I am not sure she and I will speak any language.
How is that, my most precious? No. Don't touch me yet.
As you wish, my nayika.
When I first came here, my leader in dynamic meditation kept shouting at me, "Who are you?" Now I ask the same question of you, Master. Who are you?
Who do you think I am?
I think you are my Master and love and my living path to Buddha.
[Silence.]
But now I have been told that you are not a holy man from India but a Jewish Armenian from Watertown, Massachusetts.
[Silence.]
Which is true, Master?
Wherein is the contradiction? Why may not a holy man come from Watertown? Why may not the living path begin there?
Perhaps there is no reason.
And yet you feel one. You feel deceived. Worse, you feel mocked.
Yes, I suppose.
Our tantric lovemaking, the highly successful technique of vajrolimudra, now seems a mockery, a loss of your dignity because behind the mask and accent of the guru a pair of Western eyes watched, and a brain thinking with a coarse American accent?
Something like that. Let me hear your real voice.
I'm not sure I can still do it. Even my brain now, when it talks to itself, has the Arbat's voice.
When did this incredible imposture first occur to you?
Iresent the word "imposture." I grew into it organically. It's a phase of my being, a karmic reality. In India I became Indian. I never applied for citizenship, but the rest of it-the diet, the clothes, the languages, the mind-set-just came and filled me in. But they didn't forget-the Indian authorities. They remembered, and when enough little embarrassments at Ellora bad piled up-injuries, bad trips, complaints from parents, complaints from neighbors-they kicked me out. The wogs deported me.
Why isn't this generally known?
I wasn't getting stateside publicity in those days. I was just one more guru obscuru. Coming to the States was Durga 's idea, and she was right: this is the place to score. This is the place where dubkba translates into money. Back in India, once I was gone, what did they care? To them, I was one more piece of foreign klisbta-as long as I left and the ashram dissolved, they were happy enough. Their dirty little secret was, our farm-bouse and its bit of land was where they were putting one of their cardboard-and-plaster bousing projects, with rakeojfsfor everybody. Our getting out quietly was pan of our price for not balking at their price. What you got to realize about India, it may be poor but it's a capitalist country. People are on the take. For peanuts by our standards, but on the take.
But how did you get into this country?
No problem. I bad my old passport. Dean Rusk bad signed it, that's Bow old it was. I went and got it renewed at the consulate in Bombay and walked through controls at Kennedy.
Welcome home, Mr. Steinmetz. I didn't even bother to put on a suit. Durga and Nitya andAlinga knew, but that was about it. Ma Prapti maybe, but I think not; otherwise she would have blabbed when she got to blabbing. Not everybody came in the same plane, remember. You stand in the fast line, they look up your number to see if you're on the feds' shit list, and bingo, if you 're not, you 're in. Once in, I'm the Arbat again.
But how did you become the Arhat in the first place?
The story of my life. O.K. I was born on Elton Avenue, of these two crazy mismatched people. There wasn't any religion around the bouse, my parents cancelled each other out. They must have had great sex, because nothing else showed. My mother was actually a kind of anti-Semite. She couldn 't stand my father's people, from over in the old West End, mostly. She thought they were pushy, greedy, slippery, and bad crucified Christ. And him and the Armenians-be called them barbarians, be called them gypsies. He'd say the Turks should have finished the job, she 'd say Hitler didn V have such a bad idea. I got nothing, 'growing up. No baptism, no bar mitzvab. My mother didn't even make cboeregsfor breakfast, she said my father could go out and buy himself bagels. People felt sorry for me. One of my mother's older sisters, Aunt Mariam, took me to church a few times at Easter and Christmas-to St. James locally and that new one they put up over on Brattle Street, right in Wasp country-but, Jesus, the services were endless, and all that incense and candle smoke did a job on my sinuses. Iwasone of those kids with tons of allergies. The desert here has been great for that, by the way. The same with you? I notice your nose runs a lot. O.K. Don't answer. Sulk. Make your guru squirm.
So: spiritually I grew up with nothing, just these ethnic slurs all the time and noises from the bedroom. But there was something-a blank little God I carried with me like a tiny teddy bear in my bead, this little curved shadow like a busk clinging to the underside of my brain. I mean, it was me, yet something more than me, something I could appeal to-and there wasn V just input, there was output. I was transmitting and receiving. I could feel it at night. But also in the day, in the middle of the afternoon, out on the schoolyard, this terrific joy, this gratitude that kept spilling and spilling out of me like thread when the sewing machine goes crazy. But it had no face or name; it bad no form. I was jealous and sore-my parents with their orthodox upbringings bad been given something, it was part of their energy, and the other kids in school bad been given the same sort of thing even if they took it for granted and didn V know diddledy-squat about it and even shut on it. The Catholic girls with the little gold crosses between their tits and the Jewish boys taking off a double set of holidays and even the Protestants, their faces would get a little stiff and guilty if the talk got too dirty-you could see some shadow coming from above, some message from way upstairs.
Well, not to make a sob story out of this, it got to be the late Fifties, the early Sixties. I read Alan Watts and Krisbnamurti and Salinger and Ginsberg. I read the Upanisbads and, right there, bit this terrific verse, where the King of Death says to Nacbiketa: "The Supreme Person, of the size of a thumb, the innermost Self, dwells forever in the bean of all beings." That was Him!-my old pal God, the size of a thumb, and with just that backwards curve, you know, that a thumb has. I was at Northeastern at the time, reading poli. set. and introductory psych., and a lot of other crap that was supposed to translate into some ass-kissing desk job at John Hancock or City Hall. Suddenly I was sick of competing with nerds. I could have been shipped to Vietnam but turned out to be 4-F-too asthmatic. I thanked old God and took off for India. Unlike a lot of the trash went there after the Beatles cruised Calcutta, I stuck. Whereas tbe imposture in that? 1 found peace, 1 gave peace. India made sense to me-Buddhism made sense to me-the way you can take as much or little as you want, the way even nothing is something. After fifteen years I was Indian. The people that came to that first ashram in Ellora-there on the edge of town, this falling-down tin-roofed lime-green bouse-were almost all of them Westerners. Why would they want to come to another Westerner? Subliminally, of course, what attracted them was that I was a Westerner-my vasanas spoke their language. I spoke to their hangups. But up front I bad to be strange-/ had to look like something else, afresh chance. So I gave myself an Indian childhood as a beggar boy in Bombay -what 5r the big deal? Maybe I once was a beggar in Bombay, a Sbudra gone to seed, and not good enough even at that, so for my sins I got shoved into the incarnation of a messed-up little Armenian just across the Cambridge line, across the line from all those botsy-totsy bits of ass like you. You 've been bliss, frankly. The way you talk in complete sentences, the way you bold your bead, your posture. Nice. I mean really nice. Now you begrudge me everything because of a little name-change. What's the point of living if you can V shuck skins?