Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  I was still going back and forth in my mind about Baba Raba. When I saw the gowned girls on the boardwalk, I had the same thought as Reggie: temple prostitution, or something in that ZIP code. Many legitimate spiritual teachers have come to America from India, true holy men with more insight into the nature of reality and purpose of human life than a Hilton ballroom packed full of Baptist clergymen or Catholic bishops. But plenty of fakirs have come, too, and some of the good ones have succumbed to corruption in America, whirled up in a tornado of materialistic sensations and temptations that ashram life in India never prepared them for. And the corruption always seems to center on sex. So the sweet, submissive girls made me suspicious. But now I was having second thoughts.

  The Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings had a cozy, spiritually comforting vibe that I recognized from other venerable ashrams I had visited. If Baba was a con man, he was not a fly-by-night. The collection of esoteric books in the library and the energy that hummed in the fiber of the building would have taken years to accumulate.

  The meditation room was to our right as we entered. It had probably been the formal living room. Through the open French doors, I saw twenty-five or thirty people who had staked out their spots near the front, sitting with eyes shut on prayer rugs or cushions. One of them was Evelyn Evermore. She was wearing a white designer sweatsuit and had her hair tied back in a ponytail with a red ribbon. She sat in an unstrained lotus position with her spine straight and her shoulders relaxed. Baba Raba or someone else had given her good training. The palms of her lovely hands rested on her knees, thumbs pressed against the outside of her index fingers, other fingers extended upward, forming the ahamkara mudra, which counteracts fear and anxiety. I felt a twinge of fear myself at the sight of her, a guilty echo of the botched robbery at Indian Wells, but I was relieved to see her, too, since I didn’t know for sure who had the diamonds.

  “Check it out,” Reggie said, nudging me with his elbow. I turned and saw the blond girl coming down the stairs, looking even more desirable than she had on the beach. Her hair was damp as if she had just bathed, and she was dressed in a white robe like the ones the flower girls had worn. As she came toward us down the hallway, it crossed my mind that she might not be wearing anything beneath the robe, an erotic supposition that she confirmed in part when she stooped to pick up a flyer that had fallen on the floor by the library door. The robe, which had buttons from navel to throat, was fastened only halfway up. As she bent gracefully to tidy up the ashram, I had a clear view of two white breasts with small dark nipples.

  Glancing up, she caught both me and Reggie looking but didn’t seem to mind too much. She gave us a half smile that was a delicious blend of tolerance and contempt as she brushed past us into the bookstore. I wondered if she had done it on purpose.

  “He’ll be down in ten minutes, Ganesha,” she said to a young man who was sitting on a stool behind the cash register, reading a paperback copy of the Bhagavad Gita. “Let’s close the shop and get everybody into the meditation room.”

  “Okay.” He stood up from the stool. “It’s time to go into the meditation room, folks. Satsang will begin shortly.”

  He was wearing the traditional orange robe of Indian monks that symbolizes the spiritual fire in which all worldly ambitions and attachments have been burnt up. But the longing gaze he bestowed on the girl as she turned away from him made me think a few pesky embers of desire were still glowing somewhere in his tofu-fed frame. As he herded the people out of the shop, the girl locked the cash register and put the key in a drawer behind the counter. Even with her as a distraction, I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t lock the drawer.

  “Did you see those nipples?” Reggie cackled in my ear, as the girl moved around the shop, snuffing out candles and turning off the lights. “She better not come close to me in that getup or I’ll be snapping at those things like a trout at a mayfly.” He had gone fishing when he was a Scout, too.

  Stepping into the hallway, the girl turned her back to us to close the shop’s glass-paned doors, showing us the shape of her cute little behind through the thin cotton cloth of her robe, giving me unspiritual urges.

  Turning around, she looked me in the eye, as if she knew what I was thinking. Her blue irises sparkled and there was a hint of a smile. Two latecomers were taking off their shoes in the foyer. Behind me, someone rang a bell in the meditation room, a single pure note that lingered in the atmosphere like a color wash.

  “What’s the routine, babe?” Reggie said, thrusting himself into the situation.

  The girl turned her head slightly and gave him a look that would have silenced most men. Reggie not only bore up under it but grinned through his grizzled beard and mustache.

  “The routine?” she said, haughty.

  “Yeah, we gonna sing hymns or square dance or what?”

  “Baba will give a short talk from the Gita and then there will be forty-five minutes of silent meditation.”

  “That don’t sound too exciting,” Reggie said. “Why don’t me and you go in the back parlor and you can give me some personal instructions.”

  “Hah,” she gave a short, harsh, but not necessarily unfriendly laugh. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

  “Depends on the bush,” Reggie said.

  He got another laugh. Though her features were delicate and she was making an effort to speak in a refined manner, there was something working-class about the girl’s frankness and the way she held her body. She didn’t seem to be offended by Reggie’s crude approach.

  “You have to come a couple of times before you get private lessons, pal,” she said.

  “How ‘bout if I go out and come back in a couple of times?” Reggie said, lowering his voice to a growl. “That count?”

  When the blonde laughed again, I figured Reggie was going to do what he usually did and snag the girl before I had a chance to make a move. Sometimes I hated the guy.

  “Whudaya say, babe?” he said, taking a step toward her, as if to crowd her down the hallway. “Can a stranger get some lovin’ in this church?”

  “Whoa, big boy,” the girl said, holding her arm straight out and putting her palm against his chest like a running back stiff-arming an opponent. “You can probably get some loving if you play your cards right, but not from me. Is that what you guys are here for?”

  “That’s what I’m everywhere for, sweetheart,” Reggie said.

  “Yeah, I see that. How about your friend? What’s his story?” She nodded her head sideways, glancing over at me.

  “Whudaya mean?” Reggie snapped, disconcerted to feel her attention shifting away from him.

  “You two are completely different types,” she said to me. “Why are you here?”

  “Baba Raba invited me,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I couldn’t resist.” We were looking into each other’s eyes again and something between us dilated.

  “I’m glad,” she said, and I felt a warm glow in my cold heart. Then, as if catching herself, she added indifferently: “Baba will be pleased to see you.”

  “Shakti! It is time for satsang!” It was the lad in the orange robe, standing in the door of the meditation room. He sounded a little peeved, either because the girl was putting God behind schedule or because she was talking to us instead of sitting beside him on an embroidered cushion.

  “Relax, Ganesha,” the girl said. “I’m going to get him right now. And don’t call me Shakti. My name is Mary, same as it’s always been.”

  “Baba said you are called Shakti now,” Ganesha whined. “He knows the best name for each of us.”

  “You and your friend need to go in and find a seat,” the girl said to me, and then went down the hall toward the staircase. Reggie had been demoted. I was the primary and he was the secondary.

  “Hurry up, you two,” Ganesha said to us. “Everyone needs to be seated when Baba comes.”

  Reggie bumped the w
ould-be swami with his shoulder as we went past him into the dim room.

  “Watch where you’re going,” Ganesha said in an angry whisper.

  “You watch it, or I’ll stick one of those candles up your ass!” Reggie said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The lights had been dimmed and the air was mystic with the scent of sandalwood incense. The candles Reggie had made reference to were flickering on the altar. I took two small round pillows from a pile in the corner and sat down on them. It had been years since I practiced hatha yoga, but I was still able to contort my legs into a lotus position without actually screaming out loud. Sitting on two pillows took some of the strain off my knees.

  “Where’s the chairs?” Reggie asked in a stage whisper after watching me make a pretzel out of myself.

  “They don’t use them for meditation,” I said. “Grab a couple of cushions and sit down.”

  People around us stirred and cleared their throats, giving us a subtle spiritual signal that we were disturbing them.

  Reggie piled up three cushions and plopped down on them, sitting American Indian–style, with his thick legs crossed but not locked into the lotus position.

  Ganesha closed the double doors, which had cloth draped over the glass on the inside, and sat down on the floor by the wall, showing his relative enlightenment by not using a cushion.

  I closed my eyes and began to take deep breaths, pushing my abdomen out so that the bottom of my lungs could fully inflate, then slowly pulling it back in to expel the air, taking twice as long to exhale as to inhale. It is the simplest form of breathing exercise and one of the simplest forms of meditation, very effective at dissolving negative emotions such as anxiety or sadness. Yoga has many complex breathing exercises with specific and startling psychic effects, but simple deep breathing is a surprisingly powerful technique. If you keep your attention focused on your breath, and breathe in and out steadily and slowly, it invariably calms the mind.

  A feeling of peace had begun to stain me, spreading like blue dye from cell to cell, when there was a stir at the front of the room. Opening my eyes, I saw Baba Raba entering through a door at the far end. An attendant helped him up onto a low platform. It creaked beneath his barnyard weight as he walked forward and sat down cross-legged in front of the altar, facing the audience. The blonde, who came in with him, walked around and sat down on the floor in front of the platform, keeping her distance from a cluster of flower girls.

  “Om namah shivayah,” Baba Raba intoned.

  “Om namah shivayah” the devotees responded with a single resonant voice.

  “The purpose of meditation is to still the mind so that it can perceive the infinite peace within,” Baba said. “The mind is like a curious little monkey. It is always running everywhere to look at everything, attracted first by one thing and then another, always trying to find something that will satisfy it. It sees a glittering jewel and wants that. But the jewel doesn’t make it happy. So it wants a shiny new car. Or a big house. Or a beautiful girl or boy. Because it thinks those things will make it happy. But nothing satisfies it for long. Everything in the physical world dies or decays. By cultivating attachment to material things, the mind ensures its own misery. What the mind truly seeks, the only thing that can truly satisfy it, is already within each of us. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that we are all sat chit ananda. Every one of us. Young or old. Rich or poor. Man or woman. That is our essential, unchanging nature. Sat chit ananda. Infinite existence. Infinite consciousness. Infinite bliss.”

  Baba paused. The dark room, heady with the smell of sandalwood, was utterly still.

  “This bliss, or ananda, is the peace that passeth understanding that Jesus spoke of. It is within each one of you right now, far brighter and vaster than the sun. You must train your mind to be still and look inward so that it can begin to perceive your spiritual reality. Everyone likes to come to Southern California because of the bright warm sunshine. Oh, it makes us very happy. The beautiful light. We love to go to the beach and lie in the sun and feel its warmth. If we get a nice tan, we will be beautiful, too. Everyone will want us. But you have a light inside you brighter than ten thousand suns and a beauty surpassing anything on earth. Still your mind through meditation and you will perceive it. Then you will not need jewels to make you happy. You will not need cars or houses. Or boys or girls. Or money or fame. You are happiness. You are joy. Plunge into meditation and the light within you will burn up all your pain and sorrow. All your shame and disappointment. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate.”

  Here, presumably following his own advice, Baba closed his eyes, lowered his chin to his hairy chest, and placed his hands together in his lap in dhyana mudra, the back of one hand resting in the palm of the other, thumbs touching. Again, I wondered if I was misjudging the big-butted guru. Spiritual truth is a tricky thing. In the mouth of someone who doesn’t fully understand it, the truth becomes a lie. It is dead and empty. In Baba’s mouth, it was thrilling and alive. His gloss of Vedanta’s most essential principle was flawless.

  Ganesha stood up by the door and bowed toward Baba with his hands steepled in front of his chest, then turned to the room.

  “For those who are new to meditation, Gurudev recommends tratakum. This is a very simple meditation that anyone can do. While breathing slowly and deeply, fix your gaze on one of the candles on the altar near Gurudev. If you keep your gaze steady on the flame, it will still your mind. Each time you catch your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to the candle flame. We will now meditate for forty-five minutes. Baba will answer questions in the library afterward.”

  I knew all about tratakum. Fixing your attention on a single object. It did indeed steady the mind. Continuing to take deep, slow breaths, flooding my blood with oxygen, I visualized the pink diamond necklace and waited for those around me to sink down into whatever meditative state they were capable of reaching.

  After ten minutes or so, I opened my eyes and slowly swiveled my head to reconnoiter. To my right, Reggie was curled up like a giant baby in a fetal position with his head resting on two of the round cushions, snoring softly. He was holding the third cushion to his chest like a child holding a doll. Everyone else in the room seemed equally unconscious of their surroundings.

  Ganesha had opened one of the French doors partway to let fresh air into the packed room, where fifty people were steadily inhaling and exhaling the atmosphere, extracting oxygen, adding carbon dioxide and moisture. Slowly, carefully, I unhooked my legs from the lotus position and stood up. My knees ached and my ass was numb. I did a dozen shallow knee bends to get the blood circulating, then tiptoed to the door, taking care not to bump anyone.

  I watched Ganesha’s face as I slipped out. He didn’t stir. In the hallway, I resisted the delinquent impulse to rifle the cash register and headed straight for the stairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hallways went in two directions from the landing at the top of the stairs. Down one was a series of small, minimally furnished rooms, each with a bed, a chair, and a cheap dresser-and-mirror combo. The rooms were lit by white-glass globe ceiling fixtures that blinked on when I flipped the wall switch by the door. On one dresser there was a well-thumbed copy of the Kama Sutra. The drawers were empty.

  The closets held bathrobes, flower-petal-strewing robes, scented oils, and a few miscellaneous devotional items such as velvet ropes and blindfolds. So. Baba was a rascal, after all—not that I thought sex was sinful or anything silly like that. But the context made me angry. In itself, Vedanta is pure good, the most accurate earthly map to enlightenment for those who seek it. The foolish prejudice it faces in the West comes mostly from people’s fear of the unknown and the entrenched resistance of rival philosophies, both religious and secular. But sneaky fuckers like Baba hurt the cause, too, periodically giving yoga a black eye by screwing dopey chicks or absconding with the funds. I had never heard of a legitimate yoga ashram where women were for sale.

  At least there were no whips or ha
ndcuffs.

  Down the other hallway were three larger bedrooms set up like dormitories with four bunk beds apiece, so that eight people could sleep in each room. Two were cluttered with girl stuff and had female clothes in the closets and dressers. The flower girls. The third was less cluttered, had men’s clothes in the closet.

  A fourth bedroom, larger still, had a king-size bed and a view of the floodlit garden behind the house through tall casement windows that filled the exterior wall. Mary’s white jeans had been tossed negligently on the orange bedspread and her flimsy white T-shirt was balled up on the floor. I wondered if the massive guru had been in the room when she peeled off her pants and panties, then shooed that thought away like a bird from a rail. You can’t let your mind wander when you are perpetrating a cat burglary.

  Aside from the evidence of Mary’s desirable presence, Baba’s lair wasn’t debauched. There was a meditation nook with a dusty altar, complete with candle, incense burner, and bell, and a bookcase full of paperbacks by a bewildering variety of spiritual teachers, the top shelf packed with books by Chogyam Trungpa, the controversial crazy wisdom master who founded Naropa Institute. A foot-tall antique ceramic Buddha in a niche beside the bed radiated an aura of holiness so tangible that I had to resist an urge to bow down before it.

  Set end to end along the length of the wall opposite the windows was an oak banker’s desk, a computer desk with a new Macintosh, printer, and scanner, and a worktable piled with documents and blueprints. Some of the blueprints were street plans that showed the section of Pacific Avenue where Mrs. Sharpnick’s flophouse was located and blocks north of there. Others were construction drawings for a large hotel.

  The papers were a complex mix—minutes of Venice City Council meetings, construction and real estate documents written in dense legalese, sheaves of letters to and from various individuals and city and state entities. Two names appeared frequently: Herbert Finklestein and Anthony Discenza. The second name was familiar, but I couldn’t think where I knew it from. Evidently, Finklestein and Discenza were principals in a limited liability partnership formed to develop a resort on the Venice shore, and that they were using the city’s power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire property over the protests of landowners and neighborhood groups. There was litigation pending. The closing date for the financing was on Wednesday. If the money wasn’t in place by then, the main twelve-acre parcel, which comprised more than half of the proposed resort, would fall out of escrow.