Space Between the Stars

by Deborah Santana

  1974

  Within a few months, Dipti Nivas became well known in the Bay Area. A reputation for delicious casseroles and low prices brought customers from Sonoma, Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, and Marin. They joined the local “regulars”—the name we endearingly called those who ate lunch and dinner with us many times a week. R. B. Read, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote that our restaurant was “a vegetarian delight,” with meals of “truly gourmet quality.” Kitsaun and I jumped into each other's arms, overjoyed that our hard work had been publicly recognized and our restaurant praised.

  We hired more employees and became noticeably more efficient. Hundreds of diners ate at Dipti Nivas each day. I was able to work one shift rather than all day and night. My schedule began at 2:30 in the afternoon and ended at closing. When I arrived at the restaurant, I meditated; then I layered a tossed green salad over brown rice and smothered it in blue cheese dressing; I ate at our desk in the cramped office, or at a table in the low-seating area if we were not busy. The staff was never allowed to eat in the kitchen. I was a stickler for cleanliness and posted a sign on the wall: DO NOT TOUCH FACE OR HAIR WITHOUT WASHING HANDS AFTERWARDS.

  During my shift I worked as cashier: I would ring up sales, oversee the flow of food from kitchen to counter, and make sure the shakes, sandwiches, casseroles, or sundaes were placed on customers' trays before they left the cash register to sit down. Because we were cafeteria-style, we did not take reservations. Sometimes strangers sat together, happy to get a table at all when we were busy.

  My spirit was buoyed by the hum of voices and the laughter that chimed through the dining room. I'm twenty-three years old and these people are enjoying the menu I created. I could not believe I was managing a restaurant loved by the people of San Francisco, a grand city with many award-winning gourmet restaurants. Regulars told us that one of the reasons they kept coming back was that they felt energized and full of light eating our fresh food. I swam in God's mercy, feeling that my time apart from Carlos was being rewarded.

  Kitsaun managed the early-morning chores and often finally left at six or seven at night, after the dinner rush. If someone called in sick, she would work two full shifts. She thrived in the exhausting labor and, like me, was consumed with Dipti Nivas. When the doors were locked at ten at night, I emptied the sandwich bar—wrapping cheese, bread, and tofu salad, and saving sliced tomatoes for fresh marinara sauce we would simmer the next day. The busboys washed the last dishes, pots, and pans; then they swept and mopped the whole restaurant and turned off the dining room lights before taking the streetcar home. Every day they washed hundreds of plates, cups, bowls, and saucers without complaint, their faces red and rippled with perspiration. They scrubbed stainless-steel casserole pans lined with cheese and sauce baked to a hard crust, while suds sloshed on their white uniforms. All that we did was for Guru.

  The restaurant work purified my heart, and the simple act of serving our customers balanced the life I had as Carlos's wife. Mom and Dad had raised Kitsaun and me to understand that fame was inconsequential to one's character. Mom was never in awe of musicians Dad knew, and Kitsaun and I had grown up hearing famous names without any reaction or fawning from any of our relatives. Sevika told me she had overheard a young woman in line at Dipti Nivas say, “If I were Carlos Santana's wife, I wouldn't work here.” But I remembered L.A.— and I knew I would rather be at the restaurant than anywhere else.

  My goal was to be a light to the world. The more work I did and the more projects I took on, the more motivated I became. I yearned for people around me to know God.

  arlos wrote to me from Hong Kong, “Here I am, two o'clock in the morning, all wet. We just had a water fight and it seems like everybody in the hotel was involved. Of course, I started it (this time), but everything is all right now. The security guard came over and we all cooled it.” It was a three-page letter about sold-out shows, how similar Hong Kong was to New York, and that a typhoon was coming. In the middle of the news, he wrote, “I love you with all that I am. Please don't feel lonely, for I am always with you in everything you do and say. You are my first and only love, for you are my physical aspiration for the Supreme.

  “How are my children, the cats, and how are the cars running?” he concluded.

  From the beginning of our marriage, I was Carlos's link to home, to family, and to spiritual growth. And he was my link to thinking more freely and to embracing a life with open boundaries. Like an immense John Coltrane saxophone solo, Carlos taught me to not think about the constructs put on me by society. His upbringing did not teach him to fear some One in Heaven, the way mine had; and he was not impressed with authority. My years as a Girl Scout—earning badges by collecting old newspapers to take to the dump, visiting the elderly, and singing simple songs about friendship—had trained me in good works. Carlos offered me independence.

  I flew to Brazil to meet the band and to spend a week on the road, enjoying the stadium concerts and hearing how their music had changed since I'd last heard them perform. The Rio de Janeiro show was in a soccer stadium. I sat to the side of Car-los's equipment, out of the audience's sight, watching his lanky body skate across the stage, his guitar plugged into a Boogie amp: the umbilical cord to his sound. He cajoled his guitar to speak the melodic language of his muse. Fans danced sensuously across the field. As Carlos strummed the first, slow, tremulous notes of “Samba Pa Ti,” the crowd gasped, and then a wind of ecstatic screams reached the stage. Fans struck matches and lighters, holding the flames high above their heads, flickers of light appearing one by one, ignited milliseconds apart like fireflies across the sky. From the field to the top of the bleachers, people swayed in unison, their faces glistening with emotion. Every note Carlos played resonated from a familiar place inside me. Dad's guitar playing held the lineage of Charlie Christian, T Bone Walker, B. B. King. They lived through Carlos's hands, too. How Dad wrote a song, fingered the frets, how he played the world through his Gibson, had foreshadowed Carlos's music in my life and carried the stories of jazz and blues innovators whose music had lived through times of great suffering. The audience went wild, begging for more after the concert ended. But after three encores, Carlos refused to return to the stage. He was dissatisfied with his equipment and how he had sounded through the stage monitors. Even though the crew tried to convince him the speakers in the arena had sounded magnificently clear, Carlos could not be consoled. It was the first time I heard him yell at his roadies and not go back out onstage when the crowd was still screaming for more.

  The promoter took the band to a dinner club that had tables on an outside terrace beneath palm trees. Platters of seafood, vegetables, and rice were placed in front of us. Carlos pulled me onto the dance floor when the house musicians played a slow song. I shivered from the flame of his body close to mine, and we floated cloud-like, sounds of the concert still echoing in my ears. My heart caught in my throat singing out my love for Carlos, although only I could hear. I felt Carlos's anger leave, and the heat of his body engulfed me. Santana's manager, Barry Imhoff, snapped his camera—the flash lighting in my eyelids as I rested my head on Carlos's shoulder.

  In our room, we sipped champagne, the last drink of alcohol I had as a disciple, and Carlos folded hotel stationery into airplanes, flying the white birds from our balcony to the beach.

  Every nuance of Carlos's life endeared him to me. He knelt to speak with children playing in alleyways, pouring coins into their hands. In our room, we listened to Weather Report, sharing the magnificence of Jaco, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul's solos. I learned when to fade into the background and observe Carlos's life, when to participate. On hotel beds, we discovered where one of us began and the other ended. We meditated each morning in soft candlelight. I concentrated on the rise and fall of my breath. Sometimes I heard no sound. Other times, the flush of a toilet in another hotel room, or the bell of the elevator stopping on our floor, caught my attention. When the distractions lodged in my mind, I prayed as I had as a chil
d, “The Lord is my shepherd …”

  Phone calls back to Kitsaun at Dipti Nivas assured me that she was handling the restaurant just fine. After seven days of travel—hearing hundreds of horns honking in the metropolis of Buenos Aires, and seeing the red clay of Brasília and its angular, modern buildings—I flew home to San Francisco, eager to return to the restaurant and our customers. On the road, I had been treated like a queen, staying in beautiful hotels with soft feather beds, ordering room service that arrived on silver trays with roses in crystal vases. But, as much as I loved the road and being with Carlos, it was his journey, his work, and I was an extra appendage. At Dipti Nivas, I cooked curries, chopped vegetables, and rang up customers at the cash register, caught in the activity that fueled my creativity. It was hard work—and I loved it.

  In December, I met Carlos in Osaka, Japan. I felt as though I had been transported underneath America, to the other side of the world. We rode the Bullet Train from Osaka to Tokyo, traveling 340 miles in three hours. One cantaloupe cost twenty dollars, and a glass of orange juice in the hotel restaurant was six dollars. Japanese women dressed in high-fashion European couture as well as in traditional Japanese kimonos. We visited Buddhist shrines and Shinto temples, and I read about Amat-erasu-O-Mikami, the Sun Goddess, a chief deity of the Shinto faith. Other than the Indian goddess Kali, she was one of the only female gods I knew about. We saw thousands of golden Buddhas lining temple walls, and we were taken to Kamakura, where the famous Daibutsu Buddha stood more than forty feet high.

  I had not realized how much traveling I would need to do to be with Carlos. I loved airplane flights, seeing countrysides from trains, and trying to guess what a hotel would look like before I arrived. Bill Graham often traveled with the band, and over time I began to know him. We made plans after concerts to meet in the hotel lobby the next morning to run together. Bill had a powerful, strong presence, and his body moving next to mine gave me adrenaline to pump my arms harder and push my legs farther. We talked as we huffed and strode through Vienna, Geneva, and Munich, places he had known as a child, and I got to know Bill through the stories he told of not even remembering his parents—he was two days old when his father died, and nine when his mother sent him to France for school. When Hitler's regime began persecuting and murdering Jews, Bill and his schoolmates were put on buses and sent away with almost nothing to eat but oranges. He exchanged the innocence of childhood for toughness and survival walking from Lyon to Marseilles, on a train to Spain and Portugal and on a ship to Casablanca, without parents and with the sound of torpedoes sizzling in the sky. As we ran, I thought about the trauma and humiliation Bill had endured that had produced the stony exterior and fighting spirit that had bullied me and others. Two of his sisters survived Auschwitz, and Bill was sent to a Hebrew shelter in New York, where he waited nine weeks for someone to pick him out for adoption. Compassion, love, and respect were what I grew to feel for Bill after our runs. We interacted in business as I assumed more responsibility for Carlos's schedule and finances, and I saw with new eyes the fearless warrior Bill had learned to be as a child.

  In the summer of 1974, Guru held a special ceremony in his backyard to give Carlos and me our spiritual names. Every August devotees from around the world stayed in the Queens neighborhood to celebrate Sri Chinmoy's birthday, and to attend meditations. Carlos could be in Queens only five days between his Philadelphia and Saratoga Springs shows, so he met me there. We sat among a small group of devotees as butterflies lit on the maple leaves above our heads and a warm breeze filtered through my sari. Sri Chinmoy proclaimed that Carlos was to be called Devadip, meaning “Lamp of God,” “Eye of God,” and “Light of God.” I was given the spiritual name Urmila, meaning “the Light of the Supreme.” The bestowal of names signified that we had made spiritual progress. Carlos returned to his tour, telling his road manager and band members to call him by his new name. The press was puzzled but followed Carlos's request. Mom and Dad were less than enthusiastic to hear Kit-saun call me Urmila, and they continued to address me as Deborah, the name they had given me to honor a woman of great strength and intelligence in the Bible.

  Carlos and I had always wanted a family, but were told that Sri Chinmoy's philosophy was that children were a hindrance to the meditative life. We asked Sri Chinmoy when it would be time for us to start a family, and Guru told us, “Wait. Wait.” Dipti Nivas kept me busy to exhaustion, and Carlos's schedule of touring and recording kept us apart. Abruptly, Mahalakshmi and Mahavishnu left the meditation path, which jolted Carlos and me. Sri Chinmoy said they would fall in spiritual consciousness without him, and we debated if this could be possible. I continued to manage Dipti Nivas and attend meditations as if nothing were different. Then, early in 1976, I became pregnant. I don't know if my diaphragm failed, or if I subconsciously wanted a child so badly, I'd forgotten to use it. Through the disciple phone chain, I sent a message to Sri Chinmoy, asking him to call. I hoped he would offer us his blessing. But, in his grainy voice, he told me, “Do not worry, dear one. The soul has not yet entered your body. You can have an abortion.” This sounded authentic to what an illumined master would know, but I was flooded with disappointment and sorrow. My desire to fulfill my own needs was not enough to refuse to follow his direction, and I trusted Sri Chinmoy could see planes of consciousness I could not. Now, my immaturity seems appalling, but at the time, I completely believed Sri Chinmoy was an avatar, a holy man, someone whose grasp of divinity was higher than mine. I did not consult Carlos, because my allegiance was to God and I had heard directly from God's messenger. I scheduled the abortion for a time when Carlos would be in Los Angeles, recording. He never saw my tears or noticed my emotional numbness. Carrying the secret of my act, I clung more to Sri Chinmoy's edicts and followed his way to God by denying my own inner voice. The mourning period was exactly one year until I could sit before my shrine and my first thought was not how sad I felt. It is interesting to me now that Guru never con- sidered the aliveness of a woman's psyche that is connected with such intimate decisions. He never asked how I was doing with the choice I had made.

  Carlos and I were on different time zones in our own house: I awakened at 5:00 A.M. to meditate, run, and go to work. He still stayed up until 2:00 A.M. practicing his guitar, and he rose long after I left the house. Music was his life; meditation and service, mine. It was a recipe for separation in even the closest of marriages, but with rock-and-roll as a backdrop luring Carlos away from home on a regular basis, even our devotion to God could not protect us from life's temptations. Sri Chinmoy's goal of keeping disciples busy so that the world would not draw us away from spirituality only served to separate Carlos and me more. He began going to clubs when he was home, and I was too tired to go out with him. What he really wanted was to escape the same rigid box he had left his parents' home to be free of, and he was sick of obeying Sri Chinmoy's orders. I was stuck in the cycle of obedience, and wholeheartedly subscribed to the disciple life. Carlos could not talk me out of it. If I had known it was disconnecting us, I might have been able to pull back and examine where I was; but I did not comprehend Carlos's need, nor see how I was justifying and blindly accepting Sri Chinmoy's demands.

  This continued until one Friday night in early summer of 1978, when our schedules coalesced and we went to a small club in Burlingame to hear a local band. On the drive over, I talked about how Kitsaun and I were planning a remodel of Dipti Nivas. Carlos talked about his upcoming tour. We parked on Hillside Drive and walked inside the club. Heads turned and voices whispered as we came through the doors. “Carlos is here.” “Santana's here.”

  We were led to a table in the front, but Carlos asked to sit farther back. I took off my coat and ordered sparkling mineral water, aware of eyes on us. After the band's set, a young woman with dark curls around her face walked up to our table. “I want you to have this,” she said, pushing a gold bracelet into my hands. The angle of her face and her smile were directed at Carlos, and my stomach flip-flopped at the husky in
tonation of her voice.

  I opened my mouth to say thank you, but Carlos stood up and ushered her away, his hand on her elbow. He bent over, talking to her in a way that suggested he knew her well. She looked vaguely familiar. Then I remembered—she was a Bay Area musician, and I had seen her before.

  My heart sped, and my insides felt as though they were catapulting across the room. The stage spun before me. I recognized in one horrible moment that Carlos was having an affair. When he turned to walk back to our table, I stood up and put my coat on. I had to get outside. Carlos followed me through the smoke-filled room. I burst through the doors, as though the fresh air could save me from what I had discovered. This man whom I adored, who had vowed that spirituality was the highest value in his life, who meditated each morning, who married me in my uncle's home—had chosen to break our covenant.