Heartstopper

Baba didn’t want it known where his ashes were scattered when he died—he didn’t want anyone to make a shrine to him. But when he died we didn’t call it that: we said “left his body.” He had done it before, when he was younger: had changed bodies while keeping his soul intact. “When you tear your shirt, do you cry? Get a new shirt,” he said. He didn’t worry about mending it. He wore a white T-shirt under the rough maroon robe of an enlightened one; the robe smelled like cigarettes because he could control every aspect of his body and could choose not to die of cancer. He died—left his body—in India, because he did not want to return to America. Of the allegations that surrounded him, one had led to a lawsuit against his organization, and he refused to heed the summons to appear in court. In exile, he maintained his silence around the subject, into death.

I have no memory of meeting Baba for the first time, of not knowing him. Likely because I was so little—­only five—and because I grew up hearing and believing stories about him that elevated him to the level of myth, the times I actually spent with him stretched over the times I didn’t. Baba, we all called him, which means “father.” When I was nine, he initiated me in India at his ashram. In my family, the honor of becoming my guru was one he bestowed only on me. On the balcony of his suite I offered him fruits and flowers that my parents had bought for the occasion. In Sanskrit I repeated back the words he offered to me, promising in my heart to be obedient to him, to follow his teachings, to trust him with the care of my soul. He gave me a mantra in my ear. He wrote it down for me but it was secret, and I told it to no one. I still remember it, though it has been at least a decade since I reached for it.

Baba visited me in my dreams, could read my thoughts, wanted only what was best for me. He was the symbol of a world that made sense, one in which our family was chosen, special, protected. But there was another side to Baba, or there was another world, one less magical, at once more dangerous and mundane. For years, I lived joyously in the first world, until slowly, then all at once, I arrived in the second. 

In the spring of 1989, my father had a spiritual revelation. He had been in the Santa Cruz Mountains attending a talk by Dr. Usharbudh Arya, the founder of the Meditation Center in Minneapolis, who was on a national lecture circuit to spread his knowledge about yoga. Dr. Arya was a serious scholar, fluent in not one but two ancient languages—Pali, the language of the Buddha, as well as Sanskrit—and was a former professor of South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. An autodidact, he received no formal schooling until enrolling at the University of London, where he earned his BA and also an MA; he then earned a LittD from Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. To me, he always looked a little like a brown Robin Williams, with a square, friendly face bedecked with ’80s dad-glasses, and, for much of my childhood, a white beard that also reminded me of Santa Claus’s. When my dad approached Dr. Arya after the lecture was finished, they looked at each other. My father, deeply moved by the power of this gaze, vibrating with the distress from the conflicts that had driven him to seek spiritual solace, laid his head on the shoulder of his future guru, and began to cry. 

This encounter, of two souls meeting in a state of immediate, profound knowing, is reserved for romantic love in Western culture. In our spiritual tradition, however, the instant connection felt between guru and future disciple pointed to a spiritual certainty: that the two had known each other in different lifetimes, and that they had work to do together in this one. Dr. Arya was a disciple of Baba—Swami¹ Rama—whom he had met years earlier in a similarly dramatic encounter. Already an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit and a meditation teacher, Dr. Arya took Baba immediately as his guru when they met in 1969. 

The guru–disciple relationship is a bond of intense spiritual significance, formalized by the initiation ceremony, after which the disciple is “their guru’s responsibility,” says my mother. “You make this resolve that this is the person who will guide you, and you will follow him unquestioningly. And the guru will do whatever is necessary for your spiritual well-being, which might involve putting you through difficulties and pain. Just like parents, who might ground you for your own good, which you might not like.” The guru figure can be both parent and trickster, someone whose antics would disturb their disciple’s complacency with the illusion of the material world, their attachments, or their self-conception. My mother remembers this aspect of Baba and Dr. Arya’s relationship: times when Baba would belittle Dr. Arya in front of their disciples, cut him down to size—acts that Dr. Arya always took with good humor, my mother reports, accepting them as lessons in shrinking the ego. No matter what: the disciple owes her guru absolute obedience. The guru owes his disciple nothing less than the safeguarding and the development of their soul.

When Dr. Arya took Baba as his guru, he joined the ancient lineage Baba represented, and began to see himself as a vessel for its knowledge. In the dedication to a book about the Yoga Sutras, Dr. Arya writes, in Sanskrit (as translated by my mother): “The tradition that started with the golden source of the creation, continued by Ved Vyas and other sages, and ending at the feet of Sri Swami Ram[a], I bow to that unbroken guru lineage.” When my parents were initiated by Dr. Arya, he echoed this idea: “It is not me who is initiating you. This is the lineage of Swami Rama that comes straight through me,” my mom reports him saying. If my parents’ guru was the most significant spiritual leader in their lives, then the guru of my parents’ guru, Swami Rama, was ever more powerful, almost unimaginably so. Even in absence, even before we met him, he was a constant presence in our lives. I didn’t dream then that the honor of initiation that had been bestowed on Dr. Arya by Swami Rama could also be given to a child—to me. 

Who was this man—the leader who would become my guru—who had the power of a god? When I was a child, my understanding of Baba blurred fact with magic. As an adult, I’m both surprised and validated to learn that Baba’s reputation reached far beyond our community, and that, for a time, he played on the national stage. 

Baba has many names: Swami Rama of the Himalayas, Brijkishor Kumar, Brij Kishore Dhasmana. His autobiography, Living with the Himalayan Masters, and the biography written by his disciple and successor Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, At the Eleventh Hour, are both filled with mythic origin stories, and vanishingly few dates. Born to a Brahmin family in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, in 1925, Swami Rama lyrically describes a childhood in the Himalayas spent under the tutelage of his guru, Bengali Baba, in Living with the Himalayan Masters. Alongside his yogic accomplishments, his educational claims included study at Oxford University, though this is contested by some of his former disciples. The fabrication would be in line with his ambition: not content to remain in India, the Swami had set his sights on making his mark on the West.

And America, at that moment, was particularly primed for his teachings. Yoga had arrived in this country decades before Swami Rama did, but the ’60s brought an explosion of interest in some aspects of Indian culture: sitar music, spirituality, and textiles. The psychedelic explorations of the era had also led to an openness toward other consciousness-­expanding practices like meditation (Paul McCartney, speaking to reporters after a weeklong meditation retreat: “We don’t need [drugs] anymore. We think we’re finding other ways of getting there”). Swami Rama landed in the States in 1969, during a moment of spiritual yearning at the closing of a decade of social upheaval and free love. At the same time, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had removed the quota system that had limited immigration from Asian countries, resulting in an influx of Indian engineers, and many swamis. With some exceptions, yoga had, up until then, been popularized and taught mostly by white people in America. From the transcendental meditation taught by the Beatles’ Maharishi, to the asanas of Bikram and Iyengar, Swami Rama’s teachings were part of a wave of Indian yogis looking to build their American legacy.

As a yogi, Baba practiced what we in the West now solely think of as yoga—asana, the postures that can increase strength and flexibility—as well as pranayama, meditation, and yogic philosophies deriving from Hindu scriptures. He came to America with a mandate from his guru: “All the spiritual practices should be verified scientifically, if science has the capacity to do so.” After teaching yoga at YMCAs around the country, he received an invitation from the husband-and-wife research team Dr. Elmer and Alyce Green to join their research at the Menninger Foundation, an influential hospital and research facility in Topeka, Kansas.² Their research focused on what we might now call wellness, the mind–body connection, and Eastern spiritual practices that could promote physical health. In 1970, Swami Rama became their “Swami in residence,” a position that went beyond research subject, as he also proposed experiments and spent time outside the lab with the Greens.

In the documentary Biofeedback: The Yoga of the West, which the Greens later made about their research, Baba is younger than I ever saw him, all dark curls and coppery skin. In striking contrast to the other jolly-faced gurus and ash-smeared freakshows, Swami Rama “was forty-five years of age, tall and well-built,” as Dr. Green writes in his 1977 book, Beyond Biofeedback, recalling their first meeting.  “He reminded me of an Italian Renaissance nobleman.… With a lot of energy for debate and persuasion, he was a formidable figure.” In Swami Rama the Greens had found a perfect ambassador for the alien East: he was fluent in English, dignified, Italian-­adjacent, charismatic, and, yes, handsome.

At the Menninger Foundation, Baba awed the researchers with the power of his control over various aspects of his autonomic nervous system. In one experiment, he voluntarily constricted an artery, which resulted in an eleven-degree temperature differential between the left and right sides of one of his hands, a feat that stunned Dr. Green. He writes, “The Swami’s demonstration showed exquisite… control over this normally uncontrolled piece of the neural apparatus.” In a later experiment, he demonstrated a feat that Western science had deemed impossible: by causing his heart to beat at five times the normal rate, he suspended the organ’s primary function of moving blood through the body without even “[twitching] an eyelash” in the process, observed Alyce Green, a phenomenon known as “arterial flutter.” Afterward, he removed the wires and went off to deliver a lecture.

Baba had, in effect, stopped his own heart.

I am still dazzled to discover that Baba’s canny connection with the Menninger Foundation generated national media coverage in 1971—this was the man upon whose lap I had sat as a child! The New York Times Magazine and Esquire both ran articles about Baba’s work, and I found a surprisingly in-depth report in Playboy, whose reporter even tried out meditation himself: “I loved it. After the extended session I felt very relaxed, very good. I would recommend the experience to anyone.”

I was not the only one to be dazzled. The research and the subsequent coverage gave Baba the legitimacy and the exposure to build a following in America and raise money to create the sprawling organization that would be his legacy: the Himalayan Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy. The Institute’s American headquarters were in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, an ashram situated in the Poconos, where we visited Baba in the summer, but it had centers all over America and in India as well. The Institute was officially under the governance of a board of directors, which comprised Baba’s most vigorous disciples (excluding Dr. Arya, who led his own organization)—­but really, it was Baba’s show. It was his home, his shelter, his community, his world—the world he created from his teaching and his desires, and from his ability to bend the reality of those around him.

In some respects, my parents were typical of their demographic: Indian immigrants who had arrived in America for graduate school in the late ’70s, my mother to study aerospace engineering, my father, computer science. Both had been raised in Brahmin households, my mother’s lower- and my father’s upper middle class. My mother, by choice, quit her aerospace engineering job soon after she gave birth, and stayed at home to raise me. My dad, who arrived in Silicon Valley in the gold rush days of the ’80s, worked long hours at various start-ups, making good money, but never making it big. But in other ways, they were very different from their peers. They came from different communities in India and had refused arranged marriages to love-marry against the wishes of my father’s well-to-do Tamilian parents. Both had graduated from the top engineering school in the ­country—my mother was one of about a dozen women among hundreds of men, a fact that made it hard for her to find a job in India, where employers were nakedly dismissive of female candidates. They were also artists: my mother a kathak dancer, my father a musician—both were lovers of North and South Indian classical dance and music. And both, caught in cycles of generational trauma and a troubled marriage, were actively looking for a spiritual path that would lead them through it. Despite their training as engineers, they were interested in the unseen, subtle world that yoga described, deeply curious about the ways the millennia of yogic knowledge could offer guidance and even peace to people living profoundly modern, complicated lives.

The Himalayan Institute, therefore, was not the first—or the last—of the spiritual communities my parents participated in. Restless, seeking, my parents were an uncommon if not fully rare sight in these communities, each headed by an Indian guru, but mostly composed of white disciples. While some Indian immigrants were drawn to these organizations, most were not, preferring to find their spiritual community at Bay Area temples whose members were almost all Indian: fledgling in the ’80s, and flourishing today. We did visit these temples occasionally, but for my parents these spaces did nothing to address the enduring spiritual need they felt, and reminded them, my mother especially, of the religious conservatism they had fled. They preferred the wilder, freer flavor of American yoga. 

But they were also discerning. What might have made these groups intriguing to their white members was in part the escape they appeared to offer from American culture and American life. Having little prior knowledge of yoga, Sanskrit, Hinduism, or even Indian culture, these white seekers could have been dazzled simply by the exotic nature of the offerings. My parents, both raised in Hindu households, were well versed in the scriptures. My mother knows Sanskrit. She was skeptical when she first met Dr. Arya, based on previous experiences she’d had with gurus, but was won over by a lecture she attended in which he offered an unconventional—even feminist—reading of the female saints of India. She was moved by the purity of his knowledge and his seeming lack of interest in the trappings of guru-hood, like the shows of obsequiousness from his devotees insisted on by other gurus my mom had encountered. The bond my parents had with Dr. Arya, the deep trust and love they felt for him, was solidified in these years—and by extension, the regard they felt for Baba. Their lives, and, for a time, their marriage, improved under their spiritual care.

These are my parents’ memories—what of my own? Writing this, I’m frustrated with the holes in my child-memory, which blur real events and dreams: what I have are flashes of image and vivid feeling. An adult’s capacity for creating and retaining memories is a power I’ve become conscious of while parenting my daughter, who, at six, has entered the age when some memories of these days might actually survive into adulthood. Still, mine, the mother’s, will always be more authoritative. My parents have said, “But we didn’t even meet Baba that often!” News to me, for my visits with him feel long and numerous in memory. All told, though we never made an official break with the community and continued our practices and relationships long after our drift away, my parents were active there for just a handful of years, from 1989 to 1996. Consequential years, no doubt, but a blip in the life of an adult. That span of time feels different to a child. In my memories—dreams—images—feelings—my guru was a vibrant and constant presence. I was a child and he was a grown adult, but he seemed bigger than the difference between the sizes of our bodies. I could tell right away that he was important; I could see that he was able to hold a room full of adults in rapt silence; I knew that he had magical powers, stories of which were sometimes told to me at bedtime. But my relationship with him had a more approachable quality than the ones I observed with his adult devotees. In some ways, it was not unlike the relationship I had with my grandparents in India, whom I did not see very often, but who doted on me. There were many moments with my family “backstage”—intimate, spontaneous meetings when Baba was relaxed and playful, affectionate, far from the sometimes-ferocious guru persona he wore out in the world. With me, he could be teasing, even a little silly.

I was a people-pleasing, attention-hungry kid, and Baba gave me beautiful attention. Once, in the Honesdale ashram, walking by the tennis courts, I was called over by Baba and kissed, which I complained about later, far out of earshot: “It was not a real kiss,” I claimed. “It didn’t make a sound.” Baba called me back a second time and kissed me loudly, while my parents looked at each other, astonished. I was five and don’t remember this: it’s family lore. But I remember the pleasurable scratchiness of other kisses from him, being wrapped in his smell of cigarettes and cologne. I knew I was special to him: even if he was talking to someone else, he would allow me to climb up onto his lap, even during a lecture—his attention made visible to everyone my inherent worth and potential. Somehow there was never another kid around to compete with: no kid was as beloved as me. Though I was an undisciplined child, I would have done anything to please him.

With their black-and-white thinking, children make the best believers. I believed that through his actions, his care, and his attention, Baba proved that my family was exceptional, that if we followed the rules—and we did—we would be rewarded with his special protection; that we would be protected against illness, misfortune, and even death. No one told me this, at least not explicitly: no one needed to. I had everything I needed to construct these beliefs from the clues the adults around me offered. In Palo Alto, where we lived until I was ten, I led a double life: Indian at home, and as white as possible at school. As the only Indian kid in my school, I had a painful sense of my difference without the language for it: I wanted only to be rid of it, to be like Jennifer and Maggie, with their old-money families, their perfect soccer ponytails, and their normal school lunches. I remember starting to find my social life difficult when I was in fourth grade, but my mom reports that the bullying and exclusion had begun years earlier. Normally, my differences made me feel ashamed, but Baba’s love made me proud. It was a secret I had, a bulwark against the isolating pain of racial assimilation, against the pain of a home life laced with tension. In a place where I was beginning to feel worthless, Baba’s love showed me my worth. The trick was to keep that love.

The truth was, I didn’t like to meditate. I loved the idea of magic, but the process of attaining it was too boring, the rewards too distant to ever motivate me to join my parents in their practice. Perhaps, then, I wasn’t so special after all, a realization that made me feel uneasy. I had made a promise to Baba to lead a spiritual life simply to earn praise from him and my parents—but the promise was weighty. I dreamed of Baba and told my mother: she replied that he was visiting me to remind me to meditate more. I felt guilty, but I didn’t meditate. The window of my childhood was closing: I was aware that whatever special dispensation and indulgence I was receiving would fade. How, then, would I be able to realize the spiritual expectation that had been placed on my shoulders? More worryingly, how would I earn Baba’s and my parents’ love?

Here was the greatest magic: We had been chosen. Our family was special. Not only had I been initiated by Swami Rama, which was an act radiant with meaning for all of us. He was the reason my brother was born.

In 1990, my father made a fateful visit to India to meet Dr. Arya and Swami Rama. Swami Rama told him that they had to have a long conversation, but every night of my father’s trip, when he showed up at Swami Rama’s office as instructed, he was told to come back the next night. Finally, on the last night of the trip, he and Swami Rama did talk, but it wasn’t a long conversation. “You need to have another child,” Swami Rama told him.

“I’d like to,” my dad said, “but I don’t think my wife would go for it.”

“I’ll take care of that,” said Swami Rama. “Call her tonight.” In Living with the Himalayan Masters, Baba tells a similar story about his own birth: His father and mother, a childless couple of “advanced age,” were instructed by Baba’s future guru, Bengali Baba, to have a child. Baba’s mother was in her forties when her only son was born. Mine was thirty-nine. When my dad called my mom that night, he was surprised to hear her say yes.

This is my father’s story, anyway. When I ask my mother about it, she tells a different one. Prior to my mother’s meeting with Baba, another disciple had told her that Baba “had a lot of souls in his pocket waiting to take human form,” she remembers. If he asked you to have a child, it meant he believed you were a highly spiritual person and a good parent.

When my mother first met Baba in the fall of 1990, she was struck not only by the power of his presence—the conversation she had with him was also uncanny. He repeated his request for her to have another child, a request that my dad had relayed, but that had not changed her mind on the subject. Easy for you to say, she thought, during this meeting with Baba—she thought but did not say. You don’t have to carry and give birth to the child. Aloud, Baba replied: “I know it’s easier for me to say than for you to do.”

“It was as though he was reading my thoughts, responding to every objection I had internally but had not voiced, as soon as it came into my mind,” says my mother. At the conclusion of this spooky one-sided conversation, Baba had changed her mind, not only ensuring the birth of my brother, but also convincing my mother of Baba’s supernatural ability to read people’s thoughts, a phenomenon echoed by many other disciples. The magic of this story rhymed with that of countless other stories people told about Baba: about his clairvoyance, a magical act involving an ever-full thermos of chai, and his ability to shrink tumors within his body and change bodies at will. Even now, it is hard to understand where the line is between reality, manipulation, fiction, and magic when it comes to the stories I know about Baba, the man who stopped his own heart.

My brother—BY, we called him in utero, for Bala Yogi, because of all the yoga poses we were sure he was doing in there—was born in 1992, on Guru Purnima. That the yearly festival day in which people honor their teachers with offerings and praise was my brother’s birthday simply could not have been a coincidence. Rather, it was proof that he was the great soul Baba had meant to call into this world. It was Baba who named him Bharatendu—“moon of India”—a beautiful if fully unpronounceable name in the West. 

Early on, my parents could tell that something was wrong. Large patches of itchy rash bloomed on my brother’s face and little body—he was so uncomfortable he was unable to sleep through the night. After months of tests, doctors determined he was allergic to nearly every imaginable food, and lethally allergic to nuts. My parents, at Baba’s guidance, treated him with homeopathy and Ayurveda instead of the allopathic medicine that might have offered my brother more immediate relief from his constant suffering. They were dedicated, researching in medical journals at the library, traveling to meet respected practitioners of Ayurveda for treatment, dutifully administering oils and medicines to try to cure him, staying up nights with him: for the first two years of his life, they barely slept more than two hours at a time. Baba said that my brother was a great soul burning off bad karma through this suffering, which may have comforted them through the anguish of seeing their toddler hospitalized for asthma, unable to breathe.

But maybe not. In a box of pictures I find a series of photographs of my brother’s body, close-ups of the weeping eczema sores, purply gray, the images wincingly painful to look at. Those images instantly conjure the smell of my brother’s sick skin: a vivid, animal scent. They took those pictures to send to Baba. They wanted answers. But they received no reply.

Baba died—left his body—in 1996, while in India. We had seen him there a few months before, a visit of which I have only a dim memory. A long white hallway, Baba is at the end of it, waiting for us, though he has not been alerted to our presence. The crush of closeness: incense. But perhaps I am inventing this memory from the story my mother told me about the visit.

At that point we had moved from Palo Alto to a rural area of Northern California to be close to another spiritual community of white devotees and headed by another Indian guru. This guru had taken a vow of silence and spoke through his curly writing on a chalkboard. He was many people’s guru, but not ours, a distinction we reserved for Dr. Arya and for Swami Rama, even as we began to drift away from their communities and drift into this one. Despite this, my parents hosted the old Bay Area group of devotees to meditate and honor Baba’s passing. The adults spoke ardently of his life and work, both of which, they knew, would continue in different forms. I watched as the story of him leaving his body began to acquire new, slightly fantastical details, and when I made a joke about it (“Next we’ll be saying he sprouted wings and flew through the ceiling!”), I was chided by the horrified adults.

Baba was starting to fade from my life. No one in the new community had ever heard of the old one: the aura of specialness imparted on my family by Baba had no cachet here, where specialness was derived from proximity to a different guru. My parents were disillusioned and exhausted, their marriage strained to a breaking point. When they spoke of Baba, it was with familiar reverence, but over time they spoke of him less and less. I was growing up. My waking life was consumed by the task of escaping my waking life; I was surrounded by the disdainful white children of the white hippies who made up the community, and I escaped not by practicing yoga and meditation, but through the intense and devoted reading of fantasy novels. I still believed in the world that Baba had taught me to believe in, the subtle, energetic world of unseen forces, and of magic. But I was dreaming forwards in time, not backwards, to the prospect of college, an intellectual life, boyfriends—escape.

And—there was something else. I had heard a rumor, or if not a rumor, then a shard of impossible information. There’s no one who could have told this to me except my parents, and in all likelihood it was my father. I understood that there had been an accusation against Baba, and from that I constructed a narrative that had no basis in fact: that a young woman had been pushed into a closet against her will and kissed—I could see it clearly in my mind: a supply closet. Either this had happened, even though that was impossible, or she had claimed that it had happened. Did I believe that it had?

My father and I were close at that time, unusually so. I looked up to him, wanted nothing more than to be in his favor and earn his attention and his love, much as I felt toward Baba. In the past, when we had discussed another account of sexual violence, I had gotten the sense that my dad didn’t really believe the survivor, that he felt that she might have been exaggerating, or else, if it was true, that it was icky, something she never should have brought up. This attitude fit the late-’90s stance toward sexual violence: these years were sandwiched between the Anita Hill hearings and the Clinton scandal, which we talked about both in my family and in the culture at large as though a twenty-two-year-old intern had just as much power as the president of the United States. (My father does not recall these conversations.) When I look back now, I know that not a flicker of fear or doubt crossed my mind. I trusted my dad, and he trusted his guru, who trusted Swami Rama.

My position, which was my parents’ position, which was their guru’s position, was the impossible: that the woman was not lying and that Baba had not done it, that the event had happened and it simultaneously had not happened. It was a strange, abstract intellectual puzzle—a paradox—that had no solution, like a fucked-up Zen koan. The accusation was so distant, and the accused was now dead. It stuck like a splinter in my finger, occasionally annoying, but easy to forget.

So easy to forget that after I graduated from college, as my first act of adult independence, I returned to the world I remembered from childhood. I lived for several months in the ashram in Rishikesh, India, run by Dr. Arya, who had, in 1992, ascended to Swamihood by renouncing his householder’s life, his family, and his possessions, and taking on the guru-given name of Swami Veda Bharati. At his ashram, I took meditation classes, did data entry in the office, and developed several intense and (mostly) chaste crushes on the young resident monks. Later, I volunteered at the Rural Development Institute in Dehradun and lived in the sprawling hospital-school-­institute complex that Swami Rama had built there, in part through donations from my parents. There, surrounded by Swami Rama’s legacy and the buildings, organizations, and teachings he had left for us, the paradox that had been handed down to me became a little more troublesome. I’d been through women’s studies courses in college; I had been raised by a feminist mother; I knew that false accusations of sexual abuse are vanishingly rare. Yet daily I was surrounded by true believers, people whose lives, they said, had been changed for the better by Swami Rama, and who spoke of him without any caveats, in glowing terms. Their belief strengthened mine. “I’m not sure if I believe in god yet, but I am getting a lot more spiritual these days,” I wrote in an email to my skeptical best friend in 2007. “I’ve started getting used to meditating in the mornings, though for me it feels more like praying, or setting the intention of my day. I say (in my head), ‘Baba, please give me patience and strength. Please help me be kind and loving and unselfish. And please send me a boyfriend.’” One of my jobs when I was volunteering was to edit devotees’ stories of Baba’s miracles, in the style of Miracle of Love by Ram Dass—a loving tribute to the guru from the people whose lives he’d touched. My story, contributed anonymously, described a dream of walking into a room where Baba is lecturing: “Immediately, I feel my body fill up with spiraling energy and I can’t move. After a while, must have only been seconds, but feels like much longer, it passes. Of its own accord, my hand writes on a piece of paper: Don’t you know I will always be with you?” As far as I know, the project was abandoned. 

In the hospital complex, Baba’s apartment had been preserved, and visitors were permitted to look into the room where he died. It had the aura of a shrine. I knelt there and prayed. Though I was beginning to doubt, I kept a picture of Baba in my vest pocket, right above my heart.

Was it idle curiosity or a more urgent desire that pushed me to search online for information about Baba? I returned from India and started my adult life, moving to San Francisco to attend graduate school, doing weird jobs on the side to make rent. I kept up an intermittent yoga practice: in India I had essentially gone through a yoga teacher-training program, and sometimes I wondered if I should get certified so I could teach the yoga class I was always looking for but could never find here, one that was rooted in cultural knowledge and respect and that incorporated aspects of yoga beyond the asanas. I had lost my childhood aversion to sitting still. The subtle world, which I had created an understanding of through practice, scriptures, and stories, had begun to feel rich and mysterious, and formed the basis of my writing. Baba had had deep knowledge of this world, of this I was sure. But my discomfort with my vague knowledge of his transgression was also growing.

It had been a couple years since my father was hospitalized for a heart attack so severe that the sonographer had had to run the echocardiogram twice to believe what he was seeing. When I saw my powerful father reduced to a frail man near death in the hospital, I felt my belief in Baba unexpectedly breaking: the idea that my family was special, chosen, protected was belied by my father’s grave illness. What had I thought, that our family would be spared such ordinary suffering? Everyone dies, I remembered suddenly, and as soon as I thought it, I noticed how childish, how absurd it was that I had believed anything different. At that moment, it was irrelevant to me that Baba had likely never made the obviously impossible promise to protect my father against death. If anything, the fact of my father’s survival and almost-miraculous return to health could easily have proved to me that Baba’s protection held strong. But the belief in my family’s exemption from illness and death was one that needed to break. It was a child’s way of thinking, and I was now twenty-­five. Perhaps it was this event that cleared the way for my next step into knowledge—­knowledge that proved to be stunningly easy to obtain.

A moment of what felt like idle curiosity on Google turned up a long-form investigative article published in Yoga Journal in December of 1990, and the ease of finding it still astounds me: it had been there all along. “The Case Against Swami Rama of the Himalayas” by Katharine Webster details decades of alleged abuse. The article was itself years in the making: Swami Veda Bharati (then Dr. Arya), for example, is quoted from an interview at a conference center in Napa, California, in 1989—the same year he had that fateful meeting with my father. The article had been published when my parents were disciples of Swami Veda Bharati’s and before I was initiated by Swami Rama.

More than twelve thousand words long, Webster’s article gives a meticulous overview of the depth and breadth of the alleged abuse occurring at the hands of Swami Rama, quoting multiple survivors of assault under pseudonyms, as well as former community members and people in leadership positions at the Institute. In the article, many women report similar, sickening experiences of being pressured into unwanted sex (there is a more accurate word for this, which is rape) with the idea that intercourse was part of their spiritual journey. Startled to be thrust into a sexual context with a person they believed to be celibate, many women were made to believe that theirs was a special connection to Swami Rama, and were confused and humiliated to discover the existence of other women in similar circumstances. “Because I’d rationalized that he was teaching me a lesson,” a former disciple, Carolyn, reports, “I believed he must be teaching other women the same lesson, and I shouldn’t begrudge his attention to other students.”

But the article is also filled with disturbing accusations that extend beyond sex. Megan describes Swami Rama humiliating a shy female resident, noting that he “bragged to a crowd of disciples that the woman would do whatever he told her, then put his dog’s collar and leash around her neck and walked her back and forth, while the others laughed.” Other abuses she says she witnessed included Swami Rama instructing female disciples to weed poison ivy bare-handed and kicking a kneeling woman in the buttocks. Unlike sexual assault, which usually happens behind closed doors, these abuses happened in the open, under the gaze of the community.

If I were writing this story as fiction, it would be the discovery of this article that changed everything for me. Strangely, it passed through me without even a shiver. Though I had never witnessed this aspect of him, I could recognize Baba in the horrible stories I read. His mercurial face, powerful and limber, could communicate so much with a single glance. By summoning his powers, I imagined, he could strike one dead with one fearsome glance, like Shiva felling poor Kama out of annoyance—though of course, that was the old way of thinking, mythic and magical. A new way of thinking offered itself to me too: a moment of betrayal in private, when the mask of holiness slipped and the ugly face of power revealed itself, banal and ordinary in its evil.

A wave of bad feeling passed through me—passed. There was a disconnection between myself and this information; I could not incorporate it into my childhood narrative. I didn’t know any of the women in the article. As far as I could tell, they had joined the community of their own volition, as adults; from their pseudonyms, and the racial makeup of the community, I could guess that they were all white. This mattered to me, because it separated me from them. It even gave me a prickle of discomfort along racial lines: white women were, according to various stereotypes, both more sexual and more desirable than Indian women; the disgust the white women expressed when talking about their Indian guru likewise touched a nerve, though rationally I knew their disgust stemmed from their horror at the situation, not from Swami Rama’s race.

That is all to say that I was already practiced in the art of holding two conflicting narratives in my mind. Even when I added more information to the information I already possessed, I could still hold it away from me, like a crazy story, like a curiosity. I didn’t call my parents or try to talk to anyone about what I had learned. Instead, I did what I do when I can’t figure something out: I tried to write about it, in a short story I worked on for years without success. I had been connected with a man who had grown up at the Honesdale ashram—an Indian American man—and I let him take me out to dinner in San Francisco. Knowing that he, too, had been a child in the community gave me hope that as an adult he might be similarly struggling to make sense of the allegations against Baba, that he might uniquely understand my unease. But his memories of Baba were beautiful. Baba was with him still; he had felt his real presence when his father had been in a health crisis and he had sat down to meditate. I didn’t—couldn’t—bring it up. That night, walking home through the dark city, I had a strange feeling, as though I were traveling not across distance, but across time. By the time I stepped into my bright apartment, it was as though I had left the story behind in the restaurant, like a lost hat. There was no room in my mind, in my life, for this knowledge. I tucked it away. 

Maybe another person would have let that be the end of it. Maybe some people don’t want to know the truth. I didn’t—and I did. Over the years, I would return to the Yoga Journal article two or three more times, always with a curiosity that felt casual, but that left me feeling a little nauseated. Did it sink in? It was like taking small sips of poison. A little more each time.

Have you ever broken a taboo from your childhood? Something you were told never to do, never to think? The first time you cross the forbidden line, you do so with your eyes closed, waiting for punishment to strike. But it doesn’t come. Still, the belief might not break right away. You might have to cross the line again and again before the thrill dulls and the forbidden thing on the other side becomes plainly true and ordinary. There was a point two years ago when I finally wanted to learn more: I was ready for my belief to break. I broadened my search online, reading everything I could find. In this way, I came across an account tucked inside a legal document that finally changed everything.

I was shivering as I read, I noticed, as though in fear. Because there were some broad but potent similarities between this story and my own, I felt as though I were looking at a flight map of a journey that had been interrupted, watching the trajectory of my relationship with Baba as it could have been. Like me, the disciple had been brought as a child into the community and had been initiated by Swami Rama as a young girl. Like me, she was Indian. But our stories were different too. She was a decade older than me and had known Baba in her early adulthood. She had been abused by the person she had been taught to revere and obey.

What had once been safely abstract suddenly flooded my body with feeling.

My parents and an entire community of people I trusted had placed me in the arms of a predator. It was luck, not their protection, that had kept me from direct harm.

Why did my parents—and later I, myself—fail to make sense of the information we had about the danger the community posed? And why did my parents fail to act? It was a question that included my parents, but was ultimately even bigger than them: How had so many people I loved and who loved me never disavowed this man—against whom there was a mountain of credible evidence—thus allowing him to further harm others? How did they allow me to remain in harm’s way?

Here’s what I know: Baba could bend reality. But aside from his seeming ability to mind-read and his other yogic powers, there were less-than-­supernatural methods he employed. The Institute’s leadership, under his direction, used every mode available to them to suppress dissent, including the law. They were viciously litigious in the ’90s, filing defamation and fraud lawsuits against people who had alleged abuse at the hands of Swami Rama, and people who supported those people. The very act of seeking internal accountability was offensive: letters to the board seeking acknowledgment and institutional change were met with contemptuous dismissal and became grounds for these lawsuits. According to a memo sent to the “Institute Community,” its leadership had explored “all possible legal courses of action” against Yoga Journal after the “deplorable and misguided” article came out, but decided against them, citing the difficulty of making a case against a publication with First Amendment protections in place. Instead, they urged their community to trust what they knew of their guru: “Don’t put much energy into such negative things.” They also withdrew all their advertising from Yoga Journal, and founded another publication, Yoga International, in 1991. (In recent years, a truce seems to have formed between the Institute and Yoga Journal: in January 2025, the magazine published a friendly online Q&A with Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, the Institute’s current board chair and spiritual head, in which he speaks glowingly of his teacher, Swami Rama.)

Ironically, while the 1990 Yoga Journal article had raised awareness—to those who were ready to hear it—about the potential danger Swami Rama posed, the article and other efforts to hold him and the Institute accountable might have had another effect: of serving as a loyalty test for the true believers, ensuring that those who stayed in leadership positions would be vigorously faithful to Swami Rama, even in the face of credible evidence of harm. Indeed, for years, if not decades, allegations of abuse had been brought to the board, all of them dismissed without further investigation. This was costly: with each new allegation the community lost supporters, donors, and board members, who resigned in disgust. Those who remained in leadership positions were people who were committed to furthering the narrative of their guru’s benevolence at any cost—and were willing to clean up his messes.

Pursuing legal means, expensive and time-intensive for both parties, was only one of the ways the leadership sought to control the narrative of Swami Rama for his devotees. Direct criticism, concern, and dissent were met head-on. Here’s Dr. Rudolph Ballentine, then president of the board and a licensed physician, in a letter to Robert Hughes, a board member from 1978 to 1980 and a longtime devotee: “I will not tolerate anyone’s malicious stories about the Institute,” he writes. “If you really wonder why there are so many stories about Swamiji and why they are so similar, then your knowledge of psychology must be very limited indeed and you must be blind to this society’s obviously confused attitudes toward sexuality and its apparent compulsion to discredit those in position[s] of leadership… Get your priorities straight and your head clear.” Dr. Ballentine also told others at the Institute that Hughes was spreading rumors about Swami Rama because Hughes was gay and was angry that Swami Rama had refused to arrange a marriage between himself and another man. “When Hughes openly asked questions about Swami Rama’s sexual activities during a weekend workshop [put on by the Institute], where he was the featured guest lecturer, he was escorted off the premises and driven to the airport,” writes Webster in her Yoga Journal article.

Like Robert Hughes, dissenters—both people who raised concerns on behalf of another and the victims themselves—were routinely shunned by the community. Megan, the former community member quoted in the Yoga Journal article, occupied both these roles at once, as a witness to the public harassment of others, and as a victim of sexual harassment herself. A graduate student in the Institute’s Eastern Studies program, she had decided not to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology and was finishing her first year when she began openly discussing her experience and observations with others. During this time, she was offered a position as the registrar and a tuition-free second year, an act she saw as buying her silence. She left, as loudly as she could.

In the accounts I read, I noticed a pattern: most of the dissenters were people who were either close to alleged victims or alleged victims themselves. It’s easier to discount a secondhand story, even a vitally researched article, in the face of pressure from the organization, harder to turn away from your daughter, or your friend. But even the proximity to a woman who had been sexually exploited was not enough to sway the heart of a true believer. When Dr. Ballentine learned that two women close to him had had sexual relations with Swami Rama, he did not disbelieve it; however, he expressed “difficulty in seeing the experiences that the women [had] talked about with Swami Rama as abusive… because that’s not what I saw. I saw these women mature and grow and blossom.” His belief in his guru was so strong that his thinking could remain flexible enough to justify any troubling scenario. In fact, leaders at the Institute both denied that any sexual impropriety had occurred and simultaneously suggested that if such a thing had occurred, it would have been for the women’s benefit, and not at all troubling. Speaking to the Yoga Journal reporter, Pandit Tigunait encapsulates the kind of logical contortions undertaken by the leadership of the Institute to make sense of the sheer volume and similarity of the accusations, a series of thoughts so amazingly illustrative that I cannot stop myself from quoting them in full:

Even if it happened, what’s the big deal?… People say that Mahatma Gandhi… slept with women. God knows whether it was true or not, and even if it was true, this is a normal phenomenon. And that did not undermine Mahatma Gandhi’s work!… No, this would not be shattering, certainly not. My father certainly had sex, and that’s why I was born, so will I lose my faith in my father?

Even if I found out—how can I find out? Because I do not want to find out. There’s no need for finding out, if I know it is completely wrong.

I look up pictures of these men now, trying to jog my memory of them—a prickle at the back of my neck. They look familiar to me: I crossed paths with them; likely they saw me with Baba. Ballentine’s gentle, pious look unnerves me, as does Tigunait’s jolly smile. I remember the people who passed through our lives because of our connection to Swami Veda: pandits visiting from India, particularly insufferable community members with touchy egos. But our guru had said to accept them, help them, feed them—so my mother did. It was a part of our spiritual journey to be in community, in part, with jerks. In practice, the fact that we were united by shared beliefs gave cover to all manner of bad behavior. Still, I am stunned not only by the lengths that these men went to suppress allegations of wrongdoing, but by the ways their minds warped around their belief. Their reasoning here, though disgusting to me, does not seem cynical. I believe they are telling the truth when they say they believed that their guru could do no wrong.

A charismatic authority figure who can do no wrong is a hallmark of a high-control group, and groups with unhealthy belief systems will often employ tactics like shunning to suppress dissent, as outlined in Escaping Utopia, by sociologists Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren. “Toxic charismatic authority can be difficult to escape (as many of us may have experienced in our own dramatic and unhealthy love relationships) because it engages a powerful need for belonging that keeps followers entrapped by the intense and urgent demands of the leader,” they write. Swami Rama’s organization was structured around his compelling presence: guru and organization worked in concert to exert exquisite control over his disciples.

This explains why community members who lived and worked at the Institute continued to support Swami Rama and gave little weight to the allegations, but it does not explain—or not directly—the actions, or rather the passivity, of my parents. As they both said to me, “We hardly saw Baba!” But from there, their memories and understandings diverge: they are divorced, and don’t need to make their narratives match anymore. When I called my mother about this story for the first time in 2022, she was shaken, driven to answer the question I laid out for her: How could she have missed the signs of danger? For my dad, the story could be held at a more abstract remove. “The bigger question is worthy of research,” he wrote to me, when I told him I was writing this article. “Why do so many popular gurus become psychopathic predators?” This is the question asked by a man, in full innocence: a request for another story to be told about the powerful man and not about the people he harmed.

It’s true that Swami Rama held some power over my parents, despite the fact that he was not their guru. But I think the reason why they—as people who were only adjacent to the Himalayan Institute and its influence—­were not alarmed by the disturbing stories that surrounded him has to do with another person’s complicated power over them: Swami Veda’s. In many ways the opposite of his guru, Swami Veda invited dissent and questioning of his own teachings. He won my mother over, remember, not by a display of psychic abilities, but by his command of the scriptures, his humility, and his kindness. My mother cites those early years with him as some of the most peaceful of her life. Without close ties to the Himalayan Institute community, my parents turned to their guru.

“We didn’t know a lot about the world,” my dad says, by way of explanation. “We were stupid, we were so naive,” says my mom, in a voice heavy with regret. My mother is a trained aerospace engineer who later became a math and science teacher, and is currently a lawyer. Her sharp mathematical mind makes her impossible to play Scrabble with—she’s the kind of person who studied for and aced the LSAT for fun. But in this case, once she trusted Swami Veda, she began to get the sense that in order to really commit to her spiritual betterment, she needed to “turn that critical part of [her] brain off, and be in the moment, and surrender” to gain the full benefits of the teachings—something I’d never heard her say before, and that moves me maybe because it speaks to a kind of tenderness involved in spiritual life, the vulnerability that surrender requires. It moves me, too, because it speaks to the hope my mother had, the belief that she could change her life. Baba and the Institute had, in so many ways, created a culture—a reality—in which it was possible to believe that there was more to the situation than met the eye. In other words, that there was a reason for these allegations—whether as a test of belief, as a trick of the illusory nature of the world, or as a spiritual lesson—that was not apparent to people at a lower spiritual level than Baba (which was, of course, everybody). His public silence on the matter deepened this impression; it read to my mother like the dignified silence of a man who knows so deeply he is innocent that he does not need to convince anyone else. My mother—who was trying to save her marriage, who was trying to change her life, and who had had a child, now very sick, at the behest of Swami Rama—had a lot invested in maintaining a connection with her guru, his guru, and the communities they led. She looked to the people she trusted, all of whom continued to place their trust in Swami Rama.

Despite many conversations with my dad over the course of writing this article, I still struggle to understand how much he knew, when he knew it, and why it never alarmed him. Partly this is mechanical: after surviving a massive stroke two years ago, my father has made a valiant recovery, but his memory has been altered. I do know he was aware of the Yoga Journal article at some point after its publication: my dad remembers when he and a group of devotees confronted Swami Veda about it, and Swami Veda went into silence, a yogic practice conveniently timed. Swami Veda later told my father that he had met with one of the alleged victims and believed her. And yet my dad recalls him saying, “There is a warp in the cosmic mind”—that all is not as it seems, even as no one is lying—a position echoed by the one Swami Veda expressed publicly in the Yoga Journal article:

When I ask Pandit Arya about the allegations of sexual abuse, he admits that he was very disturbed when he first heard them. He also has the integrity to admit that if they were true, it would be very terrible, a violation of the teaching that says one should treat all women as daughters. But for a man of Pandit Arya’s background and beliefs, the relationship with one’s guru is more momentous than any merely temporal bond. He cannot disbelieve his guru.

“It is a bleak statement on humanity that pretty much all the popular gurus have scandals around them,” wrote my dad in response to an email I sent him in the fall of 2022, outlining my distress about what I was learning, a distress he seemed puzzled by. Over the years he had begun to reconsider his relationship with Swami Veda and Swami Rama, a “long, difficult journey” that he considers himself at the end of. He found Swami Veda to be an “inspiring teacher” in the first few years of their relationship. But Swami Veda seemed, to my parents, to change in later years. My mother remembers that at some point, Swami Veda came to expect the shows of obsequiousness he had earlier scorned. She also remembers being assigned tedious, time-consuming tasks, like one that required hours of photocopying, and overhearing Swami Veda explaining, “You have to keep them busy.” My father writes, “I found a lot of troubling things as well, just not of a sexual nature. Gurus are human beings too, so one can expect flaws.” For his part, he has come to see the relationships with both gurus as ultimately exploitative, while maintaining a belief in the subtle beauty of the teachings themselves, for which both men claimed they were merely vessels.

“Thank god nothing happened to you,” my father wrote. That struck me as incorrect. Something did happen, I wrote back—but what? “If a parent drives drunk with their kids in the car, but makes it to the destination without an accident,” my friend Rhea St. Julien, a therapist, hypothesizes, “is that the same as not taking the risk?” My parents were under the influence, but not of alcohol: the intersection between their manipulation by their gurus and their agency as parents and choice-makers makes things muddy for me. Ultimately, I have no memory of a single inappropriate moment with Swami Rama, and whatever might have happened in an alternate future when he lived into my adulthood will always be an unknown: there is a strange kind of vanity in believing that my guru would have tried to rape me if he’d had the chance.

The curious, overwhelming cold that I feel every time I research, talk about, or write this essay tells me that my body now knows something it didn’t before. At first I thought it was like the delayed shaking of a person who has climbed out of a wrecked car without a scratch. But now I think it is something else. I have moved through this world in a female body: it goes without saying that I have been catcalled, harassed, spoken to inappropriately, fondled, and touched without consent an uncountable number of times since I was a girl. But because I am not white, and because I had always seen myself as existing outside the rubric of desirability, I had thought these experiences were punishment for my desire to be seen as beautiful, instead of as a sign of my vulnerability. Now my body, which is that of a daughter and that of a mother, is catching up to what my mind knew all along: that abuse is about power, not desirability, and that there is little I can do to keep myself safe, keep my daughter safe, in a society that does not value the safety and autonomy of women and girls. And here something clarifies for me: I think the gap between my mother’s response and my father’s might be due, in part, to their lived experiences, especially when it comes to their vulnerability to sexual violence.

Nearly three years of painful conversations with my parents undergird this essay, conversations that have taken this time in our lives as a starting point but have ranged up and down the family tree, backwards and backwards in time. I might never understand the particular circumstances that drove them to make the decisions they did: I might simply be unable to formulate the correct questions to deepen my understanding, as I lack the correct words to explain my distress to my father, who cannot understand it. My parents were being manipulated by their guru as well as loved by him, given teachings that improved their lives and guidance that harmed them. They were free adults who had choices—not only in what to do but also in what to believe—but because they were believers, their choices were constrained. They chose to believe in their guru, even as they were losing faith in him. They told me Baba was as powerful as a god, and they believed he could read minds, but still they rarely saw him, and did not think about him much. They wanted what was best for me, but ignored the evidence that Baba harmed people. These powerful and dizzying contradictions both make sense and defy it. But I think I can get a glimpse of the trusting, hopeful, unhappy people my parents were when they first met their guru. They were about the same age, in fact, as I am now. I wonder if the forces that drove me to write this story—the feeling of unease, the thirst for truth, the desire to more deeply understand, and thereby to change my life—are the same ones they felt in their early middle age, and that led them down this path. Spiritual seekers often find their most beautiful qualities and desires exploited. Like my parents, I, too, want to be a part of something larger, a force for good in this world. I, too, have found peace in the act of surrender. As much as I struggle to make sense of their choices, their impulses are as familiar as my own.

Long ago, a structure of belief was planted in my child self: only I and never my guru was considered fallible, capable of making mistakes and practicing ill judgment; even things he did that felt or seemed wrong were in the service of spiritual betterment; submission, surrender, and obedience were moral qualities a good girl possessed. I was accountable to a guru who was accountable to no one. Even as their own doubts began to form, my parents allowed this structure to remain in place.

I am writing this essay to dismantle it.

Sentence by painful sentence.

Though I was able to talk to several people about their experiences with the Institute, none would go on the record for this essay—only, to their immense credit, my parents. The Institute leadership may now be wary of writers asking questions about Swami Rama, even those who spent formative years as his disciple: my repeated queries, even to confirm basic factual information, were politely rebuffed. Others have a concrete reason to stay out of this article: the flurry of lawsuits the Institute filed in the ’90s makes speaking out still feel like a tangible risk. Like someone who has fallen asleep for three decades, I’m waking up to a truth that many people have been living with all this time. Some want urgently—whether for the sake of their own healing or to protect the reputation of their brand—to leave this unfinished story in the past.

But I cannot. Simply put, many people have put their reputations, relationships, livelihoods, and finances on the line in order to seek accountability from the Institute and from Swami Rama for the harm they caused, and to prevent future harm. Their courageous actions had a real impact: they inspired others to leave the organization and sent Swami Rama into exile in India in the last years of his life: they protected me. In 1997, a lawsuit was decided in the plaintiff’s favor, legally acknowledging the harm and holding the Institute financially liable. But over those years the call for the Institute to take internal accountability went again and again unheeded. In the Yoga Journal article, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait suggests that the women were lying either because they had been rebuffed by Swami Rama (“The person wanted something, and the other person did not agree to fulfill their desires… This sudden animosity indicates that there is something fishy in the statement of this person”), or because they were attempting to blackmail him (“Anyone who lives a public life can go through such remarks;… you have heard about all that blackmailing [of famous, rich athletes]”). Tigunait repeatedly declined to investigate the claims brought to the board in the ’90s, and continues to be the spiritual head and leader of the Himalayan Institute to this day. It is under his guidance, and his conception of harassment, that the Institute hosts residents, classes, teacher-training programs, and even retreats for women healing from sexual trauma. On the Institute’s website, alongside a series of vigorous denouncements of sexual harassment and a nondiscrimination policy, Swami Rama is celebrated as “one of the greatest adepts, teachers, writers, and humanitarians of the 20th century.” Without a formal reckoning, how will this community prevent abuse from happening again?

I am aware that the specifics of this story are unique to my family, to the meeting of Indian and American cultures, and to the wild, unregulated space of spiritual life, but the contours are almost frighteningly universal. Someone’s father, someone’s pastor, someone’s uncle, the beloved fantasy writer, your favorite comedian, the lefty journalist, the Supreme Court justice, an American president: whether in the tiny society of a family or at the highest levels of our government and culture, men with power are abusing it, and their organizations are closing ranks to protect them. Learning the truth about Baba led me to other truths buried in my family history, things I had similarly known without knowing. Now, it seems, I am surrounded by stories that have been buried in subtext: offhand remarks, a flinch at a name, a change of subject.

The trick of holding a story—a rumor, a shard of information—in the corner of one’s mind instead of letting it influence one’s body, actions, and beliefs is not unique to Baba’s disciples.

What do you know without knowing? From whose story have you turned away? 

Baba had a particular quirk when being photographed: he refused to look directly at the camera. This had to do with power, a devotee told my dad. When he looked at the camera, he gave it something of his essence, so those few pictures in which his eyes met the camera were to be treated with reverence, as though they were sacred objects. Once, when I was sitting in his lap, he said to my dad, “Take a picture of me,” meeting the camera’s gaze. For years, I would avert my eyes when presented with this rare picture, even when my belief was starting to unravel, deferent to the power he claimed was there.

But I am no longer deferent.

Baba, I am looking back.

[1] Swami is a spiritual title, meaning “master of himself,” and also a common South Indian surname. My last name bears no connection to Swami Rama, or to any swami.

[2] The Foundation will sound familiar if you’ve read Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.