“When he is sleeping,” says Puneet, “you’re not supposed to disturb him because he’s actually at a level of consciousness where he’s working on somebody’s problems.”
It’s hot where we are sitting, and this spiritual refuge attracts great numbers of mosquitoes. Puneet starts to get frustrated.
“God has been very kind to me,” he says. “My guru has been very kind to me. They’ve saved me from a lot of danger. Perhaps nothing good has happened in the last ten years of my life but I’ve been saved and brought out of a lot of danger. A lot! I mean you probably don’t even comprehend how much. I’m very grateful. But it’s been a long time without my money. It’s been a long time since I had good times.”
“What will you do when you get your money back,” I ask.
“I just want to get laid, man. Just leave all this behind. Spent too much time being a hermit. Do you think I don’t want the things other people want? I still like the idea of living in a luxurious house and driving a big car. I like nice women with nice asses. I like the concept of having a family and children and all that. I’ve put in ten years to cleaning up my spiritual account and my money still hasn’t come back to me. It’s tiring.”
I’m sure everyone with a monastic bent has thoughts like this, and I’m not entirely convinced that it is real. Has the last decade of his life been a “state of exception” — or is this perhaps just who he is? If his deepest impulse were to “get laid” would he not have devoted more of this decade to it? — he has not exactly been short of time. If he had wanted to, he could also have found other ways of earning money over these years, rather than opting out of Delhi’s boom. I wonder if he really wants his money back at all, or if the money is just one big alibi, if this money in the bank, which he mentions every five minutes, is not just an excuse for him to lead the kind of life he would like to live anyway. The story of his future liberation — when he has his money, and there will be women and parties and pleasure — may be just a fiction. An attempt on the part of a man who does not really like the world of money and struggle to appear ‘normal’ in this era of obsessive accumulation.
As if he can hear these thoughts, he says,
“But I don’t want physical things to ever smother my connection to God. I want both. So I’m a little confused right now. Because maybe God is just putting this money in my way as one more obstacle between me and him. If you’re gonna be so audacious to think that you want to be in God’s company all the time — that’s a very audacious thought. Out of the seven billion on earth only a few people have that ambition — that I want to be with God. Very few guys wake up in the morning and say that’s what I have to achieve today, right? So my guru says to me in that case, a person who’s thinking like that — in that case, which is your case, he says, God will do everything the fuck he can do in his power to discourage you. And test you. Because he doesn’t want sub-standard people in his company. So if I go the wrong way he’ll kick me the fuck out.”
The whisper goes around that the guru is awake, and, very slowly, the line of cross-legged people begins to move. After a couple of hours we reach the top of the steps outside the guru’s room, and we are ushered in.
The room is large, and there are still many people ahead of us. If I expected any great surge of feeling on seeing the guru, I am disappointed. He does seem like the only normal person in the room — everyone else is in a slightly altered state — but I don’t feel anything more exceptional than that. He is just back from a day selling bathroom fittings: he still wears his suit, and he is sitting cross-legged on a bed with his socks on.
People kneel in front of him and everyone can hear what is being said: “My daughter is doing badly at school. I am suffering from pains in my knees.” One woman gives the guru a letter to read: she is crying. To most of these supplicants, the guru gives a steel cup of drinking water that he has previously blessed by holding it against his forehead. To others he gives cardamom seeds.
A favourite phrase of Delhi businessmen is, “Your bad deeds always come back to you.” In the course of accumulating wealth you must pay bribes, steal from the system, intimidate people, make enemies — and generally forget about everything that is not accumulating wealth. If you are making a lot of money it ‘proves’ that you are a favoured child of the universe: it is on your side, you have nothing to feel bad about. But even very large fortunes can sometimes seem dwarfed by the negativity that has been accumulated in the process. Making this negative surplus disappear is therefore an eternal preoccupation of the business classes. You have to find other beings to take your negativity from you, places where it can be dumped and never return. Giving charity is good: it shifts some of your negativity from you to the person you are giving to. Going on pilgrimages earns you credit that can be offset against this negativity. But the dream of course is a mechanism that can make your negativity simply disappear.
“Those people have come with manifestations of negative return. An aching back, a child failing in school — it’s all because of negativity. The cardamom seeds take the negativity away. The guru blesses the person and the negativity is transferred to the cardamom seeds. The seeds are then thrown into the Yamuna river, where the fish eat them.”
If there are still any fish in the Yamuna river.
“Fish, because they live in water, are protected from Saturn, so there the cycle of negativity ends.”
But there are volumes of negativity that all the cardamom seeds and all the fish in the world cannot absorb, and struggling against them is a full-time occupation.
Puneet asks me, “What are you going to ask him when you see him?”
I have a pang of unease.
“What do you mean?”
“Well you’ve waited all this time to see him. What are you going to ask? Why are you here?”
Puneet is not one of this guru’s ordinary followers. The guru extends special favours to him because, he says, Puneet has spiritual qualities that most people do not have. The $100 million in Puneet’s bank account might have something to do with it too; I don’t know. The point is that I have somehow imagined all this time that Puneet and I would have a private audience with the guru. A cosy chat among equals. Now I realise I am coming on my knees to him as just one more devotee among many.
The situation triggers a deep fragility in my personality. My thoughts turn to chaos. My head begins to spin. I don’t know how to speak for myself in front of this man. In front of all these other people. Everyone will know I am faking it. I am sweating, and not with the heat.
Puneet’s turn comes first. The man on the bed puts his hand on his head. Though the two of them spend their weekends watching soccer together, there is no flicker of recognition from the guru, who asks him why he has come. Puneet tells him that his eyes have recently been stinging a lot. The guru requests from his assistants a steel cup of water, which he places against his forehead and hands to Puneet.
I feel myself collapsing inside. This is the role I choose: I am the observer, not the observed. I am in a panic, and I find myself contemptible. I realise that I know nothing. Everyone else in this room knows something very basic about life that I do not. They live; I am just an eavesdropper. I spy on life so that I do not have to live it. A non-existent wind is rushing in my ears and, in that moment, I am convinced that I have reached the age I have without ever embarking on anything real. I realise I need to speak to this guru. Maybe this has been the whole point, all along. I need a word from him to draw me in from the comfortable void of the outside. I realise I will approach him in utter earnestness.