Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [63]
The first pensée, “Wisdom,” was printed in italicized, gilt letters.
The sage stands silent on one leg
on the snowcapped peak of Mount Everest;
Master springs from bough to leafy bough
Lassoing fruit and heaven with furry tail.
The sage seeks but does not find,
Master does not seek but tail-pulls in
True wisdom, which is but emptiness.
The second pensée’s title must have been a printer’s error. “Nuclear Fusion” didn’t make sense for the two-line riddle:
Mother’s milk; cobra’s venom.
Equal delicacies when tasted in heaven.
That one I got in the gut. Deadly today, lifesaving tomorrow. I called Ham’s houseboat from the gate area on my cell phone. Jess’s voice on his tape. “We are working on the new and improved edition of the Kamasutra. Please leave your name and number. We’ll get back to you when we come down from heaven.”
I returned to Ma Varuna’s promotional material.
The kit included a detachable chart of a human body, divided and labeled like cuts of meat in a chart on a butcher’s wall. In place of cuts like chuck, rib, rump, flank, shank, sirloin, the nutritionist’s chart listed body sites for negative aptitudes, such as sloth, loutishness, mordancy, indecisiveness, narcissism, wrath. On the back of the chart was a recipe for “Ma’s Bitter Melon and Fenugreek Casserole.”
The only publicity photo I found in the kit was that of a Mexican spider monkey. The monkey had a name: Master. The monkey’s tiny eyes were glazed with an appealing desperate dreaminess. Were there on-line chat rooms for a wind-goddess’s pets and spiritual daughters?
The monkey found me before I found the author. Master ignored the bananas, went for the chocolate-flavored frozen yogurt. One moment I was coddling a cone, my tongue was caressing sweet, creamy swirls; the next, my neck was lassoed by a skinny tail, and a spider monkey no bigger than a cat was licking yogurt-drip off the ridged sides of the cone.
“Low fat, I hope?”
I heard the Bacall-deep voice behind me, I breathed in the spicy sandalwood cologne, I succumbed—like Jess?—to the beauty and spell of a god or a devil. Among the slicker-clad passengers getting off the plane, Ma Varuna, in her gauzy silk tunic, her satin pants, her rich velvet cape and her silver-heeled T-strap dancing shoes, was more an apparition than a touring author in her attention-getting travel clothes.
Two factoids to pass on to Jess:
1. Deities don’t glow
2. The devil’s horns are retractable
Message to Mr. Bullock, may he burn in hell: You didn’t have a clue about what made my poem a poem, but you started all this.
There may be some connection between energy level and levitation. Or Ma Varuna was on amphetamines. Her hands and feet led fidgety lives of their own. Her tongue raged, a flood-swollen stream, bearing me between mud-black banks on cruel waves.
“Your name, you say, is Devi?”
I sensed a trap.
“You know what your name means? Do you have the right to such a name?”
“As much as you have to yours.”
“Mine was picked out of a directory of cult leaders and crooks.” Ma Varuna laughed. “How about yours?”
“This is a free country.” I kept my defensiveness flippant. “You can give yourself any name you want. There’s a kid on my block who had his name changed officially last week. From Ralph Rinzoni to Anytime Anyhoo.”
Not. Ralph Rinzoni was the name of the paramedic who mouth-to-mouthed the Stoop Man. I sat on the curb and watched the paramedics wheel him into the ambulance. The Stoop Man, spiritual guide to the Haight, was dead even as they carried him away. I knew he was dead, the paramedics knew he was dead, maybe the Stoop Man wired to intergalactical times and spaces knew his time had come, but he couldn’t be declared