LITMIR.BIZ

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isn’t good,” Evan says. “I’m not used to it. It’s depressing.”

      “There’s no time to be depressed,” my mother says. “The only option is strength and faith … You heard what Mataji said, and I agree. It’s not easy being a human; it’s not straightforward. There’s no time to be depressed. You have to have faith and carry on! It’s all going to be okay.” Unlike her offspring, my mother does not suffer from uncertainty. In my mother’s fiery cosmology, there is no time for that.

      “Couragio. Fortitude. Come on. Where’s the philosophy? The wisdom? What’s the point of all this meditation, all this study, if you don’t apply it?”

      I lie on the carpet in front of the fire. We all study wisdom, but applying it and cracking certainty is another matter. The flames on the fire slowly subside, until it is only red coals and the occasional dart of fire, like an itinerant teenager dashing out and about after curfew.

      “Courage and patience. Let’s all learn a little patience, if you please. What’s all this need to rush? There’s plenty of time to return to teaching.”

      Cracking patience is also another matter. So I say nothing.

      “I’m not waiting till next year to go back to teach,” Evan says.

      “No one listens to me,” my mother says.

      Out there in the sooty suburbs, dogs bark.

      I get up and stretch. “Ev, go to bed, don’t fall asleep here, the fire’s burned down, it’s going to get cold.”

      I wait till he assembles himself and leave my mother to rouse Ross, then follow Evan, stumbling after his stumble; we’re following religious ritual and not turning on lights, so we keep our hands on the table, the chairs. We read the room like Braille, turning into the passageway and walking along it, fingers trailing the Dali lithographs that line the walls, to navigate the steps, one, two, and down into the lower part of the house. Evan disappears into his room off left and I read the cold walls to mine at the end of the treacherous passage, which is frigid and black as Juliet’s tomb, bed an icy square by the windowed night. In the dark, I feel my way to the closet to find something soft to sleep in and come away with tights, sweaters, leggings, a lone bathing suit; no pyjamas anywhere – haven’t thought ahead and put the pyjamas onto my bed for easy reaching – and can’t switch on lights, so I cocoon into a scratchy towel. Evan is padding about in his room, the one that flanks mine, quiet, like a stag bedding down in long grass; he thought ahead. His room settles into silence. Ross is no doubt still sleeping in the piano room and will surface round five; the leather couch gone frigid and hard in the cold, he’ll find himself awake to a bed of maroon ice. I tuck myself into a curl, tight as a pangolin, coiled for protection. The house is silent now. Outside a bird gives a distant call and a lone dog’s barking dies into stillness.

      On the Sabbath day, we lounge and read; Evan and I wander in the garden and walk step by step around the lawn. And we make endless cups of tea for my mother.

      Soup and the rest of the tagine and homemade bread for lunch.

      My mother likes to fill the wine glasses and make toasts over family meals. She will always drink to the ones present, and the ones absent. With Ross returned from Mozambique, only my sister Lexi and her son are absent.

      “To Lexi,” my mother says. “May she come to her senses and get out of that cesspool.”

      But Lexi is not leaving India any time soon. She has a husband and a child and a spiritual master, and “there’s no greater commitment than serving the guru”.

      “Gurus! I’ve had a life time of guru worship,” my mother says, because my grandmother was devoted to her master for twenty-five years, trailblazing with my grandfather before the Beatles had even discovered India and spiritual life and presented it to the West as something cool. My grandmother was ahead of her time. She was a seeker, searching for truth and, as her destiny would have it, she came across the Bhagavad Gita, the seminal work on Hindu philosophy, in a bookstore window. On account of the fact that her own name was Gita, she went in to inquire after the book and found that Gita meant “song” and the words “Bhagavad Gita” are Sanskrit for “Song of God”. By a further strange design of fate, my grandmother was an opera singer and she was losing her voice! How odd, she must have thought, standing in the bookshop. It prompted her to immediately buy, then read the ancient manuscript and, moved by it, she heeded the call to adventure and set out into India, my hapless grandfather in tow, where she found her guru in some hinterland in the middle of the subcontinent and served this man in robes, dedicating an entire life to him: she wore saris, she painted a red dot onto her forehead and she opened up a yoga centre in some dark street in downtown Joburg to raise money for the master, her babaji, his framed photo everywhere, his name in every sentence, his wisdom imparted. In my art classes at school, following my grandmother’s injunction, I painted Shiva with cobras wrapped round his purple throat, and intoned om sitting in planes waiting for take-off.

      Om … intoning as we took off for Stratford to see Shakespeare.

      Ommmmm … sounding like bees in pepper trees, the thunder of the plane’s take-off in my ears.

      After twenty-five years of serving her guru, my grandmother had an almighty nervous breakdown on account of her guru letting her down, treating her badly, one of his first disciples. He arrived back in India after his first journey to America, a very successful foray by all accounts, where he was worshipped and adored, garnering thousands of new disciples and, as the hidden side of the story has it, discovering his taste for young boys and bedding them; this man wearing the orange robes of the monk – having taken his vows of celibacy so he could be free of all human frailty and appetite and be a true master – became a late-in-life fornicator. According to my grandmother, her guru returned from America changed and full of ego, so she questioned him and he set her to cleaning toilets. Yes, it was toilet duty for her after twenty-five years of tireless service: Johannesburg, Bombay and beyond, vanishing for months. Toilet duty? My grandfather put his foot down, refused to see his wife wipe the shit off the side of the squatting bowl, singing to try to alleviate her disgust as she swabbed yellowed turd. Enough is, after all, enough! Let him clean shit, my grandfather thundered, because after twenty-five years it was not going to come to that.

      “Save me from gurus,” my mother says of her own mother and now her daughter.

      “It’s a wasted life,” Evan says. “It’s a waste of all Lexi’s potential. She’s a brilliant, talented person.”

      “It’s a tragedy,” my mother says. “To give up a full-blooded life, youngest fashion editor of The Star ever! Give it all up and go to India to serve some so-called master. Some American pipsqueak. And get married in a circus tent on the Durban beach front, with every Tom, Dick and Harry coming to watch, as part of a festival.”

      Ratha Yatra, or Festival of the Chariots, when the deities of Lord Jagannath, an incarnation of Krishna, are placed onto three forty-foot chariots and pulled through the streets.

      “We went down to Durban for the day, Ev and I. We were hoping she’d change her mind. We were praying for it, Ev and I, standing outside and saying the psalms.”

      Lexi was marrying a devotee in front of thousands of strangers; Lexi: beautiful, unusual, talented, Indian henna in swirls along her hands, a traditional Indian bride, ornate sari from Benares embroidered with gold and weighing her down as she followed her devotee husband around a ceremonial fire, her sari tied to his robes, with this American guru presiding. And just outside the flaps, in the humid afternoon, my mother, under an umbrella to protect herself from the sun and Evan enshrouded in a towel placed over his head like a veil, repeating psalms and hoping to bring about some kind of intervention to prevent the wedding from taking place, standing with shaven-headed devotees chanting the names of the Lord, selling samoosas and holy beads, with the gigantic deity of Lord Jagannath staring down with his big, black eyes from the forty-foot chariot, draped in streamers and flowers.

      My mother returns from carrying

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