The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales

THE WISDOM OF THE EAST

Alan Bennett took a quick look up and down Fifty-Ninth Street to make sure that no acquaintance was in sight, and ducked into the elderly building.

Inside the doors was a vestibule before you started up the creaking steps. Around the vestibule were glass frames. One of these held samples of a commercial photographer's art. Another contained a brown-tinted photograph of a dark-skinned man with a prominent nose and large, liquid black eyes. Under the photograph were the words "Shri Motilal Bhulojna. Third Floor."

As Bennett stood with his back to the big glass door, absorbing this information, a voice at his elbow said: "You are Mr. Bennett, are you not?"

Bennett spun and faced Shri Motilal Bhulojna himself, in a white suit.

"Why ... uh ... yes," said Bennett.

"A commercial artist?"

"Yes." Bennett wondered how the fellow knew that. Of course, it is not too difficult to discover a man's occupation if you want to go to the trouble.

The Yogi was not quite so tall and thin as Bennett. He looked just about Bennett's age, which was thirty-five, although Bennett looked older than that because his hair had begun to gray.

"I stepped out for a minute," continued Shri Motilal. "Will you come up? I am about to give my introductory talk." He trotted up the creaking stairs, and Bennett followed with a slight frown of perplexity.

Halfway up, Alan Bennett figured out what was wrong. The big glass doors opened inward. He had been standing with his back to them. To enter by those doors', it would have been necessary to push him, Bennett, out of the way. There were no other doors opening off the ground-floor vestibule.

Bennett, being an artist, was not too long on logic. But he could see that either (a) things were not what they seemed, or (b) Shri Motilal Bhulojna had either come down from the ceiling, or popped out of a trapdoor like the Devil in "Faust," or had wafted through the solid matter inclosing the vestibule.

He quickened his step. Before, he had been on the verge of calling off his visit to the alleged Yogi. Now nothing short of superior force would have kept him away.

When they reached the third floor, Shri Motilal opened a door in the conventional manner and waved Bennett through. He said: "Will you sit there, please?"

Bennett saw a number of chairs at one side of the room. Four of these were occupied, by one small, bleary old man and three women: one matron built on battleship lines, one middle-aged desiccated virgin, and one blonde, square-jawed girl, good-looking but verging on spinsterhood.

Shri Motilal Bhulojna reappeared. He still wore his white suit but had changed his shoes for slippers and covered his blue-black hair with a turban.

He began his lecture without hesitation, using the

British pronunciation with a slight but pervasive nasal accent and a tendency to stress the wrong syllable of a word. "My friends, before you be-gin a course of instruction in the discipline of Yoga, it will be desirable to clear up any misconceptions that your Western minds may be harboring.

"To begin with, it is a great mis-take to suppose that the mere fact of Eastern origin is any guarantee of mysterious or occult powers. India has developed her own schools of materialist philosophy. For instans, the Vaiseshika school anticipated many of your Western doctrines of atomic physics. And it is a notorious fact that India has produced her share of charlatans and fakers.

"I will not make exaggerated claims for the benefits that you will derive from the discipline of Yoga. As one of your own prophets remarked, many are called but few are chosen. Not all of you are equipped in this incarnation to achieve the state of superconsciousness known as samadhi, which is the goal of our philosophy. But as you persevere you will achieve, and as you achieve you will be rewarded.

"The first branch of Yoga we shall take up is the Hatha, or physical, Yoga, for you must obviously learn to control your bodies before you can dispense with them. Later we shall work up to the Jnara or intellectual Yoga—"

Alan Bennett found that the singsong cadence of the voice was putting him to sleep. He woke up with a jerk. Shri Motilal Bhulojna noticed and looked severe. Bennett pulled himself together in time to absorb the instructions for the first two steps.

One step was abstinence. Bennett did not think he would miss the liquor much, since he was a very sparing drinker. The meatless diet did not appeal, but he supposed he could put up with it for a while anyway. The ban on smoking promised to be a real hardship.

The other step was a preliminary bout of dharana or fixed attention. The five aspirants were simply to sit absolutely still for one hour. Having issued that instruction, Shri Motilal kicked off his slippers, hitched up his white pants, sat down on the floor, and settled himself in the lotus posture, with each foot resting on the opposite, thigh. Then to all appearances he became a brown-skinned statue.

At the end of ten minutes, Alan Bennett developed an itch on his nose, then an itch in his left foot, then an itch on his right shoulder blade. The itches spread until Alan Bennett was one vast itch.

At twenty-five minutes, the bleary little man coughed loudly, got up, and walked out muttering, "Damn foolishness." Bennett sympathized with him but did not intend to leave until he had settled the question of how a man can go through a glass door without opening it. The incident took Bennett's mind off his itches for a while, although they soon returned.

When they seemed utterly intolerable, Shri Motilal uncoiled himself, got up, and said: "That will be all, friends. I trust I shall see you tomorrow night at the same time. Good night."

Bennett had his mouth half open to ask about the door, but he lacked the brass to force the question on the Yogi in the face of such a plain implication to depart

Bennett had trouble with his pictures the next day. He blamed it on the landlady's noise, on the humidity, on the poorness of the light coming through the skylights of his studio—it was a summer-thunder-showery day—and finally on the real cause, which was his curiosity about the incident of the glass doors.

He arrived at Bhulojna's nearly half an hour early, which would have sounded fantastic to those who knew Alan Bennett's habits. He was the first to appear. Bhulojna told him to make himself comfortable and floated off into some inner sanctum.

Then the blonde arrived. She said: "Hello. I'm Pauline Edge. Your name's Bennett, isn't it?"

Bennett admitted with some reluctance that it was.

The girl continued: "Mother's running some club thingummy tonight, but she told me to come and remember everything Mr. Bhulojna said." They talked about the weather, discovered that they had a couple of acquaintances in common, and in a few minutes were old friends.

Bennett said: "What do you do, Pauline?"

"Me? I just puppy-dog mother."

"Is that your idea of fun?"

"Lord, no. But I'm not fitted to do anything else. We're members of the New Poor, you know. Have been for ten years. I'm not pretty enough for modeling. I'd have at least learned to run a typewriter, but mother wouldn't have it, and since she has what little money there is, here I am. That's what comes of being raised to be a debutante, damn it!"

"How'd you happen in here?"

"Some more of mother's ideas. Now that she's paid for the course, at least one of us will have to go through with it. How about you?"

"Me?" said Bennett. "Oh, I don't know. I was getting bored with my friends, and I thought I ought to have some interests besides my pictures. So I thought I'd see what there was to this wisdom-of-the-East idea."

"Here comes the Master now," said Pauline.

Shri Motilal Bhulojna drifted in. "Good evening, friends," he said, blandly unconcerned with the shrinkage in his audience. "Tonight I give you some more of the ideological background of Yoga, so that you shall understand that it is not hocus-pocus. We can be more informal now that the materialists have fallen by the wayside, as they always do.

"The postures of Hatha-Yoga, known as asana, are the means of raising the transcendental elements in your personalities to their rightful position of control over the material elements. By ascending the triad of dharana, dhyana and samadhi, you not only gain command of your own bodies—including the so-called 'involuntary' functions—but over the forces of nature, and eventually achieve unity with the universal spirit—"

At this point Bennett began to lose the thread of the argument. He could not decide whether he was stupid not to understand all these metaphysical terms, or whether Bhulojna was putting something over on him.

He wished most avidly for a smoke. He interrupted the flow of metaphysics to ask: "Excuse me, but how long do I have to give up these things—smoking and drinking and such?"

Shri Motilal looked at him pityingly. "These things are merely the first items on the list of things you will give up."

"Huh? You mean there's more?"

"That is so. Of course, since neither of you is married, it is unnecessary for me even to mention one of the subjects."

Pauline Edge here gave a gurgle of suppressed laughter, whereat the Yogi looked very stern indeed. "I see nothing humorous in such a matter, Miss Edge. You do not appear to realize the sacrifice I am making by offering myself as your guru. To live in this den of materialism; to degrade myself by accepting money— But then, how could you? You cannot know how you handicap me in my mastery of the highest grade of Yoga—the Yoga of Patanjali, the Yoga of inaction—for you have never experienced it. The fault is mine. I should have told you that as you advans in your studies, you will miss these material pleasures less and less. If you attain samadhi, your attitude toward material things will be one of indifference or even disgust."

Bennett asked: "What's the purpose of that?"

"Ah, that is the whole point. It is hard to explain the unexplainable, but I will try. Buddhism, which is in a sense a heretical offshoot of Yoga, expresses it thus: the five aggregates of grasping are pain. The cause of pain is the craving that leads to rebirth. The cessation of pain depends on the cessation of craving, which is attained by the disintegration of the aggregates that compose the personality. Our doctrine is slightly different from that, but it gives you an idea—" And Shri Motilal was off again, his fingers making delicate patterns in the air and his eyes fixed on something far away.

"Now," he said, "let us try the lotus posture. It would be unwise for you to assume it more than fifteen minutes of material time on the first trial. Remove your shoes."

Pauline had no great difficulty in getting into the position. Bennett accomplished it only after much painful grunting and cracking of joints. Bhulojna said: "No, do not place your right hand on your knee. That is the heretical Buddhist variant." And he floated off.

After a few minutes of silence, a grunt came from Alan Bennett. Then an indescribable sound that, if he had not been trying to maintain a meditative silence, would have been, "For God's sake get me out of this!"

He made a few movements to try to escape from the posture, but they did no good. He was stuck. He felt like a rat in a trap, and the fact that the trap was composed of his own members only made the sensation the more gruesome. He tugged and pushed at his feet, but that only aggravated the pain.

Pauline looked at him, then cried in alarm: "Help! Mr. Bhulojna!"

The Yogi drifted through the solid wall of the room. While Bennett forgot his agony and Pauline gawped, Shri Motilal touched a couple of Bennett's muscles. Bennett's legs came out of their contortion.

Bennett said: "How ... how did you do that?"

"How did I— Ah, you mean my entrance. I told you that we attain to control over the forces of nature."

"Is that how you came through the door last night?"

"Yes. I fear I grow careless. You have cost me a severe setback, for the essence of these powers is that one shall be too indifferent to the material world to use them. Can you rise?"

Bennett tried. The other two finally got him to his feet, but he could not stand anywhere near straight.

Pauline supported Alan Bennett down the stairs and out. She asked him anxiously: "How are you feeling, Alan?"

"I think my back's busted," replied Bennett. "Oh, you poor boy! You need someone to take care of you!"

"Thanks," said Bennett, "but right now I need a drink more."

"Swell idea. But—how about Mr. Bhulojna's rules of abstinence?"

"To hell with Mr. Bhulojna."

"Still, Alan, I think he's really got something there, with his oozing through walls."

"Maybe he has. But he can keep it as far as I'm concerned. I'm an artist, not a committee for psychical research. Now how about that drink?"

By the following evening, Bennett found himself able to walk almost normally. Pauline telephoned him: "Alan, are you still interested in the wisdom of the East?"

"No! Well, maybe I am a little, but not to the extent of tying myself in hard knots for it. Why, Polly?"

"I think I've found one who won't tie you in knots."

"Found one what? Another Yogi?"

"Not exactly. This one calls himself a Vedantist philosopher. Name's Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh. He guarantees to give you all the Eastern wisdom you want without contortions or breathing exercises. Want to try him out?"

Bennett did.

Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh hung out on East Fifty-Ninth Street only a couple of blocks from Shri Motilal Bhulojna's place. Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh himself was a more colorful person than the Yogi—tall and powerfully built, with a long, gray beard and bushy eyebrows. His audience was much the same sort of crowd that Bennett had found at Bhulojna's the first time, only bigger.

Bennett had been late, in accordance with his usual habits. He arrived when Bhamkh was saying: "—wherefore the self is not the unity of the evergrowing and changing mental experiences. The self in dreamless sleep cannot satisfy our need, since it is empty of all content and is a bare abstraction. The true self is the universal consciousness existing both in and for itself. The three states of the soul—waking, dreaming, and sleeping—are included in a fourth—turiya—which is intuitional consciousness, where there is no knowledge of objects internal or external. It is the unchanged and persistent identity which continues in the midst of all change—"

Bennett did not understand this, but his artist's sense could appreciate the fine picture that Shri Ramanuja made with his turban and beard and sweeping arms.

"—which brings us the doctrine of Maya, the world illusion. Every object tends to pass away from itself to something else. The categories of time, space, and cause, which bind experience, are self-contradictory. Our knowledge of the world is inconsistent—"

"Wonder if I could get him to pose for me," thought Bennett. "They wanted a rajah for that blended-rye ad—"

After it was all over, Bennett said to his friend: "I didn't quite get it all, I'm afraid."

"Neither did I," replied Pauline. "But isn't he picturesque? I think I'll go to the rest of the lectures in this course; they're cheap enough."

She went, and Bennett, whose own girl friends had all married or moved away a couple of years previously, went, too. By the third lecture he was getting restless.

When the audience was breaking up after Bennett's third lecture, and the usual knot was plying Shri Ramanuja with questions of honest puzzlement or spurious erudition, Bennett said to Pauline in a low voice: "Polly, all I get is words, words, and more words. Don't you think we could get more wisdom of the East for our money out of somebody else?"

Pauline looked uncomfortable. Before she answered, Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh was upon them. "My friends!" he said heartily. "I have had my spiritual eye on you for some time." Then, in a much lower voice: "How would you like to join our Inner Circle?"

"Is there one?" asked Bennett.

"Yes, surely. One does not expose the tender minds of children like these to the ancient wisdom without preparation."

Bennett queried: "Does that mean giving up all the material pleasures?"

"No, no, no silly asceticism. We merely penetrate to the reality that underlies the world illusion. Come, I beg of you."

They went.

There were three other members of the Inner Circle. All, to Bennett's surprise, were good-looking girls.

The room was dark and high-ceilinged. At the far end was a little statue of something with a lot of arms, illuminated by a concealed red light.

Shri Ramanuja had changed to a long gown. He said solemnly: "In this, the five thousand and forty-third year of the Kali Yoga, we have gathered in the name of Ardha-narissa, to symbolize the union of the Maya or cosmic illusion with the Prakriti or plastic matter, and thereby to penetrate to the primary source of mundane things." Here followed several metaphysical sentences that Bennett understood not at all. He felt vaguely uneasy.

Bhamkh continued: "The first mantra or word of power that we shall learn this evening is —." At the end of this sentence Bhamkh rounded his lips as if he were saying "oh," but no sound came forth.

"Beg pardon?" said Bennett

Bhamkh smiled "I forgot that you are a little behind the rest of us. Know that mantras, which the foolish Yogis misuse as a mere hypnotic device, are in reality ideal, inaudible sounds constituting one aspect of the universe. When written, they form a universal terminology. Do you speak French?"

"A ... a little," said Bennett, flustered.

"Know, then, that the mantra —, if sounded, would be a vowel like that in the French word bon—an onh sound, It is one of the most powerful mantras, representing as it does the triple constitution of the cosmos. The component parts, ah, oo, mm, represent respectively the Absolute, the Relative and the relation between them. Now, say —."

"—," mouthed Bennett.

Shri Ramanuja smiled. "With a little practice, you will be perfect. These are the defensive mantras; only to advanced students do I reveal the offensive ones. The next word of power is — — ."

"Huh?" said Bennett.

"— —" Bhamkh politely did not say. "It is spelled A-v-e-l-o-k-i-t-e-s-h-v-a-r-a, and if it were pronounced it would be Avelokiteshvara. Say— —."

"— —" repeated the students.

Bhamkh explained: "The mantra — — assures that, should you meet with a fatal accident in the practice of your brotherhood, you will be reborn at one of the ten points of space."

He continued to instruct his class in ideal, inaudible sounds. Bennett found it harder and harder to keep his faculties with him. He was not exactly sleepy, but his mind seemed bent on wrapping itself into a fuzzy, trancelike state.

Bennett tried to concentrate on Bhamkh's instructions, but that only made it worse. He tried the multiplication table, but that did no good. He was not alarmed; merely curious and a little peeved, as he was when he found himself to have drunk beyond his modest capacity, that his mind would no longer behave as he wished it to.

The thought drifted through his mind again: what a swell picture the old guy would make! At once the mists cleared a little. Bennett, with the still-conscious part of his mind, felt relief. If it was as easy to escape as that, there was nothing to worry about. He let himself slip a little further into the trance again. He noted with lack of much interest that the four girls were all leaning forward with glassy eyes.

Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh straightened up. "Enough instruction," he said. "We are now ready for the climax of our meeting; the consummation of our contact with the reality of which the world illusion is but the shadow; the worship of the female creative principle!"

That brought the tiny, still-conscious fragment of Bennett's mind up standing. Whatever worship of the female creative principle was, Alan Bennett did not like the sound of it

But it was so hard to, think, and his body refused utterly to obey the feeble commands of that two per cent of a mind ...

Bhamkh looked the audience over, ending with Pauline Edge. "You," he breathed, "as the newest member of our circle, shall officiate this time!"

Bennett frantically turned on his knowledge of art. The lighting and composition would make a swell magazine cover—

Slowly his mind came awake, feeling for all the world like an arm to which the circulation is returning after having been cut off.

Bennett pushed himself out of his chair, inch by inch. He croaked "J-j-just a m-m-minute—"

Shri Ramanuja whirled. "What is this? You interrupt the Master?" He took two steps forward and did not say the mantra "— —!"

Bennett reeled backward as from a blow. Bhamkh followed.

"— —!"

Bennett felt the floor leave his feet.

"— — — — !" A great wind whipped at Bennett's bony form. He slid toward the door, faster and faster, down the stairs, and through the glass doors at the entrance to the building. He went through the glass, not by any mystical process, but with a loud crash and tinkle.

He picked himself up. There was a small cut on his wrist. A couple of pedestrians were looking at him. He lunged back at the doorway. As soon as he stepped inside it that wind—which did not seem to blow anything but him about—caught him, and the floor became slippery under his feet.

He gave up that attack. You needed fire to fight the Devil. And the best fire merchant lived only two blocks away.

Shri Motilal Bhulojna unwound himself and looked up at the panting Bennett when the latter burst in without knocking. The Yogi said with the faintest hint of querulousness:

"You have interrupted my concentration. Why?"

Bennett told his story.

"Ah, well," said Bhulojna. "I could have told you that Bhamkh was a secret Tantrist, and a left-hand one at that. If you had persevered in your study of Yoga to the attainment of even a fraction of my powers, you would have been able to deal with him."

"Can you?" said Bennett.

"Yes. That is, I could have up to last week."

"You mean you've forgotten how?" cried Bennett.

"Not at all. It is merely that I have mastered the Yoga of Patanjali, the great Yoga of inaction. I shall return to India and devote myself to the highest form of my philosophy, the doing of nothing."

"But ... but—you don't want this guy Bhamkh to ... uh ... do whatever he's going to do?"

"I do not want anything. The word and all that is in it are utterly unimportant to me."

Bennett danced with frantic anxiety. "But ... but—"

Bhulojna said thoughtfully: "There is one thing I can do. I will not thwart this Tantrist personally, as that would involve action on my part. But I will summon a fellow adept, who may be able to help you, heretical Mahayanian though he be."

Bhulojna closed his eyes. He remained absolutely still, not even breathing, for one minute, while Bennett fidgeted.

There was a glow at one side of the room. Through the wall glided a small yellow man in an extremely dirty yellow robe. He was sitting on nothing in the lotus posture.

Bhulojna said in a bored, faraway voice: "This, Alan

Bennett, is the Pan-chen-rin-po-cho, sometimes called the Tashi Lama. He already knows your story. He will help you."

"Oh, will I?" squeaked the little yellow man. "All the way from Tashilhunpo to rescue the negligible victim of an unimportant Tantrist? It shows less than your usual good sense, Shri Motilal. Anyway, I am not sure that my principles will let me."

"Why?" yelled Bennett.

"It might result in the loss of the Tantrist's life. And I am not permitted to take life under any circumstances. For instance—" He extended a plump wrist. Bennett took a good look at it; then almost fell backward in his haste to put yards between the Tashi Lama and himself. He gagged.

"You see?" said the Lama. "I must not kill one of my little six-legged friends, or even deprive it of a warm and comfortable home. So to take the life of a Tantrist would be out of the question."

Bennett asked: "Couldn't you teach me what to do? Then the blame would be mine."

"No. It would still be mine, though at second remove."

Bennett had a horrible inspiration. He shot out a skinny arm; his fingers snatched at the Lama's skin where the arthropod life clustered.

"Now," he grated, "I've got four or five of your little six-legged friends between my thumb and forefinger—"

"Murderer!" screamed the Lama. "Return my friends at once!"

"Not until I get the dope from you on how to fix Bhamkh. If you won't do it, I'll squeeze and squash—"

"All right, all right!" panted the Tashi Lama. "I will do it! To sacrifice one life to save five will not, I hope, exclude me from the ranks of the Bodhisattvas."

Bhulojna said: "You may return the Pan-chen-rin-pocho's guests, Alan Bennett. What he says he will do, he will do."

That seemed plausible, in view of the Lama's fantastic scrupulousness about killing. And Bennett had no pillbox to keep the Lama's friends in. He obeyed.

When the transfer had been effected, the Tashi Lama gave the impatient Bennett several mantras. Bennett dashed out of the building without amenities.

Bennett bounded through the shattered door of the building that housed Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh. The wind caught at him and held him.

"— —!" Bennett did not say. The wind ceased so suddenly that he almost fell forward.

He bounded up the stairs. When the stairs turned

slippery, Bennett did not say, "— —!" When his weight

disappeared, another mantra brought it back again.

Almost immediately, a new sound penetrated to Bennett's ears. Something, evidently in Bhamkh's studio, was going tweedle tweedle twee with an air of intense self-importance. Bhamkh seemed to have run out of, or given up on, long-range mantras; the entrance to the Inner Circle neither writhed, bit, slipped, nor displayed undue originality. It opened.

Shri Ramanuja was doing the tweedle-tweeing. He was attired as Krishna, engaged in a loose-kneed, bowlegged dance, and breathing hard. One of the excessive number of arms with which he appeared to be equipped was occupied in tweedling. On the floor before him, Pauline Edge sat cross-legged with her arms up. Back of her sat the other three girls in a similar posture. They were all singing a hymn that was not less beautiful for the fact that it was completely inaudible.

Bennett dashed across the room and pointed at Shri Ramanuja. "— —!"

The Tantrist reeled from the attack, but came back with one of his own: "— — —!"

""— — —!" retorted Bennett.

"— !"

"— — — —!"

" —!"

Shri Ramanuja abandoned the duel of mantras and tried another form of hostilities. Before Bennett's eyes he grew and changed into a towering black figure with ten arms. Each arm bore a lethal weapon. He advanced on Bennett.

But when the Tantrist changed form, the four girls at once came out of their trances. They looked at each other and then at the thing that Shri Ramanuja had become. One of them scrambled to her feet and ran out the door; one sat where she was and shrieked; one tried to bury her face in the floor boards.

Pauline Edge showed a better grasp of the situation. She picked up one of the empty chairs, climbed on another chair, and with the first chair she hit the ten-armed nightmare over its fanged, goggle-eyed head.

The chair splintered and the thing staggered. Bennett, who had with what he thought was his last breath been damning the Tashi Lama for not foreseeing this, jumped forward and wrenched a spear from one of the ten black hands. He reversed the weapon and jabbed; felt the point go in.

Then he was chasing the thing downstairs and out into Fifty-Ninth Street. It was very late, and few people were abroad. The nearest person was a citizen named Pascarella, whose trade was the robbery by force of arms of financial institutions. Mr. Pascarella, seeing ten feet of ten-armed Hindu demon bearing down on him, drew a pistol, fired once, and dropped dead of heart failure.

The thing also fell, kicked a little, and changed back into Shri Ramanuja Bhamkh. While the crowd brought out by the shot gathered around the corpes of the bank robber and the man in the beard and turban, Bennett and Pauline Edge slipped away. They found a doorway in which they stood and simply shivered for a few minutes.

When they found their voices, Bennett said: "I suppose we ought to go back to Bhulojna's and tell him what happened."

Pauline nodded.

They found the Yogi in a posture more intricate than they would have believed possible. He saw them, partly unwound himself, and said ungraciously:

"Oh, it is you again. What is it?"

Bennett told him what had happened.

Shri Motilal mused: "Bhamkh's mistake was to resort to material means, whereas with purely transcendental ones he might at least have escaped with his life. He forgot that this bizarre form he assumed would have no greater intelligence, courage, or strength of character than did the original man. He will pay for his error by being reincarnated as a tapeworm, no doubt."

Bennett asked: "Is the fellow from Tibet gone? I wanted to thank him."

"It does not matter. Such things are utterly unimportant to him, as they are to me. I leave for India immediately."

"Oh, so soon? Polly and I were just thinking ... uh ... we were a little hasty in running out on you. Would you consider giving us some more lessons?"

"No. I have advanced to the stage where my usefulness as a guru is ended, as is witnessed by my failure with you two. Anyway, I see that you are planning a set of materialistic interests inconsistent with progress in Yoga. You are going to ask this woman to marry you, are you not, when you get your courage up?"

Bennett reddened, then snapped: "Yes, I am."

"Disgusting. I go." Without further farewell, Shri Motilal Bhulojna, still in his half-contorted posture, rose from where he coiled and drifted through the wall. He was gone.