Chapter Ten ~ SERVICE, THE HIGHEST FORM OF PRAYER

I loved my new office, large and sunny, a room all to myself, as different as possible from the bare desk parked outside Mr. Hudson’s office on Park Avenue. Instead of a desk I sat at a long counter now along one wall next to two large windows. Above my head were shelves and cubby holes on which lay the future pages of the magazine, each month in a different stage of production.

Under the window I had plants in pots sitting on filing cabinets and behind me on the opposite wall a carved wooden shelf that I had accepted enthusiastically when no one else in the department wanted it. They said the shelf had once been in Baba’s kitchen. I wondered if I would ever get so blasé about these things. Although it was a bit heavy and ornate in a hippy-homemade kind of way, I placed a framed picture of Gurumayi on the shelf, along with a little brass bell and an incense holder. I wanted my office to feel like a temple. I vacuumed and dusted and burned incense every morning.

The Art Department occupied the two long intersecting corridors of the second floor of the central building of Sadhana Kutir, the third of the ashram’s three old Catskill hotel complexes, the one most removed from the hustle and bustle of the ashram’s public face. Sadhana Kutir – named after the Sanskrit words meaning "spiritual journey" and "meditation hut” and referred to most often as “S.K.” -- was the most neglected of the three complexes, the one that had seen the least renovation. S.K. was scrubbed clean, but still shabby, the Cinderella of the three sister complexes. Its scattered, motley collection of buildings was used mostly for staff offices, warehouses and workrooms, plus cheap dorms and family housing during the summer.

My office had once been a small hotel bedroom. It connected through a short narrow hallway to an identical office next door with two tiny rooms in between that had once been a shower stall and a toilet. Pat, my neighbor in the next office and my supervisor, had fixed up one of the tiny rooms with a plug-in kettle, a small fridge for milk, boxes of tea and an electric popcorn popper. I welcomed these cozy touches of comfort that had not been allowed at any office I had ever worked in.

I loved Pat. She was in her fifties with clouds of reddish-blond hair, big glasses and a soft, maternally plump body. She was usually laughing. When I went to her, nervous with a copyediting question I thought I should know the answer to, Pat surprised me with a casual shrug. “Beats me,” she'd say and start laughing. This was not what I was used to. This was not how Mr. Hudson had responded when I dared to ask him a question. This was not what Natvar had said when I dared to show uncertainty. I couldn't imagine Pat yelling at me. She was more likely to give me a hug and make me a cup of tea, or a strong coffee when there was a deadline.

All twenty or so members of the Art Department gathered at 8:30 every morning in Sonya’s office to chant and meditate together. Every department throughout the ashram began its day together like that. I usually volunteered to walk up and down our two Art Department corridors, ringing a small brass bell lightly, calling everyone in to puja.

Many were reluctant to put down their pens. They wanted to finish what they were doing. They were usually on deadline and it bugged them to have to stop and pray. “Do we have to do this?” Sheila complained one morning after our meditation. “After all, we’ve already meditated for an hour and chanted the Guru Gita before breakfast. That should be enough.” Sheila was a small intense woman with long black hair in her early forties. It was her job to coordinate the entire production of the magazine so she was really Pat’s boss, second only to Sonya. Sheila rarely smiled. She looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. I admired her in many ways -- she had a big job with a lot to keep track of -- but her complaint shocked me. Complain about chanting? This morning ritual was one of the things that distinguished my working day here from what I had left behind. Finally, I thought, for the first time in my life, I had a job I liked. If this wasn’t guru’s grace I didn’t know what was.

Sonya’s office, a few doors down from mine, was starkly different from every other office on the floor, reflecting not only her elegant taste but her status as department head. Its wall-to-wall carpeting was smooth and white. There were two cream-colored silk couches with curved legs and between them a glass-topped coffee table displaying bright, shiny copies of Darshan magazine. In one corner stood a narrow armless white silk chair. This was Gurumayi’s chair. Gurumayi had never sat in it, but it stood there, a symbol of her presence and our willingness to receive her. Beside Gurumayi's empty chair stood a small table holding a crystal glass with a pink linen napkin over it, a small unopened plastic bottle of Perrier – to be offered to the guru should she show up one day -- a framed photo of Baba and a candle on a round silver tray. At the foot of the chair was a long toy stuffed caterpillar in bright primary colors with dozens of sneakered feet. Gurumayi had given the department this as a gift years before I got there because it reminded her of us, she had said – many feet walking in the same direction.

Every morning we all left our shoes in a row along the wall outside Sonya’s door and stood before Gurumayi’s empty chair. Sonya invited one of the women – preferably someone who was wearing a skirt -- to “wave the tray” as the rest of us chanted. The chosen woman took the silver tray from Gurumayi’s side table, lit its candle, then stood in front of the chair waving the tray in three large, slow circles, a ritual known as “arati.” The flame on the tray – as we were often reminded – represented our own inner divinity. To wave it before the guru’s image was to worship the divine in the guru and in one’s own Self. For a big formal arati, done at times of high celebration in the Mandap or main meditation hall with a couple of dozen women dressed in saris, there were many precise prescriptions to follow. But for morning puja we kept it pretty simple.

After arati and then chanting special mantras to Saraswati, goddess of the arts -- mantras our department had been given special permission to use -- we sat, either on one of the couches or cross-legged on the white carpet, as someone read from one of Gurumayi’s or Baba’s books. Often we read from manuscripts that had not been published yet, confidential manuscripts to which we were privy because of our department’s central role in all publications.

For the first few weeks after my arrival we read from a manuscript that was still in design, a collection of Gurumayi’s poems with black-and-white drawings of her and Baba done by a devotee who lived in the ashram. The drawings were perfect replications of photographs and the poems were mostly rapturous descriptions of the mysterious relationship between disciple and guru. I looked at the poetry thoughtfully. Without question, it was considered the highest possible writing here in the ashram. I wondered if I would read it if I didn’t know it was written by the guru. Would I think it was good if I just came across it in a bookstore? I wasn’t sure, but I was sure that Gurumayi was in love with her guru, Baba Muktananda, the way he had been in love with his guru and I wanted that kind of incredible relationship. Writing didn’t seem nearly as important as this mystical bond.

One day Pat gave me a small framed drawing from the book, an outtake that would have been burned – images of the guru couldn’t just be thrown in the trash. If they weren’t going to be used they had to be burned. The drawing was of Gurumayi when she was still a girl with two long braids, sitting on the floor beside Baba who sat in a chair. I loved the image and placed it on my desk. I wanted to be that girl in the picture, utterly submissive and therefore open to grace.

After the reading we meditated for five minutes, one person watching a clock and rousing us by hitting a small gong lightly three times. Then the craziness of the day began.

Each word of the magazine was typeset by my sister Durga and her boyfriend Sean, then xeroxed so it could be proofed by two women who came in part-time from other departments, Jane and Doris – people whom I supposedly supervised and certainly cajoled. I thought for seva they’d put their best face on, but I often found Jane and Doris grumpy as I brought in yet more pages for them to look at. “Again?” their faces seemed to say, and I felt like it was a constant struggle to keep them in a decent mood.

We read the same articles over and over, starting with the original typed pages passed down from the editorial team, then the first typeset version followed by myriad generations of corrections, all the way down to – three months later -- the “blue-line,” the ink-smelling, blue-type version of the magazine the printer sent before he pushed the final button and the colorful, glossy magazine hit the presses. Over and over we hunted for the misspelled word, the badly aligned caption, the wrong size type. The guru’s magazine could not have any errors in it. It had to be perfect, all 180 pages confirming the greatness of the guru and the Siddha Yoga path. People around the world subscribed to Darshan and it was translated into several languages by dedicated devotees in other countries.

The editors -- whose job it was to conceive of each issue, decide on the articles and find writers to write them -- were all in India with Gurumayi when I first arrived in the South Fallsburg ashram. For over a year I communicated with them feverishly by email, fax and packages ferried back and forth by devotees making the trip between the South Fallsburg ashram and the ashram in Ganeshpuri, India.

Fresh on the job, unable to believe my good fortune that not only was I now on staff, living here full-time, even receiving a monthly stipend of $350, not only that but I was working on a magazine instead of in a law office, I had more than enough patience to send long emails to editors I had never met but whose approval I needed before a comma could be added or deleted, before a letter could be capitalized, before a Sanskirt transliteration could be updated. I spent hours each week, listing the changes we were suggesting, copying my letter onto a disk and taking it over on the shuttle bus to the manager’s office in Atma Nidhi for it to be approved and sent, then awaiting the editors’ detailed responses to each item.

And there was always other seva to do -- the music department needed people who could sing to lead the different chants scheduled throughout the day, the garden needed help planting trees or raking leaves, Accommodations needed help cleaning dorms. When I first arrived I said yes every time I was asked until gradually I learned that most people said no. Only naive newcomers said yes. For one thing, your supervisors always wanted you in your main department. They didn't want you going out and helping other departments. I didn't like the sense of war -- each department struggling to get a few more sevites, but after awhile I couldn't imagine things being any different. This was the guru's world, the way she liked it, I thought, not a place you felt you were supposed to change or improve. In the guru's world, I thought, my job was to accept. And that was something I was good at.

One day in the early summer Sonya invited me into her office and asked if I’d like to supervise a team of waiters for the upcoming Community Dinner. That was another of Sonya’s sevas – to liaison between the ashram and the local community who were usually angry that the ashram didn’t pay the taxes that the impoverished area badly needed. Sonya – so gentle-voiced and composed – was the perfect envoy. Once a year the ashram hosted a big dinner-dance and invited several hundred local people – this year it was going to be huge and, because Gurumayi was in India, it would be held in the Mandap.

The Mandap? Yes, the Mandap with its smooth marble floors, its high vaulted ceiling and vast plate-glass walls, the place where I had first met Gurumayi two years before, the place of enormous evening summer programs and Intensives. But this year, with the guru away, things were quieter, and we’d use it for the Community Dinner.

There were meetings in the weeks leading up to the dinner – detailed explanations of how everything would be run and organized. The serving of food had to be done quickly, on time with no mistakes, otherwise the schedule of the evening – with its speeches and dancing – would run amuck. Ashram cooks were doing all the cooking – fancy dishes we never saw in the dining room -- and the music would be provided by a bunch of well known professionals, all of whom were devotees. I held sub-meetings with my team of eighty waiters drawn from all over the ashram, going over precisely what had to happen and when people missed the meetings they called me in my office. Each time I answered their questions conscientiously, wanting each person to have as clear a picture as I did. “Can’t you just make a recording?” complained Sheila as she walked in on one of these conversations. "Where are those fixes you said would be ready?"

“A recording?” I thought. “Who’d listen to a boring recording? Aren’t I supposed to do my seva in the best possible way?” Her resentment again confused me. This world of seva was hard to figure out.

The dinner was spectacular – a long glittering buffet up front where normally there’d be lead chanters, musicians, swamis and speakers – and instead of hundreds of rapt devotees cross-legged on their white woolen asanas the vast space of the Mandap was filled with a sea of round tables set with linen, glasses and silver and waiters dashing through the crowds with trays held high.

At the end of the evening, after midnight, long after the last guest had departed, there were just a few of us left, folding up the legs of the tables and loading tubs of dirty dishes onto the truck headed back to the Atma Nidhi dishroom. It had been a long long day after weeks of preparation. Now was the time to snap, I thought. A teenage boy from Mexico who was in the ashram just for the summer started to drive his van away, leaving a table full of dirty dishes behind. I pounded on the side of the truck and he stopped. “You can’t leave,” I heard myself yell at him. “Look what you’ve left behind.” He apologized and loaded up the remaining dishes.

I had thought there might be some satisfaction in the yelling, yelling due to seva stress. But there wasn’t. I’d never done that before in the Manhattan ashram or up here in Fallsburg, but somehow it had begun to feel that if you’d lived in the ashram long enough and stayed up late enough, you’d earned the right to snap at others, as if it were a badge of some sort, evidence of how much seva you had logged.

Sean and Durga's office was just a couple of doors down from mine. I hated having to knock on their door to let them know what changes had to be made in the magazine's text. It wasn’t easy asking them to make revisions over and over in pursuit of perfection. To counteract their often bored, frustrated faces looking up when I appeared, I made apologies as if these corrections were my fault.

"It must be so great to have a sister in the ashram," people would say to me wistfully. "My family won't come near the guru, though of course they receive her blessings.” We knew that even if there was only one devotee in a family, that family received the guru’s grace even if they didn’t know it. I would nod and agree that it was great. I was proud that both of my sisters and my mother were so active in Siddha Yoga. I didn't say anything about how things didn't feel right around Durga. I was sure that if I just prayed enough, made myself more and more open to her, things would improve. It wasn’t something I could just leave alone. After all, we were sisters living in the guru’s house, a place where family ties were honored. This was a problem it was my duty to fix.

I had been at the ashram for almost a year when I was invited to give a talk in an informal Chanukah program. The ashram liked to celebrate holidays from other traditions, always finding a way to turn them around so they reflected a Siddha Yoga teaching. The Programming Department asked me to research and tell the Chanukah story. Never mind that I wasn’t Jewish. The program was to be held in the dining room, just before dinner.

Excited and honored, I spent an hour or two in the small ashram library over in the Main Building and began to write up the story of the small amount of oil that had burned miraculously for eight days. And then I got an idea. Why not write it as a monologue? I could take on the persona of one of the Macabee brothers, describe the battle over the temple, the miracle of the burning oil as if I had lived and seen all these things myself. It would be more like a small piece of theater, I hadn't seen anything presented like this in a Siddha Yoga program before. I was creating something brand new.

After getting the necessary approval, I rehearsed alone for days, memorizing my script and not telling any of my friends what exactly I was up to. On the day of the program I made sure Durga and Steve knew when I'd be on. "You'll be there, right?" I asked. "You've got to be there." I was nervous, but I wanted her to see what I had created.

"We have to get these pages to the studio today," Durga said doubtfully. "But we can always come back after dinner. Yes, of course, we'll be there."

I dressed up in a costume of sorts to give the impression of an ancient soldier, a shawl like a blanket over my shoulders, a tall wooden stick from the woods held in my hands like a staff. When the time came I stepped into a spotlight at the edge of the packed dining room, lit only with candles. Into a microphone, I told my story, speaking as a soldier who had witnessed the miracle first hand and then bringing it around to Siddha Yoga at the end, making some kind of allusion to the guru and the search for true light. “Guru,” after all, meant the one who brings you from darkness to light, so it was easy to draw a moral. I received a storm of applause and all during dinner friends and people I hardly knew came up to say how much they’d enjoyed it. I didn’t see Durga anywhere. No, I thought, she couldn’t have missed it.

"God, sorry we weren’t there," Durga said casually, later that evening. "We lost track of time."

In the ashram conflict was to be washed away through meditation and prayer. "Sweet" was one of our favorite words. Sweetness was paramount. Whatever this disturbing thing was that I felt coming at me from my sister, no one else seemed to feel it. I tucked it away. It was just something I had to work at. It was part of my spiritual journey, something the guru had placed in my life to test my resilience.

One afternoon Sonya gathered the Art Department and said that we were all to meet in a room over in Atma Nidhi. She didn’t say what for. Dutifully, aware of a heightened sense of mystery, we made our way over by car and shuttle bus and regrouped in a plain room that was not often used.

Awaiting us were two women I had never seen before, but whom everyone else seemed to know. One was middle-aged with short graying hair dressed in comfortable but executive clothes. The other was younger, dressed in a simple skirt and blouse, daintily ironed. The older woman smiled as we arrived and asked us to sit down. Most of us sat on the floor, a few took chairs. I sat next to Pat on the floor with Sean and Durga nearby.

“Hi,” the older woman began when she saw we were settled, “I’m Amba, and I’ve just come from Ganeshpuri. Gurumayi sent me here to meet with you, with all the staff here in Fallsburg. She wants to hear from you, to know how you are. Please feel free to speak up about anything that is on your mind and I will convey it back to her. Consider this a private moment with the guru.”

There was a short silence. Then Pankaj spoke up, the friendly guy in the studio who pasted up all the magazine pages and always greeted me with a smile and a joke. “I think people who have lived in the ashram for a long time should be able to get a single room,” he said. “I just asked for one and I was turned down.” Wow, I thought, asking for a single room. I could never imagine myself doing that.

“Thank you,” said Amba as the other woman scribbled something on a pad of paper. “That seems very reasonable to me. We’ll see what we can do. Anybody else?”

I knew what I wanted to say, but I waited. I did not dare, but as the silence stretched, I knew I had to. It was the only piece of truth burning in my mind. I raised my hand. “Yes?” said Amba, “please go ahead.”

“I feel very guilty,” I said. “A few years ago I left my sisters and my parents behind and I went away with a false guru.” My voice began to crack. I could feel the tears welling up. “I just feel so bad. I feel like I hurt my sisters and my mother so much and that I’ll never be able to make up for it.” By now I was crying completely, all control out the window.

Amba said something soothing and the meeting went on for another half hour with one or two other people bringing up concerns. Afterwards, I went to my room and sat on my bed. There was a knock at the door. It was Durga. She came in, sat beside me on the bed and put her arms around me. “I didn’t know,” she said. Somehow it seemed necessary to keep the tears in my eyes, to remain broken for this moment of closeness to continue.

Chapter Eleven ~ HANDMAIDEN

Like many exciting things in the ashram, it began with a surprise phone call in the middle of the morning from Personnel. “You’ve been approved to care for Bade Baba,” the woman said to me. I had learned by now that the word “approved” meant a lot in the ashram. It implied your name had been whispered in secret chambers, that perhaps Gurumayi herself had been told of you and had nodded her head.

“Bade Baba” was the affectionate, everyday name for Nityananda, the man who had been Baba Muktananda’s guru, in a tiny village called Ganeshpuri in the state of Maharashtra in India. Bade Baba had died in 1961, but I had seen grainy, black-and-white videos of him – a tall man with very dark skin, a round lively face, long skinny arms and legs and a big stomach. He was almost naked in most of the photographs I saw, wearing only a white loin cloth. I had read how mysterious Bade Baba had been, a man who rarely spoke to anyone, but had been much revered by the local people.

In all his books and talks, Baba Muktananda gave all the credit for his own accomplishments to this strange man, his guru, Bade Baba. Muktananda had built the temple in South Fallsburg to honor Bade Baba. The temple was built around a life-sized, bronze statue of Bade Baba, sitting cross-legged – huge and magisterial – set up on a broad pedestal of white marble and surrounded by a circle of four white pillars.

This statue of Bade Baba was said to be alive with consciousness. Through an ancient ceremony of offerings and mantras Baba Muktananda had years ago breathed consciousness into that statue. Bade Baba was present. He heard you. He saw you. He responded to you.

As you entered the sunny, silent, carpeted temple you stepped right into Bade Baba's gaze. Up there, dressed in silks and jewels, his eyes looked both right into you and far beyond you. He was the hub of the ashram, the one you went to with special prayers.

The temple, circular and not large, was beautiful inside, its walls made almost entirely of big plate glass windows that looked out onto lawns and landscaped gardens. In between these windows, spaced evenly around the circumference of the temple, were four small alcoves, each dedicated to a different Hindu god or goddess and decorated daily with fresh flowers. The carpet was a deep turquoise. Within Bade Baba’s circle of white pillars stood four tall brass oil lamps always burning small flames that had to be tended at least once an hour. A huge rose quartz crystal – taller than me and broader than the span of my arms -- rested on the carpet behind him.

Instead of her usual raised throne, Gurumayi had a simple pair of firm cushions on the floor at the front of the temple against one wall, facing Bade Baba, almost as if here, in his presence, she was a humble devotee like everyone else. And directly in front of Bade Baba, on a slim white marble pedestal, lay a pair of silver sandals, padukas, also decorated every day with fresh flowers. Padukas were sacred. They symbolized the guru's feet, considered the holiest part of the guru's physical form. It was said that a guru's divine power emanated most strongly from the feet. To touch the guru's padukas was to come in contact with the purest essence of the guru.

It was customary to enter the temple and bow one’s forehead to the padukas, then to stand and gaze into Bade Baba’s eyes – to make contact -- and from there to either take your seat on the carpet or walk around him several times as a form of prayer. Entering the temple was like stepping into a different universe. The pace of the day died away. Almost all sound was gone. It was just you and god.

Bade Baba was “fed” three times a day. Samples of food were driven over from the kitchen before each meal and offered to him on a silver tray. Afterwards, this blessed food was mixed back into the food on the serving line. In addition, Bade Baba was dressed every morning in glorious robes sewn for him in the Sewing Department. Many were of thick, colorful silk. In winter he wore woolen cloaks and matching caps. Sometimes he wore turbans, always jewelry, long thick ropes of amber, coral or pearls. To feed and to dress Bade Baba was considered a form of worship, and to worship the guru was to worship your own Self.

The woman on the phone told me that I had been approved to undress and bathe Bade Baba at night, late, after the temple had closed and everyone was in bed. It was a confidential seva, she said, one I was not to mention to anyone. It filled me with pride to have been chosen for such an intimate, high-standing position.

I shared my secret responsibilities with William, a tall, thin, blonde, bespectacled man. We alternated nights. And when I had my period William took over because a woman was not allowed near Bade Baba when she had her period. It was embarrassing to have to let William know when my period was, but of course I did it, seeing it as just a small hardship to offer up to the guru.

I arrived at the temple at 9:30 at night just after it had closed. In terms of the ashram day, which officially began at 3:30 in the morning, 9:30 at night was late. Almost everyone was in bed by then except those staying up late in their offices, buried in some seva project, and Security which maintained its watch twenty-four hours a day.

At 9:30 the regular lights of the temple were turned off, and instead the temple was bathed in soft blue light, as if it had suddenly become an underwater cave. I played the chant we had been instructed to play during this time, a tape of Baba Muktananda chanting to his guru.

A cute Spanish man with curls and very little English came too to collect the flowers that had been displayed all day in the temple, throw out the ones that were too old to use again and preserve the good ones in tidy rows spread out on trays, ready for someone who would come back at one or two in the morning to decorate the temple with them again. Govinda worked silently on his own, walking back and forth with trays of flowers from the different alcoves to the room at the back of the temple where the musical instruments were stored along with Bade Baba’s clothes for the week, some of his jewelry and other temple items.

I began by stepping up onto Bade Baba’s circle of marble, first unlinking a fine gold chain that lay across its entrance. When I stood beside Bade Baba his head was a good foot above me. I reminded myself that this was not a cold piece of bronze, but a form permeated with consciousness, somehow aware of my presence. Delicately I removed first Bade Baba’s heavy cloak -- long, broad, embroidered, lined -- a fine rich garment, worthy of him. Piece by piece, I carried his clothes back to the closet in the back room. I removed his hat – a blaze of red velvet one day, perhaps purple silk the next – and arranged his jewelry carefully in the drawers as I had been taught to do. All the while, Baba’s voice sang in the background and I felt like I was merely a shadow, moving through blue light.

When Bade Baba was undressed I took bowls of warm water and soft cloths and gently bathed him, wiping his head and face softly, his long arms, his strong thighs, his feet. Sometimes I washed his ears. If he was real, I reasoned, I should clean his ears. But on other nights he seemed too god-like to need something as mundane as an ear wash and I would refrain, afraid that to do so would not be showing sufficient respect.

When Bade Baba had been bathed, I brought out his night clothes -- long pieces of soft white muslin that had to be wrapped just so or they would slip off his shoulders. It took practice, leaning across his broad chest on tiptoe, adjusting the fabrics while he stared ahead, tolerating my care.

Everything of course had to be done perfectly. What could be more important than bathing Bade Baba? I was bathing the guru. I did my best not to feel proud, to remember my humility, but it did seem an incredible honor. All this took a good two hours. Afterwards, Govinda and I paused in the back room. The swami in charge of the temple would have left us a piece of prasad – a piece of chocolate or coconut that had been offered to Bade Baba that day.

After reverently munching our treat, knowing it was drenched in grace, we turned off the chanting tape and the soft blue lights, left the four oil lamps burning low in their circle around Bade Baba, bowed to his sandals one last time and locked the temple door behind us. We hung the key in its special hidden place and walked back on the paved curving path that led through the woods back to Atma Nidhi and our warm single beds. A string of light bulbs up in the trees dimly lit our way.

I wondered hopefully if Govinda might become my boyfriend, but we did not say much to each other on the late-night walk home. Words sounded too ordinary after being in the temple alone with Bade Baba. The stars were bright in the cold mountain air. It was almost midnight. And when we reached our rooms he always smiled, said good-night and walked away quickly.

Chapter Twelve ~ NO AIR

It was my mother’s idea. We could have Christmas together. My sister Durga and I could come down from the ashram and Agnes could fly in from Tucson where she was going to college, cleaning houses and living in the barrio.

We could stay at Lena’s house, the wealthy woman in Chappaqua – an affluent town in an affluent county -- for whom my mother kept house several days a week. My mother lived in a room in the home of an elderly couple in exchange for taking care of them. We couldn’t gather there. But Lena would be away at her second or third house in Hawaii and she told my mother it would be fine for us to stay at her Chappaqua place.

It was my first Christmas since moving into the South Fallsburg ashram. I’d been there almost a year. Gurumayi was away in India so there would be no huge ashram celebrations or holiday crowds. It would be a good time to slip away for a few days, be with my mother and sisters -- my closest friends since I’d gotten back from Europe a couple of years before.

Just before I left I got a phone call inviting me to come to the Personnel Office the next day between 2 and 3 o’clock. Personnel was in a small office over in Atma Nidhi, the central complex which held most of the staff housing and offices, plus the main dining room and the main kitchen. Atma Nidhi had its own Amrit Café, meditation hall, and bookstore and a big front desk for checking in when you arrived.

The Personnel office was tucked away on an otherwise empty and unused corridor where you’d never find it unless you knew where to look. Five people were already seated outside in a row against the wall, waiting. I took a seat. We didn’t speak to one another, just waited patiently. The line moved pretty quickly as one by one we were invited to enter as the person ahead of us emerged.

When it was my turn, I stepped inside the room that, like all the other offices, had once been a hotel room, and sat down at an office desk opposite Gopi, a woman a few years older than me, dressed in a trim white suit. She smiled warmly. “Gurumayi wants all of her staff people to be warm this winter,” she said. “This is a gift from her for you to buy warm clothes.” She handed me a small white envelope.

“Thank you!” I gushed, amazed that Gurumayi – way over in India -- would think of me, of us. I picked up the envelope – not quite sure what it could contain -- as if Gurumayi had just handed it to me herself. It felt like she had. The envelope almost glowed. I bowed my head and touched the envelope lightly to my forehead with a wordless prayer of gratitude.

“Remember,” advised Gopi gently, “this is a private matter between you and Gurumayi, not to be spoken of to anyone.” I tucked the envelope discreetly into the book I was carrying and made a bee line for my room, crossing to the other side of the Atma Nidhi complex of scattered buildings.

Finding my room empty of roommates, I sat on the edge of my bed and opened the small white envelope. Three $100 bills lay inside, lined up tidily, all the heads facing in the same direction. $300! From the guru! I was overwhelmed. No one had ever given me that much money before. It was too much. Here I was, trying to serve the guru, and she was giving me $100 bills. How did I get so lucky?

The thing was I needed the money badly. Not for clothes – though I needed it for clothes too. But there was a much more urgent problem.

Marianna, a good friend from Manhattan, had left recently to spend the Christmas month in India with Gurumayi. “Here,” she had said before she left, “why don’t you take my car for the month?” and I had accepted gladly. To have a car in the South Fallsburg ashram was a delicious luxury. But someone had dented the car in a local parking lot and I wanted to fix it, felt I had to. I took the car to the local body shop and paid for it with Gurumayi’s Christmas present.

I’d be returning the car to Marianna in a couple of weeks and I’d had an idea. I thought I’d make a little puja for the dashboard as a gift.

The word “puja” in Sanskrit means “worship.” We used the word “puja” for a lot of things. We used it to refer to the little collection of guru pictures that each ashramite had on top of his or her bureau. We used the word “puja” to refer to the small altar that each office created around which to hold its morning prayers and chants, a ceremony that was also referred to as “puja.” In cars pujas were reduced to a laminated photo stuck to the dashboard. All ashram vehicles – shuttle buses, mini-vans, passenger cars and trucks -- had at least one laminated photo of the guru – Gurumayi, Baba or Bade Baba -- taped to their dashboards. I thought I’d make something a little fancier for Marianna’s car.

I had this tiny wooden vase. Somehow it had come my way. And I had a pretty piece of dark red silk left over from making a cover for my chanting book. I could cover a piece of styrofoam with the silk, place a small framed photo of Gurumayi on it and, beside the photo, the little vase holding some miniature dried flowers. I’d stick everything down and then attach the miniature tableau to the shelf of the dashboard. I thought my friend would like it. It was the kind of thing – pretty and devotional – that devotee women liked.

I thought I’d make my gift while down in Lena’s house. I didn’t have time, living in the ashram, sharing a room with two people, getting up at 3 in the morning to meditate and chant, working all day at the magazine, fitting in an extra seva like a shift in the dishroom or the temple, then maybe a hatha yoga class and a few minutes of spiritual reading before bed – all necessary daily practices we were told – and getting to bed by 9 so I could start all over again the next day.

It would be fun to go down to Lena’s house, listen to the new Van Morrison album, make this little puja for Marianna, hang out.

Lena’s house did not look lived in. It was tidy and well appointed, like something in a Martha Stewart magazine. Not my taste, but I didn’t care. It was a place to be and my mother had scored it.

It was the first morning. I was downstairs in a room that was supposed to be casual. The couch was leather, the wall paper something to do with baseball. I was sitting on the floor with the piece of dark red silk and glue and Styrofoam. I had the music going. Agnes was sitting with me, looking over the cover of the tape, reading me the liner notes. This felt so great, relaxed, fun.

Durga entered. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said. Her face was angry. “I don’t know how you can stand it here. I want to go back.”

I turned the music off. I felt guilty as if it were my fault Durga felt so bad. What hadn’t I noticed about this place that she had? Sure, it was kind of ugly in its way, but so what? Maybe I shouldn’t have played rock & roll. Maybe for Durga that was just too coarse after having lived a few years in the ashram. Maybe I should have known better. My mother came in from the kitchen. Now Durga was crying. “I don’t know, I just hate it here,” she said and stormed upstairs, slamming the door to her room.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt awkward as if anything I might say would only reveal further what an insensitive clod I was. I watched as Agnes went upstairs quietly, knocked on the door and was let in. I couldn’t have done that. I didn’t dare go near Durga, but Agnes seemed able to handle it easily.

“Well, we’ll just have to drive her back,” my mother said matter-of-factly. “It’s too bad,” she added. “I thought it would be nice to all be here.”

I was quiet. Agnes and Durga emerged, Agnes’s arm around Durga’s shoulders. She was talking earnestly about a book of daily 12-step meditations that she really liked. Agnes was full-on into AA and Durga had been going to an Al-Anon meeting near the ashram. Because they liked these meetings so much I had tried a few and bought a couple of books, but nothing had really taken with me. And besides, I thought, with Siddha Yoga wasn’t anything else superfluous?

Seeing Agnes and Durga so close together made me feel again like I didn’t know anything. “I must be like my father,” I thought, “utterly cut off from people, incapable of connecting.” I felt no hope at all, shut out forever from something Agnes and Durga shared. Even my mother – who also was going to Al-Anon meetings – seemed part of their alliance. She, at least, knew what to do. We had to take care of Durga and get her back to South Fallsburg right away.

My brain was a scramble of emotion as the four of us sat in the kitchen, all packed up now, ready to leave, the visit aborted. I couldn’t sort out my thoughts. All of them seemed wrong. I took refuge in tears and hopelessness. “You guys seem to have something I don’t have,” I said. “I feel like I turned into Dad, like I have no warmth, no understanding of how people are and can be together.” It seemed like my sisters knew how to be close. I felt like I could never be close to anybody, like my father had never been close to anybody.

My sisters looked at my sympathetically. Agnes patted me on the back. I’d better join 12-step, I thought. Maybe then I’d open up. In the meantime, I was a cripple.

We began the drive north and stopped in a diner for a late lunch. As we sat in a corner booth by a window, glancing over the big plastic menus, searching for vegetarian possibilities, my mind was a storm. I felt myself closing down into darkness, awash in things I could not define. Bread, butter and salads started arriving. My sisters and mother were talking and laughing and making jokes. I tried to keep up with them, but while they seemd whole, I was a mass of jagged pieces.

Suddenly I was fighting for air. My eyes froze into a stare. I heard my ragged inhalation, rasping against the back of my throat like a gear trying to turn without oil as I fought to take in a breath. “She’s choking!” my mother said with alarm. A man from the next table jumped up, wrapped his arms around me and squeezed. Something moved and the air came in. I could breathe. I could breathe.

Chapter Thirteen ~ FACE TO FACE

I had been living in the South Fallsburg ashram for a year and a half, my second summer was about to begin. I had come to love the familiar rhythm of the shuttle bus circuit, the hatha yoga classes with just staff before dinner, the way a notice was moved from the door of one dorm room to another, letting you know it was your dorm’s turn to vacuum the corridor.

I showed up for almost every ashram-wide weekend seva project – whenever the Art Department would release me -- planting trees in the rain and stopping for tea and cookies brought by someone in a truck from the kitchen, or joining massive cleaning teams for Accommodations. I loved the ritual of walking quietly up to the Finance Department on the appointed day to receive my monthly stipend -- an envelope with $350 in cash inside it. I loved lining up for lunch along the worn carpet of an unrenovated lobby and picking up my mail first from trays set out for us in the lobby.

It seemed like the ashram was always improving itself. Shelters at the shuttle bus stops going up, buildings for the children to play in, a room with a chanting tape playing twenty-four hours a day so you could go and chant any time you wanted. Even if I never had time for it, it was nice to know it was there. Everything was always getting bigger and better, it seemed, trying to meet more and more needs. One day, I imagined, there will be a whole village here with its own bank, its own post office and schools, everything drenched in the guru’s grace.

I felt at home. The faces I saw over and over at the early morning Guru Gita chant, at meals, on the shuttle buses became my friends – even the ones I never spoke to. I felt great affection for the sweet familiarity of their faces and knew that even if we never or rarely spoke to each other we were in communion. They were there for me and I was there for them. I had a world to live in.

This second ashram summer would be different though. Gurumayi was coming back after spending more than a year in India and for the first time I would be living in the ashram while the guru was in residence. Maybe I would run into her on the way to the Guru Gita, I thought. Maybe I would see her as I climbed up onto the shuttle bus to go to my seva. Maybe she would walk through the dining room, right by my table, during lunch. I couldn’t wait. Everyone said there was nothing like being in the ashram when the guru was living there too. And I had read and heard so many stories of people’s encounters with Gurumayi – coming across her in the garden, in a corridor or a stairwell. In people’s stories these moments always became miraculous, the guru maybe murmuring one word to them as she passed that changed their life forever.

Now that Gurumayi would be here, maybe I would get a few good guru stories of my own, something miraculous, something dramatic, something that I could point to as a turning point, solid proof that this spiritual endeavor was for real. Plus, a few good guru stories meant you'd been around for awhile. I wondered what it would be like if Gurumayi knew my name -- even though I knew that wasn’t important. That wasn't why I was here. I knew that on the most important level the guru knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. She could see the love in my heart even when she was on the other side of the earth. Still, it would be wonderful to have her notice me now that we were going to live in the same ashram, ask my name, maybe even like me the way she seemed to like some of the special people. But that probably took years.

In late spring, as the summer season loomed with its anticipated crowds of visitors, the whole ashram began to prepare for Gurumayi’s arrival with frenzy. We were divided up into teams. As part of the Art Department, I went one sunny morning to paint the asphalt of the helicopter pad in case Gurumayi returned by helicopter. With big paintbrushes and bright colors we covered the smooth black asphalt surface with huge red hearts and flowers so that when she looked out the window of her helicopter on her way down to earth she would know how much we loved her. A curtain of shiny silver fabric cut in strips was hung across the main gate, choirs were practicing and baskets of flowers were being planned to line the path from the helicopter pad down to the gate.

One afternoon, the call came. Each department was telephoned. Gurumayi was on her way! By helicopter! We were all to gather at the Main Building to welcome her. Everyone in the Art Department stopped what they were doing immediately and ran down to the parking lot to hitch rides with those who had cars, or wait impatiently for the shuttle to make its steady round.

Minutes later, I stood in the densely packed crowd inside the gate through which Gurumayi would step. I watched her helicopter circle overhead as all of us looked upwards, waving, some people jumping up and down. For a moment the helicopter hung over the temple and I watched as it dropped a white garland of flowers onto the pointed copper roof. Then the helicopter veered back to the small hill above where we stood, to the hearts and flowers we had painted like children. I saw people in Security at the edges of the crowd talking quickly into walkie-talkies, their faces concerned, disconnected from the scene of celebration in which they stood, their words impossible to hear because of the loud chanting that had begun. We sang a sweet melody of Sanskrit syllables, over and over, in unison.

I stood, chanting and trying to see over the heads in front of me, as Gurumayi appeared, stepping through the bright silver curtain that hung across the ashram’s arched entrance on which Baba had years ago inscribed the words, “See God In Each Other.” It was as though she did not see us. She had already slipped off her shoes and I watched her sink to her knees and touch her forehead to the pavement of the driveway. It seemed like all she cared about was being back on holy ground, the ashram, her home and ours. As she stood, two children marched forward with a long garland that they struggled to lift up onto Gurumayi’s shoulders. She laughed, wrapped her arms around them and accepted the garland in her hands. She walked slowly towards the temple, still carrying the garland, people standing back to let her pass. From where I stood, I couldn’t see into the temple, but someone told me at dinner how Gurumayi had placed her garland on Bade Baba’s feet. How sweet and humble, I thought.

I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. The next morning she was not at the Guru Gita. I did not see her for days. It didn’t seem like anyone did. The only sign that Gurumayi was back was the triangular orange flag that had been raised the day of her arrival, the traditional flag that always flew when the guru was in residence.

Life was exactly as it had been except that there were new faces in the dining room, people who had just spent a year and a half in India with Gurumayi, people who were strangers to me but whom everyone else seemed to know and be glad to see again. The Darshan magazine editors returned with the India crowd. I followed Pat's lead, greeting them like honored members of the upper class. It seemed appropriate that they move into offices on the floor above us.

And then, a week or two later, we were told that Gurumayi would be meeting with each department privately, one by one, now, before the summertime crowds descended and there would not be time for anything.

Everyone in the Art Department was incredibly excited the morning of our scheduled meeting with Gurumayi. I was excited too. I had never sat in a small group with Gurumayi in a regular-sized room. This was one of the privileges of being on staff. What would she say? Would she ask me questions, want to get to know me? Everyone was saying with delight how this would be an “informal” darshan, and how these were by far the best kind.

We gathered in the lobby of the Main Building at the prescribed hour, dressed in our best clothes. We had put our money together to buy Gurumayi a gift – a huge basket of flowering plants for the gardens. We had been told that she liked gifts that were useful.

A couple of young officious women were moving back and forth between the lobby and the Namaste Room where we knew Gurumayi was sitting, receiving guests. I had passed the Namaste Room many times from the outside. It was at the front of the Main Building and looked out over the main entrance, but its large window was darkened and difficult to see through from the outside. I was curious. The Namaste Room was Gurumayi territory, a place I had never been.

I sat in the lobby with the other members of my department, awaiting our turn. The secretaries in charge of the morning's darshans carried clipboards and small frowns of concern. They were dressed perfectly. Shorter skirts were beginning to replace long full skirts in the ashram that summer, at least among the people who were around Gurumayi a lot. These secretaries moved with steps a little shortened by the unfamiliar constriction of a tight skirt. They made up for the shortened stride by scissoring that much more quickly in their stocking feet. A group filed out from the Namaste Room with shining faces. A few minutes later the secretaries ushered us in, now with welcoming smiles as if theirs was the easiest, most carefree life imaginable.

Gurumayi’s assistants were called darshan secretaries. It was a seva that came with a mantle of secrecy and envy. A secretary was female, usually young and beautiful, but not always. Sometimes young girls became secretaries right away, upon first appearing in the ashram world. Sometimes people were promoted to darshan secretary. It was all very mysterious, part of Gurumayi’s private world.

The sunny room, carpeted in beige, was not large or much furnished. Gurumayi sat cross-legged on a chair raised on a low carpeted platform and flanked by the usual two side tables with a framed picture of Baba on one side, and of Bade Baba on the other, each decorated with a small fresh bouquet. We filed in, about twenty of us, and sat on the floor around Gurumayi’s feet, gazing up with polite, expectant smiles. I felt a little awkward and shy. I wasn’t sure where to look. Carefully, Sonya, the head of our department, placed the basket of plants next to Gurumayi and said that it was from all of us. “Very pretty,” murmured Gurumayi and smiled. We all smiled back.

There were a few moments of silence. Gurumayi looked relaxed, gazing out the window. I followed her gaze. The window was perfectly clear from this side. I could see the beautiful rangoli that had been made that morning – an elaborate design made with many shades of brightly colored sand. by a team of people every day before dawn. Rangolis were said to bring good fortune. Every morning before dawn the rangoli makers hosed away the creation from the day before and made a brand new design on the pavement in front of the lobby – huge scenes on special celebration days, smaller ones – still bright and intricate – on regular days. From where I sat I could also see the back of the big bronze statue of Shiva surrounded by the array of flowers the garden department had planted. Beyond Shiva stood the big arched entrance through which Gurumayi had stepped a couple of weeks ago when she’d returned from India. Gurumayi finally turned her head and surveyed us with her deep brown eyes. She was utterly composed, the soft red silk of her habit draped her in perfect folds, a small gold pin fastened at her neck, everything simple yet unquestionably elegant.

"Big crowd," she commented, her voice deep and relaxed with the familiar soft accent. A muted ripple of laughter went through our group. Gurumayi nodded at the secretary who sat on the floor directly to her right and looked again out the window. The secretary looked out at us with a bright smile. “Gurumayi would like each of you, one by one, to say your name and what your seva is. Sonya? Since you’re the department head, perhaps you could begin?"

Sonya – tall, elegant and maturely pretty, every prematurely-gray hair in place -- was sitting demurely with her legs tucked to the side, under her narrow skirt, a Pashmina shawl spread across her knees to ensure modesty. The new ashram fashion made it difficult to sit on the floor, impossible to sit cross-legged. Meditation shawls spread across knees were becoming a common sight. "My name is Sonya Hamilton,” she said with a smile, “and I am the head of the Art Department."

I was surprised. I knew that Gurumayi knew almost everyone here. Most of the group had been in the ashram for years, some of them since Baba’s time, since before Gurumayi was even the guru. Still, even those people repeated their first and last names obediently as if they were here for the first time and said whether they were an editor or a designer or a proofreader. Pat had told me that Gurumayi had given Sonya the diamond and sapphire ring she wore every day. So how could Gurumayi not know Sonya’s name, I wondered. They must be so close. Why this odd formality?

"Thank you," Gurumayi said when the last of us had spoken. "The Art Department does great work. The Art Department is a wonderful place to do sadhana, spiritual work, because the Art Department is like a furnace!" Gurumayi began to laugh now, leaning forward in her chair. We began to laugh too, as if we were all insiders, members of the Art Department, talking shop. Straightening up, Gurumayi continued, her face again more serious. "In the Art Department there is no room for big egos. How will the magazine get done on time if there are egos? It would be impossible. And yet, you bring it out every month, so I know you are doing Baba's work." We softened and sank deep into her words as if she were stroking our heads. "In the ashram, no one is indispensable. No one. The ashram does not need any one person no matter how important they think they are. The ashram exists because Baba wants it to exist. The work gets done because Baba wants it to get done. Don't think that the ashram needs your seva. Do not neglect your meditation because you think you are so important the world will end if you do not get your work done. The summer will be big. Remember who you are and why you are here."

I listened as if Gurumayi's every word contained the possible answer to everything. I had often wondered about that old push-pull conflict between doing seva and the other practices of chanting and meditation. Sometimes it felt like you had to choose one over the other. How did you choose between things that were all said to be crucial?

Some people in the ashram never got up for the Guru Gita because they stayed up so late in their offices. And there were people in the Art Department who were always leaving the office early or coming in late because they insisted they had to meditate or get to a chant. I didn’t like either of these extremes. I didn’t want to become someone who thought their seva was always more important than chanting or meditating. At the same time, there was something completely annoying about inflexible meditators, especially when you were killing yourself to meet a deadline.

Sometimes the guru emphasized meditation. Sometimes chanting. Sometimes seva. It was hard to know what the right thing to do was.

Gurumayi gestured to a couple of secretaries who were kneeling at the edge of our group and within seconds they had jumped up and brought in a large basket. “Each person should take a stuffie from the basket,” said Gurumayi, “as prasad.” I knew Gurumayi liked to give stuffed toy animals. She called them "stuffies." I had seen them on people's pillows. Now I would have one. As the basket began to circulate, I hoped I'd get a cute one, but I was determined not to peek, not to choose my own gift. I would put my hand in blindly and receive only what the guru wanted me to receive.

The basket came my way. I stuck my hand in and let it close around something soft. I pulled it out and looked. It was an ugly white toy dog sticking its red tongue out at me. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t cute at all. But it was what she had given me. I would learn to like it.

“Well,” Gurumayi said finally, placing her bare feet on the carpet and standing up, “it’s time for lunch.” People laughed because Gurumayi had mentioned lunch. We knew she was referring to our lunch, not hers. She hardly ate. She was too enlightened for that. That’s what I’d heard. I imagined her somewhere in her private quarters, delicately chewing a few lettuce leaves. “Thank you, Gurumayi,” a number of people chorused while others knelt and touched their foreheads to the carpet. Gurumayi nodded and turned, disappearing behind a door.

As we stood, I kept a smile on my face that matched everyone else’s though in my mind I felt like not enough had happened. I mean, Gurumayi had said some wonderful things and I would write down everything I could remember as soon as this was over, but it had not been like I had hoped. I had thought she would really try to get to know us. But even the people who had sat with her like this many times before had seemed nervous. “Wasn’t that incredible?” said Pat, my supervisor with the clouds of curls as we sat out in the lobby again, putting our shoes back on. "Yeah!" I agreed. Maybe I had missed something. My disappointment did not belong here.

Chapter Fourteen -- CRISIS

We zoomed through the summer. I got used to waiting half an hour in long lines for lunch, rushing to evening programs and then sometimes back to the office late at night to meet a deadline. For two months the crowds were thick, foreign languages loudly filled the dining hall, children played on the swings and ran through the lobbies, chased by mothers trying to slow them down. I looked forward to everyone going home, to everything returning to normal.

Things quietened down after Labor Day. The crowds departed, leaving behind the familiar faces that had become dear to me. This was how I preferred it, though I knew I wasn’t supposed to have preferences. I was here to serve. Still, I liked my life in the ashram better during the quiet times when it was just staff. It was as though we all spoke the same language, moved at the same rhythm. People who visited from the outside were different. Even though they loved the guru, they didn't share a room with two people, didn't ride shuttle buses and have dish shifts. An invisible curtain seemed to hang between us no matter how friendly one side was with the other.

It was around this time in the early fall when things had gotten quieter that I got a call in my office from Ajit, the man who had asked all the difficult questions so harshly during the Seva Course a couple of summers ago. Ajit was not someone who would normally call me or even say hello if he passed me in a corridor. He was a VIP, someone who had lived in the ashram since Baba’s time. I’d heard Gurumayi tease him in many programs and even if a thousand people were watching Ajit could be counted on to come up with a witty response. He’d even written a book about how he had gotten into Siddha Yoga years ago. It was different from the other Siddha Yoga books, more conversational, more like a normal book. If someone in your family or a friend wanted to know more about what you were doing in Siddha Yoga, Ajit's book was the one recommended to give them. He made Siddha Yoga sound palatable, something even New Yorkers might do. But Ajit wasn’t known for being friendly himself. He usually walked around with a sour expression, if he was seen at all.

But there he was on the phone that afternoon, asking to meet with me. “Can you come down to the lobby?” he asked in his familiar gravelly voice. “You don’t have to mention to anyone in your office that I’m down here.” I was thrilled that Ajit wanted to see me – what could it be about? I slipped down the stairs. Ajit was sitting in a far corner of the empty lobby. He stood to shake my hand. He always dressed a little preppy. His sandy hair was short and he wore large glasses. He wasn't tall. He looked like a college professor.

“Your name has been coming up,” he said as we sat down side by side. “Gina says you’ve been doing a good job up there at the magazine.” Gina was Ajit's wife and the editor-in-chief of Darshan magazine. Although I met almost every day with the other editors, I rarely even saw Gina. She operated at a different level. I didn't know Gina even knew my name. “The ashram needs help over in the Scriptural Research department,” Ajit went on, “and I have been asked to find someone. We need a department head over there, fast. My wife thought maybe you’d be good.”

I was flattered and excited. I loved the idea of a new seva. I was getting a little tired of wrangling with copyeditors over split infinitives. Maybe the guru was giving me a chance to move on. “Why don’t you go over to Scriptural Research tonight," Ajit was saying. "You can meet with Henry who’s been heading up the department, get him to show you around and see if you think it's a good fit. It's a great seva. You're steeped in the scriptures all day. Anyone would love it." Ajit stood up as if we were done. "Listen," he added, "nothing is certain so there’s no reason to mention this to anyone.”

That evening I walked over to the Main Building, the most public area of the ashram. This was where the beautiful gardens were, the huge meditation hall, Bade Baba’s temple, the Mandap where I had first met Gurumayi and, most special of all, though never seen from the inside, Gurumayi’s private wing – "the house.” Not many offices were in the Main Building, only special ones, and Scriptural Research was one of them. If I were to move here my office would be next to the offices of people like the swamis and Gurumayi's secretaries.

I didn’t really feel like I belonged in the Main Building, not like I did in Sadhana Kutir or Atma Nidhi. The Main Building was for people who traveled with Gurumayi, not for those of us who stayed behind through the long winters, year after year, doing our seva, getting up every morning to meditate, day in and day out. I didn't feel I had the expertise to move in Main Building circles, but perhaps I was being invited. I would do my best.

I knocked on the unmarked door that stood in a row of unmarked doors on a long corridor that had once been a row of hotel rooms. The door swung open immediately. "Welcome!" said a man, “I’m Henry!” His smile was huge and he gave me a hug. "Come on in!" He had blue eyes in a narrow face, framed with a beard. His hair was tied back in a gray pony tail. Henry sat me down at a table in a small library-like room, lined with books. “That’s great you’ll be taking over,” he said. “I love it here, but you know how it is when you work for the guru – you have to be ready to change all the time. She never lets you get comfortable." His voice had a nice Brooklyn sound.

“Oh, it’s not definite yet,” I said quickly. “Ajit just thought I should come and see.”

"Well," laughed Henry, "I'm out of here on Friday, so if it's not you I don't know who it's going to be. Scriptural Research can't just be left empty. Listen, what's not to like? You get calls from the swamis all the time, sometimes even from Gurumayi’s house. Whenever someone needs a scripture when they're giving a talk or teaching a course, they call you. You have the ashram library just down the hall, and I've started a data base for all the Siddha Yoga scriptures. Have you read them much? The Upanishads? The Bhagavad Gita?”

“Mostly just Baba’s and Gurumayi’s books,” I said, wondering if I was in over my head.

“Well, that’s a good start. You’ll get into it. It’s great reading. I used to teach literature at Columbia. This beats all of that. Why don’t you come by every evening this week for a few hours and I’ll show you the ropes?”

Suddenly I felt like I was carrying a huge burden. Things were moving too fast, going from a casual visit to a new job in minutes. I told Henry I'd give him a call the next day and began the walk back to Atma Nidhi along the comfortingly familiar path through the darkened woods.

I imagined being alone in that Scriptural Research office, having to provide information for important people I didn’t normally speak to. I wasn’t sure I could do it. But then, of course, I reminded myself, you weren’t supposed to think you were the one doing your seva. You were always supposed to remember that it was only the guru’s grace that accomplished anything. My job was just to be the willing channel. So maybe I should just trust that things would work out and not be so scared.

“You can do it,” Ajit assured me gruffly when we met the next day, again in the lobby downstairs from my office at the magazine. “Do you want it or not? Henry is already packing. I need to know now.” I felt as if the walls were closing in on me. The ashram needed me. I must not be afraid of grace.

"Okay," I said.

“Good,” Ajit answered, standing up. “Why don’t you start spending afternoons in Scriptural Research with Henry while he's still there, and in a week or so you can just move on over and be there full-time.”

“But what about the magazine?” I asked. As always, we were right in the middle of a deadline. “Who’s going to take over for me?”

“Well, that’s Jackson’s problem, not yours or mine,” Ajit answered. “Frankly, this would be a good time for you to split. While Jackson is away.” Jackson was the new head of the Art Department and he was away visiting printers. Sonya had been moved on to other things. I nodded as Ajit stood and said he had a meeting to get to. I walked back upstairs to my office. This all had to be the guru's will, right?

But I didn't feel good. Ajit had gotten me this glamorous new seva, but he wasn’t going to do anything about my current one. I was supposed to walk out of my office and take up residence in another one. I was supposed to walk out on my department, disappear on Pat and everyone else I'd been working with for almost two years. Let them deal with the deadlines. They’d be hurt and, worse, they’d be furious. They’d hate me for a long time. I had thought that as long as you did what the guru wanted you'd be protected. But I didn't feel protected.

I closed my door. My fingers were shaking as I dialed Ajit’s number. “I don’t think I should do it,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I think I need to stay where I am.”

“My god,” I heard Ajit’s voice reverberate on the other end, livid. “I offer you a plum and -- well, thanks for wasting my time.” He threw down the phone with a crash.

I walked into Pat’s office. I told her about Ajit’s offer and how I’d turned it down. I was crying now. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said, jumping up to boil water for tea. “They know they’re not supposed to just take people from other offices without asking. I'm going to call the Seva Center right now. They'll be pissed as hell.”

Two days later Jackson returned and called me into his office. He sat behind his large desk, looking like an accountant who liked jogging. I sat across from him, my nerves still raw. Jackson would comfort me, I thought, maybe thank me for staying with the Art Department instead of leaving. “I heard that you led Ajit on,” Jackson said solemnly. “That’s what George told me.” George was Gurumayi’s right-hand person. He was at her side almost all the time and in charge of the ashram’s vast landscaping and remodeling projects. I couldn’t believe George, the crown prince of the ashram, even knew I existed.

“That’s not true!” I was horrified and tongue-tied by the injustice. Jackson was not moved by my sputtered attempts to tell my story. George – Gurumayi's shadow -- had reported that I had behaved badly. It must be so. Who would believe me over him?

I was shaken and frightened as if suddenly the ashram were not a benevolent cocoon, but a minefield. I made an appointment to speak with someone in Personnel. I didn't know who else to go to. Prema had always seemed like a sweet woman, plain and simple, several years older than me. Maybe she would listen and pass on my story. I sat at her desk, telling her what had happened. After twenty minutes she said gently, "That sounds terrible, Marta. But you know, I'm just a secretary in this office. There's nothing I can do. I think you should just pray to Gurumayi. Or go to the temple." I was furious. Why hadn’t she said that when I sat down?

Maybe I should just pray about it, but I couldn't let it go, couldn't let Jackson continue to pass me every day in the corridor outside my office, looking past me as if I were a criminal. I made an appointment the next day to speak to Shama, Prema's boss in Personnel, someone I thought for sure other people would listen to. Shama's hair clung to her head in tight black curls. She wore glasses and wasn't glamorous, but being the head of Personnel gave her a lot of authority. "Sit down," she smiled as I entered her office. "Tell me what happened." But just as I began to speak Shama's pager went off. "I've got to go," she said, jumping to her feet. Gurumayi must want to see her, I thought as I watched Shama grab a briefcase and pull on her coat in one movement. She was already halfway through the door before she remembered me. “It sounds like you led Ajit on,” she said, repeating the same phrase Jackson had used. It must be an epidemic. I sat in her office, wondering how I was going to get anyone to listen to me.

That afternoon the staff gathered for our regular monthly meeting, all five or six hundred of us, in the meditation hall. Usually staff meetings focused on practical things like asking people to tape plastic over their windows to save on the ashram's heating bills. But this time Gurumayi surprised us by walking in as we were chanting the opening mantras. She took her seat at the front of the hall and then she spoke into the microphone that someone quickly brought. “You know,” she said, “you should never take a person from one department into another without going through the Seva Center. We call that stealing.” I was stunned. She had to be talking about me. But how had she known? Maybe now Jackson would apologize, or even Ajit.

The next afternoon Gina, Ajit’s wife, called and asked me to meet her in the corridor outside her office upstairs, down at the end where it was empty and no one was around. She was wearing dark glasses and I could not see her eyes. “You know,” she said without smiling, “Ajit and I did nothing wrong in inviting you to take over Scriptural Research. We didn’t do anything wrong.” I just looked at her. If I said anything she’d launch into argument. I knew she wanted to beat me down with argument so I just looked at her.

And in the evening Sam gave me a ride from Sadhana Kutir back to Atma Nidhi for dinner. Sam was one of the editors on Gina's team upstairs. I liked him a lot. He was warm and friendly and could be counted on to make everyone laugh. I never minded knocking on his door and asking if we could go ahead and capitalize or italicize something in an article he'd written. With his round glasses and short stature, Sam looked a little like a gnome, a little like a scholar. “I heard what happened,” Sam said as we drew into the Atma Nidhi parking lot. “I was worried about you. You had to deal with the heavies.”

I didn’t want to stay in the Art Department. It didn’t feel like a friendly place anymore. The weather had turned cold and people were getting sick. Sickness often passed in great waves through the ashram, dozens of people getting sick at the same time with flu and colds. This time pneumonia was making the rounds.

When I felt my throat getting scratchy, I didn't think much of it. Then the headache. Still, I kept going. That's what people did. Sickness was rarely looked on as a good reason to stop. Hardcore sevites didn't let superficial things like sickness get in their way. I wanted to be tough like them.

When it got worse I went to the local doctor who diagnosed pneumonia. I was happy. I was finally really sick, sick enough not to go into the office. And so began my weeks and weeks of recovery, staying in my room day after day.

It felt nice at first, lying on my bed, listening to the radio in the stillness of the morning, everyone gone to their seva. After a couple of weeks I felt guilty, watching my roommates rushing out. I was in the ashram to do seva not lie in my room, but I couldn't get better. Sometimes people offered to bring me a tray from the dining room. It was the traditional thing to do for a sick person, but as often as possible I went to the dining room myself, sitting alone in the Silent Section. Trays brought from the dining room were sheathed in plastic wrap and I knew it was a real drag to bring one more than once or twice. Everyone was always in a hurry at lunch time.

I had two roommates: Julie and Kalika. Julie was new to the ashram. She'd just gotten divorced, had a shag haircut, a red Jeep and a Southern accent. I didn't like her brassy worldliness. When one of my favorite swamis chose her to come with him as his assistant on an international tour, I could not understand it. Julie? She was brand new. She hardly knew anything of ashram ways and, worse, she seemed to have no depth at all.

Kalika was at the other end of the spectrum. She was thirty-five, but looked fourteen, pale and ginger-haired. She was shy, wore glasses, had lots of allergies and had been living in the ashram for over ten years. She had a small statue of Bade Baba on her dresser for which she loved to sew outfits. She would spend weeks planning a small cape, where to get the fabric, how to fasten it around his neck, how long it should be. "If it weren't for the ashram," she once told me with a lopsided smile, "my family probably would have put me in the nuthouse."

My sick time dragged on. Each time I thought I was better enough to return to the office, as everyone kept expecting me to do, the fever would return and I'd slink back to my room where even Kalika was getting tired of me.

I went to the Seva Center and asked if I could be moved to the Registration Department, the front desk of the ashram where every guest checked in upon arrival. In contrast to what I had been doing for the last eighteen months, Registration would be gloriously public, so different from the Art Department. I wanted to be amongst the crowds when they came during the summer, meeting people. I was tired of being shut away over in Sadhana Kutir with the Art Department especially now that I would never be invited to be part of Editorial, not while Gina was editor-in-chief. Grace or no grace, I could see the human impossibility of it.

It was an odd way to think about seva, I thought, not the perfectly acquiescent way I used to think of it. But maybe I was just losing my beginner’s sheen, getting a little bit of that jaded quality that differentiated those who had been on staff for a long time from those who were just coming on board with their fresh faces and bright wide eyes.

My request to go to Registration was granted within two days. I was surprised. I thought seva changes took ages. No matter. I was excited. Going to Registration would be entering a whole new world. That suited me fine. I was ready to start over. There was just one thing I wanted to do before I began my new life. I wanted a spiritual name

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ~ SPIRITUAL NAME

I had wanted a spiritual name from the very beginning, but I had come into Siddha Yoga at a time when the guru wasn’t giving them out. Gurumayi was saying to people, “Keep your own name. It’s very spiritual.”

Baba Muktananda had started giving Westerners Indian names not for any profound reason, he insisted, but because he had trouble remembering Western names. But as he began naming people “Shakti” and “Gopi” and “Vishnu” almost everyone started asking Baba for a spiritual name -- as it came to be called -- and attaching significance to the name they received.

I had always wanted a spiritual name. It seemed a way of drawing closer, almost like a membership card, a way of reaffirming my connection to Gurumayi. I wanted to know what name she would choose for me, what it would mean. It would almost be like becoming her daughter, to have her name me.

Although Baba had said that he had started giving names just for convenience, and that we shouldn't attach importance to them, I had also read in one of his books that the spiritual name by the guru was significant, that you should meditate on its meaning and seek to become it. I was used to hearing contradictions like this in yoga. Baba would say one thing in one book and the opposite in another. “All you need is meditation.” “All you need is seva.” “All you need is the Guru Gita.” Yoga, I had concluded, was not black and white, not a simple set of instructions like I’d first thought. It was more complicated than that, a tangle of truths I would have to find my own way through.

Then I heard Gurumayi was giving spiritual names again.

It was a good time for me to take on a new name. I was about to begin my new seva at the Registration Department -- the long busy front desk in the main lobby where everyone had to check in upon arrival. I’d been ill for months and was just beginning to feel ready for full-time seva again. And it was Valentine’s Day, a holiday the ashram celebrated. We all gathered that evening in the meditation hall for a special mid-week, staff-only program with Gurumayi. Family night. It had been about two years to the day that I’d first moved here to the South Fallsburg ashram that now felt so much like home.

Gurumayi sat in her chair and after the choir had sung one or two opening songs she invited all the couples who were engaged to stand up, say their names and tell their stories of how they had met each other. It was rare for ashram romances to be talked about so openly, especially by Gurumayi. I watched as two by two people stood and described, with giggles, their first date.

I was surprised there were so many. Dating was generally a covert activity in the ashram, something people tried to keep secret as long as possible. The dining room was the place to find out who was interested in whom. If two people suddenly started sitting together for meals, most of the rest of the room registered the information with invisible antennae. That was the most obvious and sure-fire clue that a couple was forming. Sometimes the couples lasted and got married. Sometimes they fell apart. You could pretty much tell what was happening just by what went on in the dining hall.

Gay couples didn't exist on the ashram's radar. Any homosexuality was deep underground, almost too deep to see, easy to gaze past. Now and then the subject surfaced for a moment at a lunch table, how two women had been asked to leave because their relationship was “inappropriate.” You could tell just by looking around you that being gay and the ashram didn’t go together. I just tossed it onto the pile of things that were discouraged or not allowed – all things that seemed worth giving up if it meant getting free of absolutely everything, being liberated.

I didn’t know most of the engaged people who spoke during the program though I’d seen their faces and knew their names. Gurumayi joked with them. She knew them well. They were mostly people who worked in “the house,” Gurumayi’s private quarters, or on "special projects," code for "none of your business." All of them were clearly used to speaking with Gurumayi. They laughed back and forth as if they were friends.

I hadn't found any romance in the ashram at all. Most people lived in the ashram for years never having a boyfriend or girlfriend as far as I could see. Then there were others who seemed to know the secret of meeting someone in a place where there was always something else you were supposed to be doing. Durga had found a boyfriend right away, for instance, and last year she had even married him.

“Sean and I are getting married,” my sister announced to the art department when we had finished the twenty or so minutes of chanting and meditating with which we began every day and it was time for announcements. I knew this announcement was coming. Durga had told me. “It’s about time,” muttered Andrea. Andrea was one of the designers, an English woman with dry humor, and a good friend of Durga’s. Her comment was supposed to be funny, but no one caught it. It didn’t sound funny to me anyway. The whole announcement – which I had sort of hoped would be greeted with some sort of standing ovation -- had an air of anti-climax as people murmured their congratulations and got up to get on with whatever they’d been getting on with before morning puja.

Durga and Sean – she with her long light brown hair, he handsome and cute in a California way, just starting to go bald – handed each person a piece of chocolate as we filed out of Sonya’s well appointed office. In keeping with tradition, they had taken the chocolates to the temple before breakfast and rested the box for a moment on the silver sandals decorated with flowers and displayed before the life-size bronze statue of Bade Baba. Each of us received the chocolate reverently in cupped hands as a gift from the guru, blessing the engagement.

Durga said that she and Sean had arranged to leave the ashram for a month or two to go out and make some money to pay for the wedding. Sean would fly out to California, work some job, then drive his Honda Civic back. They would have a car, and a good one – precious item in the ashram. Durga would go to Boston where she had friends and temp for a few weeks.

When she returned she told me with delight how she’d gone out every day with her friend Annie, looking for a dress, and the great triumph of having found one for only $300, not a wedding-wedding dress, but something lacy and cream-colored. I envied her this friendship, this patient friend. I didn’t have friends like this, friends that I would ever ask so much of.

Durga was busy now planning the wedding. Everything had to be as cheap as possible. She and Sean had only what they had just earned, plus a few hundred dollars our mother had given. Durga wanted to make sure that there was enough left over to go on a camping trip honeymoon.

The wedding would be at a small pretty Japanese garden two or three miles from the ashram. The garden was run by devotees and felt like an annex, a place halfway between the ashram and the outside world and often used for devotee weddings. Only very rarely did people actually get married in the ashram itself, only real V.I.P.’s.

Gurumayi was in India. Durga sent her an invitation. “She’ll be at my wedding,” Durga said with confidence, meaning that even if the guru wasn’t physically present she’d be there – in the air, so to speak. “She’ll be there,” Durga said, almost daring me to contradict her. I wondered if she didn’t faintly hope there might be a miracle and Gurumayi would actually appear. She was so adamant I thought it might happen.

Durga bought invitations in a package at a store, ones where you filled in what you were inviting the person to and where and when it was. She brought the package over to my dorm room and asked if I’d help fill them in and address them. She’d already done a few. I was surprised how messy they were. I was so used – from my bitter years with Natvar and now here at the ashram – to things having to be done perfectly, and her invitations were nothing close to that kind of perfection. I filled them out in my steady convent script. It was easy for me to make them look good.

Durga’s roommates were her close friends. One was going to do her make-up and hair. The other was going to sing. Durga also asked our younger sister Agnes to bring her guitar from Tucson and sing as part of the ceremony. She asked me to be maid of honor and I felt honored. Maybe she did like me.

My father flew in from Hungary on a ticket probably paid for by my mother from her $10/hour housekeeping jobs. Agnes flew in with a sore throat and a big flowered dress she had borrowed to wear for the wedding. Cleaning houses and going to school, she had no money either. An aunt came from British Columbia, my mother drove up; plus Sean’s parents and a handful of his siblings. They could all stay in the ashram for free – two staff members getting married got special attention. For a couple of days I felt part of a small royal family.

The evening before the wedding I sat with Durga and Sean and my family on the lawn outside the lobby. I wore a red dress – straight and tailored, very much executive ashram wear. Sonya had given it to me, a hand-me-down from her polished wardrobe. I’d been overjoyed at first – I had no money for clothes and found it hard to keep up with the demands of ashram fashion – until I noticed an almost invisible stain on the front. But I wore the dress anyway that day. Maybe I hadn’t noticed the stain yet, or maybe it was during the short phase when I wore it anyway.

My father said cheerily that Sean and Durga should come up to his room for a moment, and me too. Proudly, he handed the soon-to-be-married couple two slim boxes. They opened the boxes – each held a watch with a brown leather strap. “Thanks, Dad,” my sister said with a mild smile as she stood to give him a kiss. Sean too thanked him politely. My father leaned back in his chair, his eyes bright with the delight of his gifts. I felt his fragility. So much depended on the admiration of what he had brought. I knew he had put a great deal of thought into it – how to stretch his Social Security income enough to purchase rich-looking gifts. Luckily, in Budapest, that income went much further than it would have in New York.

I never saw the watches again. They got lost. My sister once said to me, “Every time I open a present I know I’m not going to like it.”

She had just had a bridal shower in the ashram. She’d given Shellie, the older woman who was organizing it, a list of things she’d really like: a toaster oven, a TV, a blender – all things that could be used in an ashram dorm room to make life more normal and comfortable. Shellie collected money and at the last minute bought for Durga instead a tabletop bronze statue of Shiva. “It’ll last forever,” said Shellie. “In twenty years, what’s a blender going to mean to you? But this statue will always be with you.” Durga was furious. She’d been so looking forward to setting up a cozy kitchen in the new room she and Sean had been promised. Married couples got their own room.

Pankaj, a sweet man who was perhaps the easiest person in the art department to work with -- never in a bad mood, always someone I could joke around with -- the man who had asked for and actually got one of the rare single rooms in the ashram, offered to make the wedding cake. He’d done years of seva in the ashram bakery. He worked several days in the early hours of the morning before dawn to have the cake ready and said he actually had to make it twice. The first one collapsed. Where else, I thought, could a friend make a cake for you like this?

I had been to Lohman’s recently, a big clothing discount store. I was slowly learning the art of having to look expensive during celebrations at the ashram without having any actual money. Successful women in the ashram dressed very well – thick brocade saris on Indian holidays with plenty of jewelry and a perfect hair cut, silk suits on more secular days. Clothes were looked at. Somehow it seemed that the women with the more important sevas had the best clothes. To have an important seva seemed to indicate you had achieved something spiritually. So somehow good clothes seemed almost a yogic attainment.

Ashram clothes had to be elegant and modest. I had no idea how to pull it off. I had always enjoyed looking good, but my natural style was very different – more quirky -- but I wanted to look like the Main Building women. I had some hand-me-downs from Lena, the wealthy woman my mother kept house for, but she wasn’t exactly my size and besides there was a bit of a stigma in the ashram about wearing other people’s clothes. Something about how you’d pick up their karma. You had a better shot at enlightenment if you could get your own clothes brand new.

So I’d found my way to Lohman’s and I’d bought a long pink linen pleated skirt – long pleated skirts were a pretty good bet in the ashram, with the added advantage that you could sit cross-legged in them. In the mirror I thought I could pass for one of the elegant women who walked briskly through the dining room on missions I knew nothing about.

I planned to wear it to my sister’s wedding. “Take it to the dry cleaner’s,” my more worldly roommate suggested. “Have them press the pleats in really strong.” But the dry cleaner’s closed early on the day I went to pick up the pink pleated skirt. I’d have to wear the other skirt I’d bought. This one came just above my knees, a straight skirt of metallic fabric. I wasn’t so comfortable in this skirt, wasn’t sure I looked good in it, but I was trying to meet the new ashram fashion of hipper, shorter, straighter skirts.

I got to the garden where the wedding was going to be. It was May and the sun was out. Durga was tucked away in some inner sanctum with her friends getting dressed and gussied up. I was hurt that she shut me out of those moments as if my presence would get in the way of her becoming beautiful, as if it were something I knew nothing about and could jinx. In a way, it was true. Girl things had never been my territory, or my mother’s. Or my sister’s. Other people were better at these things.

Chairs were set up outside and I sat in a front row in my stocking feet. A big garlanded picture of Gurumayi had been set up as the centerpiece and a carpet laid down. Our good friend Vasudev, also from the art department, sat to the side behind his electric keyboard, Durga’s friend, Elsa, beside him, ready to sing, “You must give yourself to love, if love is what you’re after.”

Behind me sat the two sets of parents and a small crowd of friends from the ashram. Sean stood, waiting, in his suit. Durga appeared in the lacy dress, looking pretty. She came forward and stood beside Sean. I stood beside her and the best man, Sean’s brother, stood over beside Sean. The ceremony was performed by an African American Presbyterian minister whom everybody loved, the head of the ashram’s board of trustees. My only job was to stand in my short skirt while Elsa sang, mantras were chanted and rose petals strewn and then Agnes stood in her borrowed dress and sang and, as always, made everyone laugh with her curls and her self-deprecating humor – and then it was over, a big garland draped over the couple, people munching the snacks Durga had carefully budgeted and the beautiful three-tier cake that Pankaj had baked and decorated that morning with fresh lilacs.

And then the rock and roll went on and people were dancing. I had thought this would be the fun part, but I left after a song or two. I left everybody. I slipped away and walked home down the road, lined with woods on either side and signs saying that only members of the local hunting club could shoot in there. It seemed strange and wrong to leave the wedding. I didn’t know why I wanted to go. It just felt so much nicer to be alone, walking.

Sean and Durga left the next day to go camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a week – they now had Sean’s Honda – and when they came back Durga brought me a gift, a necklace of heavy green stones. “I wanted to thank you for all that you did,” she said, and I was touched and surprised. The necklace looked like real jewelry. It was a real gift. Something she knew I could use to prop up my wardrobe.

So some people managed to have a love life in the ashram even though there was a subtle implication that those who could resist such mundane preoccupations were more serious about their yoga. None of the men were showing any interest in me and sometimes that felt just right, and sometimes it felt terrible. Sometimes I wanted someone to think I was beautiful and interesting, and sometimes I was glad to be left alone just to get up at 3:30 in the morning and go to bed on time at night. Sometimes I forced myself to sit down at a chattering table in the dining room since this seemed the best way to be on the market. But most of the time I did what was easiest and just sat in the Silent Section where you didn’t have to make small talk.

The night of the Valentine’s Day program, I sat on the women's side of the big meditation hall on the plush turquoise carpet, just a few rows from Gurumayi. After introducing each couple and chatting with them, Gurumayi asked them to throw "stuffies" into the crowd – the brightly colored toy stuffed animals she was always so fond of giving out. People laughed and stretched their arms up to catch a precious toy. It was a party. Everyone wanted a present from Gurumayi, but you had to be lucky. There were at least five hundred staff present and just a few baskets of toys. A bubblegum-pink elephant came sailing my way. I caught him easily, his large floppy ears imprinted with small red hearts. I held him close, amazed at my unusual good fortune. The way that pink elephant had come straight for me, it felt like Gurumayi was reaching out her hand towards me, almost as if it were only me and her in this crowded hall. I knew it was the night to ask for my new name.

When the time came, I joined the long line for darshan. After kneeling and touching my forehead to the carpet and feeling the delicious sweep of the peacock feathers across my back -- almost as sweet as if Gurumayi had brushed me with her own hand -- I leaned forward, still on my knees. I waited until I caught her eye. Then quickly I asked, “Gurumayi, may I please have a spiritual name?”

She nodded and indicated that I should wait on the side. As the crowds continued to come forward, as the musicians played in the bright light of the hall, I stood and moved to the side of her chair where I sat down, happy to be allowed to linger this close to her. I watched from this new close-up perspective as Gurumayi laughed and smiled, turning this way and that to speak to one, then to another, then lapsing into a contemplative silence again, her hand always holding the long wand of feathers, always brushing them across her people as they came forward. On either side of her kneeled the usual cluster of elite young women, beautifully dressed and pretty, their long hair brushed to a sheen. They watched Gurumayi and the approaching line of her loving staff, ready to pick up on the subtlest instruction, to pass on a message or a gift.

In a few moments one of these smiling darshan girls turned to me, her smile becoming even broader as she handed me a heart-shaped piece of white paper, bordered with multi-colored flowers. On it, in red, imperfect calligraphy letters, was written the name, “Madri.” On the back of the paper heart I read the translation, “Devoted wife.”

I bowed, kneeling, touching my forehead once more to the floor, surrounded as I was by hundreds of people but certain Gurumayi was receiving the flood of gratitude I felt for this name, this sign that I was accepted and embraced in a new way. I went directly to the temple, just a few steps from the meditation hall, to thank Bade Baba. The temple was almost empty. I bowed before the statue that I knew was alive with awareness and sat close to the base of the white marble on which he sat. I felt safe there under Bade Baba's loving protection. I closed my eyes and savored my new name. It wasn’t as pretty as I’d hoped for, and I didn’t like this “devoted wife” thing. But still I tingled to have a new name.

Sunil was the first friend I saw on my way to dinner half an hour later. Sunil had MS and had been in a wheelchair since he was twenty. He was about forty now, a wide-faced, jovial man whom I liked to think of as an older brother though his friendly eyes sometimes had a flirtatious glint that made me uncomfortable, mostly because I couldn’t believe it was really there. Sunil had been around since Baba’s time and partially because of his illness, which he seemed to have mastered so well, and partially because of his manner he was particularly respected. “That’s a great name,” he said, his eyes lighting up with delight. “And a rare one!” I glowed, hoping I was special.

He told me the story of Madri from the Mahabharata, the ancient Hindu epic poem. She was a young, beautiful queen. Her husband the king had been cursed so that if he ever touched a woman he would die. His two wives managed to have children by mating with the gods. One day the king could resist no longer. He reached out for Madri and – boom – he was dead.

Madri and the king’s other wife, weeping with grief, prepared to jump onto their husband’s funeral pyre. But the gods stopped the two queens, saying, “You can’t abandon your five sons!” The other queen followed the command of the gods and pulled back, but Madri, too distraught and blaming herself for the king’s death, ignored them and dove into the flames.

I wanted the name to be a perfect fit, something I could be proud of and live up to. I liked Madri’s rebellious go-for-it nature. She disobeyed the gods! On top of that, “jumping into the fire” was a familiar theme in Siddha Yoga. It implied being unafraid, living fully no matter what difficulties god or the guru had to offer. The only part of the story I didn’t like so much was Madri feeling responsible for her husband’s death. That guilt felt too familiar. I wished that part could be erased. The only sense I could make out of the “devoted wife” part was that hopefully it meant that one day, in spite of how things were going, I'd fall in love and want to marry.

I had timed my new name well. I knew how annoying it was when someone, especially someone you worked with every day, suddenly got a spiritual name. Even though it happened fairly often in the ashram it always was an annoyance to have to start calling Trish Kevali or Jim Prabhakar, though everyone always eventually got used to it and forgot there had ever been a Trish or a Jim.

But I was entering a new department with people who hardly knew me. My new seva, Registration, was in a different, much more central part of the ashram, a new world, a new crowd of people. I wouldn’t have to do that embarrassing thing of asking people I had worked with for months to start calling me something new and strange. Here, in Registration, I could introduce myself as Madri. They would never know me as anyone else.