The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales

He began his lecture without hesitation, using the

British pronunciation with a slight but pervasive nasal accent and a tendency to stress the wrong syllable of a word. "My friends, before you be-gin a course of instruction in the discipline of Yoga, it will be desirable to clear up any misconceptions that your Western minds may be harboring.

"To begin with, it is a great mis-take to suppose that the mere fact of Eastern origin is any guarantee of mysterious or occult powers. India has developed her own schools of materialist philosophy. For instans, the Vaiseshika school anticipated many of your Western doctrines of atomic physics. And it is a notorious fact that India has produced her share of charlatans and fakers.

"I will not make exaggerated claims for the benefits that you will derive from the discipline of Yoga. As one of your own prophets remarked, many are called but few are chosen. Not all of you are equipped in this incarnation to achieve the state of superconsciousness known as samadhi, which is the goal of our philosophy. But as you persevere you will achieve, and as you achieve you will be rewarded.

"The first branch of Yoga we shall take up is the Hatha, or physical, Yoga, for you must obviously learn to control your bodies before you can dispense with them. Later we shall work up to the Jnara or intellectual Yoga—"

Alan Bennett found that the singsong cadence of the voice was putting him to sleep. He woke up with a jerk. Shri Motilal Bhulojna noticed and looked severe. Bennett pulled himself together in time to absorb the instructions for the first two steps.

One step was abstinence. Bennett did not think he would miss the liquor much, since he was a very sparing drinker. The meatless diet did not appeal, but he supposed he could put up with it for a while anyway. The ban on smoking promised to be a real hardship.

The other step was a preliminary bout of dharana or fixed attention. The five aspirants were simply to sit absolutely still for one hour. Having issued that instruction, Shri Motilal kicked off his slippers, hitched up his white pants, sat down on the floor, and settled himself in the lotus posture, with each foot resting on the opposite, thigh. Then to all appearances he became a brown-skinned statue.

At the end of ten minutes, Alan Bennett developed an itch on his nose, then an itch in his left foot, then an itch on his right shoulder blade. The itches spread until Alan Bennett was one vast itch.

At twenty-five minutes, the bleary little man coughed loudly, got up, and walked out muttering, "Damn foolishness." Bennett sympathized with him but did not intend to leave until he had settled the question of how a man can go through a glass door without opening it. The incident took Bennett's mind off his itches for a while, although they soon returned.

When they seemed utterly intolerable, Shri Motilal uncoiled himself, got up, and said: "That will be all, friends. I trust I shall see you tomorrow night at the same time. Good night."

Bennett had his mouth half open to ask about the door, but he lacked the brass to force the question on the Yogi in the face of such a plain implication to depart

Bennett had trouble with his pictures the next day. He blamed it on the landlady's noise, on the humidity, on the poorness of the light coming through the skylights of his studio—it was a summer-thunder-showery day—and finally on the real cause, which was his curiosity about the incident of the glass doors.

He arrived at Bhulojna's nearly half an hour early, which would have sounded fantastic to those who knew Alan Bennett's habits. He was the first to appear. Bhulojna told him to make himself comfortable and floated off into some inner sanctum.

Then the blonde arrived. She said: "Hello. I'm Pauline Edge. Your name's Bennett, isn't it?"

Bennett admitted with some reluctance that it was.

The girl continued: "Mother's running some club thingummy tonight, but she told me to come and remember everything Mr. Bhulojna said." They talked about the weather, discovered that they had a couple of acquaintances in common, and in a few minutes were old friends.

Bennett said: "What do you do, Pauline?"

"Me? I just puppy-dog mother."

"Is that your idea of fun?"

"Lord, no. But I'm not fitted to do anything else. We're members of the New Poor, you know. Have been for ten years. I'm not pretty enough for modeling. I'd have at least learned to run a typewriter, but mother wouldn't have it, and since she has what little money there is, here I am. That's what comes of being raised to be a debutante, damn it!"

"How'd you happen in here?"

"Some more of mother's ideas. Now that she's paid for the course, at least one of us will have to go through with it. How about you?"

"Me?" said Bennett. "Oh, I don't know. I was getting bored with my friends, and I thought I ought to have some interests besides my pictures. So I thought I'd see what there was to this wisdom-of-the-East idea."

"Here comes the Master now," said Pauline.

Shri Motilal Bhulojna drifted in. "Good evening, friends," he said, blandly unconcerned with the shrinkage in his audience. "Tonight I give you some more of the ideological background of Yoga, so that you shall understand that it is not hocus-pocus. We can be more informal now that the materialists have fallen by the wayside, as they always do.