Free Cartwheels in a Sari by Jayanti Tamm

from bulletin boards to phone booths, and blitzing neighborhoods with leaflets. The more people in attendance, the more pleased Guru was with the event. Numbers mattered. If Guru was going to transform humanity, it was advantageous for him to appear before big crowds.
    The biggest audiences came when the famed guitarist Carlos Santana, whom Guru named Devadip, became a disciple. After receiving initiation, Guru instructed Santana to marry his girlfriend, Deborah. Although they lived in California, they often came to New York to bask in Guru's divinity and have Guru as their muse. As a great honor and privilege for Santana, Guru invited him to perform during Guru's concerts. Inevitably, however, though the house may have beenpacked at the beginning of the night, after Santana finished playing, bowing both to the audience and to Guru, then left the stage, most of the audience fled. Those who did stay to see Guru's follow-up act exited shortly after as Guru scraped a bow across his cello while singing Bengali songs. For nine years as Devadip, Santana devoted himself to Guru's path, receiving special attention from Guru with every visit, until suddenly he was gone. I remember Guru sitting on his porch, chastising Santana and his wife, blaming their broken spiritual lives on their disobedient desire to start a family. Santana instantly became an ex-disciple. Guru told us Santana would drown in the “ignorance-sea,” and immediately all of his relationships with the Center were formally and permanently severed.
    I was used to this by now. When a disciple left, Guru forbade any contact. It did not matter how fond one was of the person—that ex-disciple had to be discarded. So many disciples came and left that cutting off a person from my life, even someone I had known from when I was learning to crawl, now felt normal. One couldn't, or shouldn't, get too attached. I'd learned how to scab over quickly, until I couldn't feel anything anymore, and an ex-disciple was just another name added onto the rapidly expanding blacklist.
    Santana's break with Guru, however, did have a profound effect on concert attendance. With Guru as the headliner and only act, the less than full houses had early, mass evacuations. Although I understood that the concerts were hours and hours long and the music was unbearable, the people who left, I concluded, were simply unenlightened and didn't understand the larger purpose. I felt sorry for them. Here they were given an opportunity by the Supreme himself to becomea disciple of the highest avatar, and they blew it. It really was their loss.
    At three in the morning, shivering, I huddled against my mother in the broken-down bus. Due to chronic mechanical trouble, the bus's engine stalled. From my seat beside the window, frigid winds seeped through the glass. Besides the distant beads of lights from the highway, everything outside was dark. I sighed with the realization that if the bus was repaired within the next hour or so, I might still make it home in time for school. Not only would I not have had any sleep but my language arts report, like the majority of my homework, had not even been started. When I asked my mom if she thought I'd make it to school on time, she told me not to worry, that she would happily call in sick for me. With all of my absences, I was the sickest kid enrolled, the local hypochondriac. I didn't mind since I always felt absent at school even when I was present.
    Long after I had stopped dressing in saris and decorating my cubby with photos of Guru in
nirvakalpi samadhi,
an elevated state of consciousness, the kids at Silvermine Elementary School still remembered. Tommy Frangelo, a boy who lived down the road from my house, told a legion of kids that he saw my family sacrificing a monkey and then drinking its blood. Because one of the ancient Hindu sacred signs is a swastika, it became standard knowledge that on top of everything else, the Tamms were Nazis, too.
    In school, on the