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One of my first roommates at the Ashram was a middle-aged African-American devout
Baptist and meditation instructor from South Carolina. My other roommates, over time, would
include an Argentinean dancer, a Swiss homeopath, a Mexican secretary, an Australian
mother of five, a young Bangladeshi computer programmer, a pediatrician from Maine and a
Filipino accountant. Others would come and go, too, as devotees cycled in and out of their
residencies.
This Ashram is not a place you can casually drop by and visit. First of all, it’s not wildly ac-
cessible. It’s located far away from Mumbai, on a dirt road in a rural river valley near a pretty
and scrappy little village (composed of one street, one temple, a handful of shops and a popu-
lation of cows who wander about freely, sometimes walking into the tailor’s shop and lying
down there). One evening I noticed a naked sixty-watt lightbulb hanging from a wire on a tree
in the middle of town; this is the town’s one street-lamp. The Ashram essentially creates the
local economy, such as it is, and also stands as the town’s pride. Outside the walls of the
Ashram, it is all dust and poverty. Inside, it’s all irrigated gardens, beds of flowers, hidden
orchids, birdsong, mango trees, jackfruit trees, cashew trees, palm trees, magnolias, ban-
yans. The buildings are nice, though not extravagant. There’s a simple dining hall, cafeter-
ia-style. There’s a comprehensive library of spiritual writings from the world’s religious tradi-
tions. There are a few temples for different types of gatherings. There are two meditation
“caves”—dark and silent basements with comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be
used only for meditation practice. There’s a covered outdoor pavilion, where Yoga classes are
held in the morning, and there’s a kind of a park with an oval walking path around it, where
students can jog for exercise. I’m sleeping in a concrete dormitory.
During my stay at the Ashram, there were never more than a few hundred residents at any
time. If the Guru herself had been in residence, those numbers would have swollen consider-
ably, but she was never in India when I was there. I’d sort of expected that; she’d been
spending a fair bit of time lately in America, but you never knew when she might show up any-
where by surprise. It’s not considered essential to be in her literal presence in order to keep
up your studies with her. There is, of course, the irreplaceable high of actually being around a