1
The Myth Begins


My life story can be traced back to an address scrawled across a matchbook directing my mother to the place where she hoped her lifelong search would end. She didn't have a phone number or contact name. Although it was just after dusk, the New York neighborhood seemed empty. No one to ask, no clues. After crisscrossing the street four times, she stood before the only building on the block without a number. Wrought-iron bars covered the cracked glass of the front door. Instead of a panel of backlit doorbells, five chewed wires jutted from the brick. The door was unlocked and sighed open at her touch.
The dank stairwell had one bare lightbulb. Cigarette butts littered the floor like flattened cockroaches. She rechecked the address clutched in her left hand. This was suddenly absurd. All of it--her exhausting journey, hitchhiking from San Francisco with her two-year-old son, leaving behind her straying husband and all of the contents of her former life, bringing nothing other than one small satchel and a matchbook with the address of Sri Chinmoy, a guru recently arrived from Pondicherry, India. A drip of rusty water fell onto her shoulder from a brown-stained ring on the ceiling. This was not the place to find a holy man. They reside by the gardenia-soaked banks of the Ganges, or inside cavernous mountain dwellings, or shaded by boughs of the bodhi tree, not in dilapidated East Village tenements.
As she turned to leave, an ancient voice, gentle and lulling, drifted down to her.
"At last, at last. You have come, good girl. Bah."
She looked up. Dressed in traditional Indian garb, a pale blue dhoti, and matching kurta, Guru's gold-hued skin glowed, and he seemed to flood ...