Krishna Bus Tour

Part 1-Krishna Road

I found Maharha sleeping on the couch. "You were moving around so much last night." She said, "You kept me awake."

"Sorry about that."

"You have a lot going on." She folded her bedding, because the living room should look nice even at four in the morning. "Whoever buys this house is lucky. You did a good job on it."

"It took me twenty years." I helped her carry blankets upstairs. "Now I've got two weeks to finish the soffit and fascia, some paint in the kitchen..."

"Is that what you were doing in your sleep? Climbing ladders? It looked more like you were dancing."

"It could be."

She opened the closet. "This house is a work of art."

With the bedding put away, it was time for our morning meditation rituals. The two of us sat in the temple room I'd sketched on graph paper many years before. A peaceful morning of focus ensures a productive day. The birds hadn't started their morning song, there were no distractions, but my beads tied knots as I counted prayers on them. I had to pull them out of their bag several times to untangle them. I tried to bring my focus back to the mantra.

I was determined to prove the astrologers wrong when they said we'd be moving soon. We loved our location, the house, the land.

Another interesting thing the astrologers said was Maharha and I would come into a happy period, "LIke when you first met, only better."

Maharha glanced with concern as I pulled my beads from the bag again to disentangle them,

The previous day, young men in rusty pickup trucks bought my tools while their wives in long homemade dresses picked over Maharha's kitchen things.

We were just like them when we moved to North Carolina, twenty years younger, buying broken tools at yard sales.

Now it was our turn to pass things along.

The sky turned red, I went outside to chant with the birds.

***

It was definitely not a good time to leave for an excursion.

Our house was for sale and in the midst of renovations my boss called to say he didn't need my help anymore. I was unemployed. 

***

We were the first family to settle on the dusty dirt road surrounded by three hundred acres of Krishna community. The county said we could name it if it was something they could pronounce. We called it Krishna Road.

Our community grew. Krishna Road was busy, especially in the summer when families drove to the pond at the end of the road, their kids hung out the car windows,calling our son, Gaura Narayana to join them.

Everyday, Chitra would gallop by on her white horse at teenage speed, followed by Lalita on her four wheeler. From our dining room window we could see kids across the valley walk down the hill and disappear into the treeline along the creek, to emerge again in the field where vegetables grew in straight rows. We'd try to guess who it was.

"Is that Tilak?"

"I think it's Vish."

"Who is he with?"

When my work was done, I'd join them at the pond, or take a few kids up the creek in our backyard to play on boulders and waterfalls.

The kids grew up, went to college and moved away.

There was no more traffic on Krishna Road, and there was a for sale sign on our driveway.

***

Wednesday, July 8

My son helped load the car.

"We're not coming back," I said. "After the tour you're going straight to college. Are you going to miss this place?"

Gaura Narayana pushed his duffel bag into the trunk, "Not really."

Maharha carried large grocery bags from our house. "This bag is your lunch and this one is snacks and this one is ... "

"Thanks, Mom," Gaura Narayana said.

"Make sure you eat this first. I put spoons in this bag and ... "

"I wish you could come with us," I said. "I know they'd love you on the bus tour."

"Yeah, right!" Maharha rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't last an hour on that bus. I need my space."

"You'll have plenty while we're gone," I said.

The three of us hugged again. I'm still not used to my son being taller than me.

Krishna Road gravel crunched under our tires as we drove past empty houses.

"Here we go again," I said. "Five hundred miles to Alachua."

"Plenty of snacks." Gaura Narayana patted the bags.

"We're well stocked."

This wasn't our first bus tour. Over Christmas break Gaura Narayana and I did the tour through Mexico. This summer was the twentieth anniversary of bus tours. The organizer said it would be the "mother of all bus tours, your chance to scratch everything off your bucket list—Niagara Falls, Yosemite, Grand Canyon—with fifty of the best people in the world."

"I just noticed something." I said, "You're the same age as the bus tour."

"Oh yeah, twenty!"

"Any news from your phone? You've been on it all morning."

"There's a lot of kids coming from England."

"Anyone we know?"

"Not yet."

"There were a couple British kids with us in Mexico. What did you think of them?"

"They were fun. Not what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?"

"Mmm, boring."

"And polite?"

"Yeah, but they were fun."

"And they speak our language!"