Guru Grapple
Rob wets a fingertip, slicks back his grey hair and grins. Good ol' India. Gonna stuff meself on curries, make a pile o' cash, an' I'll be off to Goa laughing!
He peers out of the auto rickshaw, sun yellow, and sees flat-roofed buildings: pink, lavender, pistachio green. Red billboards, women in shimmering saris, and a chai stall where a bevy of babas sit sipping, with heads wrapped in turbans and long bristled beards.
He is crammed in next to his battered black suitcase, knees sticking up like clothes pegs.
“Ah, what a beaut,” he says as the peak of Arunachala slides into view. The mountain swoops up in an elegant arc above rooftops.
He ducks out of the rickshaw to squint at the building before him. First floor electric blue, second floor yellow, a thick stripe of green in between. A pockmarked old woman leads him up to the room. Peach walls, double bed, battered table. Small wooden shutters, metal bars in matching peach. A view of stained walls and flat roofs. Laundry draped over electrical wires, flapping in the breeze.
He clears his throat; puts on his voice of authority. “That will do, Madam.”
The woman in her sea green sari backs out of the door and closes it.
Rob lays his scuffed suitcase at the foot of the bed.
Then he showers off the grime of twenty-six hours of travel. Sighs relief as cool water washes over his thinning hair, his flabby chest, his sagging biceps.
He wraps a towel high around his waist. Lathers his face until it foams like boiling milk. With smooth swift strokes, he shaves off the last three weeks' stubble.
He rinses his face; pats the pale skin dry.
Rob slips on a white kurta, a long cotton shirt that has slits to the waist, and trousers: crisp white. The long sleeves cover up the tattoo on his shoulder that says RIP Bubbles with a picture of his childhood dog.
He puts on a necklace of rudrakshas, rough reddish brown seeds large as eyeballs, ridged and mottled like clusters of granola.
Now, the finishing touch. He takes the folded orange cloth from his bag. Winds it round his head; tucks it in.
He looks in the mirror. His gold tooth winks at him.
In Birmingham, he's Crook-Tooth Rob. Spare parts man, wheeler-dealer. Procurer of all sorts of sordid sundries, given a wink and a nudge. Drinker of White Ace, smoker of Pall Malls. In India he's Mukti Baba. The guru himself in physical form. He grabs a satchel of flyers and strides to the door.
Time to drop into the now, and all that.
*
Mukti Baba walks past Shiva-Shakti Ashram with its pale green walls and pink diamonds, past the Dreaming Tree's red, gold tipped gate, past the rubbish-strewn underbrush. Along the yellow wall of a carpet shop, past the lady on the steps with tin pots of bananas. Around a green wall to the roar of the main road. Motorbikes honk past him. A cow trundles by, its hide like an Oreo milkshake and one curling horn.
He sticks up his flyer on every cafe board, between dance meditation and palmistry sessions, and over the top of other gurus with beaming beatific faces. Then he waits.
*
The seekers file like ants down the broken-up road, through the lobby of the Ramana Towers Hotel, up the cramped elevator to the air-conditioned room on the roof. Hungry ants, ants that will seize whatever crumbs they can carry off with them. Oh, he will feed them.
He arranges himself on a stack of three cushions, gets into lotus pose and assumes what he calls his stone face. When the room is full, he opens his eyes. Gives his deep rested look, achieved with half-lidded eyes and a completely straight face. Lots of hours in front of the mirror practicing that one, to make sure he doesn't crack up. Then, in a deep voice that is not the voice of Crook-Tooth Rob but the voice of Deep Universal Knowing, he speaks.
“Some people ask me why they feel suffering. And I tell them, suffering is in the mind. What happens when we get out of the mind? It's not there! When pain arises, become the witness. Those thoughts that are painful – love them. Love them to death,” he says, ending with a line swiped from from Ram Dass.
He goes on for a while about mind and no mind, and just as the audience's eyes are glazing over, he switches to ego.
“The more you look into the ego, the less you see, because the ego is an absence of awareness,” he says, ripping off Osho. “How can you surrender to it, if it does not exist?” He glances at the rows of rapt eyes.
“What you eat is holy because it becomes part of you, your blood, bones and tissue. Even when you bite into a Taco Bell Supreme Burrito and the sauce drips down your neck, that is holy. Think of that sauce and cheese and tomato broken down to the tiniest quantities and transforming into your tissue, your bones, your blood! If that is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”
The audience gaze with raw fascination.
“I would like you to remember,” he continues, misquoting Osho, “I'm imperfect, you're imperfect, the whole universe is imperfect, and our task is to love this imperfection. So let's rejoice in our imperfections!” He lifts his hands in the air and sways them like a conductor. The audience beams.
Satsang audiences don't clap. At first it threw him off, like he'd delivered a punchline and only heard crickets. Instead they let the last words of the revered teacher's voice resonate through them like waves on the ocean. Mukti Baba smiles his sphinx smile as he watches his words sink in. Then with great gentleness, he puts out the donation tin.
“Give what your heart feels,” he says in a voice that is cushioned with softness. He watches as the grateful press fifty and one hundred rupee notes into the tin he got for 50p at a charity shop. His gold tooth winks at them.
*
They file out, as silent as they came. A woman in pink flicks her blonde plait behind her and casts him a reverent namaste.
“Keep your practice up, Olga,” he says with fatherly smile.
A skinny youth lingers at the back, darting glances between the crowd and the guru. Mukti Baba remains seated, observing without appearing to. The youth takes a step forward, pauses, and turns back to shake Mukti Baba's hand. Introduces himself as Satya.
“How'd you get your name?” asks Mukti Baba.
The youth looks up through his glasses. “I've discovered my essence is truth. And satya means truth in Sanskrit.”
“Oh yes, so it does.” Mukti Baba should know this. Corny as cornballs says Crook-Tooth's rasping voice in his mind. Shut up, he tells the voice.
Feeling rather chuffed with himself, Mukti Baba strolls back to his room.
*
Mukti Baba is walking down the dirt road, whistling. Not the dirty pirate song he sings down the pub, but his secret power-mantra, Om Hanumate Namah. It's lodged in his head like a barnacle.
He stops in his tracks and curses under his breath. Looks around quickly to make sure nobody heard him. There, approaching him dead ahead is a man.
A terribly familiar man.
Sri Sri Vasiliji, his arch nemesis. His head is swathed in a sky blue turban, his robes are the color of midnight, and his dark eyes are glinting. Mukti Baba resents the extra Sri in his name, a mark of superfluous importance.
“Om shanti shanti,” says Mukti Baba by way of salutation, spreading his hands as if to say, all of this is mine and you cannot have it.
“Shanti Om,” replies his adversary, the words so deliberately spoken they are sharp enough to stab. His face is all angles, his clean-shaven chin as pointy as a toothpick. He narrows his eyes at Mukti Baba. Mukti Baba returns the look.
Don't let him get to you, don't let him get to you, chants Mukti Baba to himself. Clutching hold of his rudrakshas, he continues his dignified stroll.
*
Mukti Baba walks up the steps to the Dreaming Tree. He pauses on the stairwell to search the wall for the comfort of his own face smiling back at him. Plastered over his poster is the sharp toothy grin of Sri Sri Vasiliji. Ten am, outside Ramana Towers. The same time as his satsang. Mukti Baba clenches his fists until his bitten-off nails press into his palms. Then he orders a cinnamon lemonade and sips it with deliberate slowness, with menacing glances to everyone who is not looking.
*
Morning satsang. Soft light on the cream marble floor. Through the windowpanes, leaves stir between stretches of rooftops.
Something is wrong. It's ten past ten and the only people seated on his cushions are a frowning man with deep furrowed brows and a woman with a pinched face wrapped in a shawl and slumped forward. Even Satya, who he had labelled as his staunchest supporter, has left him for that—no, he will not think the word.
With a secret inward sigh, Mukti Baba starts. He speaks of detaching the bonds of the grasping ego, but his innards are bubbling like lava.
*
Mukti Baba puts on his stone face and strolls around the corner. Finds people streaming out of a huge white canopy. He peers within. The cavernous space is filled with folding chairs, facing a stage set with flower-wrapped vases and fat white candles that frame the curling legs of a seat like a throne. It's backed by twin blue velvet banners embroidered with gold insignia.
Sri Sri Vasiliji is standing, surrounded by a throng of supporters. Mukti Baba recognises them from his own satsang, along with an all-to-familiar figure. Satya.
“Traitor,” he hisses, his mouth curling downwards.
There are others, blue robed attendants, all female and mysteriously beautiful. Women in pastels he has never laid eyes on, draped in gemstones and flower of life pendants.
As Mukti Baba stares, two of them come skipping out of the satsang, hair glinting, faces rapturous.
Mukti Baba stops them with an outstretched arm. “What did he say in there?”
The first girl smiles and shakes her head, as if the experience was too delicious to disclose.
“He was amazing,” gushes the second. “He says the Guru is within us, and that we can become the love we are seeking!”
“C'mon, Mandy,” says the first girl, tugging her friends arm. “Let's go for a chai.”
They skip up the road, kurtas flapping, scarves fluttering.
“Bad for business,” mutters Mukti Baba, “if they start seeing their inner gurus.”
He lets the rest of the devotees stroll past him. Their eyes have taken on a strange, bright gleam.
He stands square to the entrance, waiting. His nemesis strolls forward, blue robes hardly stirring in the humid air. His chin is sharp as ever, eyes deadly.
Seeing Mukti Baba, he stops. Gives a long, slow smile.
“Babaji,” he says in a voice like gin on ice.
“You're stealing away my devotees,” declares Mukti Baba, his feet planted firmly in their sandals.
“Your devotees?” snarls Sri Sri Vasiliji. His voice is as deep as the Marinara Trench, his accent unmistakably Russian. “Ownership is illusion. You must stop grasping, start being.”
“Don't tell me what to do,” demands Mukti Baba.
“I'm telling you what not do do,” counters Sri Sri Vasiliji, voice acid.
Mukti Baba slashes the air with his hands. “Whatever. The point is your satsang is clashing with mine. I've barely got any audience left.”
“Ten am,” says Sri Sri Vasiliji, “is optimal time for absorption of spiritual wisdom. As I'm sure you already know.”
“Yes, I do,” says Mukti Baba between clenched teeth. “And I started my satsang first. So you need to change yours.”
Sri Sri Vasiliji cracks his knuckles. “What is your essence?” he asks without warning.
“My essence,” splutters Mukti Baba. “It's—well, it's...” Trying to catch me off guard, are ya? Well I'll show you. He rubs his palms together. “It's that I am at one with the infinite universe.”
Good bit of fluff, that, he says to himself.
Sri Sri Vasiliji grins, displaying a row of white teeth. “My teachings have the same essence. If everything is one, does it matter which satsang people go to?”
You're only saying that because yours is more popular, thinks Mukti Baba with spite. “It does to me. I want them at my satsang.”
“You have infinite possibeelities to accept the situation,” says Sri Sri Vasiliji, stepping forward to pat him on the shoulder.
Mukti Baba recoils as if his long fingers are snakes.
“Mitra,” calls Sri Sri Vasiliji over his shoulder. “My stick.”
A woman appears, her dark hair loose, blue robes flowing like a waterfall as she moves. With half-smiling lips she hands him a wooden cane topped with a cobra. The cobra's red eyes glare at Mukti Baba.
“Hari Om,” says Sri Sri Vasiliji, and before Mukti Baba can get a word in, he's striding out the doorway, tapping his cane as he goes.
Mukti Baba glares at him.
*
Days drip on like the sweat on his brow. Mukti Baba pauses in his circuit to wipe it off with the edge of his robe, folds his arms and makes a face. His satsangs are floundering. His donation tin is empty. And Satya has not returned.
He looks up to the rocky slopes of Arunachala, the holy mountain. The ideal place to gain clarity and insight. Plot a new course or reflect on his failings.
No, he tells himself, clenching his fists. I refuse to fail!
He climbs the mountain.
He has glorious memories of being on the top yet his mind seems to have glossed over the foot-wrenching process of getting there. He staggers up, huffing and cursing and glaring at the rocks, as if they were somehow at fault for his irrational choices.
At long last, he slips out of his sandals and steps onto the ghee-sticky, soot-blackened rock of the summit, takes a deep breath of fresh air, and nearly chokes on it.
There is Sri Sri Vasiliji, sitting on a yoga mat, smiling like the Gods have brought him dessert. A woman in sky blue, blonde this time, holds a sunshade over his head and gives Mukti Baba a look that says you're stealing quality time between me and my guru.
“Not you again,” groans Mukti Baba. “I came up here to get away from the drama. Why do you keep popping up like a bad case of herpes?”
Sri Sri Vasiliji spreads his hands. “We are defined and controlled by all we have not yet transcended.”
Mukti Baba folds his arms across his chest. “Oh, so you're going to throw Adi Da at me, are you?”
Sri Sri Vasiliji levels his eyes at him. “Let's resolve this once and for all. I challenge you to a dance battle. We will discover who is most talented dancer. Winner will keep his time of satsang. Loser must leave Tiruvannamalai for all eternity.”
Mukti Baba folds his shaking hands. He wills his face to harden into stone, no, something harder than stone. Titanium.
“Where,” he demands.
“Dreaming Tree. The ninth of the ninth, at nine o' nine.”
Mukti Baba sticks out his chest. “Challenge accepted.” He rubs his palms together. They're sweating.
“Exceellent,” declares Sri Sri Vasiliji.
His attendant flashes a cat smile.
Mukti Baba's legs shake as he walks away. The whole way down he curses his foolishness for accepting a challenge he would so likely fail at. He will find a way to pull it off somehow, that he swears.
He will never admit to anyone that he's rubbish at dancing.
*
How could I agree to this nonsense? Why didn't I object? Mukti Baba is heavy with the feeling of probable failure, heavy as a barbell on his back. No, a piano.
Then, a realization. It happens in the German Bakery, over bowls of tofu broccoli soup. He's sitting at one of the tables on the edge of the restaurant's rooftop—prime seating, they'd arrived early for that. Across from him sits a small-framed young woman, her chamomile hair in a thick plait, rounded face serious and her whole body poised on the edge of her chair. The thatched roof is open at the sides and across the rooftops is the round reddish bulge of Arunachala's slopes. Late afternoon sunlight is buttering the walls.
“I just want to know how you do it,” she is saying. Her name was Olga but Mukti Baba has recently renamed her Madhuri, meaning sweetness, a reflection of her ladhu-like qualities.
Madhuri looks at him, rapt. “How can you be a channel for a force so pure? It's like... I feel this great light moving through you. It moves me beyond words. I'm overwhelmed.” She drops her eyes into her soup.
So pure, eh? Rob is tickled.
“Don't try to process it with the mind, my child, just feel. Feel it with your whole heart.”
“My heart is feeling so much,” she says, eyes closed, head shaking in amazement. “I'm so... grateful to share this space with you.”
Mukti Baba looks into her eyes. Feels the gratitude she shines at him. It's real. He sees her naked yearning for spiritual wisdom. Crook-Tooth Rob would chuckle to himself and butter her up like toast. But Mukti Baba is not given to flattery. Instead he gazes back, into those eyes as blue as Lake Baikal, and answers her yearning with a gaze that seeks to pour all of his spiritual wisdom from his eyes to hers. In this moment, he realizes, he actually wants nothing more.
*
At his next satsang, there is only the furrowed-browed man and Madhuri. Mukti Baba ditches his script and rambles off the top of his head. At the end, he is greeted with glowing praise.
The next day, six pairs of eyes gaze up at him. The following day there are twelve. There in the middle sits Satya, with a look of such devotion it's as if he never left. Mukti Baba takes back all his traitorous thoughts as a feeling of sweetness towards the young man floods through him. He speaks based on texts he perused on the internet and tells stories like he once told at the pub, peppered with anecdotes, zinging with truth. He likens the search for the divine to a pub crawl and his audience breaks into laughter. He wants to cancel the challenge but he would come off as wimp.
*
Mukti Baba sees a poster for a tribal fusion dance class. Unsure of what it entails, he attends.
The room is full of women. They shoot him strange looks that he tries to ignore. The teacher instructs them to raise their arms and wiggle their hips in ways he has never done before. As he shimmies, he feels like a beached whale.
*
When the day comes, he is not ready. Nor will I ever be, he tells himself, but it does not help.
Mukti Baba walks up the steps to the Dreaming Tree. His heart pounds.
Seeing the mass of sandals in the doorway, he gulps. There are people here. A lot of people. He walks past the low tables, legs like jelly, turbaned head held high.
At the back of the screened-in rooftop is DJ Kaos, the resident DJ. He is standing behind a glass case draped with a psychedelic banner, thrashing out tunes from his laptop. Behind him is a thin thatched screen fastened with jute to bamboo poles, wound with lights that wink an inexorable pink, green and blue.
He sees the woman with the pinched face hunched by the wall, Satya wearing rudrakshas just like his, and Madhuri in a kurta like a lemon meringue. The frowning man nods at a him, mouth parting into a slight smile. There are others—all the people who dropped in and out of his satsangs, and more. Scattered between them are women, formidably beautiful, in blue robes.
The crowd parts.
Sri Sri Vasiliji is waiting.
He bows extravagantly while his narrowed eyes gaze out mocking.
Mukti Baba salutes him with a namaste, delivered with a stony glare.
The music starts up in a swirl of bhangra.
They dance.
Sri Sri Vasiliji moves in slow precise steps. He points his toes as his feet twist into complicated patterns.
Mukti Baba begins with small hesitant steps. His bare sweaty feet feel clumsy on the terracotta floor.
This must be some kind of bad joke, he thinks. He swivels his hips as he learned in tribal fusion, shaking his shoulders, but the movements come out jerky.
Then he remembers what he said was his essence. I am one with the universe. Raising one arm up, he pauses. But am I? He feels divided in two.
Abandoning his newest moves, he dances like Crook Tooth Rob in the Hog's Head: head bobbing, feet slapping the floor as he makes up his own rhythm.
s he does so, he realises something. His last satsangs have been successful because he did less trying and more being. People like him for being himself. He doesn't need to revert to his old self or pretend to be something else entirely. He can be the best of both because that is what he truly is, a fusion. Bangers and mash with a dash of masala.
The bass rises and he moves faster until he is no longer Mukti Baba or Crook Tooth Rob or any designation. The external world becomes a blur. He no longer sees Sri Sri Vasiliji with his fancy footwork. What he has pretended for so long has become his reality. He is one with the samosas and paneer butter masala that flowed into his gut to become him. He is one with the juddering rickshaws and screeching motorbikes and lumbering cows and every steaming chai shop that surrounds him. He is no longer seeking or aping the guru. The guru shines through him. His feet fly, moving beyond his control. Be the watcher, says Osho's voice in his mind.
He dances until his mind is drained of thought, till he is clinging to nothing, and he is pure emptiness. He dances the emptiness.
The music stops and Mukti Baba looks around, bewildered. The crowd cheers, a multitude of voices merging into a single roar. Satya steps forward and holds out his hands. “Silence!”
A hush falls over the room.
“Now, whoever thinks Mukti Baba is the winner, give us your applause.”
A roar surges up from the dance floor.
Satya cuts the sound with a flick of his hands. “And whoever think Sri Sri Vasiliji has won, cheer now.”
There's a smattering of applause and a few half-hearted hoots.
Sri Sri Vasiliji's gaze flicks between onlookers. His brows draw together and his eyes narrow. The blue-robed women have disappeared like sea mist.
Mukti Baba looks harder and discovers they have taken their robes off and are now dressed in floral range of pastels. The room appears lighter.
“This is unfair!” exclaims Sri Sri Vasiliji. “I demand a rematch!”
“The people have chosen,” says Satya, unblinking.
Mukti Baba is swept up into the embrace of the crowd. Their warmth surges through him, obliterating all thoughts of beach bars in Goa, and in that moment he wants nothing more than to remain with his devotees. His eyes land on Sri Sri Vasiliji and are caught there. For a moment he feels their menace on him. Then he smiles, and the look on his nemesis softens to a grudging acceptance. He smiles wider, not putting on any particular face but being as he is. Pure isness.
Author’s Biography
Malina Douglas is inspired by the encounters that shape us. She was awarded Editor's Choice in the Hammond House International Literary Prize and longlisted for the Reflex Press Prize and the Bath Short Story Prize in 2022. Publications include the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, WestWord Journal from Retreat West, Typehouse, Wyldblood, Opia, Back Story Journal, The Antipodean, Ellipsis Zine, Teach Write, Consequence Forum, and Because That's Where Your Heart Is from Sans Press. Two highly commended stories were published in the anthologies When it is Time and All Those Things You Thought Never Mattered. Guru Grapple was written during a stay in Tiruvannamalai, India. When she's not writing, she can be found wandering through temples, over mountainsides or tasting new curries. She is an alumna of Smokelong Summer and can be found on twitter @iridescentwords.
