Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

I remember thinking: “Well, it better .”

Still, I loved him. God it felt wonderful to love. And feel loved again!

I can’t remember how long after Kura’s confession it was — when he confided his fear that the Great Guru would peer into his cupboards and find them bare — or how long it was after he’d raged and scared the bejesus out of me — but one day we were in Barcelona when he announced, “We’re going.”

“Going where?”

“To Bombay.”

I was thrilled.

Could not wait. See, I had a mission — to seduce the old swami and reveal him for the fraud he was. [sings] “He’s just a man… and I’ve had so many men before, in oh so many ways … he’s just one more!” I was determined to smash the false idol and destroy my lover’s illusions once and for all. Thus, Kura would be forced to admit that I was the Great Guru, I was his teacher — and nothing could compete with what I had between my legs. O, I am telling you, Bruce, I was the most awful girl!

I’m still awful. At least, I hope I am!

The hegira began as a straight-ish shot but our course kept deviating, for reasons unrecalled and unknown. I think we came in through Karachi — don’t ask. We arrived in Bombay about a month after leaving Spain. This was 1970. From the moment we landed, Kura was quite ill. I thought he’d acquired some legendary Indian malady but since we’d only been in the place a half-hour or so it wasn’t too likely. I forgot to add an important detail: for the first time, we were traveling alone. That was how Kura wanted it and his posse reluctantly agreed. Not that they had a choice.

No arrangements had been made for a car to pick us up at the airport. So there I was, plunged headlong into the middle of that amazing LSD trip called India — thank God I was acid-free at the moment! — with the padrone fading fast. My 17-year-old Great Mother instincts kicked in; finally, I got to take care of him . I have no memory of how we got to the Taj — our hotel. All I know is that for a few days I was a pint-sized Patton. A real rite of passage. Man. We were up half the night. Kura’s temperature was crowding 105° but he refused to see a doctor. I fell back on junkie survival skills and rang for ice. The bellboys brought up bucketsful — they were all in love with me. O Jesus, by the time I left Dodge, I had that hotel wired. I whined and wheedled and finally shoved Kura into the bath. He whinged and whinnied and threw mini-tantrums, fought me all the way. That did the trick though. His fever broke at last.

Satsang was at 9:30 in the morning. It was already dawn and neither of us had slept a wink. When I suggested we put it off till tomorrow, Kura had a hissy fit. I argued my point: the Great Guru did his “questions and answers” seven days a week, year-round. What was the rush? But he was adamant.

Our car never showed. (Of course it didn’t.) We hung around the lobby like resentful drunks, half-hypnotized by the remorseful staff’s honeyed apologies and assurances this grievous error would soon be rectified. The longer we waited, the deeper we sunk in the comic quicksand of penitent, sacred hospitality. To save us from being swallowed up completely, I demanded a cab.

I know madcap taxi rides through India are an awful cliché but that one I’ll never forget. On the other side of my window there was some kind of full-tilt Halloween/ Carnaval goin’ on: a blurry burlesque of the undead, hands outstretched for flesh and candy. Whenever we stopped to make our way around some road-blocking cow — the latter apparently being the only living thing the municipality gave a shit about — the zombies pressed against the glass anew like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish. Kura compulsively checked his Patek, the perfect way to remain oblivious to our motorized rampage. I’ll admit my mordant fascination with the hairs-breadth escapes of those on the street whom the driver seemed determined to kill caused me to drop the ball on consulting the map the concierge had painstakingly notated. In a short time, we were lost. Kura sat as if frozen to his seat, his forehead too-warm to the touch. Soon we ground to a complete halt, with nary a cow in sight. I couldn’t help but ask the driver why, knowing his answer would be as meaningless as my question.

“Accident,” he said, through a jubilant slash of a mouth. A chorus of bobble-headed Ganeshas on the dash shook in exuberant affirmation.

Without warning, Kura bolted out the door, through the protozoa and into the festive ooze. I threw sodden rupees at the driver and gave chase.

I yelled after him but the padrone didn’t respond. When by some small miracle I finally caught up, I shepherded him into a grimy cafe. The return of his fever rendered Kura somewhat docile. I begged him to stay put while I went for directions. I paid the harpy who ran the place for a Coke twenty times over, for which she expressed time-sensitive gratitude. It was like some fucked-up hockey game — I’d probably bought about 15 minutes of bench time for Kura before heading back to the ice to get my nose broken.

I lurched into the street. I had no intention to seek help from pedestrians (if that’s what one could call them) and decided my best chance was a soldier standing in the middle of the street. He wasn’t directing traffic; his main function, it seemed, was to sweat and scowl. He had a machine gun slung over his shoulder. I got in his face and pronounced the name of the Great Guru. His response wasn’t so much cantankerous as outright hostile, with the implicit threat of pending violence to my person. I wondered if he harbored ill feelings toward the siddha but concluded it more likely that I’d violated a cultural code with my pretty young Western thing’s pushiness. I wound up back on the sidewalk, where pleas for money crashed against me like insects on a windshield.

Hangdog and defeated, I rejoined my man. Kura was nursing a cup of tea our hostess had thoughtfully prepared — and why shouldn’t she have? She smelled a tip that might conceivably cover a few months’ rent. I was glad to see Kura hydrating and my only hope was she’d kept the kettle on long enough to evict the tap water’s microbial tenants. (Though I figured what Kura already had was probably enough to kill whatever was in the water anyway.) I was about to announce the plan: to call it a day and return to the Taj for a much needed rest. Tomorrow, we’d have a proper car and driver and bring a porter along to make sure we reached our destination.

Then he spoke, for the first time all morning.

“The proprietress knows how to find him.”

He looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, like they’d become engaged while I was gone.

“Apparently,” he said, “his shop is just round the corner.”

A freakish serenity overtook him as we ambled onto acrid Mogul Lane, for we’d entered a world of myth that belonged as much to Kura as it did to Bombay. His eyes dilated and the color returned to his skin. We strolled along the broken spine of a vendor-choked passage already so familiar from the photographs that graced Kura’s collection of books by and about the Great Guru. He walked stealthily, almost regally, to his destiny — toward the man he hoped against hope would consent to become his teacher. The man he was certain would see through him, then see him through…

In the years leading up to our sojourn, Kura spent countless hours in his library inhabiting the jostling panorama of Mogul Lane, memorizing— memorializing —all its parts, re-creating shadowy and sunlit corners, summoning smells aroused by the baked-on heat of the Indian sun, flipping back and forth from The Book of Satsang text to the tattered visual archive of the boulevard’s temples and buildings, loitering amongst the shapes and forms of his pictorial montage with enormous patience and intent , so when at last he found himself in the actuality of it (en route to the tobacconist’s) he was like an avid child dropped down to Narnia, in hot pursuit of Aslan’s lair.