Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  “Why not? You did.”

  “That’s right. That’s how I know you shouldn’t do it.”

  “You always said it was easy.”

  “Well—it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  My mother stopped grinding and looked up at me. “You want to know what it was like? I was there all alone in that little studio apartment, nothing in there but one big mattress for both you and me, and a couple of towels I’d spread out instead of a changing table. My privates were all torn up—I had to have stitches—so it hurt to walk, hurt to sit down. And you screamed and screamed and screamed—your body stiff, your face purple, like you had a hot iron up your behind. That second night home alone, I actually called the emergency room. ‘It’s probably just gas,’ they told me. By the third night, I was afraid I would throw you out the window.

  “One night, I just walked out the door and went down to the bar. I left you lying in the middle of the futon, screaming your little head off. It didn’t seem to make much difference to you if I were there or not. I sat there and drank a Pepsi and looked at the men playing pool and thought, ‘I could just walk away, just like her father did. Get on a bus and never come back.’ It seemed plausible, for a moment, like I really could do it. But, of course, I didn’t. I turned around and came back home. You’d given up crying by then and gone to sleep, all alone in the middle of the futon with your little thumb in your mouth.”

  The smell of cardamom and cloves hung around us. “Why didn’t you go home to your family?”

  “Pride, I suppose. I had finally gotten out of there. I didn’t want to go back and hear all of them saying, ‘I told you so.’ I didn’t want to want them to know how bad it had gotten.” She put the pestle down.

  “Amanda. I don’t want that sort of stupid pride to prevent you from coming home. Just think about it, that’s all I ask. You could stay with me. You wouldn’t have to work. You could just focus on the baby. Let me take care of you.”

  “You take care of me?” I tried to wash the incredulity out of my voice. “I’m sure your new boyfriend would love that.”

  “I know I’ve made some mistakes. But I tried my best. You’ll find out what it’s like soon enough. As a mother, all you can do is just bumble along doing the best you can. Maybe, when you get desperate, you read a parenting book, but none of them tell you anything worth knowing, really. And meanwhile, it feels like your life is racing away from you, and you keep on trying to chase it down, but it’s always just a few steps in front of you. Like you’re a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit around and around a track.

  “It took me years to realize that my life hadn’t run off somewhere else. It was actually happening, right there, with you, all that time I was trying to find it. And by the time I started to realize that, you were gone.”

  Kalyani had pulled her Prana Ma doll from her backpack and was clutching it as she watched us, spellbound. I couldn’t believe it myself: My mother was actually talking to me about her feelings. Maybe Prana Ma’s breath had done some good after all. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d seen a leper cured, a cripple walk.

  “I don’t want you to make the same mistake,” my mother said.

  FOR THE REST of the week, the whole ashram went into a frenzy of activity preparing for the descent of the Divine Mother, as if we were expecting a visit from Oprah. In the kitchen, we stepped up the preparation of chapatis, rice, dal, and spices. My arms ached from rolling dough, and the smell of turmeric clung to my hair. Every day, more devotees streamed into the ashram, including hundreds of local Indians, dressed for a festival in brilliantly colored saris and suits, their faces lit with an eagerness that reflected thousands of years of devotion to the Divine Mother. The Westerners milled about, all seeming slightly anxious, like children lost at the mall.

  By the time the bhajans began, in the early evening, the hall was packed knee to knee with people, pressing thigh to sweaty thigh. The chanting was wild, ecstatic, accompanied by drums and tambourines and a harmonium: a wave of communal ecstasy, the energy soaring higher and higher. The faces of the Indians were bright with faith; the faces of the Westerners were bright with the longing for faith. On my left, Kalyani was weeping. On the other side of her, Devi Das rocked back and forth, his eyes closed. On my right, even my mother was singing and clapping her hands. Why did something in me always hold back?

  I felt a pressure against my knee. I opened my eyes. Just in front of me, a white-haired Indian woman in a mauve sari was slipping sideways onto the ground. Her face was wet with sweat; her eyes were rolled up in her head. In the frenzy of Mother worship, no one else seemed to notice that an actual mother had collapsed. I pulled out my water bottle and dabbed water on her face, but she didn’t respond.

  “Should we carry her outside?” I shook Kalyani.

  “No!” she hissed. “Prana Ma is about to appear as the Divine Mother. We can’t disturb the ceremony.”

  The bhajans stopped. Horns blared, a bell rang, and the curtains rolled back to reveal an empty throne on the stage, with a crown on it. The singing began again, and the curtain closed. I looked down at the fainted woman; her face was clammy. I caught the eye of an ashram official standing a few feet away. I pointed to the woman lying on the floor. The ashram official shook her head sternly, lay a finger on her lip, pointed at the stage, then at her watch: Later, she pantomimed. Later. The crowd kept on singing: “Kali Ma! Durga Ma! Lalita Ma!”

  The curtains pulled back once more, and the crowd roared: Prana Ma was on the throne in a silver crown and a gold dress. A priest bowed in front of her, offering a flame from a ghee-soaked wick blazing in a silver bowl, as the crowd sang: “Om Jaya Jagadeesha hare…Swami Jaya Jagadeesha hare…” What if this lady died in my lap? I turned to my mother. “Mom? What should we do?”

  My mother stood up. “Well, who cares if we disrupt the ceremony?” She bent and scooped up the woman in her arms. “She doesn’t weigh more than a feather pillow. Let’s get her out of here.”

  We pushed our way through the crowd to the door, as people began lining up for darshan, still singing. Out in the courtyard, we set her down on the dusty bricks. My mother took my water bottle and began sprinkling water on her face, pressing it to her lips. Her eyes blinked open.

  “It was just the heat and the crowds,” said my mother to both of us. “And the excitement. That used to happen a lot at the football games at A&M. I once had to carry a cheerleader out of there just like this.” The woman watched her face as she talked, then pushed herself up to a sitting position and leaned against the wall. My mother and I sat next to her.

  “This is what being a mother is all about,” my mother said to me smugly. “You just take care of what’s right in front of you.”

  In one corner of the courtyard, a man sat on the ground saying mantras. Children darted here and there, kicking an empty water bottle. The line for darshan wound out the door of the temple and around the courtyard. I looked at my mother.

  “I can’t go home with you this week, Mom,” I said. “But I’ll come back to California in time to have the baby. I promise.”

  Upward-Facing Bow Pose

  (Urdhva Dhanurasana)

  Lie on your back. Bend your legs and plant your feet by your buttocks and your hands by your shoulders, fingers pointing back toward your heels. Press into your hands and feet and roll your spine to the sky as your heart arches open. Imagine roots tethering your hands and feet to the earth. Feel the strength of your muscles lashing together the steel girders of your bones.

  Below your surfaces, rivers of prana course through an intricate network of subtle channels—creative and unpredictable. Now open your inner floodgates and set the rivers free. Let your body ripple and ride on their currents. Let it blow in the wind of your breath.

  Without structure, the pose collapses. But without prana, it is as useless as a polished brass jug with no water inside.

  The thought “Who am I?” will destroy all other thoughts, and
like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then, there will arise Self-realization.

  —Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950)

  CHAPTER 20

  A WEEK LATER, my mother left—blowing a last kiss to me out the window of her hired car, her hair wrapped in a silk scarf against the wind as she headed to the airport. For about thirty minutes, I was giddy with relief. Then I began to worry that I should have gone with her.

  My worry rode along with me as Devi Das and I took the bus inland a few days later, heading for an ashram at the base of a mountain that Kalyani had told us was one of the most famous pilgrimage sites in India. “Mount Arunachala is sacred to the Lord Shiva,” she’d told us. “All you have to do is walk around it and you’ll get enlightened—if not in this lifetime, then definitely in the next. It’s guaranteed.” Our bus lurched along potholed roads; my window was jammed halfway open, so dust and fumes billowed in. We alternated between hurtling down the road at a sickening speed and stopping for long periods for mysterious reasons. Rumors flew up and down the aisle: There was a strike blocking the road a mile ahead; a truck had overturned, spilling coal across the road. The woman in front of me was carrying a bucket of live fish flopping in a little water; as the day went on, they died one at a time.

  I was five and a half months pregnant, and in the last week my belly had mushroomed. The baby somersaulted inside me. My uterus pressed up into my rib cage so I couldn’t take a deep breath and pressed down on my bladder so I desperately needed to pee. When the bus finally pulled over to the side of the road for a pit stop, I squatted by the side of the road and pulled down my pants under my tunic, holding my nose against the stench of excrement. I felt a flood of animal relief as the urine trickled down into the dirt, then tried not to step in it as I stood up and pulled my trousers back up. Back in the U.S., the other moms on the HeyBaby.com bulletin board were taking their swim aerobics classes, picking out curtains that matched their crib bumpers, buying baby-wipe warmers and diaper tables, practicing their Lamaze breathing with their husbands as coaches. What was I doing here?

  Our bus pulled into town after midnight, too late to go to the ashram. So we checked into a run-down hotel down the street from the bus station, directly across the street from the thousand-year-old temple to Shiva. Our room was hot and whining with mosquitoes; I discovered I’d left my mosquito net at the Prana Ma Ashram. So Devi Das and I pulled our twin beds close together—avoiding looking too closely at the stained, lumpy mattresses—so they’d both fit under his netting, which we rigged from the bare-bulb light fixture. It seemed to me that most of my trip had consisted of rigging and dismantling mosquito netting.

  As soon as we turned out the light, Devi Das began to snore. I was exhausted, too, but I couldn’t sleep. My mother had lit a worry fuse inside me, leading straight to a dynamite keg of terror. Her voice hammered out questions in my head: How are you going to make money, Amanda? Who’s going to watch the baby while you finish your book? Can you afford a babysitter? Will your roommates let you have a baby in the house? Are children even allowed under your lease? And even if they are, where will the baby sleep?

  How had I avoided these questions for so long? The money I’d been paid by Maxine would last me two or three months, tops; I’d have to finish the book to get the rest of the advance, and how would I finish it while I was taking care of a baby? I still had the basic health insurance Tom had insisted I get while I was living with him; that would cover the cost of the birth. I could buy all the baby gear used. But the lease on the apartment was in Ernie’s name, and it was a big deal for Ernie when Ishtar got a parakeet. How would I afford a deposit on a new place? I’d have to live with my mother, and we’d drive each other to nervous breakdowns.

  Something was biting my thighs and inner arms—I hoped it was fleas and not bedbugs. Just before dawn, as I started to doze off, raucous chanting began to blare from the temple across the street. The speakers were turned up so loud that all the high notes screeched, all the low notes buzzed. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I reached over and shook Devi Das’s shoulder.

  “Mmpph?”

  “Devi Das. What am I going to do?”

  “Use earplugs.”

  “The birth is only three months away, and I’m nowhere near done with my book. If I don’t find an enlightened master soon, I’ll have to give back the advance, and I’ve already spent most of it. And then how am I going to support a baby all alone?”

  He sat up, pulling the blanket around his bony shoulders. “We wish we could be more help. But we don’t know anything about supporting babies. We don’t even know much about supporting ourselves. We do know this, though: People come here from all over the country to bring their troubles to Shiva. Maybe you could try that.”

  “Isn’t that a bit risky?” I thought of the corpses on the pyres in Varanasi; Shiva covered in ashes, meditating and watching them burn. “Shiva is the god of destruction.”

  Devi Das put his arm around me, enveloping me in the smell of unwashed armpits and camphor incense. “Are you saying you have a problem with that?”

  A COUPLE OF hours later, Devi Das and I emerged into the roar of the streets. I was exhausted and covered with fleabites, including a row down the inner crack of my buttocks. Bikes and bullock carts fought for space with autorickshaws and cars. The street in front of the temple was mobbed with pilgrims and barefoot sadhus leaning on staffs. We stopped at a stall and bought green coconuts; the coconut seller split off their tops with a single thwack of a machete. I sucked the cool milk thirstily through a plastic straw.

  We paid a rupee to leave our shoes at the sandal stand and walked barefoot up the street to pay our respects at the Shiva temple, at Devi Das’s insistence. We passed shops selling garlands of jasmine, and heaps of perfumed powder, and steel plates and tiffin canisters, and bangles, and plastic buckets, and pictures of Shiva and Parvati and Krishna and Ganesha. Then we passed through the arched stone gateway into the courtyard of the ancient temple, where a morose, dull-eyed elephant stood caparisoned in crimson and gold silk. At the gesture of the elephant keeper, I offered him a handful of rupees. He reached out his trunk and took them delicately from my hand. Then, with his curled trunk, he caressed the top of my head as if in blessing.

  Devi Das and I walked through another arch into the inner sanctum: a dank cave with intricately carved stone walls, where a Brahman priest in a dhoti, naked to the waist, beckoned us past two stone bulls glistening with ghee to a smooth pillar of a Shiva lingam, wet with water. Devotees pressed close, waving their hands over the puja flame and fanning their faces with the blessings from the fire. I was walking into a chamber of the collective unconscious, peering into a primal soup of archetypal visions. But there was no time to sit in silence, soaking it up; the priest performed a hasty puja, then pressed a packet of ash into our hands. “Donations,” he said, gesturing with his head toward a collection plate.

  From: HeyBaby.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  As you sail into your third trimester, the good old “nesting instinct” is kicking in strong! If you haven’t already, now’s the ideal time to start picking out a crib and a car seat, choosing a theme for baby’s room, and stocking up on receiving blankets, booties, mobiles, rattles, and other goodies. Click below for a special deal on Shrek-themed bedding.

  Symptoms you may be feeling include drowsiness, heartburn, indigestion, flatulence, bloating, headaches, bleeding gums, nosebleeds, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, itchy abdomen, clumsiness, leaky breasts, absentmindedness, increased fantasizing about the baby, anxiety, boredom, clumsiness, backache, leg cramps, constipation, and thick white vaginal discharge.

  Be sure to savor every minute of this special time!

  From: Lori647@aol.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  I wanted to let you know that I just got a call from Tom. He wants me and Joe to do the landscaping this weekend on the new house he just bought in Half Moon Bay. I j
ust wanted to clear it with you first. There are a million people he could have called for this job more locally; I know he’s just using this as an excuse to get news about you. But I could really use the money. Is it all right if I tell him yes?

  * * *

  Enlightenment for Idiots: Sample Chapter Draft

  If you’re looking to increase your odds of spiritual awakening, you can’t do better than head for Mount Arunachala, a solitary rocky red hill thrust up in the middle of the arid plains! Devout Hindus believe that this 3,000-foot outcropping of igneous rock is a piece of Shiva himself—not just his dwelling place, but his upthrust “lingam,” the actual god himself in phallic, physical form. The sight of this mountain—in fact, even the mere thought of it—is believed to neutralize all your negative karma and lead to the state of ultimate knowledge of your true nature. If you walk all the way around the mountain, it’s said that all your deepest wishes will come true.

  * * *

  “YOU ARE LUCKY,” said the receptionist in the ashram office, a sweet-faced Indian man. “Normally, ashram is booked many months in advance. But last night only, one married couple is canceling. You are married couple, yes?” He glanced at Devi Das’s sadhu garb and my swollen belly.

  “Yes, we are,” said Devi Das firmly. “Thank you for finding us a room. My wife is expecting, as you can see.”

  My wife. It was the first time I’d ever been referred to that way, and it was amazingly comforting, even though it was coming from a dreadlocked sadhu who was sworn to celibacy.

  The ashram was an oasis of green lawns and stone buildings nestled in the snarl of roads at the base of Mount Arunachala. Nothing was required at this ashram—no meditation, no chanting, no work practice, no yoga. The guru had died many years before. And so for the first week and a half there, that’s exactly what I did—nothing. I just lay on my bed for hours at a stretch, looking out my screen door at the mountain poking up its craggy peak behind the ashram buildings. It was curiously peaceful, lying there, watching the clouds drift by it in a blue sky. I could hear the sweet, high-pitched croon of the Brahman boys chanting in the ashram temple. Giant monkeys rattled the bars that shielded my open windows, leering in at my stash of bananas and tangerines. I left my room only for meals in the ashram dining room, where we scooped our food off banana leaves with our bare hands: rice cooked with mustard seeds and coriander; spicy coconut chutney; sweet sticky balls of cardamom, sugar, and ghee.