SIMRIN
The emails come in through the blog, encrypted with her own public key. The first: Simrin. I think of you often and with deep affection. Arjun. She reads it three times, each time the name making her breath catch, her heart beat irritatingly faster, but she shakes it off. There have been so many trolls lately, strangers that have dug up parts of her past. Her fan-created Wikipedia page is a trove of info on Ananda Nagar, most of it pretty accurate descriptions of the “Eastern-leaning ashram in Central California,” a community focused on “enlightenment through liberation from the self.” There is a short statement on equality, how Ananda members are treated as equals no matter their sex, race, or age. But there is no mention of what this means. No mention of the grueling schedule—the hours of meditation, the mandatory karmic yoga duties, the memorization of long strings of unintelligible mantras and the subsequent assessments in front of the whole community, all required by the time you turned five. This she keeps to herself, and she imagines the others do the same. As children, they weren’t allowed to talk about Ananda with outsiders, and that vigilance is hard to shake. Besides, she can’t imagine any of them want to talk about it. Ananda kids didn’t want to be known then, and she’s sure they don’t want to be known now. Herself included. She’s never tried to find any of the “brothers and sisters” she grew up with. The one exception to this is Arjun. For years she has googled him with no results, but she doubts he is still using his real name. Even she transformed from Simrin to Simone soon after they left.
Still, the email catches her, and she saves it under “Fan Mail,” his name scratching at her persistently until a second email arrives the next day: Simrin. Do write back? Missing you lately. Arjun. This one she keeps in her inbox, opening and closing it throughout the day, annoyed at herself for getting pulled in by some basement-dwelling hater. Someone has dug his name out of some old Ananda propaganda, she tells herself, found an incense-scented pamphlet at a garage sale or unearthed some old microfiche and seen the ads in Whole Life Times and New Dawn magazine.
But the third email—the third sends her head reeling.
She is checking her diagnostics when it comes in. Cakravat parivartante duḥkhāni ca sukhāni ca, it says. Please, Sim? Arjun.
The world seems to slow. It is the mantra they both lived by and loathed. Even now, twenty years after she ran away, it is the one she still weaves through her head when she’s had to photograph cancer patients in hospice and community-obliterating wildfires, the last scrap of Ananda embedded inside her: “Pain and pleasure revolve like a wheel.” If you didn’t like something, the grown-ups would say, wait patiently for the wheel to spin. They hadn’t liked a lot of things, but they had endured. Pain, then pleasure; pleasure, then pain.
Her phone rings, and she is jarred back from the ache of those memories. Tom. She steadies herself, takes a breath, and answers.
“Hi, Tom.”
“Papa?” Quinn asks. Quinn is splayed on the floor, playing with the iPad, those damn Disney princesses flouncing across the screen.
“Yes,” she mouths.
“Darling,” Tom says.
She walks into the kitchen. “Tom, what a pleasant surprise.”
“Oh, don’t be mean,” he says. “It’s not good for your complexion.”
“Where are you?”
“In your driveway.”
“Jesus, Tom. Quinn has a birthday party in an hour.”
“Oh, let her skip it.”
She sighs and closes her eyes. She’s seen enough talk shows about children trapped between divorced parents to know that a hostile environment works great if you want your kid to become a drugged-out pole dancer.
“I’ll bring her out in ten minutes. Please take her to the party,” she says.
“Fine, fine, and have her pack a bag? Stay the night?”
“Sure.” She sighs and hangs up.
She walks into the living room. “Papa’s outside. He’s going to take you to Bea’s party, and you can sleep over.”
“Yay!” Quinn says.
“Go change and pack some stuff. Don’t forget your toothbrush.”
Quinn runs to her room, and Simrin sits back down on the couch. She stares at Arjun’s name on her computer screen and thinks of the last time she saw him—that crazy night in San Francisco. She and Jaishri were fifteen, Arjun sixteen. The three of them just babies. It was two weeks after they had run away, and Simrin had returned to the day-rate motel room after stocking up on frozen burritos and strawberry yogurt and found both Jaishri and Arjun gone, which wasn’t that unusual. The motel was cheap and scared Jaishri—the cockroaches in the shower drain, the screaming and slamming of doors from the other rooms, even the weird buzz the light bulbs made—so Arjun would take her on walks to the park to pet the dogs and look for dropped change. But this time, they didn’t come back for hours, and when they did, it was just Arjun. “Jaishri decided to go back,” he said. “I tried to stop her.” Then late that night, he had vanished too.
“I’m ready,” Quinn says. She is wearing a pink dress with yellow pajama bottoms underneath and carrying two stuffed animals, a backpack, and the birthday present.
“Okay,” Simrin says but doesn’t move.
“Mama!”
“Okay.” She gets slowly to her feet.
Quinn races ahead of her and opens the front door. Sunlight spills in, too bright, too yellow.
“Bye, Mama,” Quinn yells and races into the back seat of Tom’s car.
“I’ll bring her back tomorrow morning,” Tom calls out the open window.
And then they are gone, leaving her with the mantra looping through her head: Cakravat parivartante duḥkhāni ca sukhāni ca.
She shuts the door, bolts the top lock, and lies down on the floor. It is, without doubt, him. No trolls. No fans with too much time on their hands. Just Arjun, somewhere, staring into her site, his unnaturally green eyes the same ones that peppered the brochures, the pamphlets, the flyers, the bumper stickers, the notebooks, the letterhead, the gift shop incense packs. Every single printed page of her Ananda childhood.
Simrin and her mother had moved to Ananda when Simrin was four. Her mother had always been interested in “spirituality,” and Simrin had spent many hours in dimly lit shops browsing the chakra-cleaning crystals and purifying candles while her mother paged through books, looking for enlightenment. But then came the rough divorce. And the lost job. And then a friend from her mother’s meditation class asked her to go with her to visit Ananda, to experience the “path to inner joy.” Ananda was having an open house. The two of them might leave with new insights. And her mother had. And then come back and immediately packed up their San Francisco apartment and moved them three hundred miles away, explaining the move as if they had won the lottery: “Everything you’ve ever wanted, you can find at Ananda!” “Candy houses?” Simrin asked. “Better than candy houses!” her mother said. But it wasn’t better. Instead it was a lot of white people trying to find themselves by taking Indian names and forcing little kids to chant a bunch of stuff they didn’t understand, a community of grown-ups earnestly in pursuit of enlightenment and inner peace.
At first, it had seemed an adventure. The California high desert was nothing like the tightly packed blocks of the Haight. Ananda sat on a wide expanse of open land, nothing but barrel cacti and jackrabbits disrupting the flat brush. Their first night there, her mother had taken her beyond the outbuildings—the pink communal houses and massive dining room and sacred learning spaces—and shown her the stars. So, so many. And then one had shot across the sky, just for her, her mother said. And then they had seen a kit fox, his eyes shining yellow in the strobe of their flashlight.