“Ha!” A man stepped forward, wearing a dhoti like a diaper, and a badly tied turban, and sprayed the elephant with a hose.
She decided to try the word that was in her mind. She pointed at the man and said, “Mahout?”
He smiled, said, “Mahout, mahout,” and went on spraying, and the elephant too seemed to smile.
Alice lingered a little, watching the elephant being drenched, his gray dusty skin blackened by the water, thick and wrinkled, looking like cold lava. Then she clasped her hands, said “Namaste,” and was delighted when the mahout returned her greeting and somehow encouraged the elephant to nod his great solid head at her.
“You were missed,” Priyanka said when Alice got back to the ashram.
Priyanka had a haughty, well-brought-up way of speaking that annoyed Alice, not for its Indian attitude but its English pretension.
The other young woman, Prithi, said nothing, but Alice knew what she was thinking.
They were her friends, but not so close that she could tell them that she’d just made a new friend. They were a little older than she was, Prithi a runaway fiancée, Priyanka a runaway bride. Told that a husband had been selected for her in an arranged marriage, Prithi had been rescued by Priyanka and had found peace here under the benign presence of Sathya Sai Baba.
Priyanka had her own story, another arranged marriage, but to an abusive husband, in a house with a nagging, possibly insane mother-in-law. She had suffered it for two years and then done the unthinkable—slipped away, disgraced her parents, infuriated her in-laws, and hid here. The ashram was her refuge. Although she was damaged, scandalous, unmarriageable, she was safe. And she had money.
Prithi also had money. She said to Alice, “Until I was seventeen, I had no idea there were poor people in India. I thought everyone lived like us, in a big house, with servants and a driver and a cook and all the rest of it, surrounded by flowers. I thought our servants had lots of money. Their uniforms were beautiful.”
“Your father probably bought them their uniforms,” Alice said.
“May I finish?” Prithi smiled in annoyance. “I wanted to walk home from school one day. The other girls weren’t met by a chauffeur, as I had been all my life. The driver begged me to get in. He called me on my mobile, but I refused to answer, and I walked home while the car followed me.” She folded her hands primly. “So there.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I saw how people lived. Not like us. It was quite a shocker.”
But Prithi said that she still had never been on an Indian bus or train. She had flown to Bangalore from Mumbai and had not left the ashram for eight months.
So it seemed more and more to Alice like a nunnery, yet with none of the fear, no talk of salvation, nothing of sin, no rejection of the outside world; simply the pleasure of being in a safe and loving place, among happy people, where everyone was accepted. Not like an organized religion at all, but perhaps like the first followers of Christ, the people who had been so moved by the Sermon on the Mount they had left houses and families to follow the Master and to witness miracles.
Swami performed miracles, always reluctantly, which made them more startling, and always with a smile. He had a magic ring: cookies materialized in his hand for children, and sometimes money. The devotees applauded, as though at a party trick, and Alice realized they were like the earliest Christians, whose heads were turned by Christ’s words and his marvels, not seeing him as a figure foretold by Scripture or a human sacrifice, the Lamb of God, but a handsome man with a new voice, a beautiful spirit, a reformer, a liberator, someone who was able, in the most memorable words, to make sense of the world.
“I love Swami,” Alice told them.
“We were worried—isn’t that so, Prithi,” Priyanka said. “You have such a good education. You are so independent and strong. Such people seldom tarry here, you know.”
“I feel that we are here at the beginning,” Alice said, still thinking of the listeners to the Sermon on the Mount. “Seeing Swami in the flesh. Hearing him at the darshan. I love watching him nod and smile as we chant the bhajans.”
“Yes, we’re lucky,” Priyanka said. “I see that life has a meaning. Even my divorce has a meaning. It allowed me to come here.”
More time passed, some weeks perhaps, and one day both women approached Alice while she was sweeping the room.
“We have something for you,” Prithi said.
She took her hands from behind her back and presented Alice with a large cloth pouch, decorated with small round mirrors sewn to it, a piece from Rajasthan, red and orange, glittering on Alice’s lap.
“It’s great,” Alice said.
“Open it.”
Alice untwisted a woven cord that held it shut and saw that it contained a soft brick of rupees, held together with rubber bands. Because they were worn and dirty they seemed somehow tested and proven to be especially valuable.
“I can’t take them.”
“Yes,” Priyanka said. “You must.”
“But you don’t have to keep them,” Prithi said. “You can give them to Swami.”
“Swami doesn’t want money—he says so all the time. ‘Where money is asked for and offered, I have no place.’ I love him for that.”
“It is one of his most spiritual qualities,” Prithi said. “But still, ghee butter costs money. Pulses cost money. That broom.”
Alice was holding the broom in one hand and the chunk of money in the other. She said, “Yes, he can buy some more brooms!”
A day or two later Alice realized what the women had done. They were helping her pay her way, giving her the money as an oblique present so as not to embarrass her. One of the devotees was always passing the hat—actually, it was a brass bowl—and the residents putting money in. Alice usually slipped in a one-hundred-rupee note—about two dollars. This had been noticed.
She had believed that sweeping and washing and tending to the pots of flowers and weaving garlands for Swami were enough. But no—it seemed you had to pay.
This face-saving gesture, done so sweetly, saddened her. She had come to India in a spirit of renunciation, looking to Swami—with the help of Ganesh—as an example. Stella had hindered her in her quest; Alice saw that after Stella had gone off with Zack. But this need for money was a surprise, because she wanted to go on living at the ashram, and clearly she could do that only by getting a job somewhere in Bangalore. Well, wasn’t that why most people came to Bangalore?
“I’m looking for a phone,” Alice said to Priyanka, slightly distracted by the way Priyanka ate—using her fingertips on the cha-patis, but one-handed, eating with the fastidious concentration of a watch repairer.
Priyanka let her fingers hover and dangle while she looked at Alice with amazement, as though she’d asked for a forbidden thing.
“Whatever do you require a phone for?”
“The usual thing,” Alice said.
“Idle phoning is discouraged by Swami.”
“Who said it was idle?”
“Phones are frivolous, Swami says. Ashram is complete and self-sufficient. He is the only link we need.”
“Maybe I want to phone Swami,” Alice said, and she could tell that she was becoming angry in her sarcasm.
“He won’t pick up.”
“I thought you had a cell phone. You mentioned it once.”
Priyanka smiled while she chewed her mouthful, then she dabbed her lips. “I left my mobile with Daddyji. He was flabbergasted.”
“My daddyji doesn’t even know where I am,” Alice said.