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do. I was sure that my question was inappropriate. They must have assumed I was a born “meditator.” I was a special soul, and meditation should have just come naturally. I tried to convince myself that whatever I was doing to fill up the time was most probably the correct technique. It seemed to be working. Guru was proud of me, and when Guru was proud of me, the world was right.
    Once, I gathered my nerve to ask not just anyone but my idol, Prema, about meditation. Guru had two personal assistants, Prema and Isha. From driving him, to washing his clothes, to typing his correspondence, these women were his closest disciples. Guru let them sit in the front row in the first and second place before his throne, and they arrived and left with him. The female disciples treated Prema and Isha with fawning flattery or wild jealousy. They were Center celebrities, carefully admired and ceaselessly scrutinized. To me, Prema represented pure bliss. Not only was she Guru's special disciple but she was dazzlingly beautiful. Although she didn't like children, she did think it was cute that I admired her, and she, knowing full well my special status, made a slight effort to acknowledge me. Guru assigned seats, and he bestowed on my mother and me the highly sought after seats directly behind Prema and Isha—seat one and two in row two. As a consequence of spending literally hundreds of hours in supposed meditation, sitting directly behind Prema, I studied her as though she were my own private experiment. I noticed how she secured her fine blond hair with narrowplastic barrettes worn behind her ears in shades carefully coordinated to match her sari, her burst of lily of the valley fragrance that greeted me every time she swept by my row and assumed her seat in front of me, and her precise and motionless stance that she maintained for hours, never shifting even the slightest during meditation.
    One evening, during a break, while Guru was in his private chamber adjacent to the altar, Prema was joking with the other women in the second row. I wanted to ask about her meditation secret, but I had to do it subtly. I couldn't let her know that I was really trying to figure out how to meditate, so I asked her how she was able to meditate so well. How come she never moved, coughed, shifted, or even made a hard swallow during meditation? She laughed at my question, causing the rest of the women to laugh too.
    “Do you want to know my secret?” she asked, teasing me with her large brown eyes.
    “Yes, yes!”
    “Well, I take a stick of special meditation gum.” She reached into her white crochet bag and pulled out a pack of Trident cinnamon gum and unwrapped a piece. “I never chew it. I just keep it in my mouth beside my cheek. Here,” she said, giving me a piece. “Now you have my secret.”
    I was thrilled. Now I knew. I asked my mom to support my meditations by keeping me sufficiently stocked with Trident, and I toted it with me at all times.
    I HAD A lot of work to do to reach Guru's level, and Silver-mine Elementary School seemed like an awful waste of time. I really needed to be stapled to the floor before my shrinewith Trident gum. However, my schoolteachers were not at all sympathetic to my plight.
    Mrs. Wright kept me after school one afternoon for a talk about my obsession with Voodoo and sent me to the guidance counselor's office. The guidance counselor drilled me with questions about my home life, asking if my parents provided me with food and shelter and if they regularly beat me. I found it hard to pay attention; I was too distracted by her coffee mug with a picture of a cow on it. I flashed a big missing-tooth smile as I proudly pointed to the mug, explaining that Guru said both my mother and I were not just regular cows but sacred Indian cows—fancy white ones—in our past animal incarnations. My father, I patiently continued, had been a giraffe, and my brother was a dog. As I left the guidance counselor's office, it was