35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

148
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
years. But the newly white beard, which was eerily similar to his
father’s, lent him a more venerable Eastern-sage appearance. He
now looked much more in character for the role he was about to
play on the world’s stage: messiah of the New Age.
One small restaurant I entered contained clients who all wore the
orange and the beads. My first thought, however, was that this implied
the restaurant served food acceptable to Western stomachs. I took
my Western stomach in, searching for somewhere to sit. The
proprietor propelled me toward a table with one spare seat next to
two young women and a man – all orange, all beaded. They seemed
delighted by this intrusion and introduced themselves: Ma Rukmini
– blonde, probably Californian, spaced out; Ma Tantra Ananda –
dark, gypsylike, Brooklyn accent; Swami Hariprasad – a youthful
Robert Stone, prematurely balding, a beard at least ten inches long
but containing fewer than a hundred hairs in total.
They behaved like people who had recently smoked a bale of pot.
What did they recommend one eat here?
‘Near Bhagwan,’ Ma Tantra informed me, in a dreamy tone illsuited
to Brooklynese, ‘everything is good.’
Her companions nodded profoundly.
I ordered whatever they had ordered and asked about their
experiences with the bhagwan.
‘Love,’ Ma Rukmini replied, making the word sound more like
‘loot’. ‘Bhagwan gives us so much love.’
Swami Hariprasad was a little more explicit, announcing in an
accent as bland as the Midwest that had probably produced it that
the bhagwan had put him in touch with energy he’d been repressing
all his life. I finally gleaned from this that he’d been getting laid
more in Poona over five months than he had back in Omaha over
the preceding fifteen years.
I dug into my fried flatbread and some kind of curried mush
composed mainly of potatoes. As conversation progressed I gradually
deduced that Swami and these two Mas had been enjoying threeway
sex – a novelty that was ‘opening up their chakras to the
kundalini energy’ rising brainward from its lair in the base of the
spine.