Karma for Beginners Read Online Free PDF Page B

the path keeps going, finally snaking around to the entrance. As I come up to the doorway I pray Ninyassa won’t be there. She isn’t, thank god or whoever, and I make it through the pink marble without having to talk to anyone.
    The double doors swing open when I push them, like a saloon entrance in a TV Western. The room is huge, at least twice as big as the cafeteria at school. And it’s filled with hundreds and hundreds of people. I don’t know how Jayita thought I’m supposed to find my mom.
    One of the guys from the lobby yesterday stops me at the entrance. He’s bald, with a collarless shirt. Up close he looks like this guy Ed from the lumberyard that my mom used to go out with. He still isn’t smiling. “Name tag?” he asks, peering at my chest. I hold the tag out from my body to show him, so at least he won’t be looking at my boobs. Lumberyard Ed used to look at my boobs.
    â€œExtended Retreat,” he says. “Okay. Go on over to that line.” I grab a tray and some silverware and shuffle toward the steam tables. Each of them is filled with a different kind of glop. There are little cards in front. One says “Amaranth,” another, “Millet”; then there is “Sweet Cereal” and “Savory Cereal.” Savory Cereal has flecks of stuff in it and smells like an Indian restaurant. I ask the lady with the ladle what it is. She says, “It’s the Guru’s special recipe. Try it!” I’m skeptical, but she seems so enthusiastic I let her scoop some into my bowl. It lands with a splat; a little gets on my shirt. I walk out into the sea of tables to look for my mom.
    It really is kind of amazing how much like the school cafeteria it is: balancing a tray of food, trying to find a familiar face in a sea of chattering strangers where everyone knows each other except me. The only different thing is the huge painting of the beard guy surrounded by peacock feathers that takes up the entire back wall. Eventually I give up on my mom and settle for the next best thing, a table where there’s extra space and people aren’t talking to each other much. Just like school.
    Nobody looks up when I sit down, which I guess is good. My Savory Cereal’s cold by now; I can tell just by looking. Halfway through the first bite I am very sorry I didn’t argue with the ladle lady. It’s oatmeal, bland and thick, except with spices like Indian food, and no salt. It wants to be dinner but it can’t stop being breakfast, and it is gross. Washing it down with orange juice sort of helps and sort of makes it worse.
    I think maybe Savory Cereal will be more manageable with salt, and I know they won’t have salt, so I ask the lady who’s sitting nearest me, “Do you know if there’s any soy sauce?” She jerks her head up fast, fixes me with a sharp look, then goes back to her amaranth.
    I try the guy on my other side, a short-haired man with a checked collared shirt who looks like a normal person’s dad. “Do you know where the soy sauce is?” He turns toward me slow and calm, takes three deep breaths, and then keeps eating.
    So I lean across the table. “Excuse me,” I say to a skinny woman with long hair and a longer face, dressed all in white. “Can you tell me where I’d find some soy sauce?” The lady next to me starts saying, “Om namo Bhagavate” over and over in an annoyed whisper. Long Face looks at Checked-Shirt Guy, lips pursed in a sort-of smile, and then she nods at a laminated card in the middle of the table. It says: THIS TABLE IS RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO OBSERVE MEALS IN SILENCE. SAD GURUNATH MAHARAJ KI JAY! I am never going to get soy sauce. I hold my nose and eat my Savory Cereal in silence.
    . . . . .
    What I really want is my mom, but at least being around our stuff makes me feel a little better. I curl up with her yellow sleep shirt. I wish there was a TV I