For couple returning home from US, Guruji is sole anchor T
HE Jauhars returned to India five years ago from New York. Their re-entry was not without friction—the homecoming was not as warm as expected. And Meera Jauhar often griped in those days that they had no one to guide them. That changed in August of 2006. For quite some time, their neighbours, the Bhatias—who like them were in the real estate business—had been persuading them to meet a person they only referred to as Guruji. Anil Jauhar did not know quite what to do with the proposition. However, the couple decided to take up the invitation one evening. As they set out with the Bhatias, Meera wondered about the children—twins aged eight—the couple was leaving behind. She told her husband that they should go in good faith, listening to the Bhatias’ well-meant suggestion as they would have to their parents’. Meera was a diabetic—a fact not known to her neighbours, who had told her that it would be unwise not to drink the tea or have the langar served at Guruji’s. It was thus with some trepidation that the couple entered Guruji’s durbar in Empire Estate. Meera had her tea and then the langar that, apart from chapattis and dal, had laddoos. The sacred meal over, her stomach protested with pain. She endured it for the next hour. When : 242 :