“Order! Order!” Judge Langley’s voice was a whisper in a hailstorm. “I’ll have order in this courtroom!”
As Brice Mack stepped up to the railing and waved his arms in a desperate plea for silence, his face was as abject and distraught as Scott Velie’s was filled with amusement and delight.
“Hare Krishna! HARE KRISHNA!” The bedlam of voices grew and built, setting up a vibration that caused the water glasses to rattle on their trays.
There seemed no way to bring the situation under control short of sending for the police, which Langley was about to do when, suddenly, in response to a gesture from the venerable Hindu, the mere raising of his hands to the Children of Krishna, the chanting immediately stopped.
“My children,” appealed the maharishi in his melodious, commanding voice, “It is not necessary to visit and pay homage to my physical being when to find me you have only to look within your spiritual sight.”
The statement, meant to calm them, only served to rekindle their ardor and bring on a new wave of chanting, different in sound and pattern from the previous one: a formless, seemingly wordless humming, “OM! OM! OM! OM!” producing a deep, bell-like vibration of ear-shattering power and intensity.
“Order,” Judge Langley shouted, “or I’ll have this courtroom cleared!”
“My children!” the maharishi beseeched, to no avail.
Then, as if obeying some wordless, inner-inspired signal, numbers of the Children began drawing out small pots of incense from within the folds of their robes and setting them aflame.
Judge Langley shot to his feet in a rage and spluttered his final warning. “There’ll be no damn smoking in my court!” And turning to the bailiff, ordered: “Bailiff, I want this courtroom cleared! Send for the police, and eject these people from the building!” And with a final rap of the gaveclass="underline" “Court will stand in recess until order has been restored!”
Pressing his way through the ranks of singing, laughing, chanting children, swaying amid clouds of incense, drumbeats, and recitations from the Bhagavad Gita, Bill hurried to outpace the reporters to the main door before the police arrived and the ensuing turmoil sealed off the route of escape. His single aim was to get to a phone and report the disaster to Janice, who had remained at the Candlemas Inn in Westport to care for Ivy.
The connection to their room made, he counted twelve rings before the desk clerk switched in to inform the operator that the party didn’t answer and offered the message desk. Bill then asked to have Janice paged, as it was still early enough for them to be at breakfast, but with no success.
Hanging up the receiver, Bill retraced his steps to the courtroom in bewilderment, augmented by a tinge of anxiety. It was more than odd not to find Janice at the inn, not only because of Ivy’s illness, which he felt Janice had been disposed to exaggerate, but because she knew the importance of staying close to the telephone. The decision for Janice to remain in Westport had been made with Scott Velie’s knowledge and concurrence. His only warning was to keep herself available for any summons from the court since failure to appear at the defense’s request would be construed as an act of contempt. Why would Janice have chosen to ignore Scott Velie’s warning?
Perhaps, he reflected gloomily, Ivy had taken a turn for the worse.
It was ten twenty before peace and quiet was at last restored and court reconvened.
The spaces vacated by the Children of Krishna, who had been boisterously carried off in the four buses to their gurukula in Bronxville, were only partially filled as Brice Mack opened his examination of the badly rattled Hindu sage, commencing with a series of questions concerning the rudiments of his background, his name, place of birth, education, place of current abode, and the general character of his life’s calling, and of the faith to which he had dedicated the sum and substance of his seventy-two years.
At Brice Mack’s gentle proddings, the maharishi picked his way through the complex web of the Hindu faith, telling of the origin of the word “Hindu” itself, in the sixth century B.C., as it was applied by invading Persians to the Sanskrit-speaking people living by the Indus River.
In a flutelike voice, he sang of the sacred writings, or Vedas, composed well before the first millennium b.c., and of the catalogue of magical yajnas, sacrificial formulas, mantras, and rituals that the Vedic religion embodied, and of the many schools, sects, and religions that had developed through the centuries: Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas, all of which were preached and practiced under the separate canopies of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which in turn took their impetus from the original Vedic, changing and refining the basic precepts into a multiplicity of separate doctrines: Karma, avatar, samsara, dharma, trimurti, bhakti, maya.
For more than an hour, what people were in the courtroom seemed mesmerized by the singsong voice and the strange-sounding words, as the maharishi particularized the many gradations of beliefs, emphasizing the eclectic nature of the faith, which adhered to no particular belief, nor worshiped any particular prophet or God, such as the Christians’ Jesus or Islam’s Muhammad, but found expression in the worship of animals, ancestors, spirits, sages, and the entire world of nature. A religion as variable as the people who practiced it, yet with certain constants: the belief in holy pilgrimages, in bathing in sacred rivers, in the veneration of sages and gurus, and, above all, the belief in the reality of reincarnation.
Which was the cue Brice Mack had been waiting for, since the expression on Scott Velie’s face presaged an objection about to erupt on several valid grounds.
“About reincarnation,” the young attorney quickly interposed, veering the maharishi toward the relevant issue in the case. “You speak of it as a reality, as a functioning doctrine believed in and subscribed to by millions of your countrymen. Can you elaborate for the jury on the precise manifestation of reincarnation?”
The impudence of the question brought a smile to the elderly man’s lips. From the casual tone of the young man, he might have been asking him to interpret the mechanics of a harvest combine instead of an eternal mystery vouchsafed to but a handful of saints. And yet, reasoned Pradesh to himself, he was in America, where machinery ruled, where the wonders of science were worshiped above faith, and only that which was explainable was viewed without suspicion and accepted as reality.
Delivering a primer on the dwelling place of the soul between its incarnations and the inner workings of the astral cosmos to an alien audience was tantamount to explaining the principles of atomic energy to a Bushman.
Turning to the oddly mixed faces of the twelve men and women sitting in the jury box, all of whom seemed to be observing him with varying degrees of doubt and skepticism, the elderly man began his discourse on the world between and beyond incarnations in a manner so childlike as to preclude misunderstanding by all but the densest of intelligences.
“The astral world,” he began, “contains many planes, many levels, many spheres to receive souls as they pass out of the body at death. There are many astral planes teeming with astral beings who have come from the earth life to dwell in these different mansions in accordance with Karmic qualifications. By this I mean the soul of a gross person whose Karmic qualifications are of a low order dwells on a lower plane than those souls of more enriched substance. The gross person, whose main drives in the earth life were of a fleshly and material tendency, will reincarnate very shortly after death since there is little for such a soul to meditate over, as all its attractions and needs are of a material kind. These souls soon find their way back, for there is always a sufficient supply of new bodies among parents of like natures, which offer ideal opportunities in which to reincarnate.”