Now that I was an adult standing before him I found myself fighting the sense that Lama Dorje Rinpoche loved me completely. It threw me off balance. This was the love I’d wanted from my mother. Instead I felt it in the presence of one of the men who had taken her from me.
Lama gestured for me to sit on the mat, then, as if he had been reading my thoughts, he said, ‘You know Ana-Sofia, I think of you often. When I was very young, because I am a monk, it seemed normal that your mother would leave you with us and with friends. Now I know westerners better I see this was a very unusual situation for you. I think this must have given you pain and that makes me sad.’ He handed me a tape. ‘I make this for you. Also, if you don’t mind, I put it in library so all people who have benefited from your mother’s work will know she is important. Only if you give me the okay. First you must check it out.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, my voice breaking. I had known this meeting might lead to tears, but I hadn’t expected them so soon. Venerable Bruce came in and put a tray of tea before me. ‘It is true that I have been thinking about my mother’s life. That I am trying to understand her.’
‘You are still very attached?’ he asked, though it seemed to me like more of a statement.
‘I find it hard to imagine,’ I said, ‘that my mother had the patience to become such a devoted student.’
‘I also was not so sure,’ he said. ‘Anna did things different to us. Our minds were hungry to understand this because with how things are in Tibet, we must learn to become friends with the west. Anna described to us what it was like to be in the movies. She told us about one film with that sad woman, famous woman. Anyway, that woman has died now and her suffering in this lifetime is over. But Anna told us about that film, because in that film she has to sing a song that goes, “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”. In the Diamond Sutra we talk of diamonds and wish-fulfilling jewels. Anna thinks this is funny. She shows us the dance and sings us the song. I think this is quite a serious song. “Men grow cold as girls grow old” it say. It is about impermanence. Lama Gyatsho also liked this song very much. He says, “That is it. That is the point. Dharma, not diamonds are a girl’s best friend”. And anyway, first Anna, then him, then me, we are all laughing so hard we can’t stop. Dharma! Dharma! It is dharma that’s a girl’s best friend!’
At this memory Lama Dorje began to laugh, then rock, then cough and splutter. ‘Did you know we chose this hill to build the monastery on because your mother dreamed it? Such dreams are common,’ Lama Dorje said, after he’d regained his composure, ‘for people with clear mind.’
‘Anna had clear mind?’
‘Of course. Dreams are bardo. The bardo of becoming. You get to check it out before most powerful, before too hard.’
‘Check what out?’ I asked.
‘Death,’ he said. ‘Actually, I mean dead.’ He paused and got the look on his face he always got when his English frustrated him. ‘With Americans things are all one way or the other. Actually, you know, with us Tibetans it is not like you are alive one moment, dead the next. Continuous, all part of the same. It is all the space between. There is the space of meditation. There is the space between sleep and dreams. The space between life and death. Check that space out, you know? Always, you must check up on that space. Make it bigger.’ Then he burst out laughing. ‘Biggest is best, very American. Biggest space is best space.
‘Mother is the beginning of life, gives us the body of a precious human rebirth that allows us to practise the dharma. Your mother found the path. She showed many people the path. She made everything possible. As well, she give you precious life. So, you ask if it is possible that she was enlightened? It is possible. There is nothing, not one small thing in this or any other realm, that the mind cannot do if it tries.’
Eleanor
Here at the atomic Crack-end of Time XX Century
I pinned up the latest announcement from the Council for the Summer of Love on Serendipity’s noticeboard: This summer, the youth of the world are making a holy pilgrimage to our city, to affirm and celebrate a new spiritual dawn…The activity of the youth of a nation which has given birth to Haight-Ashbury is a small part of a worldwide spiritual awakening. The Summer of Love wasn’t so much a spontaneous explosion as organised event. I opened my cafe a month after I got back from Ceylon. Sometime in early ’67. That gave me three months to get things up and running before the Love officially began.
No one had heard of Ceylon, so I called my food Indian. I served pancakes with eggs fried into them which were similar to the hoppers Raj cooked. I made banana pancakes, and omelettes with onions and green chili. I worked Raj’s beetroot salad up into a kind of coleslaw that, even if I say so myself, became famous throughout the Haight. I hope you won’t mind it when I tell you that juggling two children when I was starting up a business took some doing. You were cared for by women at the commune in the mornings and in the afternoons you came and sat in the corner playing with your toys and read your books. I often came out of the kitchen to find one of the customers sitting beside you on your rug, reading to you out loud. You had to start school in September but when I wrote to Anna asking her if she had any thoughts on the matter she didn’t reply.
In the end of course there was less love going round than everyone hoped for. What there was most of was rain. All April it poured and all April you cried, five years old and desolate, asking when you would see your mother.
‘Soon,’ I always said to you, even as I began to suspect otherwise. ‘Soon.’
Serendipity was a few doors up from the Psychedelic Shop and sometimes Marilyn would take a break and go and hang out there. She spent all her pocket money on beads and ribbons which she then sewed onto her jeans and dresses in increasingly elaborate arrangements. When I went off to do the afternoon banking I would see her there, sitting in the theatre seats that lined the shop’s front window, legs tucked under her, writing in her diary. Marilyn loved you and though she was older—she’d turned eleven that winter—she was endlessly patient with you. Sometimes she’d come into the cafe in the afternoons and play with you or help me out with customers. I tried to make her do her homework at the tables, but there were always too many interesting things going on. Customers dashed outside to throw fruit at the tour buses that drove down the street. Most days school kids turned runaways came by, freaking out, and had to be talked down by the regulars. People sat around drinking my version of marsala chai and rolling dried bananas, which they told me made them high. When I tried it, it did nothing for me. One of my regular customers, Dan, told Marilyn that Bob Dylan was dead and his record company was covering it up. Another day a group came by to eat, disconsolate after a failed meeting with Hopi Indians. Their request for a Be-In on Indian land had been refused. ‘You are a tribe of strangers to yourself,’ a Native American leader had told them. ‘You gather and disperse. You are not together.’
On the afternoon before the summer solstice—when the love was supposed to start—Marilyn didn’t turn up at the cafe. I didn’t see her at the Psychedelic Shop either. When I got home I called for her but instead of her lovely freckly face coming towards me out of the gloom of the hallway, the boyfriend of one of my housemates stepped into the hall.
‘She’s off tripping,’ he said, then saw my face. ‘I only gave her half a tab.’
I was speechless. My newest housemate—you’d laugh if you saw him then, can you imagine Tom with a long beard and ponytail?—joined us in the hallway. ‘You’re kidding her right?’ he said.
The guy just stood there, looking hassled.
‘Are you a total freaking idiot?’ Tom asked. ‘Do you know where she is? Have you seen Az?’ The guy muttered something about not being a babysitter and wandered back into his rooms.
Tom had only lived with us for a week, so I barely knew him, but he came with me as I scoured the parks, the streets and the crowds. There were hundreds of thousands of people wandering the neighbourhood, most of them off their tree, and I was hysterica
l. I loved my daughter. I didn’t know how I could live without her—my mind had already leapt to the worst possible conclusion—and it became increasingly incomprehensible to me that Anna could have abandoned you.
We didn’t find either of you until the next morning: you were both sitting with hundreds of others, in the fug of Twin Peaks, watching the dawn of the new age.
‘Marilyn?’ I was beside myself. ‘You can’t do that to me! Never go away without telling me where you are.’
‘Stop being such a square,’ she said, as if she was eighteen, rather than eleven.
I tried a different tack. ‘Are you hungry?’
Marilyn nodded, then fell asleep before my eyes. You were already curled up on the ground beside her. Tom lifted her up, and I carried you. The two of you spent the rest of the day in bed together, and that night I called a house meeting. At the end of a long-winded discussion in which most participants were too stoned to keep to the point, I said that unless a motion was passed that no drugs be given to people under fourteen without their parents being present, I was leaving the house. There was a vote, which I won, nine to six. Suddenly I was exhausted. Tom followed me to my bedroom and we collapsed there on the bed with both of you. So that, really, was how I met him. I never would have got to know Tom if it wasn’t for you girls. He is just one more of the many pleasures you both brought into my life.
At the height of summer, the same day some kids down the road were arrested for having sex in the park, Mary dropped by. The sixties seemed to suit her desire for comfortable attire, and she looked much more relaxed in her apple-green pant suit than she ever had in her grey skirts and jackets. Her blue eye shadow was applied very thickly and her frosted pink lipstick was slashed across her face at such a rakish angle it almost hit her jaw line.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you outside your office in LA,’ I said, as I hugged her.
‘You’re right. I don’t leave that hell hole often enough. Any chance of a coffee?’ She sat down and watched the scene until I came back with mugs for both of us.
‘This is a nice place,’ Mary said. ‘Though the kids around here are all going nuts. But what’s this I hear about Anna’s become a nun? She always seemed such a lost soul.’
‘It would seem,’ I said, finding myself defending her, ‘that her soul’s found a home. She believes that when she dies she may well…’ I was suddenly embarrassed to say it, ‘be reincarnated.’
‘Rubbish!’ Mary lit a cigarette. ‘You don’t mind, dear? Good. We rot. R.O.T. That’s it. And to my way of thinking, that’s a relief.’
I protested that of course there was something more, but Mary was looking at me, with one painted eyebrow raised. I laughed and said, ‘But I’m fucked if I know what it is.’
‘Exactly my point. And what about you? You have Ana-Sofia? How is she?’
‘Sad.’
‘Well, that won’t change,’ she leaned forward, touched me on the knee. ‘If she ever wants advice about the industry, you just let me know. Is she attractive? Like her mother?’
‘Mary, she’s only five!’
‘You were talented yourself.’ Now she sounded like my mother.
‘People get more pleasure from my food than they ever got from my dancing.’
‘Just don’t forget you were good. But if you’re going to dance again’—then, to my horror, she gestured at my breasts—‘you’re going to have to start wearing a bra. I tell you, of all the stupid fashions I’ve seen in my time…Okay. One more question then I’ll go. I know why I put up with her, all that running around after Anna and her mistakes. Why do you?’
‘We’ve shared some very heavy trips together…’ That eyebrow again. ‘I love her, I guess. It’s not rational. She is,’ I smiled, ‘impossible.’
Mary lit her next cigarette from the smouldering butt of the one before. ‘Are you a lesbian?’
‘God Mary, no. I mean Marilyn thinks she’s one, but, you know, she’s only eleven.’
‘Well, I knew when I was twelve,’ Mary said. Age appeared to have made her forthright.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, like she’d just told me she was ill, ‘I should have been more supportive.’
Mary snorted with laughter and shook cigarette ash all over the table. ‘You’ve been doing too much consciousness raising. I had it well enough figured on my own, thanks very much, and if you’d asked, I wouldn’t have told you. The point I am trying to make—apart from the fact that who knows what anyone really gets up to—is that Anna was not always true to herself. She was always too concerned by her image. So, if she’s prepared to dance around like some kind of mad woman in robes, it must be important to her.’
‘There’s no dancing, Mary. She’s not a Hare Krishna.’
‘I wouldn’t know the difference, dear,’ she downed her coffee. ‘I’ve got to run. I’m in San Francisco to help cast some car chase movie. It stars that McQueen man. He’s terribly surly, but the girls tell me he’s sexy. Are you interested in taking on a role now and then?’
‘I’m too old,’ I smiled.
Mary winked at me. ‘Makeup can work miracles dear. Just look at me.’
*
After Mary’s visit I made another attempt to connect with Anna. I wrote to her trying to convey the momentous times that had come to San Francisco. When she finally replied it was clear she couldn’t make head or tail of what I was talking about. All this talk of music, and sex and love—is that really where it’s at for you? she asked. I replied, in a white heat of rage: Is abandoning your daughter where it’s really at for you?
The next news we got was not from Anna herself but from the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper had picked up a story first run in the Katmandu Post about Anna’s fundraising efforts for a monastery. Which was news to me. Of course the article was more interested in her time as a stripper in Paris than her work as a nun. It was you, of all people, who pointed the article out to me. You came into the restaurant kitchen holding the newspaper open. There was a photo of Anna wearing robes and looking devout. She was standing in front of an elaborately carved, multi-stepped temple.
‘What does childless mean?’ you asked before I had a chance to snatch the article away from you.
‘The journalist has made a mistake, Az, your mom isn’t childless. She’s got you.’
‘Marilyn read it to me,’ you said. ‘I’m not in there.’
‘Anna is doing special things, here, listen to this bit. We are building a place, your mom says, where people can start their lives again. She loves you very much. Don’t forget that.’
‘If she loves me why did she leave me here?’
‘Aren’t you happy here with me and Marilyn, honey?’
You shrugged in a gesture so reminiscent of Anna that it took my breath away.
*
By 1971 Anna had succeeded in having her monastery built so I agreed to attend a course there. It was your third trip to Nepal and my first. Ian turned up the same day we arrived and I’ll never forget how your face lit up when you saw him. How you ran, full pelt towards him and leapt into his arms.
‘My beautiful girl,’ Ian looked over your head at Anna. ‘And my lovely wife.’ He put you down so he could give Anna a hug. After that he held her at arm’s length. ‘My,’ he drawled, ‘haven’t we changed our image.’ He gestured towards her cap of brown-grey hair. ‘Can I touch?’
‘Because we’re married,’ Anna was smiling, ‘I’ll make an exception.’ She lowered her head so he could rub his hands over the fuzz.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You know, that feels very sexy. I’ve been meaning to ask—what is our legal situation? I’d hate to disappoint the folks. They’re still keen to meet the little woman, doing good works over in India.’ Ian loved to carry on about how straight his parents were, when as far as I could tell they’d been endlessly generous. They’d even contributed money to the monastery.
The reunion between Anna and myself was not nearly as touching. We didn’t know what to say to
each other. I stood at a distance from her and watched you go to her and give her a formal kiss on the cheek. Anna knew that I disapproved of her. She also knew that in turn she had expected more than was reasonable of me. In my disapproval I had chosen not to let her know that I loved you too much to find you a burden. Or that my fear was that she’d want you back. We smiled at each other warily, but did not touch. Anna gestured towards the hillside where a large marquee was being assembled. Smaller tents were being erected around the place. ‘The toilets are just a pit in the ground,’ she said. ‘And there are no showers. Just buckets of water. I am worried,’ she said, ‘that this might freak you out.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She was right, though. I thought living in a commune in the Haight was pretty wild, but as usual Anna lived closer to the edge than I would ever have the courage to.
‘I think she’s serious about these lamas,’ Ian said to me, when we sat together at dinner.
‘You’d have to be,’ I replied, ‘to let them make you leave your daughter behind.’
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