The Secret Side of Jaya

By Jnana Hodson

Embracing three distinct novellas, The Secret Side of Jaya tells of her paranormal encounters in each of the three places she inhabits after leaving the ashram.
In the first, Bible translator John Wycliffe (born 1384) meets up with surrealist painter Hieronymous Bosch (born 1450) in the railroad-siding town where she's living on the Great Plains. Who knows what will erupt, especially when modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan (born 1877) joins the action? Who says great genius doesn't continue, even in the most out-of-the-way places? Jaya plays along with their subversive operation out of an old warehouse owned by Virgil and Homer. It's my wildest prose to date — a work that has already bitterly split one competition jury that awarded publication to another author. So be warned, you'll either hate or love it.
The second novella focuses on a woman miller who makes flour and cornmeal the old way — with waterpower and granite stones. With each visit into the spring-fed ravine, Jaya finds there's more in these Ozark mountain backwoods than she's imagined. Even the wildlife's magical, or at least the critters she comes to understand.
The third novella introduces the legendary hunchbacked Native piper Kokopelli, who soon has Jaya fiddling beside him as he takes flight through the desert interior of the Pacific Northwest. You're invited to dance along.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jnana Hodson
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463445273

Jnana Hodson

It’s been a while since I’ve been known by my Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes, at least in summer. Winters in New England are another matter.For four decades, my career in daily journalism paid the bills while I wrote poetry and fiction on the side. More than a thousand of those works have appeared in literary journals around the globe.My name, bestowed on me when I dwelled in a yoga ashram in the early ‘70s, is usually pronounced “Jah-nah,” a Sanskrit word that becomes “gnosis” in Greek and “knowing” in English. After two decades of residing in a small coastal city near both the Atlantic shoreline and the White Mountains northeast of Boston, the time's come to downsize. These days I'm centered in a remote fishing village with an active arts scene on an island in Maine. From our window we can even watch the occasional traffic in neighboring New Brunswick or lobster boats making their rounds.My wife and two daughters have prompted more of my novels than they’d ever imagine, mostly through their questions about my past and their translations of contemporary social culture and tech advances for a geezer like me. Rest assured, they’re not like any of my fictional characters, apart from being geniuses in the kitchen.Other than that, I'm hard to pigeonhole -- and so is my writing.

Book preview

THE SECRET SIDE OF JAYA

A vagabond's surreal

and fantastic encounters

. . . . .

Three novellas plus bookends by Jnana Hodson

. . . . .

Copyright 2020 and 2015 by the author

Dover, New Hampshire, USA

Cover illustration by Tatiyana Mi via Shutterstock.

Thank you for selecting this story. Please remember this ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please order an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

= + =

Contents

. . . . .

Madness

With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses

Miller at the springs

Along with Kokopelli's hornpipe

Homecoming

About the author and more

= + =

Madness

. . . . .

Am I losing my mind? I can't keep up. Not just on the job and definitely not in my marriage. As for my yoga practice? Like I have time for that these days? Just who am I, anyway? Especially here and now?

Yes, we — my husband, my Schuwa, my guy the world knows as Joshua, and I, little me — well, we've landed in a strange land, one not the least bit like what we expected or had known. And yes, I'm talking to myself, at least in my head. The one I feel I'm losing.

Is anybody listening?

I can't even keep up with my pile of reading, not in my own field or in my personal interests, much less my spiritual practice or self-help reflection. No, everything keeps piling up.

As for the dirty dishes in the sink or the clothes on the floor?

Look, nothing's really fun. Not anymore.

And others see me as strong, intelligent, capable? Little do they know the terror I'm always feeling. Yes, behind my confident mask, little me.

And I wonder why I can't sleep?

Thank God for the occasional notes from Wendy, all those miles away. We're so different and yet so alike, in a secret sort of way.

Usually they're just random quotes of Scripture she jots on a postcard or a small piece of stationery. Nothing regular, just time to time when she thinks of me. Lately they've been preprinted greeting cards she bought from a mission group, and even so she apologized for being lazy. At least you get the first pick, she scribbled on the first one. I could almost hear her sigh.

I fired back, No apology necessary. You're overworked and underpaid. I hope Pastor Bob knows what a gem his wife is.

I know about being overworked and underpaid. I'm told I'd be making ten times as much in the private sector just purveying junk nobody needs. You know, the debris of godless capitalism.

If only my Schuwa would be as supportive of me and my work as Wendy is of Bob's.

OK, what I do relies heavily on volunteers. As we say, they're paid even less than I am. And there's so much need. How can I justify a white-collar managerial salary?

As one of her notes said, The poor you will always have with you. Jesus said that.

Nothing like that for a model of voluntary poverty.

At least she followed that up with another: For the poor you will always have with you in the land. Therefore, I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and the poor, in your land.' That was Moses.

Her quotes always seem to arrive just at the right time. I could certainly use one today.

Before I met her, most of my scriptural reading had been in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads we studied in the ashram. And then I became intrigued by fragmentary texts from antiquity, especially those of so-called primitive peoples.

And her husband calls me his favorite heathen? If anybody on this whole planet comes close to understanding me, it's Wendy. And even so, there are a lot of things I've experienced I dare not share with her.

As for Schuwa? Even more problematic.

She's the one who introduced me to the concept of sojourning — a recognition of dwelling temporarily where you're a stranger in a strange land, as the Bible calls it. Wendy says God can lead you to places like that so you can learn something important or do something for good. She's said that's why I was in Prairie Depot, where I met her and my Schuwa. It's not where I was supposed to sink roots or make my true home.

So here I am, living in a shack in an apple orchard in a desert — a destination that was supposed to be a Promised Land for me and Schuwa, only we're still not settled.

Promised Land? Another Biblical idea. And what did Wendy get from me? The Joy of Sex, which she read on the sly. She's a preacher's wife, remember?

Fact is, I've never ever really been settled. Never had a real home, not with the divorces. Not in Manhattan after college.

The ashram held that appeal. An old farmhouse in the woods, all of us living and working together under Big Pumpkin, as we called Swami. That, or Elvis, his other nickname.

Living close to the land, as we were, I became much more aware of the seasons. Not just the climate, but the seasons each of us within ourselves and the seasons of whatever work we do.

And Big Pumpkin insisted that each place has its own vibe. He said it's an important spiritual awareness. A powerful vibe pulled him to the farm that he bought and opened as his yoga homestead, so he said.

It was unlike anyplace else I'd ever lived — Cambridge, next to Boston; Pittsburgh; Seattle; Chicago; Philadelphia; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; and then Manhattan. No, this was out in the woods, far from even the suburbs. We started seeds indoors and gardened and composted and cut our own firewood and collected eggs from under our hens. This was hands-on learning, not out of books.

If only other things hadn't come to a head before I could truly understand what he felt there. Instead, I was out again and plopped down in the Heartland. Adventurously adrift in a broken and suffering land. In terms of farming, Prairie Depot had some of the best soil in the world, but that richness carries a price, as I would learn.

And you need to watch your step, as I would also discover.

So just about the time I find my way around and connect people's names to faces, I'm uprooted and off again. Story of my life.

Do I take on too much? Do I have a choice?

Again, I'm grateful to Wendy. She says I have a calling. One from God. I do wish she wouldn't express it that bluntly. Frankly, that part gives me the willies. But why else would I earn a Master's in Business Administration degree and apply it to the field of nonprofit enterprises?

I never think of myself as a maverick, honestly. But I do buck convention. Can't help it. Is that part of a calling?

If I could only be content working in organizations that run top-down, on a command-style structure, I'd be making better money. No doubt about that. My job in the foundation in New York was like that, even when we thought we were pretty ground-breaking.

My discontent started when I listened to voices at ground level. The people we thought we were helping had no say in what we were doing. We were doing things to them, not with them. And we created a lot of bureaucracy in the process. As they told me, you gotta talk white when you're filling out those forms. Even poor whites, the majority of our clientele, could complain about our language barrier, one way or another.

Then I saw the ways fiefdoms, turfs, and empire-building got in the way of working cooperatively.

I've built my career on trying to serve real people with real needs, including them in whatever we're doing. It's not always easy and it's often controversial. Did I mention exhausting?

No wonder I feel I'm skating on thin ice. Or worse, feel I'm drowning. I'm surrounded by all kinds of people in trouble and their basic needs. Matters of social and economic justice. Or, as a colleague says, we have a tiger by the tail. We don't dare let go.

There's too much!

I do try to leave the office behind when I'm off work. That's where the Others have been a godsend.

And the yoga exercises and meditation, when I can. This morning, nothing's quite connecting.

I'll be off to the office shortly, but this is my time. My own time. My own precious time to myself, even when I'm going nuts.

I'll stop whining. No good that it does. Make it to the weekend, declaring Saturday my collapse day. Don't expect anything out of me till three at the earliest. As for Friday night? I won't be back before seven. At least I'm not on call this time — that part rotates.

Saturday I think I'll look back over my journals and tidbits from Prairie Depot. Sometimes to get a sense of where you're going, you have to look back to where you've been. That's certainly my case today.

= + =

With a passing freight train of 119 cars

and twin cabooses

. . . . .

I wish I could find more of this kind of notebook. It's legal size, longer than the usual ones. Measures eight-by-twelve-and-a-half inches.

Simply flipping through, I see entries that are way beyond Schuwa. Here he is, or was, showing me this locale as it is on its surface but nothing of what's buried in its depths. Nothing of its underground or ancient secrets. None of its occult or hidden practices.

I had a lot of nights to myself back then, especially when he was off to college or working at the bar. My beloved had little idea of my private life — what was going on in my head and heart — much less what I was perceiving as snapshots of infinity.

= + =

Maybe I need a murder here. Or a kidnapping. A flying saucer would be nice, too. Anything but what you experience in your common life.

How many murders have involved your life, directly? Ditto, ditto, ditto. Cancer and heart attacks, more likely.

Everybody else does it. The evasion. Look at that cowboy ride!

Someday, after we’ve built an Interstate clear to the moon, my years in the field would have gotten me halfway there.

= + =

How did I first meet them? The ones I know as the Others. For the most part, they're refugees or at least in hiding. It's a timeless reality for revolutionaries.

= + =

Bosch was forced to make his drawings from the grandmother's land, which I traipsed thanks to my lover-boy and future husband who knows nothing of these characters. Yes, Schuwa, who can now exit from the scene.

My tea bag bleeds in the hot water, Bosch says by way of explanation.

This is a card playing town, she replies. The waitress. People here dress up to go to funerals the way people elsewhere do for the opera.

Ignorant of its squalid conditions, they’re thankful to leave the hospital alive. They still retain that old belief you go there to die. That there’s no other reason. Yes, die.

We sit at the cafe counter. Warm your cup?

Of course.

Can we trust her?

Wycliffe closes his book. You can’t sell deodorant to a yogi.

It's Greek and Hebrew, even though he's translating from Latin.

Modern politics is a choice between one detergent and Brand X, I say.

Not the thing, but the shadow the beasts burden under.

Not perceiving that Bosch, too, labors within multiple mirrors, I quote Yevtushenko.

Maybe it's the first time a Russian poet has been mentioned in this hamlet.

Om gurr, om gurr, om gurr, the mantra of bus and subway, echoes somewhere in our pasts.

Who knows what else is being fired from a cosmic slingshot.

= + =

Gossip mongering at the next table, the woman bitches about a neighbor’s boyfriend but holds the diamond-studded whore down the street in highest regard. Nobody will admit openly she’d been a gangster’s mistress, but everybody knows it. Especially not Al Capone’s.

Oh, she made good.

In this self-proclaimed Home of Hospitality, we’re out-of-towners and always shall be. Only a few will speak more than formalities to us. Guardedly.

We could turn the tables, of course.

Round, wretched head, run, dull eyed and hunchbacked.

I came here to do ethnographic research, or so I joke. My real work is far more pedestrian.

A decaying, dying, tacky city of sixty thousand broken windows. Flaking paint, rotting mortar. How long would it take its deflated citizenry in mothballs to finish the job?

There are two social classes: the ruling Elite 400, with their genealogies of pimps and thieves turned to fiction. And the rundown 15,600 others.

This ‘area news’ might be a boon to circulation, but to the locals, it’s a red flag, Bad Ed cautions, talking about a town we can see from the water tower at the edge of the city. Prairie Depot’s merchants, however jealous, seem all too happy to take the aliens’ money.

He could be speaking as easily of the Bible. He’s a deacon.

(Yes, Bad Ed is a deacon, the cornerstone church on the corner.)

Bosch joins us at the counter. Doesn’t need to say he’s been sketching the foundry and grain elevators. He’s been doing a lot of that. He'll add the insects later.

Railroad routes intersect here like a pile of pick-up sticks. Five depots, points of some deranged star, precipitated development. A few derailments, too.

The biographies of the locals? Born, married, buried. Little in between. That’s how it's been.

The painter could have run for the hills when the executioners came. Instead, he lit out across the plains.

You’re not from around here, are you?

No.

I could tell. Neither am I, the translator and printer said by way of introduction.

You learn to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, he told me when I first showed up.

It was his idea I buy the business. Make you appear to have a reason for being here. And an unpretentious cover for my research.

Pinky’s Big Bundle Launderama.

He's fronted me the money.

I have no idea who Pinky was. My name's Piper Joy, at least in my new guise.

Look, if I can't openly be who I am here, I might as well be someone else. 'Nuff said?

= + =

Wycliffe's an old man. Older than Bosch. He operates out of a red brick warehouse he claimed at a foreclosure auction. Two stories along the Nickel Plate Line. With its own rusty siding.

Bosch already has a studio on the second floor when the dancer arrives. She’ll occupy the other half of the floor, thank you.

We're becoming quite the subset.

At least the plumbing works. And nobody asks questions.

Not to our face.

They say it's better than living in Kastoria.

= + =

Sometimes you can look at life as a travelogue.

Are you going out to the gardens today? Out Hartstrait Road, from Hart’s Trace or even Hard Straight, nobody knows for sure.

Past Griffy Reservoir, a variation old Scot possessive form of Griffith.

We lease our plot from Homer and Virgil.

A thickening plot.

We can still see the water tower.

Moving in or out is a matter of setting sail. Here's the crew, there's the port. These are the white winds, the blue currents, the plum-toned storms.

Moving out or in is a matter of adjusting the focus and lighting as well.

Moving out or in is a matter of boxes and breakage.

Planting rows of beans, sweet corn, potatoes, and tomatoes. Everything we do openly suggests we planned on sticking around awhile.

So we become a landlocked sailor, each one a part of the whole. The scarecrow. A crew. Dancing in the breeze.

And then she appears. Isadora. Look, my overcoat’s still filled with city dirt. Needs cleaning.

OK, Pinky’s Big Bundle also handles dry cleaning.

That old Buick ‘27 is sturdy, solid, has plush fuzzy seats, sits high, has lots of headroom. It’s a masterpiece, she says, stepping forth as Paderewski plays Chopin, 78 rpm. Scratch, scratch, scratch, all in rhythm.

These aren’t your everyday snapdragons or nasturtiums.

Homer's driving. He speaks of Gossamer, the spider. The web.

How Wycliffe has connections. In this case, via the Kansas City Customs Office. A fugue by Geronimo Frescobaldi punctuates his meaning.

None of the local church organists can tackle it.

They stare at the score without asking. What is field in art? (Field of vision, for starters.) In this case, a landscape with larger-than-life figures. As well as the limitations, self-imposed and otherwise.

Oh, my, she says. The reality never quite measures up to our expectations, even of a place.

This is a travelogue, Wycliffe counters. We age along the way.

And then there is timeless.

I note the fable, where everyone's the richest, wisest, poorest, oldest, whatever. Always, like a fairy tale without fairies. I look around and see everything apart from us here is average.

Yes, excepting the present company.

Isadora's impatient. SOMEBODY NEEDS TO ACT!!!

She screams. Do something and take the consequences! She begins scribling notes, naming the wildlife, trees, flowers, insects, and birds she's found in an old Boy Scout Field Book.

Bosch, of course, has already taken to the field. His field notes are the sketches and