NOVEL EXCERPTS:
© 2025 Sharada Devi. All rights reserved.
BE HERE THEN
My Twelve Year Marriage to Bhagavan Das
A Memoir by Sharada Devi
Sometimes I close my eyes and sing the song and we are together again. That song is the Krishna Aarti we did at the end of every kirtan, when I would hold the flame and circle him, imagining him to be Neem Karoli Baba until I just knew he was.
I’m so relieved when I’m singing, as if those bad things never happened. I don’t want to open my eyes, but I know I have to. When I do, the room isn’t as bright as it once was, or maybe how I imagined it to be. Saints and gurus still hang from my walls. It makes me feel like I’m suffocating, and yet, I keep them there.
More than once, I said to him, “God, you guys are all stuck in 1967 talking about Be Here Now. Don’t you think you should instead call it ‘Be Here Then?’”
He laughed every time.
Because he always said, “If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.”
ONE
The first time I see Bhagavan Das is on the summer solstice, one year after my father’s death. He wears shorts and a t-shirt and his back is toward me. I expect him to look like the holy person I read about in Be Here Now, but instead I see a sleazy guy surrounded by giggling girls. It is disappointing.
Until the kirtan starts. Until he sings.
An hour later I am sitting in the front row of a dim room. He passes by me draped in a long white gown with dreadlocks hanging down to his knees. Candles flicker as the crowd’s voice dies to silence. When he bows before the altar a dreadlock flips back and whips my face. Turning, he grins at me with knowing eyes and then rises and steps onto the stage.
From his big chair, he scans the room. His gaze seems to see what the rest of us cannot. Then, he picks up his ektara and begins chanting an incantation that transforms the space from a dim yoga studio into a mythic realm of gods. People sway and rock, mesmerized by him because he seems to have opened a portal into another dimension. He cries out with yearning and thunder. His voice is deep and raw with the anguish I feel.
“Oh Maaa, Kali
Darkness like the night,
I see your eyes of light.
Take from me all that is not free.”
Tears stream down my face. He is not the sleazy guy anymore. He is the vessel for her. The room has gone wild with ecstasy and he is stomping the floor and growling like a war god who wants to make love.
After the kirtan, I get in line to meet him. I can barely feel my body, all I feel is him pulsing through me. When my turn comes, he looms sweaty and glowing. His eyes are lightning blue, his eyebrows bushy. But all I see is Kali. He opens his arms for a hug “I love you,” he whispers into my ear. I feel his heart thumping against mine, the steam of his breath on my throat, the sound of silk and smoke and gravel. This is the moment I give my life to Kali through him.
Then, as I am leaving, he yells out to me, “Will you come see me again?”
His eyes reach into mine from across the room. I nod. “Good,” he says, and hugs the next girl.
***
yet i write a phantom still
a novel by sharada devi
ONE
A pale light warms my face. Outside a musical wind is tossing birds to and fro. Their shadow wings dance across the worn pine floor and I sigh because Father is stirring. The ghost of woodsmoke clings to every sound.
“Baby,” I hear and close my pages, firm from a world that will never see or know my heart or the secret man who lives there. I reach for that old brush, her brush with the ivory handle and I head for his room.
The hall is long and dark, my feet are bare. My nightgown swallows me in a whiteness dulled by time and endless washes. I can barely find myself here in these echoes, the quiet of woods, where once men came and now no one. I don’t remember anything when she died, I was just born when Father shut this place down and locked all the doors with us inside it.
His door is open, I am woman-sized now but still I sit in her chair and he brushes my long amber hair to shining and I face the clouded mirror of where once her face was and he watches and breathes and sometimes his strokes become rough because Father is troubled and so I hide and I smile from him the world where I would rather be with my secret lover who fills my pages and dreams with his passion and fury for me.
“There you are,” he says. “My autumn princess.”
I watch the trees reach for me through his window, yet unable to grasp me this deep within walls. I hear hidden, no, imprisoned birds calling for me from inside boughs too dark to escape. I hear their wings caught in branches, scraping. Father is breathing hot breath onto my neck. I see sunlight somewhere trickling in like blood through these curtains.
“I heard wolves last night, Father.”
“There are no more wolves,” he says, when his fingers brush my neck and my legs tighten. I hear a squirrel climbing high into a tree. Twigs break and dried autumn leaves rustle. A wind blows a harsh note and his feet thunder to the front of me. Now the mirror is gone and he bends and kisses my lips. I cannot get out.
“I love you Father.”
***
BLACKBIRDS IN THE YEW
A Novel by Sharada Devi
ONE
On the night we leave the loud man I call daddy who doesn’t call me anything pees dog yellow against the wall and slams his fist into my mother. She doubles over hugging her stomach yelping, “My baby, my baby.” Huddled under the table she finds me watching and grabs my wrist. The man yells, “Get back here bitch,” as she pushes me over the backyard fence and the wood slats jab my ribs and I fall face first into wet dirt, biting my tongue as my dog cries for me from the window like a trapped child with a penis red dragon fuming behind it.
The neighbor lady watching through a curtain opens her door when my mother collapses in her front yard. “What a monster,” she says, petting my mother who I think has died, and I’m crying and scraping mud onto her body while she calls a policeman who later drives us to the train station. His metal blue gun eyes smile and shoot danger into mine when he asks my name and I want to stay with him longer and closer as he watches us through the rearview mirror. “Are you sure you have somewhere to go?” I want to tell him but my mother squeezes my hand no and so we sleep on a mouse filled mattress in a tunnel behind the train station where rats nest and bigger things lump grunting “Jesus Christ,” and “Oh shit,” from the dark of their cans bottles and black bubbling spoons until the next man takes us.
We live in a place where all the monsters pee on walls and death bugs scatter clicking when you flip the light and needleheads poke from alley cracks hard. I have to call him daddy again but he kicks at me swatting. “Good thing yer a hot piece a ass,” he tells her and I wonder if mine will be too. The baby dies that night. Apparently due to the blows.
***
THE BLUE OLEANDER
A Novel by Sharada Devi
ONE
When I was fourteen I found the girl from down the hall a seahorse curled shut in the incinerator washed to an ashen slat. Her yellow hair gone blood brown and her skin some peel of dead meat clouded in flies. Three days she had lain there a pupa a mound wings stuck to her ribcage something gone wrong. When they pulled her out she had turned a broken blue abuzz in a halo of gnats. An entity burst gasping from her eyes in pops and reaching it reached for me. For weeks I had watched her in the halls fluttering and bobbing unready. She had nearly been my friend. After she went into the blue bag I kept watch watching for what might come into me to do such a thing too soon.
In the dark shadows crossed beneath my door swamp thick footsteps piled step by step waiting looking in through the oval glass its eye milky with frost. Something there breathed something knew what I’d seen. Once one spoke to me his eyes black as driven nails in a language stripped of feathers. Go to sleep he said. The birds had gone silent and now fell dying from trees soft wet sounds against earth their eyes wide and blue pools of stopped sky. One day a yellow bird snaked into my palm its body still warm and entered me with its eyes. Have you ever seen the eyes of a dying bird? There is a light there that belongs nowhere a light that makes you turn from the sky and keep looking down low and shaded and weighted with grim. When the dreamless came it made a new light a clear light to leave through this is not a dream she said pointing down to where I lay fitful and small a million miles below that is a dream.
***
MAYBELLINE
A Novel by Sharada Devi
1.
My name is Maybelline.
I am a human and I will die.
According to the Buddhists.
From childhood, I learned to shapeshift myself, reality — both.
I could turn to glass, stone, or smoke. I could walk upside down on the ceiling.
It didn’t matter what he did. I could hide, bend, or blend myself away.
Because he hugged me and needed me and made me feel important.
I don’t know if you know how obsession feels, but I had it. And Mesmer fed off of my emotional illness until I became more, not less — a thunderous shell.
Now I have episodes that last for hours or days. And I can’t sleep. I don’t want to sleep — because he finds me there.
I have to get grounded and develop a routine, according to my doctor.
Maybelline, after the makeup. I’m a recovering fill-in-the-blank.
***
THE VIRGIN KALI
A Memoir by Sharada Devi
Autumn, 2014
Deathly thin, waiting to eat, I sat on the deck at Spirit Dragon Sanctuary overlooking the vast bright autumn of late September. Two weeks had passed since my near death experience.
“Here it is, honey. I hope you’re hungry!” Baba said, handing me a huge plate of French toast drowning in ghee and syrup.
“Okay. Thanks, Baba,” I replied absently.
Peaches the cat tried to snag it, but I won. “Not for you, stupid cat,” I said, swatting.
Having not eaten in a month, I had no appetite, and what once was appealing stunk.
I was done being me.
Bhagavan Das is the cool sadhu guy from Be Here Now, written by the cool LSD guy Ram Dass – and you’re the one who doesn’t matter no matter what you do…
“It must be hard living in my shadow,” he would say to me over the years.
But that wasn’t it—shadows aren’t real and yet there I was, sucking his darkness as if it were air. Baba had no idea what the black magic had done; how I had absorbed the nutrients of death into every cell of my being. How I felt the dreaded black entity pulling from a center where no girl should ever go.
Weeks after the surgery, I was told by Mammaji that when I first opened my eyes, I had said to him three times “I can’t do anymore Kali pujas.” And though I had become living proof that magic had physical consequences, he never told me this. When I asked what he would have done if I had died he said, “It would have been beautiful. I would have covered your corpse in flowers and sang to you for days.” Confirming I was nothing to him but a dispensable vessel meant for Kali to animate.
“Your body is a skeleton, but your eyes glow like Kali,” he said.
“Would you stop the Kali talk?” I snapped. “I’m over it.”
“But I’m scared of you, honey. You look just like her. When you stood at the top of the stairs yelling at me last night, all I saw were eyes and flames. I almost peed my pants. You’re scary!” he said, laughing slightly.
“Kali isn’t real. I’m a person,” I said quietly. No longer mad. No longer trying.
I mindlessly stuffed the French toast in my mouth, dripping with ghee and maple syrup.
“Pour ghee all over everything,” I had told him, weighing barely over a hundred pounds and needing to gain weight before my checkup.
“Maybe I should return to India,” I pondered. “Nothing here is real.”
I didn’t know what to do.
“Any minute now, I will make a knife out of a cloud,” circled in my head while listening to Baba in the kitchen flirting with Astrid, a woman his age who needed to feel sexy if we wanted to live in her house, and being a glutton for adoration, he made sure of it to the point of neglecting me.
There was a chill in the warm morning. Despite the chirping birds and sunny skies, winter was moving in.
