Guru Days – creative nonfiction by Shanti Ariker

Guru Days

The Indian family welcomed us in to their home for the first time. I was around ten years old. By now, I knew there were many different religions, yet I hadn’t heard of a guru before or how that tied into worship. 

As we took off our shoes, I could see pictures of an old man with white hair, sitting cross legged in a black and white framed picture and inside the picture was an ashy substance. There were also pictures in color of a man with a big Afro of curly black hair, wearing an orange straight robe down to the ground, smiling and wearing flower garlands with his hands outstretched in front of him.  

We sat on pillows on the ground as they started to sing songs that were like prayers of praise to Sai Baba. We sang, “Om Bagavan, Om Bagavan, Satya Sai Bagavan.” 

People passed around a bowl of ash and smeared it into the creases in their hair, while others placed it as a dot on their forehead above their eyes. Harriet, my stepmom, leaned over and put a dot on my forehead and one on hers. She told me to take a little ash onto the tip of my tongue and taste it. I did and it tasted sweet, not like ash from a fire.

“That is ash from Sai Baba,” she said. “The pictures are the original older Sai Baba and his reincarnation.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“When you come back in another form, but you are the same person.” I immediately wondered how they would know it was him, but I knew better than to ask a lot of questions in the house. 

She continued, “When we sing really hard and with feeling, Sai Baba hears us and ash is produced in the pictures, like you see in some of the frames. It’s a healing substance and some people have been cured of diseases from taking the ash.” 

I think she wanted to believe it was true, that this guru had a special connection to God and could produce ash as a sign of his divinity. I watched, trying not to blink, to see if I could catch any ash materializing while we were singing, but I never saw it happen. I closed my eyes and prayed hard, trying to see if it would release spigots of ash. I opened my eyes. Nothing looked any different.

*

My parents started out as hippies, then divorced and recoupled with new partners. Dad and Harriet were ‘spiritual’ at first but then embraced their Jewish heritage – I would say they went in ‘whole hog’ if it wasn’t so contradictory to Judaism but that is how they did it.

Even though we had been going to temple and practicing Judaism for a few years, Harriet still longed for something else. She had convinced Dad that we should check a guru called Sai Baba, a spiritual man who performed miracles. On Sunday afternoons, we began going to bhajans, a service where we sang songs in Hindi at the house of a local Indian family.

My parents didn’t see any conflict with being practicing Jews and having a guru. I had read that we should not have idols but I knew better than to ask if Sai Baba would be considered an idol. I kept my mouth shut so I could avoid my stepmom’s wrath and punishments. I could always tell God that I wasn’t seriously worshipping Sai Baba, I figured.

Over the year, as I grew up, we continued to go to bhajans every Sunday afternoon at an Indian family’s house, and Harriet also dragged Dad and me to see other gurus over the years. I never believed in Sai Baba or the other gurus, but I did enjoy the singing, the spicy Indian food and the colorful clothing. Just like I had to choose between my parents, I had to choose between Judaism and worshiping a guru. I chose Judaism – it was tied to my ancestors and made more sense to me on a visceral level. 

That first day, after the prayer songs were over, the family invited us to go with the rest of the group to their restaurant down the street. The meal started with samosas, full of a spicy mixture of potatoes and peas, dipped into a mint chutney, then vegetable pakoras, bundles of zucchini and other vegetables fried in batter. I had never eaten Indian food before and the curry was spicy, with hints of tomato, cumin and sometimes coconut. I loved it.  

A man came over. “Welcome family! We are happy to have you here with us in worship and to celebrate with a meal.”

Dad and Harriet smiled and nodded. 

“How do you like the food?” he asked me.

“It’s great, not what I am used to but I like it a lot.”

“And how did you like the bhajans?”

“I love to sing, but I am Jewish. I go to temple and I am learning Hebrew,” I said.

He smiled and nodded his head.

Harriet frowned at me and said he didn’t need to know all that and I was insulting his religion.

But he just laughed and moved his head in waves like Indian people sometimes do.

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Shanti Ariker is a writer by night and a lawyer by day. The start of her memoir appears in How We Change, the 2024 San Francisco Writer’s Foundation Writing Contest Anthology. Her work has been published in The Thieving Magpie, On Being Jewish Now substack, OfTheBook Press and Simpsonistas Vol. 3. She can be found at shantiariker.com.