Hopelessly Devoted to Guru
When two women bowed before their teacher, I bowed out
We gathered each morning in the tamped dirt courtyard of the hotel. I sat on a rough wood bench letting the sun warm my winter bones. Robert lit a cigarette.
“New people arrived last night,” he said. “two women.”
“From where?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t see their passports through the peephole.”
I laughed. Robert and I met a few weeks earlier at the ten-cent-a-night hotel on the Ganges River. Neither one of us had any plans other than to stay in India as long as we could afford. Sharing a room meant we could last twice as long.
But there was nothing sexual between us. Maybe even something less than nothing. Robert once described his sexuality as that of a toaster so I was surprised by his interest in the new guests.
“They’re traveling with an older guy,” he said, lighting a cigarette. Robert usually smoked cheap, rolled-leaf, Indian bidis that smelled like stinkweed. An actual cigarette was a rare indulgence.
Robert worked as a dishwasher in Australia. Every year or so, he’d quit and buy a flight to India and stay for as long as his money lasted. I’d grown up on a blue collar block in suburban Minneapolis. I banked every…
