Chasing Love: A Mother’S Journey

By Elinor Rogosin

When a goodbye unexpectedly becomes forever, there is an emptiness that can never be filled. In Chasing Love, author Elinor Rogosin tells her personal story of saying goodbye to her nineteen-year-old son Jonathan as he left New York to travel to India in the summer 1982. She has not seen him since.

In this memoir, Rogosin shares her journey of acceptance as she sifts through her family history in the hope of shedding light on her youngest sons dramatic choice of a lifestyle. She recounts her marriage to an independent documentary filmmaker, their travels to foreign countries; the birth of their three sons, the repercussions of her husbands abuse, their divorce, and her attempt to remain close to her boys.

Chasing Love probes her relationship with Jonathan, the youngest, and attempts to analyze their clash of ideals as he joins a religious cult and disappears into an unknown world in India. Rogosin narrates a story thats filled with heartache where she takes a painful voyage through loss to acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462046393

Elinor Rogosin

Elinor Rogosin is a part-time adjunct teacher at Ringling College of Art and Design and the author of The Dance Makers. She also reviews ballet for a local newspaper, the Pelican Press. Rogosin lives in Sarasota, Florida.

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Copyright © 2011 Elinor Rogosin

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-4641-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-4639-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011914639

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 8/11/2011

for Jonathan with love

Contents

Prologue

Book One

Chapter One The Call

Chapter Two The Lecture

Chapter Three Night

Chapter Four Forewarning

Chapter Five Indifference

Chapter Six Hidden Answers

Book Two

Chapter Seven Dream Time

Chapter Eight Exploring Life

Chapter Nine Movies And Babies

Chapter Ten Illusion

Chapter Eleven 1961/1963

Chapter Twelve Prelude to Divorce

Chapter Thirteen Confusion

Chapter Fourteen A Line Is Drawn

Chapter Fifteen Once Again

Book Three

Chapter Sixteen Darkness and Light

Chapter Seventeen Undertow

Chapter Eighteen Jonathan

Book Four

Chapter Nineteen Second Chance

Chapter Twenty Preparation

Chapter Twenty-One The Long Good-bye

Chapter Twenty-Two The Chasidic Rabbi

Book Five

Chapter Twenty-Three Confusion

Chapter Twenty-Four The Journey Begins

Chapter Twenty-Five Revelation

Chapter Twenty-Six Questions

Chapter Twenty-Seven Chasing Rainbows

Chapter Twenty-Eight The Mother

Chapter Twenty-Nine The Nightmare

Chapter Thirty Settling

Prologue

My son, Jonathan, went to India and disappeared. He was nineteen in the summer of 1982 when he left New York City.

Book One

Chapter One

The Call

New York City

April 1982

I have a collect call from Los Angeles, from Jonathan Rogosin. Will you accept the charges?

Yes.

I sat down on the edge of my bed, telephone in my hand, made a quick, silent wish, and waited to hear more.

Mom, there’s a lecture on yoga on Friday night that might interest you, Jonathan said, jumping directly into his message.

Mom?

I know very little about yoga, I replied, feeling my voice tightening with a sense of unease. Usually, my son was impatient to end these minimal conversations. Most often, his calls consisted of permission to charge his other calls to my home telephone.

I really think you should go. You don’t need to know about yoga, Jonathan continued. It’s part of a seminar given by the 3HO Foundation at Cami Hall. It’s near Carnegie Hall, I think, Jonathan added, knowing that I was often in the midtown area.

Fine, Jonathan, if you really think so, I replied, realizing that this backward way of communicating was my son’s attempt to share something important to him.

Okay, ’bye. Jonathan was ready to hang up.

The weather in Los Angeles must be lovely, I said, trying to extend our conversation.

Silence.

Jonathan, what are you doing?

What? Jon, as he preferred to be called, echoed. What do you mean, what am I doing?

What are you actually doing out there in Los Angeles? How long do you plan to be there? I asked. I quickly added, Do you remember how you enjoyed yourself years ago when you were visiting some friends, and came home carrying that boogie board?

It was a long-forgotten image that had popped into my mind as we were speaking. Jonathan had been traveling back from Los Angeles to New York City. I had gone out to the airport, as there had been no one else to meet him. Perhaps, now as we spoke, there was a part of me wanting to hear that he was once again on his way back to New York.

I’m with the Sikhs, my son replied, letting my reference to his twelve-year-old self drift away without comment. ’Bye, now.

Jon, are you whirling? I persisted in a last-second attempt to keep the conversation going, something my son wanted to avoid. Remember, you had come with me out to Brooklyn to a theatrical performance of a visiting group of whirling dervishes.

No, Mom, those are the Sufis, Jonathan replied without any change in his soft, casual tone, as if having to cope with his mother’s silly questions was to be expected. I’m working in a health food store.

I knew that at nineteen, my son was independent and no longer a child. However, his traveling around the country was worrisome, and my amateur sleuthing, with the monthly telephone bill as a guide, gave me a way to keep track of my wandering son. Jonathan would call friends in different states by charging the number he was calling to me; but he needed my permission for the operator to put the call through, and so he would have to first speak to me.

Chapter Two

The Lecture

I hadn’t wanted to sound disapproving or dampen Jonathan’s suggestion by digging for more information about the lecture or the organization. The history of our distant rapport during the last eight years when he had been living with his father had left me with a need to be extra careful about what I said, especially since we had slowly been able to re-patch together the bits and pieces of our life together.

I was intent on building on this new rapport, and when Friday, the day of the lecture arrived, along with the kind of harsh, springtime chill that sent shivers through every nerve and muscle in my body, I headed toward Fifty-Seventh Street. It was a perfect stay-at-home evening, but I had given my word. And so without a moment’s hesitation, I ran up the stairs of Cami Hall, only to suddenly stop in front of an assortment of shoes scattered casually about the floor. Surprised, I checked my notepad.

Yes, it was the right place and the right time. Uncertain as to the whys and wherefores of removing one’s shoes to attend a lecture, and though I thought it strange, I took off my shoes and carefully placed them in a corner of the vestibule where I would be certain to find them.

Aware that I would be seeing a roomful of shoeless people, I pushed open the heavy doors and discovered an even more extraordinary surprise. My son’s casual words had done nothing to prepare me for the reality of walking into a room where everywhere I looked, I saw someone dressed from head to toe in white. Secure in their mirror images, these ghostly men and women fluttered about the room like a flock of exotic birds.

The men were all bearded. Their heads were swathed in exotic turbans. Oversize shirts hung over their billowing, Indian jodhpur-style trousers, and it looked as if they had rejected individuality for a common sartorial style. A few of the women had added heavy cotton pants under their long smocks, in a stiff version of the colorful, flowing silk outfits worn by the girls of the Punjab in northern India. Instead of turbans, odd hats, resembling double-tiered cake tins, perched precariously on all the women’s heads, mimicking the men’s turbans.

I thought this odd attire was a deliberate statement to set these men and women apart from the rest of society. Perhaps my ideas about clothes are old-fashioned and traditional. To my way of thinking, if it’s not Halloween, and it’s not a costume party, then why dress in such a fashion? We were in mid-Manhattan, not some fantasy island.

Two long rows of cushions had been carefully placed on the empty wooden floor, but there were no chairs and no speaker’s platform. Jonathan had said that it was a lecture. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t the right place or the right time.

I approached one of the white-clad figures. Is the lecture on yoga in this room? I asked, half-expecting the woman to say no.

Yes, she answered immediately. The yogi will be speaking after a while.

A few minutes later, everyone sat down on the floor cushions. All the women formed a long row facing the opposite row of an equal number of seated men. I was obviously an outsider in my black sweater and black slacks, but I had been invited, I was here, and so I joined the women’s line. A smiling young man sat directly opposite me. Copying his pose, I tucked one leg over the other and rested my hands in my lap. As a teenager, I had studied Indian dance for a short period of time. I knew this crossed-leg position as the lotus posture, but there was nothing else that felt familiar about the scene.

My eyes must have reflected the anxiety I was feeling. Though I could feel my blood rushing through my body in a moment of fear, I pretended to be nonchalant. I nodded to the young man sitting opposite me as a way of saying hello. Another young man, who appeared to be in his twenties, sat down at the end of the seated lines as though sitting at the head of a family dining table.

"Aum, Shanthi, Shanthihi, Aum, Shanthi," he began to chant a moment later in an ongoing, soft, mesmerizing rhythm, as if beating time on a silent drum. Every person in the room joined the chanting. I remained silent. My thoughts swirled in my head like a mini-hurricane, as I realized this chanting was tailor-made for Jonathan. From the time he was three or four, my son loved to sing songs to himself as he played. Later, when he was a little older, he would hum a tune while he puttered with plants or mulled over his thoughts.

My heart sank. I knew as certainly as if Jonathan were sitting next to me what had attracted him to this group. With his reflective temperament, his loose hips, and his strong bass voice, it would be easy for my son to sit chanting for hours on end. There was no doubt in my mind that he could slide into this world as easily as a hand into a glove, and it frightened me. My son’s apparently innocent telephone call telling me about a lecture that he thought I would enjoy had obviously been a first step in bringing me straight into the heart of his new world—a world that made me tremble with an immediate, wordless feeling as cold and as unwelcome as the day’s pounding rainstorm.

The chanting was followed by a series of breathing exercises. Soon the room was filled with the sound of people breathing so deeply it seemed as if an invisible wand had lulled everyone into an enchanted sleep: breathing in, out, over and over in a steady, regular rhythm, fingers pressed first over one nostril and then the other. If this was a daily exercise, no wonder the women in the group had clear, rosy complexions.

It was hard to keep my thoughts from whirling around. For a moment, I was tempted to get up and leave. Nevertheless, my own curiosity or my inner sense of discipline took over. I began to copy the gestures of those around me, breathing in unison with the group. Focused on my breathing, I lost all sense of time.

Yogi Bhajan, the leader of this Americanized version of the Sikh religion, replaced the young man who had been leading the preliminary breathing exercises. At least six feet tall, large-boned, and heavy but not overly fat, the yogi gave the impression of strength and solidity.

He was dressed in the same outfit worn by the men, with the added accessory of a bright gold wristwatch. The two lines of men and women spread out before his seated figure like tendrils emerging from a potato, or like the subjects of an imaginative, unorthodox court.

The yogi began to chat with some of the young men, who sat before him like guests at the feet of an ancient potentate.

Ravi, are you feeling better?

The young man smiled, pleased that he had been singled out. Yes, much better.

Raj, you have a new family. Congratulations.

Thank you. Yes, we are grateful.

I listened to these short conversations with some of the men about their work and their families, which continued on for a few minutes. Obviously, these people either lived together or gathered frequently. There was no question, though, that the yogi was their leader.

The yogi began to talk about the differences between American and Indian society. As he spoke, the soft, ingratiating questions, the little smiles, the quick head nods were replaced by a sharp arrogance in his voice.

It’s respect for the family, he lectured, pinning his listeners with the power of conviction that stamped every word and every pause in the lilting rhythms of his Indian-accented voice.

We put more importance on the family. Here in America, there’s not much concern about the welfare of children. You will find that as a rule -we in India, our way of life - is more ethical, more virtuous than here in America, especially nowadays. We are more rooted in our religion and guided by the teachings.

No one replied. I listened in silence with my anger glowing like a fire out of control. My mind filled with my own thoughts of life in India, as I had known it. It was impossible for me to agree with the yogi’s comparison of the two cultures. The experience of my short six-month stay in New Delhi before Jonathan was born, while I was still married to his father, who had intended to make a documentary film there, differed greatly from the description of life as presented by this guru.

As the yogi rhapsodized about the solid values of Indian life, I recalled young beggars running through the streets of New Delhi—until the government decided that it would be better public relations to hide them in special camps. The India I had experienced was a world where middle-class people thought nothing of starting to eat dinner at eleven at night, while their servants dozed on stone floors waiting to be called. It was a world that in the middle of the twentieth century had not yet completely thrown off the shackles of its ancient caste system. I doubted that India, a country bound in tradition, had changed that much.

Until this evening’s gathering, I had known only that the Sikhs were a religious community originating in the Punjab area of India. In New Delhi, turbaned Sikh men drove taxis through the city streets, as though they were chasing herds of cattle across the vast plains of their homeland. I was aware that they all shared the same surname: Singh, and sported a silver bangle bracelet on one wrist. The men tucked their long hair under turbans and grew beards in accordance with an ancient tradition that believed that a man’s strength would be forever preserved by not cutting his hair.

When the yogi finished speaking, he lowered his head for an instant, and then closed his eyes as he began to speak in a low, mesmerizing voice.

Breathe in through the right nostril; breathe out through the left, he murmured, his voice soft and caressing, as he directed our breathing with the regularity of a ticking metronome. Everyone in the room followed his voice. We continued: breathing in, breathing out, on and on and on. My memories of India slowly faded as I focused: breathing in, breathing out.

There weren’t any windows in the room that I could see. The air was stifling. Minutes melted into minutes. How long, I wondered will this go on? There were more than seventy people, all breathing in and out in unison.

I panicked. Afraid of fainting, I shifted my weight very slightly. And I let my gaze wander around the room. The moment I made these subtle movements, one of the monitors pacing around the room, came quietly and quickly over to me.

Please remain still, she whispered, and focus on your partner. Otherwise, you’ll disturb the flow of energy. This is kundalini yoga.

I looked at the young bearded man sitting opposite me. His eyes were closed, and his chest moved with each breath as if he had an inner accordion. I closed my own eyes and continued breathing. Suddenly, I was hearing the yogi’s words echoing in my ears without really being conscious of listening.

Breathe in, breathe out. His words dissolved into the air and floated through every nerve and muscle in my body.

As I continued to blend my breathing with that of the men and women sitting around me, I plunged deeper and deeper into some hidden part of myself. I kept taking strong breaths, breathing in, breathing out, focusing all my energy on my breathing; then dark circles began swirling around in my vision. I started to feel dizzy. My head felt as though it were stuffed with a fearful buzzing, as if a bee had been caught inside my thoughts.

Certain that I would faint if I continued, I told myself that I had to stop this breathing exercise. Instead, something strange and unexpected happened. The darkness disappeared; the buzzing stopped. I had broken through my own fear without knowing how or why or even what was happening. My body relaxed as though I were nothing more than a balloon of air that had been pricked by a pin. I felt myself slowly melting into the space around me.

My sense of the world expanded in a mysterious way. I kept breathing, in and out, but now without the fear that something dreadful would happen to me. I joined in the group practice as if singing along with a choir.

As