Karma for Beginners (4 page)

. . .

Through selfless service we discover our true destiny.

The next morning, I have to get my
seva
assignment. My mom walks me to the office after breakfast, and then she leaves for kitchen prep. I watch her turn around and walk down the path, fingering a bracelet of mahogany wooden beads. She doesn't look back at me.

The office is in another beige trailer beside the lobby. Inside are houseplants, thin brown carpet, and a crappy desk. They have me fill out a questionnaire about my interests. The interests they list are weird, like: Social Growth, Organization, Nurturing, Finance, Manual Labor, and Nature. I check Nature because that's the only thing on there that doesn't sound completely lame.

When the
seva
coordinator calls me in, she gives me a stack of tattered textbooks. “We homeschool here, for kids your age,” she says. “After junior high. So you'll need to take the practice tests in these books and hand them in, along with weekly reports on what you're learning from your
seva
. That's how school works here.”

Then she informs me I've been placed on Grounds Crew. She hands me a special yellow vest and a piece of lavender notepaper where she's written the name of my supervisor. On the bottom of the paper it says “Smile At Your Destiny!”

The place I'm supposed to report to is called Darshana Gurunam, and it's basically a shed. Wheelbarrows, dirt and wood chips, flats of flower seedlings stacked on wooden shelves. It's tucked way behind the main building, through the woods, so you can't see it from anywhere else. No one's there. “Hello?” I call out, looking at the notepaper. “Devanand?” I sound out the name, voice echoing in the metal walls. I'm about to go and find my mom when I hear gravel crunch.

“That's me!” Devanand is string-bean thin and tall, in red running shorts with yellow piping, a tight sky-blue faded T-shirt that says JOGGING! and green Nikes with a yellow swoosh. He has a brown scraggly ponytail and a terry-cloth sweatband around his forehead and a gross, enormous beard. He's probably my mom's age, thirty-five or so, but she wouldn't think he's cute. He's not her type. His eyes blaze and laugh at once, which makes me think he's possibly a little crazy. His legs are very hairy, and his shorts are very short. “So what are we gonna do today?” he asks.

Weird: I thought he's supposed to tell me what to do. “Um—take care of the grounds?”

He laughs. “Well, yes, that is what we do here at Grounds Crew. But
specifically
, that is to say
particularly
, what are we going to do
today
, is what I mean, m'dear. It's up to you!”

I just stand there. I don't know anything about Grounds Crew or what the different jobs are, so I can't really answer. Plus, he is weird.

“Okay,” he says. “Since you don't know, why don't I pick for ya. See those flats of asters over there?” He points. “They need to get planted. You know how to plant an aster?”

Two hours later, the wood chips finally break through the skin on my knees. I don't mind the dirt beneath my fingernails—I'm not one of those girls who acts dumb about that kind of stuff—but the wood chips actually hurt. Devanand gave me a wheelbarrow full of twenty flats of forty seedlings each, and scampered off like a tall, long-bearded rabbit. Grounds Crew doesn't seem to be much of a crew. It's just me.

. . . . .

When I get to the back of the main lot, I spot a path leading through the trees. It opens up into another lot, which looks like it's for ashram vehicles. There are vans back there, and school bus shuttles; trash and tools and extra tires. Plus a red VW bus, the cool kind with the pop-up top. I don't see how anyone is going to notice asters back here, but I've got a lot left over, so I kneel down. It's hot; I take off the Grounds Crew vest and throw it in my wheelbarrow. No one's back here to see.

After an hour or so, somebody yells, “Hey!” I about jump out of my entire skin. I'm sure it'll be Devanand, busting me for not wearing my vest.

“Sorry, didn't mean to spook you.” I turn around; it isn't Devanand. It's this guy with a wrench in his hand and grime smudged on his stubbly face, younger than Devanand but older than me. He's tallish and slouchy and cute, and he doesn't look like any of the other people at the ashram. He's got normal short brown hair, jeans, and a plain green T-shirt. Plus a little gold stud in his left ear, which I've only ever seen on rock stars. He doesn't have a name tag on. “How's the planting going?”

I shrug. I kind of want to tell him my knees hurt like crazy, quit digging and go sit over by his box of tools, but I just say, “Okay.”

“Cool,” he says, and grins at me. He squats down, crawls under a bus, and gets to work. The whole rest of the afternoon I can feel my back, knowing there's someone behind it. Through eight more flats of flowers, I want to turn around but don't.

The next morning when I wake up, my mom's gone. No note. Surprise. In the cafeteria I find a Silent Table so no one will notice I don't have anyone to talk to, and I finish writing to my dad. I tell him the names of the freeways we took here, Mount Hope Road and Butrick Way. And I tell him the hours when my mom's away at
seva
, and that I'm good at packing all my stuff up on last-minute notice. Just in case.

By the time I slip the finished letter in my pocket, the post-breakfast crowd is streaming out into the long hallway. This whole building is huge, dorm rooms and cafeteria and big marble lobby, plus a bunch of different rooms for meditation or chanting or who knows what. Not to mention I've seen other buildings we haven't even been in yet. I don't think I'll ever learn my way around. I slide into the gift shop—the fourth one I've seen so far—and buy some stamps.

Outside the gift shop there's a little slot in the wall to send mail, like at the post office. I open it, heart pounding, and drop in my letter care of Honest Groove Records. It's a huge relief to have it off me, out in the world, where she can never find it.

I'm wiping my hands on my jeans, wiping off the sweat, when my mom comes around the corner and spots me. “Tessa!” She clips toward me past the long row of pay phones. “You're here so early!” she says, and hugs me. “Did you like the gift shop?” I stay stiff.

“Breakfast is over,” I scowl.

She ignores that. “Guess what, Tessa! You're going to be so excited. No regular activities today— there's a special program at the Shanti Kutir. The entire ashram community will gather with music and chanting!” Too bad. I was almost kind of looking forward to
seva
.

The Shanti Kutir is a giant half-enclosed outdoor auditorium at the bottom of a hill. It's a hike to get there, through Sadhana Mandap and along a trail and through another building with glass walls and scarlet carpeting. Then you walk through a garden with statues of Gandhi and Jesus and some Hindu god that looks like an elephant, all of them with flower garlands piled on. My mom says there's a shuttle, but she wants me to experience the grounds.

At the top of the hill we walk by the shuttles pulling up, old school buses with speaker systems that play chanting tapes. I take note of them, where they stop, what they look like, so I can get around here on my own. I know I'll have to eventually, even if I don't know the way. The buses all have names of school districts on their sides in peeling paint; ancient, grumbling, belching smoke. On their last legs, all of them. I guess that lot is where they go when they break down. I teeter to stay steady as we flow down the hill in a river of people. I want to grab my mom's hand for balance, but she's already way ahead of me.

At the bottom is a huge wall of cubbies for shoes. My mom hands me a flat square purple cushion from a towering stack, and we pick our way barefoot through the hundreds of people sitting cross-legged on the cold floor.

When we take our places, my ankle bones clack against hard marble. We all face a big overstuffed chair surrounded by flowers. My mom leans over, grabs my hand, and whispers, “That's the Guru's chair.” The lady next to us glares and breathes out loud. My mom shoots me an inside-joke look about how uptight she is. Her eyes spark like a Roman candle: there's that waterfall again.

A swami—bald, in orange robes—steps to the podium. The rustling in the room slows to silence.
“Sad gurunath maharaj ki jay!”
The crowd says it back to him, but I can't pronounce it.

The swami leans into the microphone. “It is a sacred practice to welcome one another,” he reads in a singsong voice. “Truly we are always being welcomed, and it is only our own limited vision, our own fear, that prevents us from seeing this. The walls of illusion we create in our own minds are all that prevent us from feeling welcomed into the ocean of love.”

He thwacks his book shut; the words sit in my ears. I watch the swami stand there making peaceful faces down at us. A sting rises up inside my throat and suddenly I want to yell at everyone looking so serene with little smiles on their lips. Because it's a lie: they're not welcoming. They use weird words and act like you're supposed to know and don't talk to you and never ask your name.

But then I swallow the sting and think about what the swami said. How that feeling isn't really real. How if we choose to shift our perception it will change. And I start to wonder: am I maybe wrong? Maybe I
am
being welcomed all the time and I don't know it, because I'm busy making walls of illusion between myself and people. Maybe it's my own fault I feel so awful here.

The sureness of my anger dissolves. It kind of freaks me out. I never realized you could make up entire feelings, that my whole inside could tell me something's true when it's really just my mind making it up.

When they ring the meditation bell, I try to see inside my brain to figure out what's true and what isn't. Every thought I have ties a knot in there, though, and every time I try to untie one, the trying makes another. Till there's just a big tangle, like when I used to have long hair and never brushed it, and the only thing to do was take a scissors and cut the whole thing out. Except I don't really see how you could cut out your entire mind.

Then the drums start up. They're not like any other drums I've heard; they sound juicy and wet, each beat round and complete as it rolls into the next. The drummers sit on the floor, building walls of sound and rhythm; tambourine cymbals start shaking; and then a sitar comes in. I know what a sitar is because of the Beatles. They plink out a melody; two men's voices pick it up, “
Jaya Jagatambe
,” and then the whole room joins in, a sea of voices loud enough to swallow me. By the third time through I know the sounds of the syllables, and I sing too, and it washes away that knot inside my head, just like my mom does when she's happy. I don't know what I'm singing, what the words mean, how to spell them, but it's too big, too much like an ocean, and I'm too small to stand against the wave of it. I close my eyes and let it sweep me off.

When I open them, the beard guy is sitting in the overstuffed chair. He's got flower garlands around his neck: pink, orange, yellow, like in pictures of Hawaii, and he wears red robes. He's Indian and small; with his long gray hair and beard he looks a little like an old man and a little like an imp. He has a red dot between his eyebrows, and a burgundy ski cap on his head, which is kind of weird. He holds his hands up and out to the sides like he's holding up the music, eyes shut, rocking like Stevie Wonder.

Eventually his hands float down into his lap. The music fades and he opens his eyes. “Hello,” he says in an Indian accent.

“Hello,” the whole room says back like an ocean.

I've read the word
beatific
before in a book, but I never really got what it meant until now. That's the look on his face. Like beautiful, but more, and simpler. I hear fast loud breathing behind me, turn to see where it's coming from. Dirty looks dot the rows of people and someone puts their hand on my shoulder, firm. I guess you're not supposed to look at anyone. Before the hand turns me back around, though, I glimpse a long-haired guy collapsing into someone's arms behind him, panting. I sneak a glance at my mom, sideways, like cheating on a test. She looks beatific too.

After a long time the beard guy stands up and walks offstage. Then Swami Anantananda strides back to the microphone. “Blessings,” he says. “Our Guruji has gifted us with
prasad
today!
Sad gurunath maharaj ki jay!
You may all line up at the top of the hill.”

The mass exodus is like Christmas Eve at the mall, except everyone's barefoot and trying to find their shoes. Eventually we dig ours out of a pile and get in line. While we wait, I find out
prasad
means consecrated junk food. The beard guy says some kind of blessing over it, so then it's supposed to have his spiritual energy. To me, it just looks like Oreos, but maybe I'll feel something when I eat it.

Ahead of us somebody shouts, “I got your Oreo!” It's a kid's voice. I look up. The tall boy and the girl are brother and sister, definitely; pale and reedy, with curly nut-brown hair and distant eyes. Fifteen and fourteen, I bet. The third guy—the short one—you can't tell how old he is, because he hasn't gone through puberty; he could be anywhere from eleven to fourteen. Both the guys wear plaid madras short-sleeved button-down shirts; the girl wears calico like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I think for a second about saying hi. Not that they're going to ever be my friends, but it would be nice at least to talk to someone my own age. But the girl has her eyes closed, like I guess she's praying to herself, and when the short guy catches me staring he looks at me like I'm something rotten he just smelled, and then he pokes the other guy and they both laugh. So much for hi.

By the time we get to the front of the line, the aluminum pans are empty of everything but crumbs. One half of an Oreo is left. I put it in my mouth, waiting for the spiritual experience. I close my eyes. It just tastes like an Oreo without the creme.