Page 74 - Just Deserts

Swami Adavasi

notes scribbled in a discarded child’s notebook (now enshrined at the
headquarters in a Plexiglas case). Its geometry was the pyramid, a
form uncannily resembling the usual distribution of wealth in society
at large. The difference, of course, was that the flow would be
regulated strictly according to one’s ability to handle the burdens and
joys of giving and taking. Adavasi’s arithmetic was equally basic: each
person must donate half of his or her possessions to an established
member of the church; that individual, having demonstrated the
ability to absorb and emanate greater quantities by dint of seniority,
would follow the same principle and donate half of his or her receipts
to the person one level higher.
At the top of this ever-concentrating funnel of cash, real property
and negotiable securities sat the swami himself, whose awesome
responsibility it was to distribute half his enormous resources
to...Help Yourself. This, he explained, was tantamount to recycling
the donations back to the bottom of the pyramid, as it was the
church’s task to bring in more converts—who would become the
next generation of donors to those who had started by giving only.
Cynics pointed out that most of the labor involved in proselytizing
was itself donated by those who desperately sought donors to make
up the shortfall occasioned by their own original donations. It had
even been suggested by one commentator—rather uncharitably, from
the church’s point of view—that the new recruits’ devotional
exercises consisted primarily of intensive training in the latest
motivational techniques of high-pressure salesmanship.
But all was not rosy in the inner sanctum of Help Yourself. Swami
Adavasi’s pre-enlightenment years of poverty and malnutrition,
followed by two decades of snowballing prosperity, had taken a toll
on his health; although barely in late middle-age, he appeared, both in
photographs and at his rare public audiences, to be failing. The
church had spared no expense in securing the services of Europe’s
finest doctors—seemingly to no avail. The swami’s days were clearly
numbered, despite Help Yourself press releases portraying the
spiritual leader of thousands as robust and energetic. Observers of
the organization’s popular success and its forceful resistance to
governmental inquiry and prosecution wondered what would become
of Help Yourself when the pyramid’s capstone cracked and fell.
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