness; you lit up with infinite light. Maybe there was no need to do endless hours of yoga, to sit for hours in meditation, to purify prakriti from purusha or get massaged by strangers in frilly bras. Maybe all it took was getting breathed on by the right person.

  Two hours later, I was within ten feet of Prana Ma. The line was feverish with anticipation. Devotees jostled together, riveted on the tiny woman on the stage, who was leaning forward, blowing on one person after another. Kalyani had forgotten all about me; I was just another body competing in the crush. My nose was jammed between the shoulder blades of the sweaty man in front of me. Pulling back, I stepped on the foot of the woman behind me. Before I could stammer my apology, she drove her elbow hard into my kidneys.