Read Cartwheels in a Sari Online
Authors: Jayanti Tamm
Cartwheels in a Sari
For all those who dare examine their
faith, be it past or present
Most of all,
for Duane,
my best friend and husband
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
SINCE SRI CHINMOY'S
arrival in America in 1964, thousands of sincere seekers and curious onlookers sought his presence. Some remained only for a few hours, others for decades. No doubt that all those who encountered Sri Chinmoy have their own experiences, their own understanding of him. This memoir isn't the definitive account of Sri Chinmoy; it is my own remembrance. Although all the events within these pages are true, the names and identifying characteristics of most people mentioned in the book have been altered in an effort to honor the privacy of those involved.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
MUCH GRATITUDE
goes out to my friends and colleagues for their support in this endeavor. For sharing their remembrances of former times, I thank my family. In particular, I am extremely grateful to Samarpana for her constant encouragement and her willingness to unearth her past.
I thank my superb agent, Adam Chromy, and my perceptive and insightful editor, Julia Pastore, for their vision.
Finally, for his tireless belief and love, I am forever in debt to my husband, Duane.
ONTENTS
2.
Because Guru Says So, That's Why
4.
The Supreme Is Your Boyfriend
T
HE LAST TIME I RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM GURU, THE
self-proclaimed spiritual master Sri Chinmoy six years had passed since his personal envoy called to inform me that my discipleship was officially and permanently terminated and all contact and association with his headquarters in Queens, New York, was forbidden. Now, after years of struggling to shed all outer remnants of my former life, I listened with muted curiosity and suspicion as the same breathless disciple carefully conveyed Guru's unexpected and urgent message. His words foretold of a “dangerous destructive force” trying to physically attack me, and, in order to protect myself, for the next two months, every hour on the hour, I needed to pray ceaselessly to Guru for protection.
I was livid.
I knew Guru's masterful tactics of manipulation to lure me back into his fold. It had worked countless times in the past. Since birth, as his chosen devotee, I witnessed Guru lovingly warn of the vicious karmic punishments in store for disciples who did not strictly adhere to his teachings. Whether it was dread of the massive wheel of karma, or weakness for
his doe-eyed charms, it had been enough to keep me beholden to him.
I couldn't hang up the phone.
Captured by his honey-coated appeal that promised his eternal concern and compassion, in an instant, all of my years of struggling to separate myself from his hold dissolved. I still possessed enough faith to fear that his prophecy might be true.
I held vigil, clocking protective prayer sessions by the hour. Two months later, when the supposed witching hour came and passed without incident, I was enraged and mortified that Guru still retained the power to control me, despite all I had experienced living as his chosen disciple for more than a quarter of a century.
That was it, my final act of belief in the cult of the short, bald man in the flowing robes who declared himself to be God.
The Myth Begins
M
Y LIFE STORY CAN BE TRACED BACK TO AN AD
dress scrawled across a matchbook directing my mother to the place where she hoped her lifelong search would end. She didn't have a phone number or contact name. Although it was just after dusk, the New York neighborhood seemed empty. No one to ask, no clues. After crisscrossing the street four times, she stood before the only building on the block without a number. Wrought-iron bars covered the cracked glass of the front door. Instead of a panel of backlit doorbells, five chewed wires jutted from the brick. The door was unlocked and sighed open at her touch.
The dank stairwell had one bare lightbulb. Cigarette butts littered the floor like flattened cockroaches. She rechecked the address clutched in her left hand. This was suddenly absurd. All of it—her exhausting journey, hitchhiking from San Francisco with her two-year-old son, leaving behind her straying husband and all of the contents of her former life, bringing nothing other than one small satchel and a matchbook with the address of Sri Chinmoy a guru recently arrived from
Pondicherry, India. A drip of rusty water fell onto her shoulder from a brown-stained ring on the ceiling. This was not the place to find a holy man. They reside by the gardenia-soaked banks of the Ganges, or inside cavernous mountain dwellings, or shaded by boughs of the bodhi tree, not in dilapidated East Village tenements.
As she turned to leave, an ancient voice, gentle and lulling, drifted down to her.
“At last, at last. You have come, good girl. Bah.”
She looked up. Dressed in traditional Indian garb, a pale blue dhoti, and matching kurta, Guru's gold-hued skin glowed, and he seemed to flood the stairwell with his radiance.
When she and her very first boyfriend fled Chicago, leaving behind her cross-dressing, abusive alcoholic father, she actively began her search for spiritual fulfillment. In her earnest longing, she had wandered through San Francisco, the epicenter for alternative spiritual paths, kneeling in silent
zazen
at Zen temples, dancing and whirling with Sufi mystics, quietly reflecting in Quaker Meeting Houses, and clapping and chanting at the Hare Krishna temple, but everything, even the splashes of mysticism, felt too formal and processed, reminding her of dreaded days in Catholic school. Once, years ago, she had read that when the disciple was ready, the guru would appear.
And there he was, leaning over the railing from the floor above, as though he had been standing there, waiting for her, her entire life. Why had it taken her this long to arrive? And how could she possibly waste one more minute when her guru had finally appeared? At that moment she chose to surrender her entire existence to him. This guru was the answer to all of her questions and longings. He seemed to know her,
and perhaps he could fill all the gaping holes that echoed inside.
He motioned for her to follow him inside his crowded apartment where the guests sat upon a bare wood floor in silence. Through swirls of sandalwood incense smoke, Guru instructed her to sit beside a young hippie, barefoot and with a sour odor. After hours of potent, silent meditation, Guru stated that if she wanted to “jump into the sea of spirituality,” she would marry the long-haired man.
That, according to my mother, is how she met my father.
The blond mendicant, my father, was also at Guru's for the first time. He drove from Yale University, where he was a graduate fellow studying philosophy. Born in a refugee camp in Augsburg, Germany, to Estonian parents who had fled when Stalin's troops invaded their homeland, my father's family immigrated to America and settled in Bismarck, North Dakota. Thoroughly dissatisfied with Bismarck's status quo, by his late teens, my father devoured drugs along with sacred Sanskrit texts as he hitchhiked, journeying through communes and churches for answers to his questions on the meaning of existence. He found the ancient tradition of asceticism appealing. After arriving at Yale, he began his own intensive course of study to become a
sadhana,
which included renouncing all material objects and attachments. He welcomed personal discomfort and self-denial as important steps toward inner strength. He roamed the Yale campus barefoot, even in the midst of the New England winters, as part of his spiritual practice. According to my father, the night he entered Guru's apartment, he planned to take a vow as a
sanyassi,
a celibate monk, to learn about the realms of the inner world first-hand from a true Yogi.
The last thing he expected that night was acquiring a wife and stepson.
When Guru blessed them both, pressing his hands over their foreheads, they felt a river of warmth course through them, awakening their senses. With closed eyes, Guru chanted in Sanskrit, and in the incense haze and overheated space, his words felt familiar. He praised their inner aspiration, welcoming them into his “golden boat that will steer them safely through the ignorance-sea to the golden-shore of the Beyond.” My mother and my father were both fatigued charting their own courses, and the guarantee of safe passage to the golden-shore of the Beyond was not something to pass up. This guru felt homespun, humble, and lacked the trappings of protocol, profits, and proselytizing over which other religious groups obsessed. This was different—just a small circle of devoted seekers guided by a simple sage. It was exactly what my mother and father yearned for. Though neither one had a desire for marriage, they were thoroughly entranced by the idea of a life with Guru. They bowed their heads, accepting Guru's wisdom.
And so on that night my mother and father became Sri Chinmoy's disciples.
ALMOST AS SOON
as my parents committed themselves to Guru as full-time disciples, Guru rapidly changed his small informal meditation circle into a structured organization. Since Guru wanted all his disciples to expedite their spiritual growth, he prescribed a lifestyle that, according to him, would guarantee the quickest route toward self-perfection. He prohibited all activities he considered dangerous detours: alcohol
, caffeine, smoking, drugs, TV, radio, movies, music, newspapers, magazines, books not written by Guru, meat, dancing, and pets. In addition, all disciples were to remain single. According to Guru, traditional families created insurmountable tangles and distractions that at best delayed, but more often derailed, true seekers in their quest for enlightenment.
There were, however, a few exceptions. Guru sanctioned certain unions that he arranged and labeled as “divine marriages.” Created to encourage intensified spiritual practice to achieve “faster than the fastest progress in their inner lives,” Guru paired a number of new disciples with the mandate that they marry but remain celibate. Shortly after my parents’”divine marriage” in 1969, my mother became pregnant, clearly violating Guru's policy. The problem of my mother's pregnancy drove an immediate thorny wedge between the newlyweds, who were still strangers to each other. Nervous to confess to Guru, they felt ashamed and embarrassed.
Guru scolded my parents for being undivine and indulging in “lower-vital forces” that threatened to eradicate all of their spiritual hunger. My parents were mortified and pleaded with Guru that their failing was due to weakness and not out of deliberate disobedience. Eventually, Guru's infinite compassion intervened. He pleaded with the “Supreme”— his preferred word for God—and told my parents that the Supreme was so moved by Guru's prayers that he decided to allow Guru to turn what he called this “undivine” episode into a spiritual boon. Guru then announced that he had contacted the “highest heaven” and arranged for a special soul to incarnate as his chosen disciple. My grateful parents humbly vowed to never again indulge in “lower-vital activities,” and renewed their undying commitment to Guru to never permit
the “trappings of family” to deter them from spiritual progress. They understood that what held them together was Guru and Guru alone. He served as the foundation of their marriage and lives.
As in all great faiths of the world, Guru, too, had stories to answer the unanswerable, to explain the unexplainable, to rationalize the irrational. His story was me—the miracle child. In the history of the Sri Chinmoy Center, from its humble beginnings in 1964 to its present-day expansion with more than seven thousand followers around the world and the hundreds of thousands of ex-disciples and seekers who, for however fleeting a time, came to experience Guru's presence, I, according to the legend originally told by Guru and then repeated endlessly by disciples around the world, am the
only
soul to have been personally invited, selected, or commanded to incarnate into his realm on earth. Though mine wasn't proclaimed a virgin birth, he announced that I descended from the highest heavens to be an exemplary disciple; I was to be the Ananda to Buddha, the Peter to Jesus, the Lakshmana to Rama, a devoted, sacrificial being, selfless and tireless, pleasing the master unconditionally.