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When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them at
any given time and whenever one died off—taken away by hawk or fox or by some obscure
chicken illness—my father would replace the lost hen. He’d drive to a nearby poultry farm and
return with a new chicken in a sack. The thing is, you must be very careful when introducing a
new chicken to the general flock. You can’t just toss it in there with the old chickens, or they
will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to slip the new bird into the chicken
coop in the middle of the night while the others are asleep. Place her on a roost beside the
flock and tiptoe away. In the morning, when the chickens wake up, they don’t notice the new-
comer, thinking only, “She must have been here all the time since I didn’t see her arrive.” The
clincher of it is, awaking within this flock, the newcomer herself doesn’t even remember that
she’s a newcomer, thinking only, “I must have been here the whole time.. .”
This is exactly how I arrive in India.
My plane lands in Mumbai around 1:30 AM. It is December 30. I find my luggage, then find
the taxi that will take me hours and hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a remote
rural village. I doze on the drive through nighttime India, sometimes waking to look out the
window, where I can see strange haunted shapes of thin women in saris walking alongside
the road with bundles of firewood on their heads. At this hour? Buses with no headlights pass
us, and we pass oxcarts. The banyan trees spread their elegant roots throughout the ditches.
We pull up to the front gate of the Ashram at 3:30 AM, right in front of the temple. As I’m
getting out of the taxi, a young man in Western clothes and a wool hat steps out of the shad-
ows and introduces himself—he is Arturo, a twenty-four-year-old journalist from Mexico and a
devotee of my Guru, and he’s here to welcome me. As we’re exchanging whispered introduc-
tions, I can hear the first familiar bars of my favorite Sanskrit hymn coming from inside. It’s the
morning arati, the first morning prayer, sung every day at 3:30 AM as the Ashram wakes. I
point to the temple, asking Arturo, “May I.. .?” and he makes a be-my-guest gesture. So I
pay my taxi driver, tuck my backpack behind a tree, slip off my shoes, kneel and touch my
forehead to the temple step and then ease myself inside, joining the small gathering of mostly
Indian women who are singing this beautiful hymn.