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Happy Thanksgiving, and even Merry Christmas. I don't know what will be happening to me. I have to confront the Arhat and do dread it. I waited twenty-two years to confront Charles and then it was by being out of the house when he came home from work.
Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder about Wa-tertown, etc. You were a good mother, given the vik-shipta (scatterbrained) style of your generation. I guess that's all any of us can do, follow the fashion and trust biology to override culture-if we try to be better parents than our peers, our children will feel uneasy. I mean, children aren't entirely the point of a woman's life, are they? But if not, what is5 Tell me if you've learned.
Addled love,
Sare
[tape]
Namaste, Master.
My little Kundalini has been avoiding me these past days.
These past days have brought many duties and distractions.
And disasters.
Disasters only to those who have not yet disengaged from prakriti. Whose vasanas still harbor phalatrishna.
That is well spoken. You are wearing Western dress. It has sharpened your tongue.
Now that it is almost December my saris seemed thin.
Your sweater indeed appears bulky. It conceals the shape of your beautiful breasts.
I blush to hear you call them beautiful. Only Buddha and his peace is beautiful.
Within bisp'eace there are a million million jewels. It is one of the priceless insights of Mahayana that particulars do not cease in nirvana. They are simply at last freed from disturbing motion. The wind of decay no longer caresses them.
As executive assistant, I have a number of sorrows to report, and one cause for joy.
I wish to bear the cause for joy. Let our lawyers deal with the sorrow. Sorrow is their trade.
The joy is that Melissa Blithedale, after months of meditation and growing disenchantment with the Presbyterian Church and her mirthless financial advisers, has experienced a change of heart. In our letter of late May she was told she would be welcome back here. Now she wants to come. And to secure your benevolence she not only offers to cease demanding return of the loan she made three years ago but wishes to kick in another five hundred K. What shall I tell her?
Tell her of course to come. Write and say, "Come, ineffable Melissa! Be no longer buffaloed!"
She will find the puram much diminished since her last stay. Then, I believe, she was thoroughly coddled.
We will coddle her again, the good Mrs. B. We will take her into our i
I am not sure she and I will speak any language.
How is that, my most precious? No. Don't touch me yet.
As you wish, my nayika.
When I first came here, my leader in dynamic meditation kept shouting at me, "Who are you?" Now I ask the same question of you, Master. Who are you?
Who do you think I am?
I think you are my Master and love and my living path to Buddha.
[Silence.]
But now I have been told that you are not a holy man from India but a Jewish Armenian from Watertown, Massachusetts.
[Silence.]
Which is true, Master?
Wherein is the contradiction? Why may not a holy man come from Watertown? Why may not the living path begin there?
Perhaps there is no reason.
And yet you feel one. You feel deceived. Worse, you feel mocked.
Yes, I suppose.
Our tantric lovemaking, the highly successful technique of vajrolimudra, now seems a mockery, a loss of your dignity because behind the mask and accent of the guru a pair of Western eyes watched, and a brain thinking with a coarse American accent?
Something like that. Let me hear your real voice.
I'm not sure I can still do it. Even my brain now, when it talks to itself, has the Arbat's voice.
When did this incredible imposture first occur to you?
I resent the word "imposture." I grew into it organically. It's a phase of my being, a karmic reality. In India I became Indian. I never applied for citizenship, but the rest of it-the diet, the clothes, the languages, the mind-set-just came and filled me in. But they didn't forget-the Indian authorities. They remembered, and when enough little embarrassments at Ellora bad piled up-injuries, bad trips, complaints from parents, complaints from neighbors-they kicked me out. The wogs deported me.
Why isn't this generally known?
I wasn't getting stateside publicity in those days. I was just one more guru obscuru. Coming to the States was Durga 's idea, and she was right: this is the place to score. This is the place where dubkba translates into money. Back in India, once I was gone, what did they care? To them, I was one more piece of foreign klisbta-as long as I left and the ashram dissolved, they were happy enough. Their dirty little secret was, our farm-bouse and its bit of land was where they were putting one of their cardboard-and-plaster bousing projects, with rakeojfsfor everybody. Our getting out quietly was pan of our price for not balking at their price. What you got to realize about India, it may be poor but it's a capitalist country. People are on the take. For peanuts by our standards, but on the take.
But how did you get into this country?
No problem. I bad my old passport. Dean Rusk bad signed it, that's Bow old it was. I went and got it renewed at the consulate in Bombay and walked through controls at Ke
Welcome home, Mr. Steinmetz. I didn't even bother to put on a suit. Durga and Nitya andAlinga knew, but that was about it. Ma Prapti maybe, but I think not; otherwise she would have blabbed when she got to blabbing. Not everybody came in the same plane, remember. You stand in the fast line, they look up your number to see if you're on the feds' shit list, and bingo, if you 're not, you 're in. Once in, I'm the Arbat again.
But how did you become the Arhat in the first place?
The story of my life. O.K. I was born on Elton Avenue, of these two crazy mismatched people. There wasn't any religion around the bouse, my parents cancelled each other out. They must have had great sex, because nothing else showed. My mother was actually a kind of anti-Semite. She couldn 't stand my father's people, from over in the old West End, mostly. She thought they were pushy, greedy, slippery, and bad crucified Christ. And him and the Armenians-be called them barbarians, be called them gypsies. He'd say the Turks should have finished the job, she 'd say Hitler didn V have such a bad idea. I got nothing, 'growing up. No baptism, no bar mitzvab. My mother didn't even make cboeregsfor breakfast, she said my father could go out and buy himself bagels. People felt sorry for me. One of my mother's older sisters, Aunt Mariam, took me to church a few times at Easter and Christmas-to St. James locally and that new one they put up over on Brattle Street, right in Wasp country-but, Jesus, the services were endless, and all that incense and candle smoke did a job on my sinuses. Iwasone of those kids with tons of allergies. The desert here has been great for that, by the way. The same with you? I notice your nose runs a lot. O.K. Don't answer. Sulk. Make your guru squirm.