{a world apar t }

half-open, and a waifish woman, per- fect olive skin, maybe 23 or 24, robed in a psychedelic purple shawl, stuck her nose in to have a look. Paramadvaiti abandoned the family talk and waved her inside, coaxing a few tentative steps. The woman moved toward him like a child approaching a cave, but she did not look scared. Rather, she glowed. When she got within an arm’s length of my uncle, she dropped to her knees, genuflecting at his feet. I just sat there, still silent, and wondered, if only momentarily, whether it would be ap- propriate to join her. Paramadvaiti soon suggested we eat

lunch with a small group of devotees. Five of us settled at an outdoor table overlooking the ashram garden, and ev- erybody waited for their leader to talk/ preach/educate, which he never did. Evidently, he was just hungry. While others ate a yellowish spread of rice and root vegetables, Paramadvaiti received a bounty: soup, beets, ginger tea, breads, floury sugar nuggets for dessert. He munched even while others waited for their food. We didn’t get far with family talk.

Meal complete, a servant arrived with a saucepan of water and a hand towel; Paramadvaiti alone washed his hands. Everybody but my uncle shared in the dishwashing.

The next morning, after an hour of

pre-sunrise chanting, my uncle taught

his daily class in the ashram temple. More than a dozen devotees — the en- tire ashram population — fanned out in front of their guru on the floor. Paramadvaiti lowered himself onto a throne-like seat cushion and promptly decided to prologue the day’s wisdom with a medical report. “I am still pumping out mucus,” he

said. For several days, my uncle had fought

a cold, and just about everybody at Vrinda Kunj knew this because he blew his nose with no discretion, as if the honking itself was an urgent message from God. Before begin- ning his lecture, he grabbed a tissue and tromboned. “Fetch me some ginger,” he said to nobody in particu- lar. A devotee scurried off to the kitchen. When these devotees

addressed my uncle, they called him “Guru Maha- raj,” which, at least seman- tically, is a little like King of Kings. He is revered be- cause of his title (“swami”) and his vow to forsake sex and material possessions, which is considered the highest level of spiritual purity and devotion. The followers had taken

spiritual names, and they considered themselves ser-

14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | may 16, 2010

vants to any number of higher authori- ties, a line that started with my uncle and traced back to Lord Krishna. Most of the devotees were between 20 and 30 years old, a mix of men and women, and many had traveled from South America and Europe. The lone American devotee there,

THERE’S

TOO MUCH EGO IN FAMILY. THAT’S WHY WE RENOUNCE THE FAMILY.”

‘‘

Swami Bhakti Aloka Paramadvait

raised in West Virginia, had arrived one month earlier carrying one suitcase, the sum of his belongings; he had sold his Honda Civic, MP3 player and almost all of his clothing to fund the pilgrim- age. Another devotee, from Germany, had spent his teenage years in anguish, always on drugs, some- times so depressed that he thought he was dying, he said. On the day he met Paramadvaiti at an ashram in Europe — his first expo- sure to Krishna Conscious- ness — he finally saw a way to combat the distress of the world. He begged to move into an ashram. He took all the pledges of de- votion. That day, his drug use ended, he said. Five a.m. was now wake-up time, not bedtime. Paramadvaiti’s follow-

ers honored their guru in part by spending lots of time on the Internet. They recorded audio and video files of his teachings, given

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