S. by John Updike Page A

Arhat and he gave me my proper subtle-body name.
    Actually, for a week or more now I’ve been taking dictation from him instead of just typing out variations on form letters. Alinga, the least creepy of Durga’s assistants, came in and asked me if I could take dictation. I told her I knew nothing of shorthand but she said that didn’t matter since you’re basically there to inspire him. He loves women, not in theway most men do or say they do but as
energy entities
, as vrittis in the ocean of prakriti. I of course was very nervous going into the presence of
The Master
but in fact he has this marvellous gift of taking you in with these enormous sad bulging bottomless eyes, of seeming to be letting you in on some huge unspoken deeply philosophical secret.
    This first time, Alinga, who is very blond and slender and serene and efficient, led me back through the cubicles of the Uma Room—it’s not really a room, it’s a rather higgledy-piggledy arrangement of trailers with doors and walls cut through and welded back together to make a lot of office space—out through a breezeway across a kind of courtyard I’ve never seen before, with these old tan rustling trees that from the size of them were planted years and years ago. They had big bumpy pods hanging down, and smelled of something like cloves. This was the old adobe ranch house, the hacienda before the Arhat came and bought all these acres. There were cats on the veranda and pegs bits of rotten rope and harness were still hanging from. Inside, the air-conditioning began again. The furniture was what we New Englanders might call vulgar but may be the best you can buy around here—heavy squarish matching pieces with a silvery shiny look to the fabric, and plastic sleeves on the chair arms, and a lot of milk-glass and painted porcelain doodads displayed on open shelves, and just the hugest television set I’ve ever seen, the kind that projects onto a curved screen like you usually see only in bars.
    The furniture didn’t really give the impression that anybody lived here, if you know what I mean—it was more like the window of a furniture store. But I suppose if you’re moksha you don’t leave the dents on things more sthula bodies do. He wasn’t in this living room but in one beyond, whichhe uses as an office, with a lot of off-white padded contour furniture on swivels and casters and a long desk of bleached wood, the kind that looks as though powdered sugar has been rubbed into the grain. Alinga left us and I sat down on the opposite side of the desk and tried to take dictation, my hands all jumpy and the pad trying to slide off the knee of my slippery silk sari. Some rich patron of the ashram was trying to get her money back and that was what the letter was about. It got rather technical about Kundalini and he had to keep spelling things. Several times he stopped and asked me if I thought a certain sentence was funny enough. I hadn’t known any of it was supposed to be funny so I didn’t know how to react at first. But we got through the letter and he seemed pleased. “We will buffalo that old bitch,” he said, and then asked me if that was a correct American expression, “to buffalo.” I said it was and he smiled his beautiful warm sly smile, so detached and sweet. He has this darling little gap between his two front teeth. His purple turban is just as it is in the posters, only woolier, somehow, with a nap that takes the light differently as the strips of it twist. His robe I think was a very pale peach, so shimmery it looked white, and on his hands he had all these rings that I’m sure were very expensive and authentic jewels but reminded me of those paste things people at fairs used to fish for by operating a little bucket crane, after putting in a dime.
    I shouldn’t be putting all this into a letter—Vikshipta and Alinga say that Durga and her henchpeople have the mail read, coming in and out—but I know how much you love the Arhat; it was your