The Myth Begins

My life story can be traced back to an address scrawled across a matchbook directing my mother to the place where she hoped her lifelong search would end. She didn't have a phone number or contact name. Although it was just after dusk, the New York neighborhood seemed empty. No one to ask, no clues. After crisscrossing the street four times, she stood before the only building on the block without a number. Wrought-iron bars covered the cracked glass of the front door. Instead of a panel of backlit doorbells, five chewed wires jutted from the brick. The door was unlocked and sighed open at her touch.
The dank stairwell had one bare lightbulb. Cigarette butts littered the floor like flattened cockroaches. She rechecked the address clutched in her left hand. This was suddenly absurd. All of it--her exhausting journey, hitchhiking from San Francisco with her two-year-old son, leaving behind her straying husband and all of the contents of her former life, bringing nothing other than one small satchel and a matchbook with the address of Sri Chinmoy, a guru recently arrived from Pondicherry, India. A drip of rusty water fell onto her shoulder from a brown-stained ring on the ceiling. This was not the place to find a holy man. They reside by the gardenia-soaked banks of the Ganges, or inside cavernous mountain dwellings, or shaded by boughs of the bodhi tree, not in dilapidated East Village tenements.
As she turned to leave, an ancient voice, gentle and lulling, drifted down to her.
"At last, at last. You have come, good girl. Bah."
She looked up. Dressed in traditional Indian garb, a pale blue dhoti, and matching kurta, Guru's gold-hued skin glowed, and he seemed to flood the stairwell with his radiance.
When she and her very first boyfriend fled Chicago, leaving behind her cross-dressing, abusive alcoholic father, she actively began her search for spiritual fulfillment. In her earnest longing for a spiritual life, she had wandered through San Francisco, the epicenter for alternative spiritual paths, kneeling in silent zazen at Zen temples, dancing and whirling with Sufi mystics, quietly reflecting in Quaker Meeting Houses, and clapping and chanting at the Hare Krishna temple, but everything, even the splashes of mysticism, felt too formal and processed, reminding her of dreaded days in Catholic school. Once, years ago, she had read that when the disciple was ready, the guru would appear.
And there he was, leaning over the railing from the floor above, as though he had been standing there, waiting for her, her entire life. Why had it taken her this long to arrive? And how could she possibly waste one more minute when her guru had finally appeared? At that moment she chose to surrender her entire existence to him. This guru was the answer to all of her questions and longings. He seemed to know her, and perhaps he could fill all the gaping holes that echoed inside.
He motioned for her to follow him inside his crowded apartment where the guests sat upon a bare wood floor in silence. Through swirls of sandalwood incense smoke, Guru instructed her to sit beside a young hippie, barefoot and with a sour odor. After hours of potent, silent meditation, Guru stated that if she wanted to "jump into the sea of spirituality," she would marry the long-haired man.
That, according to my mother, is how she met my father.
The blond mendicant, my father, was also at Guru's for the first time. He drove from Yale University, where he was a graduate fellow studying philosophy. Born in a refugee camp in Augsburg, Germany, to Estonian parents who had fled when Stalin's troops invaded their homeland, my father's family immigrated to America and settled in...

 

 

"Tamm's indictment [of Sri Chinmoy] is more effective for being conveyed, with little rancor, from the point of view of a trusting child who dutifully adored the guru and only haltingly, in young adulthood, became disenchanted."

 

"Lyrical and soulful and, at times, utterly laugh-out-loud hilarious, Cartwheels in a Sari is a modern-day Last Emperor. Tamm, the Chosen One, brought me to tears with her innocence and her soul; yet she brought me to even more laughter with the absurdity of a life that she was thrust into and made to believe."

 

"A moving, haunting memoir. While Jayanti's story may sound at first like a tale of marginality, or eccentricity, it turns out, instead, to be a tale that readers of all stripes will find familiar. The quest for truth, the search for self, the hope for love--all of these are at the heart of this blunt, smart, shimmering book. Jayanti Tamm leaves her readers doing cartwheels, and wanting more."

 

"[Tamm] recaptures her youthful struggles to understand the center's secretive, emotionally repressive world, and to negotiate her relationship with the outside world of mainstream America....Written in straightforward, unadorned prose, there are occasionally comic accounts of Tamm's pre-adolescent sexual awakenings and of her dawning consciousness of the guru's complex relationships with some of his nubile young disciples....An earnest memoir of an exceptional childhood."

 

"[A] frank, clear-eyed memoir....Witty, compassionate, and often heartbreaking, Tamm's story offers crucial insight into a cult's inner workings and methods of indoctrination. All readers, though, will recognize universal coming-of-age themes as Tamm discards unwanted childhood lessons and begins to shape an independent adult life."

 

JAYANTI TAMM is an English professor at Ocean County College in New Jersey. Visit her website, www.jayantitamm.com.

From the Hardcover...