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VISIT MINNESOTA MONTHLY ON THE WEB Online Article Index		As soon as I smelled something burning, I should have returned the car and never looked back. Because I didn't, I know a little more about reincarnation. The car was a 6-year-old Toyota Corolla, owned by an Indian couple. Sanjay and Shefali, we'll call them, were newlyweds at 60-something, and since they no longer needed both their cars the Toyota was priced to, well, move. Sanjay, small, bald, and mustachioed, showed me the car in the parking lot of their St. Louis Park apartment. Then we had tea in their tiny living room, where the sweet scent of curry mingled with Christmas evergreen. It was gentle and surreal, like the trip I'd taken to India the year before. India—magical land of reincarnation, of mind over matter, where one man sat serenely wrapped in snakes and another perched passively on a bed of nails. Now, as then, the skeptical cobra within me was hopelessly charmed. During the test drive, when I smelled something decidedly flammable and petroleum-based, I didn't panic, figuring Sanjay likely believed in the punitive powers of karma and would not let me explode. He explained that the smell was residual oil burning away; he'd left the filler cap open and there'd been a spill, but the mess had been professionally cleaned—he showed me the receipt. I insisted on a mechanic's inspection nonetheless. Sanjay wasn't keen on giving away the keys. He eyed me closely as I drove away. It was the last time he would see his car running for quite a few days. Two blocks after leaving the inspection, the car choked dramatically and died. I phoned Sanjay, expecting him to be contrite as he imagined his next life as a brake shoe. Instead, he blamed me. "I'm calling the police," he shouted. "I'm calling my lawyer." Suddenly, everything was unraveling, shapeshifting. "According as one acts, according as one behaves, so does he become," promises the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Desperate, I'd fallen for the car. And now I was learning what becomes of those who believe in things too good to be true. This knowledge was dawning on me from multiple horizons. About a month earlier, another apparent gift had presented itself, this time on my romantic doorstep: an old flame, whose dousing had been deserved. Still, as with the car, if not for that one small thing, if not for her pathological paranoia. I decided to be open-minded. Isn't everything, after all, an illusion? Even the concept of reincarnation has taken on various forms. Once, a heavenly afterlife had come between successive earthly lives, administered by a god of death. But a new concept, karma, deposed the god. Fate is between you and your self now. What you see is what you get. You are how you be. My old flame and I reimagined our relationship. Everything looked different in this new enlightenment. Reincarnation, I thought, is not a new form, it's a new form of understanding. I understood that my girlfriend's suspicion of my female friends might simply be a manifestation of my inability to commit. I was reincarnated—just as our life together would be, once I let my girlfriend into every nook and cranny of my apartment. And my psyche. I still needed a car, however. It was not yet within my ability to "understand" my way, say, to the office. And my girlfriend, it was understood, was not going to help me "understand" my way around town with her car. Thus, the Corolla. On the phone, Sanjay and I agreed that I would have the dead car towed to his mechanic. There, we discovered that the poorly cleaned oil had infected the alternator. "I am so sorry. It is God's way," Sanjay said, hugging me. I was deeply relieved. Perhaps higher powers were still in charge. When the hot potato of karma is handed to us, it could be for reasons beyond our understanding. There is only so much we can reimagine. No amount of reincarnation can change that one small thing; it's probably what makes us human. Sanjay called me at home later that day: "We discussed it, my wife and I, and we say, Tim is good person, and we are wondering if you and your girlfriend would like to come over for dinner sometime. I glanced at my girlfriend, who had dropped by unexpectedly, who was starting to unpack a duffel—"It'll just be this one bag"—the size of a closet. I looked at my appointment book, which was increasingly empty. Then Sanjay asked, "And would you still like to buy the car?" MM

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