What Now? Read Free

there after a fashion: he was a Hare Krishna.
    I stopped. Instantly, my good manners fell into combat with my paralyzing fear, fear and manners being two things I had been overburdened with in Catholic school. How did one speak to a Hare Krishna? What did 2 6

    one say? “Thanks anyway,” I said in a weak voice. “I can find it.”
    “Find what?”
    “The gate. I remember where it is now.” Hare Krishnas very likely kidnapped girls like me. They brainwashed them into playing tambourines in public parks, made them dance in circles and chant repetitive songs. Thinking of this now it breaks my heart: once the most dangerous person at an airport was a lone Hare Krishna, trying to convert the world to the ways of love and vegetarianism, or that joining a religious sect meant you might have to play an undignified instrument like the tambourine.
    He sighed and went on ahead. “Don’t be silly.”
    I felt myself grow pale. He had my suitcase. I looked around at the bustling 2 9

    throng and thought of how there was always safety in numbers. I would walk along with him a ways, not too close, and then I would make my escape. If I lost the bag, so be it. It was not a high price to pay.
    “So now you’re not talking,” he said as we walked on and on. O’Hare is a huge airport and our destination seemed to be somewhere in Southern Illinois. “You don’t talk to Hare Krishnas?”
    “It’s not that,” I said, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. The truth is the opportu-nity to talk to a Hare Krishna had never presented itself to me. A few gates later I tried a more honest tack. “I thought you wore robes.”
    “We do. But nobody talks to you when you wear the robes.” He stopped for a minute to readjust the bag full of my zinc plates, 3 0

    which was digging into his shoulder. “All I want to do is talk to people.”
    ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
    Of course he could have been trying to trick me, but if he wasn’t I had to admit the right to talk didn’t seem like so much to ask, and so I made a decision that was against my cautious nature. I decided to listen. I was lost, after all, and the Hare Krishna had found me. The least I could do was hear him out. When we finally reached the gate I discovered my plane was running two hours late, and so I listened for two hours while he told me what it was like to love God, to love God so much that you would gladly devote every minute of your life to Him, to be so moved by the enormity of His love and 3 1

    goodness and grace that you wanted to tell other people about this wonderful thing you’d found so they could know it too. “Can you imagine what it’s like,” he said, “wanting to talk to a woman about love and having her scream at you to get away, or trying to talk to a man about God and having him bury his face in a Time magazine? It gets depressing after a while.”
    “I would think so,” I said. It occurred to me that the Hare Krishna had probably been chosen for airport duty because without the robes he fit in so nicely. He had a soft voice and a pleasant manner. He had no doubt been voted the least likely to scare anyone away by his Hare Krishna class and still he failed at his task. But what all the people who had run from him would never know was that he was good company. We ate the 3 3

    chocolate-covered almonds I had in my bag and we talked about God. It was the longest conversation I’d had on the subject since I’d graduated from Catholic school, and I can’t imagine it did me any harm. When my plane was finally ready to depart he gave me one of his pamphlets on being a vegetarian and shook my hand. He was a nice man, neither frightening nor mysterious; in fact, I would bet we had more in common than not. The difference was he had answered his own What now. Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.
    ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
    The Hare Krishna didn’t convert me (though honestly, I don’t believe he had tried) but he did teach me something I 3 4

    should