A striking woman of indefinable age is behind the pillow at twelve. Her hair is an umber braid, thick as rope, a vermillion stripe down her middle part, a vermillion bindi between her eyebrows. She wears a green sari and radiates calm. She nods at Joan, puts her palms together, and bows. This must be the teacher, Joan thinks, and feels silly when she puts her own palms together and bows in return greeting.
Joan debates which pillow to choose and decides on the one at six. Turned away from the courtyard vista, she will give herself every chance to avoid distraction. Why does this feel so foreign to her, as if she is nearly a fraud? She has done yoga for years, thousands of classes that concluded with Shavasna, a silent pose that encourages the stilling of the mind. It doesn’t last long, but for those five minutes in Shavasna, wasn’t she meditating?
A hand on her shoulder. “You’ve come, Ashby,” Camille Nagy says. “Good for you. I wondered if you would show up.”
Camille is still wearing her Englishwoman’s clothing, tweed slacks this time, in the same brown pattern as the skirt she was wearing when Joan met her, a cream blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She might be in her mid-sixties, but her clothing reminds Joan of the uniforms worn by private-school children.
“I’ll sit next to you. I’ll introduce you to Ela after,” Camille Nagy says.
Her hair is in the tight bun Joan remembers. There is a funny incongruity between her buttoned-up appearance and her sweet “Namaste” to the teacher.
“Namaste,” Ela says in return, sweeping Camille into an embrace, and Joan sees how the older woman stiffens, an Englishwoman through and through. Joan wonders if this is Camille’s first time in Dharamshala as well and somehow she figured out more quickly how to experience this place more deeply than Joan.
Camille bends down, removes her low-heeled practical shoes, and places them off to the side. She makes her way onto the seven pillow and closes her eyes.
A middle-aged couple arrives. They look to Joan like twins, their features so similar, white hair, sharp and straight, falling to their shoulders, prominent noses. It seems odd to her that their hands are locked together.
“Namaste,” they call out to everyone, the man plopping himself down next to Joan, at five, his twin—partner, wife, or sister—at four.
The last to arrive is a couple in their thirties with a young boy, not more than eight. The child runs to Ela, throws his arms around her slim middle, hugs her tight, then jumps away like a baby frog, jumping and jumping until he lands, with his legs already crossed, on the pillow next to the teacher’s. The parents take the pillows at ten and at eight, separated by the peroxided muumuu’d young woman.
Ela takes her own seat, the folds of her green sari spread out around her, a flower rising up from green grass, and strikes the gong, once, twice, three times, until the sound hangs in the air, binds them all together under its tonal embrace.
“Moola Mantra,” Ela says, and everyone’s eyes, except Joan’s, snap closed, and the chanting begins immediately.
She tries to parse out the words. She hears: om.
She hears sat and chit, together—sat chit—then long words, then sri, then more long words, sri again, then more long words, and then om again.
Om is the start of the chant.
It goes om sat chit.
Then she figures out it goes om sat chit ananda, then all those long words, then sri, long words, sri, long words, back to om.
She will never learn the mantra simply by listening, the long words are convoluted, impossible to decipher.
She tries to keep her eyes closed, to chant what she has uncovered, but she stares around during the incomprehensible middle sections. Even the little boy who looks Midwestern milk-fed knows the chant by heart. She watches the words spill from his mouth perfectly, rapidly, as if he knew this language in the womb, as if he is one of her rare babies, a fetus imbued with instinctive knowledge of mantras that he carried beyond the canal and into childhood.
When the gong strikes again and everyone goes silent, Joan’s eyes are closed.
She opens her eyes and looks around.
Everyone sits peacefully, relaxed, their eyes still closed, but not gripped tightly, as hers have been.
The chanting is over and Joan realizes the silent meditation has begun. She can do this part, she thinks. This shouldn’t be too difficult.
Thoughts and images scud across her brain until she sees a brackish stream, her hand disappearing into the water, her fingers splayed, seeking the bottom. How far down must she go to touch the silky dirt. Silky dirt, she thinks. Silt. The silt upon which she will build her new existence. Can you build on silt? she wonders, she doesn’t think so.
And then Daniel is in her mind, and the calm that was inching over her is gone. She feels the angry energy, recognizes it as a fight-or-flight response. She forces herself to stay on her red pillow, despite the urge to flee, sudden phantom itches attacking her arms, neck, head, the middle of her back, until all she wants to do is scratch and scratch.
This is what they call monkey brain, Joan knows. The disquieted mind that can’t settle, hopping, jumping, leaping through fast-moving pictures, through rapid cycling thoughts, branching off into illogical tangents. Joan’s thoughts are not going round and round, she is not stuck in an infinite loop, but she can’t keep up with the way her mind is pulling off into every direction.
She tries again. Listens to her breathing, tries to become one with herself, but she is aware of Camille breathing next to her, and the man’s deep breaths on her other side, and then she is thinking about them, the identical couple, wondering what their story really is—she can see them as twins separated at birth, adopted by two different families, finding each other at a bar, flirting and drinking and kissing, telling each other the stories of their lives, amazed that they are both adopted, pulling at the threads, discovering they were born in the same hospital on the same day, but they love each other, they say, when they are naked together, once more, on a bed in a cold room—
Then Joan tries again. Listens to her own breathing, tries to keep her mind blank, a perfect blank, just black behind her eyes, but shouldn’t it be white?—
The gong sounds and she opens her eyes, hopes the silent meditation is finished. She has no sense of how much time has passed.
“For the benefit of our newest member, who would like to repeat the mantra we used today?” Ela says.
The heavy girl in the muumuu raises her hand and looks at Joan.
Om
Sat Chit Ananda Parabrahma
Purashothama Paramatma
Sri Bhagavati Sametha
Sri Bhagavate Namaha.
Joan nods, as if now, at last, it makes sense. But, of course, it doesn’t. Aside from Om sat chit ananda, the mantra flows right through her head. She knows she will never remember any more than those four words.
“I’ll say each word of the mantra, and starting with Oliver, we’ll go around the circle and each person translates.”
“Om,” says Ela.
“We are calling on the highest energy, of all there is,” says Oliver, the young boy with skin pale as homogenized milk, an eight-year-old invoking the highest of powers, smiling so wide when he finishes, displaying every one of his milk teeth.
“Sat.”
“The formless,” says Oliver’s mother.
“Chit.”