Amriika (17 page)

He had called Ginnie once early in December, at the hospital. She was preparing to return home.

“You’ll come to see me, won’t you?” she said.

“You bet,” he replied, “maybe right after Christmas.”

“I’d love to see you again.”

Christmas came, and went; Lyris had gone home and returned in mid-January.

But Ramji didn’t go see Ginnie, he didn’t call her. There was a new coldness in him, an indifference. It was as if he had detached himself from his former self, as far as possible. And yet — God knows I love you Ginnie, have loved you — in many different ways as you yourself said, and I know you of all people would understand the life I’m leading. In your laughing, carefree way you’d say, It’s all right, Ramji. But I don’t know how to face you anymore, I don’t seem to be the same person, the Ramji you knew. I am carrying on a relationship with a girl I don’t really care that much for, I am at this ashram under false pretenses and merely to escape from myself … I am not a nice person at all. I have become cynical, insensitive, brittle … a shell of myself.

He thought he would write all this, and more, in a letter to her, composed and recomposed it in his mind, began to transcribe it on paper; never sent it.

In December also, Ramji and Lyris had gone to protest the police shooting of Black Panther Fred Hampton while he was in bed. The Freedom Action Committee gang were there, drumming
up a riot, as were Shawn and Kate. He avoided them all, but very briefly once met Kate’s eye and turned away. She must have recognized him, despite his beard. She herself looked different that day; her hair had grown and she wore black cords, and the hiking-style boots looked new. Kate and Shawn, he had already learned, had moved off campus.

Gradually, the question of Satguru’s genuineness or fakeness lost importance for him; the ashram had an atmosphere that could only be called spiritual; it had a calmness and a purposiveness that was not overbearing. No one brought up his strange behaviour at the morning darshana: he would not chant but sit quietly in a back row; at the end he would stand up, do a pranam but without going up to kiss the Master’s feet, and leave. At that moment of departure their eyes would meet. It seemed that Satguru, with his liberalness and compassion towards him, was winning him over. Ramji took yoga classes, attended lectures. There was barely any theology to contend with, and the philosophy, from the Upanishads, was attractive and liberating.

His work at the printing press, located in the coach house at the back, gave a regularity to his life that he enjoyed. A group of devotees drove around college campuses in a van, distributing the Mission literature and explaining the message of “
ONNE
.…” When a place had been deemed suitable to receive him, Satguru would go there and hold a few devotional sessions. There were branches of the Mission in over twenty campuses.

In the new semester he arranged to take only self-study courses at the Tech. The ashram became an almost total retreat, a quiet hideout in whose spirituality he allowed himself to be suspended, wafting in an atmosphere pervaded by gentle sitar ragas and bhajans and Sanskrit recitals, without commitment to anything or anybody.
There were days of forgetful bliss, yes, when he could have kissed the Master’s feet at morning darshana in gratitude for allowing him into this refuge, of place, of mind. There were times when he even thought he could feel a glowing sense of euphoria, when the Guru said to hold hands and “connect.” But could he lose himself entirely? Could this place completely claim him, cut him off and subsume him? No, he knew he would eventually emerge from it.

In the first week of March, a packet of correspondence arrived at the ashram, collected from his mailbox at Rutherford and forwarded. This is how your life catches up with you. There was a letter from John, dated approximately six weeks before, January 15.

“Dear Ramji, this is to inform you that Ginnie passed away peacefully on December 23 at Runymede General Hospital. According to her wishes she was cremated. I am sorry to be the bearer of such tidings and we all miss her very much as I am sure you do. We tried calling you a few times but there was no response. Ginnie was of a cheerful disposition and would have wished us to remember her at her best. I continue to look forward to your visits to us in Runymede …”

He read and reread the letter, I wish I had called her, at least once, heard that voice for one last time, that beautiful laughing voice … I could have gone to be with her in her last hours, I could have held her hand. Instead, where were you, Ramji? I knew she was dying and I hid myself away.

He took one Aspirin, then another. Do I have a headache yet? … But I want to cry, so much to cry.…Then cry, you nuthead, let the tears come out, you rockface, but they flow internally as
in Indian film songs, you drink them in and they are no good. Damn you, Ramji, let go and simply grieve … grieve for all you’ve lost, Ginnie and your hopeless innocence and your simple faith and … and … There was a bottle of pills on Lyris’s desk, he poured them out, all gleaming in potency, little bombs or M&M’s depending on your point of view, all colours, red white blue, yellow, shit brown, orange, even black for God’s sake, you can play a marvellous game of Go with them, in Technicolor, or is it Eastman or Kodachrome … He took out a pad of square-ruled paper and arranged the pills on the intersections, you here, you go there, but it was much nicer to form a multicoloured design the way the Chinese did using schoolchildren holding coloured flags or boards and singing “The East Is Red.” … He swallowed a red pill, and another, and another and another and he went out as he’d so much wanted to.

“
OD
’d himself right outta this world. Holy nirvana, man.” It was Johnson, the black cook at the ashram, who had become Ramji’s friend recently and been plying him with a lot of questions about Africa.

“How long’s he been out?”

“Twenty-four hours, at least.” Lyris. “Moaning and groaning, Jesus, and in
my
bed. He took all the reds, who asked him to take the reds, they’re from Mexico and dangerous —”

“Holy karmic nirvana, musta’ been all those letters he received …”

He was cold, sweaty, smelling of piss. “Lemme go.” Ramji staggered away to the bathroom. His head was cracking open, his body shivering in great uncontrollable spasms. He slipped onto the floor, clutching the side of the bathtub.

Voices outside.

“I’m not touching him. You sort him out.” Lyris. So much for exotica, we are all vegetable underneath, and when we rot, we rot.

Johnson and Robin, the latter a full-time cop and part-time devotee, helped him clean, plied him with bread and sweet milk, and tucked him into a freshly made bed in his own room where he stayed two days.

Later that week in the middle of the night he was pushed over and she came in beside him; familiar smell, familiar flesh, she always wore a flannel nightie; Lyris. In the morning on his notepad, just “Goodbye!” with a flourish.

“She’s moved on to the fourteen-year-old wonder from India,” Johnson said. “That’s the second of Satguru’s devotees who’s discovered Guru Maharaj-ji and his mother. They like it easy, these kids, instant nirvana: close your eyes, swallow the phlegm, see the red light back of your eyes, that’s it.”

A
n anguished, horrified look on a girl’s face, her right hand reaching out and upwards — for what? — beside her a fallen comrade; behind, in the distance, a column of guardsmen. It became an emblem of raging dissent, that shooting at Kent State University, Ohio; and that look of horror screamed out to a troubled nation: What have you done? Don’t shoot us, we are your children!

It seemed to Ramji he was beginning to wake from a long sleep. Nixon had announced the invasion of Cambodia and campus after campus erupted in riots during the early part of May. And it seemed as if the ashram itself was seeing an invasion from the world outside. A portable nine-inch
TV
had materialized from somewhere and at night some of the devotees gathered around it in secret to stare at a world apparently in flames …

Venerated, paternal news anchorman Walter Cronkite told it the way it was, with a colour map of the United States pinpointing riot spots throughout the country. Harvard Square saw mass demonstrations once more, tear gas and bloody encounters with police clubs; Central Square was trashed; a camera caught a rock-thrower in the act and the newsman asked: Why the destruction, if
you say you’re for peace? For Kent State, the thrower panted, his missile lurking in his palm, and for My Lai, and six hundred thousand Laotian refugees, for South Africa and … and …

But in less than three weeks the strikes were over; the news of the day at the Tech, before it broke up for summer vacation, was a science colloquium.

And that was what finally brought Ramji back to reality. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, it was an event that also heralded his scientist-hero Peter Bowra’s departure into the cloudy world of mysticism.

“I was right,” Lyris said, sidling up to him as far as the auditorium seats would allow. “Satguru is all right, but too intellectual — all ego.” She prodded the side of her head with a forefinger. “But Guru Maharaj-ji is
it
, direct, the source.”

It was two months now since she’d left him and the ashram for the other guru.

Today Satguru was speaking at a Tech colloquium, the same weekly forum that had seen some of the world’s great scientists in the past. By all indications at the ashram, Satguru Edward Anandaswamy was
excited
.

The event had been billed as a Bowra-Satguru joint colloquium on the Tao, titled “The Cosmic Dance,” and the auditorium was packed, having drawn a diversity of people from near and far. Even the saffron-clad tambourine-clanging Hare Krishna mendicants were on the scene, on the green outside the Student Center.

About six weeks ago one morning the legendary Peter Bowra showed up at the Divine Anand ashram. He had been expected by
the Master, though the devotees were taken by surprise. They had not failed to note that the air was clear of incense that morning and a rather enchanting recital of the Gita was playing over the loudspeaker. As soon as the scientist was wheeled into the great hall, the awaiting Satguru fell on one knee, saying with a flourish, “Ah, the great master, welcome!”

“Wait a minute,” Bowra said, coming to a stop, “I thought
you
were the great master.”

“Ah, but you have held death in your hands, the weapon of Shiva —” The reference was to Bowra’s work during the war on the atomic bomb project.

“Isn’t it Krishna — in the Bhagavad Gita, as Oppie said — who proclaimed, ‘I have become death’?”

“But Shiva is the destroyer.…” Satguru smiled.

“But these are symbols anyway, aren’t they?”

“Exactly. Unfortunately, people quibble over symbols and lose sight of the great —”

“The great equation,” Bowra put in, “if that’s what you meant to say.”

The two were soon locked in a private discussion in the library, after which the scientist left, much as he’d arrived, with a great flourish. A few days later the colloquium was announced, and it promised to become a much-anticipated event in the Boston area.