In August of 2004, when I had just arrived in Beaumont, Texas, I had the misfortune of stumbling across a young man who went to great lengths to convince me that Jesus had brought me from India, all the way to America, so that he could tell me about Christianity. Now that was a startling revelation because if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bothered carrying my bank statements, transcripts and passport to the US embassy in Bombay for my visa interview; I’d have simply told the interviewing officer when she asked me why I wanted to go to America that it was my destiny as ordained by god. In any case, I did receive my visa and even now, it doesn’t say “divine intervention” on it which is quite disappointing if you ask me. This charming yank, with his distinctly Texan drawl, went on to tell me that, “hale, down’t you fowget where awl murderers, heathens and blasphemers end up, hale. Aawl of eternity, they gonna burrn in hale”. Then he went on tell me that his was a kind god, a loving god (not in the horny sense of the word), a god that cared. I listened. I argued. I invoked science. I listened. I quoted. I reasoned. But he had the last word. I was going to hale.

Irreligious by nature, I had a close brush with spirituality many years ago when I found myself in dire straits owing to a variety of reasons; I took to Vedanta, a school of Hinduism with close-ties to the Upanishads with a brief (thank god?) but impassioned fervor. I began attending Vedanta classes with a skeptic friend I managed to drag along by convincing him that it was an opportunity to meet attractive women; the first day, I tried to think of my exam scores to prevent myself from laughing when the guru began the lesson with a mantra that I later learnt could unleash the power of a thousand nuclear explosions (are you listening you WMD junkies?). A thousand nuclear explosions! zounds, the Manhattan project sounds amateurish in comparison. But honestly, the only reason I was inclined to religion all of a sudden was that I’d been reading too much Harry Potter and wanted to learn some seriously dangerous curses that I could use against all the cretin swarming around me. No, I didn’t want, to quote Doctor Octopus from Spider Man 2, “the power of the sun in the palm of my hand”, my ambitions were more modest – I wanted x-ray vision, to relieve myself without having to relieve myself, to predict if I’ll die drinking cheap booze,the mundane things we’d all like to have. So on the first day, I heard an apocalyptic mantra and was taught that the ultimate aim of all this learning was to acquire cosmic consciousness, to turn into some kind of a Hubble Space Telescope. Another boy, who was apparently taking all this consciousness stuff very seriously, told us that great swamis had toured the Solar System; from Mercury to Pluto and back in the blink of an eye (NASA, are you listening?). I was impressed, no doubt and paid some money and bough a text book with a brown plastic cover on it with lettering in Sanskrit and English. The index had a list of chapters that continued on the next page; I thought that when I ‘d finish reading all the chapters, I’d have attained cosmic consciousness. So I went home, returned all the books I’d been reading to the shelf, and began reading about the cycle of rebirth when my attention turned to a lizard that had a fly in its mouth. After it scurried under the tube light, I placed the treatise down and told myself that I had attained enough consciousness for one day.

A week or two later, my friend the skeptic dropped out, as there seemed to be no girls wanting to attain cosmic consciousness. A month later, I attended a speech by a high priest of Vedanta (whom I do not wish to name in case he gets offended and decides to invade my bowel movements using telekinesis) who looked remarkably fit for his age; before speaking, he began chanting the apocalyptic mantra and the audience joined in. “Illusion” he began, “all that is around us is an illusion. What then is reality? Is it what our senses perceive ?”. Hmmm. Something to think about. That mongrel pissing on the road is an illusion. That man, wiping his mouth, is an illusion. The police chowk, an illusion. The Internet cafe, an illusion.  Then what the #$%^ is not an illusion? “Reality…”, the master went on, “is unchanging”. The guy was impressive; I was sure he had been around the solar system. In the blink of an eye, as I was told. Faster than the speed of light. General Relativity is an illusion. The master was not lacking in humor either; he frequently joked, provoking great laughter in the audience. A man beside me in a saffron robe and long beard was laughing so hard that I thought I didn’t understand the joke. So I laughed with him, not to feel left out. After the speech, I came out feeling more spiritual than I’d ever felt in my life. I wanted the solar system so $%^&ing badly that I forgot where I was walking and stepped on a pile of shit that soiled my jeans permanently. Later on, after washing off the shit, the spirituality returned; I read the treatise and finished nearly half of it. That was as far as, say, Jupiter? Possibly. Soon, I experienced such confidence welling in me that I’d think to myself while walking on the street-look at those poor bastards, they’ll never know what is reality, where as I, I will become master of my own destiny, I will become a star child; once I’ve conquered the solar system I’ll move on to other shores, the Milky way, in the blink of an eye.

A month later, I seriously considered joining the master’s ashram, where, for the modest price of 99 thousand rupees an year, I could stay in the ashram with the disciples and pursue godhood. Living conditions in the ashram would be strict-no oily food, prayers from 4am, lights off at 9pm, limited TV hours, no booze, no marijuana, no watching porn on the public computer, restricted visitor’s hours, no leaving the ashram without permission, yes, it would be a demanding existence. If I weren’t doing so poorly in my exams, I wouldn’t have had the guilt that stopped me from asking my parents to shell out 99,000 rupees (an auspicious amount, no doubt, being a thousand rupees less than a lakh, a thousand tiny suns); but as I finished reading the treatise, I found that no one had been able to explain some minor issues I had with the concept of re-birth; I didn’t dare ask the high priest for fear of incurring his wrath since I noticed that he dismissed such basic questions with the arrogance of a cosmically conscious soul that had little time to waste on such trivialities. Soon, I had the opportunity to ask an elderly disciple of the swami to tell me about rebirth, which he explained was a dreadful cycle until the soul attained godhood. But I already knew that and I wanted more proof. “Have you traveled across the solar system?”, I asked him wearily, and he looked at me as if I was stoned. Since then, my impiety has grown and my ambitions have diminished; I now turn to Hollywood for all my inter-stellar traveling.

Coming back to Texas, the mad Christian didn’t know that I almost became a sorcerer, a chanter of apocalyptic mantras and a seer of everything; that wanting to traverse the solar system, I traversed a pile of shit. That hale, as the master said, was not a geographical location but a state of mind. That illusion, was what had brought me to America, more than anything else.