Vandal Love (29 page)

Despite his questionable name, Jamgoti maintained a celebrity entourage. He’d fashioned a stylish light turban, though for yoga he preferred shorts and tank tops to robes, his legs being as sculpted as a porn star’s. But little by little he began to refuse invitations, even when they said he could bring Sat Puja.

I’d have stayed at Yale if I wanted parties. Besides, you’re the only one here crazy enough to keep up with me, he said, at once assuaging Sat Puja’s jealousy and arousing a sense of worry.

Jamgoti’s lectures were numerous. He explained how masters used to leave their students in the middle of nowhere with absolutely nothing and would tell them that they had to find their way back. A medicine man left his student in the middle of Las Vegas, he said. Without a penny.

Sat Puja felt himself being primed.

It’s failure till the end that’s real, Jamgoti told him. Or almost until the end. It’s the love that keeps you from enlightenment that brings you to the true meaning in this world.

But it was on a day that Jamgoti didn’t show up until well past noon that he announced his solution.

Sat Puja balanced his turban and looked up.

Sadhus, Jamgoti said. We’ll become sadhus.

If there was one taboo on an ashram of householders, it was this, and Sat Puja told him so. That the master had lectured severely against those who chose to renounce the world. The sadhu was supposed to near God through deprivation and suffering, but the master set them straight. The sadhu, he’d said, doesn’t marry. He called them tourists in life’s pain.

And I’m sure people say the opposite somewhere else, Jamgoti told Sat Puja. I’m sure others would accuse householders of clinging to worldly security. Just imagine, he said, the power of committing to nothing but enlightenment.

But Sat Puja wasn’t convinced.

I don’t think you really believe in all this, Jamgoti told him, narrowing his eyes with consideration and making Sat Puja feel not only that he was worth close scrutiny but that he was being dared. You know, I think that most young people who come here are trying to spice up their middle-class existence. Maybe you’re just running away.

Sat Puja had considered this argument a thousand times. Inwardly he chastised himself for spiritual motives that weren’t pure. At community meals, turbaned company directors discussed corporate imaging. Though the possibility that he might someday belong tempted him, he could see all this through Jamgoti’s eyes—that the
Sikhs could but tie him to a system, to rules that were, quite simply, worldly. He’d read the work of a Buddhist who said that cruelty came when one’s rule for life failed and that all worldly love or desire for love ended in hatred and pain.

Sat Puja put down his rake and listened. The sprinklers clucked and chuckled. Distance blurred. The sky wavered. What was this place? he wondered. This desert? These weirdos in the American landscape searching for tradition? Would they disappear like the gunslingers and saloons? This was too in the middle of nowhere. The sun seemed to be approaching the earth, the ashram itself. Would it bounce off like a rubber ball, leaving a faint burnt splat, this artificial green desert again?

Their preparation consisted of improvised ceremonies, cutting up credit cards, leaving uneven stacks of books about the trailer park like primitive stone piles. Harvey took his Toyota to a used-car lot. Three hundred, the fat man said, his speckled belly visible between the taut buttons of his shirt. Sat Puja tried to insist on its relative worth, but Jamgoti laid a hand on his shoulder.

As for the BMW, Jamgoti admitted that it was his mother’s and couldn’t legally be sold. Sat Puja imagined running it off a hill or parking it in a bad neighbourhood or selling it for pennies to a Mexican chopshop. Instead Jamgoti called a drive-away service to take it home.

A hip pouch, a blanket, turbans and a pair of baggy yoga clothes were all they agreed on as well as whatever
they had in cash, less for themselves, Jamgoti pointed out, than to regale the needy they might encounter. They took a few minor cosmetic objects, a nail clipper, toothbrushes, floss, a needle and thread to stitch rags into cloaks like itinerant Buddhists. Sat Puja was tempted to sneak a credit card or even to withdraw a substantial amount of cash and hide it. He did, however, secrete his driver’s licence and passport, surprised at the power of his instinct for survival.

They set out at the hour of the pre-dawn meditation. This was when mystics went deepest, in the chill, living air. Wrapped in blankets they followed the arroyo on a trail used by dirt bikes. Aren’t we near Los Alamos, Jamgoti asked, where they made the first atom bomb? The moon had set. The stars were a molten path along the sky.

After a while they stopped on a hill to meditate, their breaths controlled like those of divers, their eyes closed as if they were falling back into water. Their blankets and robes had turned red from the dust. Sat Puja felt a tightness in his chest and tried to calm his rushing mind. Jamgoti’s words returned to him—the love that keeps you from enlightenment. He pictured himself gone off to surrender attachments, embittered by the world. What love, what willowy figure, would save him from cold immortality?

Later, when they tried to rest, both were too excited. They headed randomly downhill, surprised to find a path of sorts. By early morning the sun had muscled back the shadows. Surveying the distance from an
outcropping, Jamgoti not only resembled Lawrence of Arabia but looked as if he felt like him, too. Finally unable to bear the heat they sat under an overhanging rock, bandits at wait.

I’m thirsty, Sat Puja said. He was thinking about the money in his hip pouch and where they might buy something. Jamgoti suggested this was just nervousness and that it would pass. Dust and heat conspired to make Sat Puja’s eyes water. He felt a shortness of breath, regret that they hadn’t brought drinks. He stared at the fissured earth, an intricate puzzle that stretched infinitely before them. He’d imagined begging for rice at huts, meditating beneath trees, crossing uninhabited distances. The ascetic life was supposed to be purified of all things, but this was the world and then some. He worried that they looked like homeless people.

Near dark they were unsteady on their feet. They’d meditated and napped. A few times, when a breeze had passed over the baking earth, its hot, thin air drying the sweat beneath his clothes, Sat Puja had felt his spirit lift, but only briefly—these were earthly sensations, conflicted and fleeting, not what he’d hoped. When the day had cooled enough, they set out again. Cresting a rise, they saw the highway and the beacon of a Chevron. They started down in a giddy, shuffling run. The man behind the counter watched them, phone ready, finger on the hook. They bought Gatorade and chocolate bars. Moderation, moderation, Jamgoti repeated as they tore through the wrappers with their teeth. The man rang up their purchases with one hand.

Outside again they ate and belched. Sat Puja immediately felt nauseous but too happy to let it show. They headed back out from the gas station across a colourless, lunar plain, occasionally picking their way over forgotten strands of barbed wire. Soon there was only the strange silence of the desert night, disturbed by a distant baseline or the downshifting of a tractor-trailer.

They’d walked long enough to lose all notion of time and had come into view of a mesa’s single turret when, across a range of juniper, a flare rose as if from the earth. It dipped, briefly disappeared, rose again and separated into headlights. A pickup slowed on a dirt road they wouldn’t otherwise have noticed.

You boys lost? a man asked with a faintly lilting Chicano accent. From the shape of the headlights and the grille, the smoothness of the idle, the truck was clearly new. This calmed Sat Puja. The cab light came on. The man had a dark, round face and high cheekbones. He leaned heavily over the door.

Hop in back. I’ll give you a ride over to my place and you can use the phone.

Sat Puja was about to refuse politely when Jamgoti thanked the man and climbed over the tailgate. He hauled Sat Puja up like a child and whispered, Adventure. As they began moving, he explained that they had to let the world take them where it would.

They rode through the still air, now heavy and cool on their bodies. Not far from where they’d been picked up, the landscape descended. They passed the occasional tree, patchy tall grass, and to the side, farther down,
undergrowth and a narrow river. The truck pulled into what had once been a farm, sheds and a sagging barn, a house stacked back in ever more rickety additions.

The man driving was at most thirty, and his size would have been imposing if it weren’t for the jean jacket that made him look pinched at the shoulders, his cowboy boots dainty as high heels beneath his big frame. He introduced himself as Danny. He was returning home with a half-dozen new PlayStation rentals.

Another man, slightly younger, met them at the door, and Danny did no more than introduce them as guests. This is my brother, Andy, he said.

You guys prophets or something? Andy asked, tugging at his sparse moustache. If either brother was surprised by the two filthy young men wearing turbans, they hardly let it show.

Jamgoti led them into uncertain laughter by abbreviating their adventure, saying they’d dared themselves to live like holy men.

The sound of coughing came from the backroom, and when Sat Puja glanced in that direction, Danny explained that his
abuelo—his
grandfather—was sick. Don’t worry, our sister takes care of anything if he needs it.

Danny then told them that they could spend the night on the couches, which they accepted after a few rounds at the PlayStation, at which Jamgoti appeared quite skilled.

Morning came too soon with a yellow, intersecting light. Sat Puja’s lungs felt furry, his eyes pinched and sore. He
looked for the bathroom so he could blow his nose.

Danny came into the kitchen with a rifle. Coffee’s on, he said, then went out. Sat Puja watched him go up the driveway, past outbuildings half-lost in a flame of wild grass.

The night before Danny had explained that for the past seven months he’d been visiting the neighbours, whose cousin from Mexico had gotten his sister, Juanita, pregnant then disappeared. Though Danny confessed to being a softy, he remained volatile in regards to his sister, explaining that their father had abandoned them and that she, not yet born, had been sent along years later. After a few questions from Jamgoti, Danny had told the story, explaining that his
abuelo
, a hard man in his youth, had been the town constable for more than three decades and had hated drifters and criminals. One day, the grandfather heard that Danny and Andy’s father was dealing drugs, and he drove to the trailer where the young man lived with his girlfriend and boys. The aging constable showed up holding an old leather harness and repeatedly tossed his son to the ground with one hand as he struck. He left him on the trailer’s cinderblock steps that the next owner would have to paint black, and a week later woke in the night to find Danny and Andy, aged three and one, in the kitchen with a garbage bag of clothes and a half-empty box of diapers. Nine years afterwards a stranger arrived in a truck and brought a baby girl into the house. She’d been stuffed naked into the cut-off leg of a woman’s jeans, insulated with cotton balls, a napkin pinned to the denim reading Juanita. The stranger spoke with the grandfather, described the man with the scarred face and
so confirmed that this was Danny and Andy’s father. He had breakfast, tried his hand at a few bouts of
Space Invaders
with the boys, then put on his hat and left. Why the girl had received a Mexican name remained a mystery unless it was meant as a jab at Juan, the grandfather. Danny and Andy had been the first in the family with gringo names, their mother being uppity. Also, the napkin it was printed on came from Denny’s, which Danny had seen as something of an omen, the closest God could come in worldly terms to an edict.

And now she’s pregnant, Danny had told them. The guy who did it was real little, like you. He gestured to Sat Puja. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I catch him. But no one’s going to want her now but us, and he should pay.

Jamgoti was still asleep on the couch, an arm flung against the sunlight. The grandfather hollered toothlessly, and Sat Puja went to the door. He eased it back. Danny had told him that one day his
abuelo
had woken with numb fingertips and that this had by degrees spread throughout his body. The old man lay stiff on the mattress, his head twisted against the pillow. His eyes were wide. Sat Puja had retied his turban that morning, reversing the cloth to hide the dirt, and the old man stared as if this were indeed the end, a half-pint Eastern angel sent to collect his soul. A glass of water sat on a rickety night table, and he’d manoeuvred a skeletal arm towards it, the hand suspended in a rictus of bone. The girl lay in the bed across the room, curled halfway. She had faint dark hairs on her upper lip and sweat along the side of her
nose. Her face glistened, her hair pushed up in a nest away from her neck. Both stared, the old man with cartoon eyes, the girl with a prisoner’s veiled look of curiosity.

It wasn’t until Sat Puja closed the door that the moment struck him. He couldn’t recall how long they’d paused, watching each other in the dim, hospital-smelling room with its drawn blinds and undertones of earth and decaying floor joists. Danny’s words returned to him, that she’d loved a little guy like him and that no one would want her now.

To calm this sudden emotion, Sat Puja meditated in the living room while he waited for Jamgoti to get up. It was the first time he’d missed his pre-dawn meditations since he’d joined the ashram.

When Jamgoti was finally awake, Juanita was sitting in the kitchen, spooning corn flakes from a bowl of milk. She perched forward on her chair and wore a ballooning white dress, her legs thatched with hair. The arches of her feet hugged the rungs, and she smiled shyly, her cheeks swollen with sleep.

Jamgoti sat across from her. We haven’t met, he said and introduced himself. Do you mind if I join you for cereal?