All was silent after Boob had gone. Yet the silence was tranquil, rather than strained. As it stretched on, it gave Regina an opportunity to study the Maharishi.
He was a small man, skeleton thin. His skin was light brown with a golden tint to it, translucent against the white of the simple robe he wore and the turban which framed his wizened features. The bare, crossed shins were gnarled, as were the long-fingered hands. The whole picture was one of inner peace -- with two off-notes: a sparse white goatee which lent the complacency of his demeanor a slightly puckish air; and deepset black eyes which burned like hot coals, feverishly, fervently, twin live embers in the bed of purified ashes which was the face of the Maharishi.
Finally Regina spoke. “There are some questions I’d like to ask you, Maharishi,” she said respectfully.
“To question is to set one’s foot on the Path of Wisdom,” the Maharishi replied in deep, rich tones.
“Yes. Well, what I wanted to ask you is—”
“If one could but find the serenity to know that which is the Right Question to ask.”
“Of course. Now what I’d like to know is—”
“To Know is to identify the Knowable. But the Knowable is ever Unknowable.”
“I see. But if I could just—”
“To Know that the Knowable is Unknowable is truly to take the first step on the Path of Wisdom. Such Knowledge stoppeth the Tongue which would question that Faith which must be accepted without being Known. Is that clear, my child?”
“Not exactly. All I want to ask you is-—”
“Hush. Meditate on it. The answers one seeks lie within oneself.” The Maharishi closed his eyes. Regina sighed. This was going to be harder than she’d anticipated. “Umm,” she said, fishing for words.
“No, my child. Not ‘umm’. Om. Now join me in the mantra of Oneness. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm--”
“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm—” Obediently, Regina sang along with him. Follow the bouncing ball. “Ommmmmmmmmm—-”
“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm—” The Maharishi continued until he ran out of breath.
“I once heard Allen Ginsberg do that,” Regina remembered when they’d both stopped Omm-ing.
“The Brother Ginsberg means well, but his Om has an unfortunate Yiddish intonation. Understand, my child, that I remark on this in a Spirit not anti-Semitic, but rather anti-semantic. Some of my best friends . . .”
The Maharishi’s voice trailed off into reflection.
“I Wanted to ask you about Faith Venable.” Regina got it out before the Maharishi could sidetrack her again. ”
“May the Sister Faith have found Nirvana,” the Maharishi intoned piously.
“She was, I believe, a disciple of yours?” Regina persisted.
“We are all One,” the Maharishi replied cryptically.
“You had a falling out?”
“Error had disrupted Sister Faith’s Being; it had disturbed her Inner Peace; put her in conflict with Karma, which is the Oneness of the Soul.”
“The newspapers reported that you quarreled over the pronunciation of a mantra.”
“If the Pupil questions the wisdom of the Master, then is not the Lesson that when the Master is Lessened, the Pupil is Lessened as well?”
“Could you be more specific?” Regina’s head was spinning.
“Should a flat ‘A’ jar the Song of the Nightingale, then shall not the Universe echo with the dissonance?”
“Sister Faith mispronounced a mantra with a flat ‘A’?” Regina tried to pin it down.
“Flat? Oy, veg! Such an ‘A’!”
“I beg your pardon?” Regina was startled.
“Her pronunciation of the mantra was indeed a Sin of Pride, which is a separation of the Self from the whole. I bade her Meditate on it and banished her from My Presence until Illumination should once again Fill her Being.”
“How long ago did you banish her?”
“Time is a stagnant stream. There is no past, no present, no future. Time is Meaninglessness.”
“Six months? A year?”
“In Meaninglessness, there is Meaning.”
“Isn’t that contradictory?” Regina wondered.
“Yes,” the Maharishi granted. “And no,” he disagreed. “In True Truth the Opposite is Truly True.”
“Then that statement is false!” Regina thought for a moment that she was getting the hang of it. “And so the Opposite is false!”
“That is both True and Not True,” the Maharishi topped her with equanimity. “All Truth is True. All Truth is False. It is so simple, is it not?”
“Duck soup!” Regina muttered.
“We are all alien Knadlach in the Soup of the Duck.”
“Egg Rolls in the Minestrone,” Regina replied wildly.
“All Shish kebab lost in the Clam Chowder of Manhattan, born Strangers to swim and sink in the Universall Sea, and yet a part of the Vast Ocean, at one with it beyond our Discontent. We are all --”
“In the soup!” Regina summed up for the Maharishi.
“And not in the soup.” The Maharishi held out his hands palms up; everything had been explained.
“Soup aside, this mantra that Faith Venable mispronounced, was it her mantra?”
“Her mantra is thy mantra is my mantra is our mantra is one mantra. There is only the One. It is All. All is One.”
“All for one, and one for all,” Regina echoed wearily.
“All is One,” the Maharishi corrected. “One is All.”
“Is there only one mantra then?”
“There are many Roads to Karma.”
“All roads lead to Karma,” Regina guessed.
“I think that’s Rome you’re thinking of,” the Maharishi corrected her. “It’s a different bag.”
“Sorry. Now getting back to Faith Venable. You were her mentor, weren’t you?”
“We are all Pupils; and all are Masters.”
“But she did receive her initial instruction in Transcendental Meditation from you. Is that so?”
“I was her Guru.”
At last! A simple, direct statement! Regina followed it up quickly. “And you fell out over the mantra. Then what happened?”
“Sister Faith said ‘Guru, you’re thu-ru’.”
“And after the split she set herself up as a Guru?” Regina asked.
“She seduced some of my prize pupils away from the Right Path.”
The word “seduced” brought Regina up short. “Do you mean Faith Venable used sex?”
“No-no! Sister Faith strayed from Right Thinking, but I am sure that she remained Pure of Body, if not of Spirit. Indeed, her Purity of Flesh may have played no small part in luring my disciples from me.”
“How do you mean?”
“Abstinence makes the Heart grow Fonder.”
“Particularly somebody else’s abstinence,” Regina rerflected. “Did you see her again after the break?”
“No.”
“Where were you on the night she was murdered?” Regina tried to slip the question in casually.
“Where I always am. In the Universe. At One.”
“Could you narrow that down a little?”
“With the Allness of Love, Sister, I will tell you with specificity. I was in Los Angeles addressing a Band of the Faithful, in full view of two hundred people.” The Maharishi beamed at Regina beneficently. “So just can it, Sister,” he added with transcendental calm. “You can’t lay that on me!”
Scratch one suspect! It was easy enough to check out, which probably meant it was true. “You still haven’t told me if it was Faith Venable’s mantra you quarreled over,” Regina reminded him.
The Maharishi meditated. He shrugged. “It was not,” he said finally.
“Whose mantra was it?”
“If the Lips are Sealed, the Foot may not enter the Mouth.”
“Did you give Faith Venable her mantra?” Regina tried it from a different angle.
“Sister Faith did indeed receive her Holy Chant of Oneness from my Humble Self, her Guru.”