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actually supposed to be nearby. Obviously I'd just confirmed this
driver's worst suspicions about Westerners. The first problem was
that there were no other buildings nearby, or indeed even visible,
nor were there any people to ask for bad directions. We sputtered up
the monotonously straight flat road, spotting a five-year-old boy in
some kind of school uniform, barefoot and carrying three books on
his head as if practising lessons in deportment.
'Sivabalayogi ashramashram?' I asked him hopefully.
He grinned impishly, saying, 'Sheevbalashramum, ha?'
I nodded. He pointed to a clump of trees, saying something to
the driver in Kannada, the language of Karnataka, and about as
closely related to Hindi as Japanese is to Russian. The driver nodded
as if he'd known this all along. 'America?' the boy asked me. I nodded,
to save time. 'Give me one pen,' he demanded bluntly, his hand out.
I reached in my shirt pocket, discovering the Sheraton Hotel
Kathmandu ballpoint, which I must have looted from the sleepy
concierge. The boy's smile broadened until half his face was pure
ivory.
We buzzed and bounced on toward the copse of palms. Gradually
a low, drab, flat-roofed bungalow crept into view, squatting in the
midst of a dusty compound bordered by more fields. 'Sivabalashram,'
a humble wooden sign proclaimed. A couple of scruffy middle-
aged men in lungis milled around outside the building's main door,
holding coconuts and flowers, sucking the smoke from their
cigarettes through clenched fists as if puffing on joints. I asked them
if the yogi was home.
'Five o'clock, five o'clock,' one man said, pointing at the
wristwatch he wasn't wearing. I looked at my own. It was ten past
five already.
'The Bhagavan coming five o'clock,' my driver explained, adding
that he would wait for me, as if this were a client relations thing. I
joined the men, squatting on a concrete step decorated with
handpainted swastikas, the same traditional Sanskrit symbols
originally and popularly thought to signify eternity and good
fortune that Hitler adapted for his own purposes, tilted and reversed.
A woman of startling antiquity, so bent that her back and head
were horizontal to the ground, scuttled from behind the bungalow
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