Boston Mantra Moment

Before I caught sight of him standing on the top step of an elegant brownstone in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, I had smelled the incense, slithering in a slow coiling stream of smoke out of his street-level window on Commonwealth Avenue. He was young and slight, with five o'clock shadow for hair and a vertical line of yellow dye streaked across his forehead. His robe, translucent as tissue paper, was light orange, the color of white socks after they'd been washed with a red shirt. "Hello," he said demurely.

"How're you doing?" I asked. I wondered aloud if there was somebody available to talk, because I wanted to learn a bit about the Hare Krishna community. "I think there is," he said, a noncommittal affirmation.

He motioned me up the steps and into a hardwood hallway. I asked whether I should remove my flip-flops. "Up to you," he said in a voice soft and thin, the hesitant tone of someone in a library. At midday, the house was dim; it felt more like early evening. Painted portraits of mustachioed teachers and garish, gray-skinned deities adorned the walls.

"I'm Tom," I said, holding out my hand.

In the instant after our introduction, I uttered a silent prayer: May I never have to call roll for a gathering of Hare Krishnas. His name was Kisna Duaipayana Das. It hearkened back to an author of the Vedas--the encyclopedic oral and written body of sacred Hindu revelation--who chose to live as a hermit five millennia ago. Kisna had led me to sit on a floor pillow in the main room of the building. Part of me wanted to prove my yogi-like discipline by staying in one cross-legged position. I hoped he might remember me with admiration as the guy who sat without shifting.

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