“Ahh, yes foreigners might get a little confused. But what is the harm in having a spiritual side to revelry? Munich is named for the Munichen monks – and what is Oktoberfest without beer? It is what we were all born to do!”

I wondered if the munchkin had ever had any kind of transcendental communication with Pundit-ji. Or whether karma had anything to do with our meeting here this October evening, outside Munich’s most famous brewery. What was Munich, the land of the monks without Oktoberfest? Or Oktoberfest without beer? Or munchkins for that matter?. And what was Ayurveda without meat? Or publishing without any double standards? Or karma without intention. Or my intention, without Arjuna, the Indophile, to help me understand it? I juggled all the permutations in my head as the munchkin pointed out my hotel -lit up with festive lights like a carousel in an amusement park

I turned around to thank her and ask her name. But it was not in my karma to find out. She had disappeared into the October night.

When I walked into my room, I saw that the phone had indeed been sitting on the dresser all the time. There were five missed calls- all from Felicia my agent. I listened to the voice mail.

“Sorry to be a pest, but I had to talk to you. India is being featured as the main point of literary interest at the Frankfurt book fair. A really topnotch publisher wants to sign you on for an Ayurvedic cookbook. The only caveat is that it has to include non veg recipes – and I didn’t know whether you were up for that. Can you meet them in Frankfurt tomorrow? Before you get back to San Francisco?”

How often is it that we plan intently for something only to have it backfire and take us to an entirely different course? And though we do not realize it, the people we meet everyday, become tools in our own very unique karmic journey. And thanks to them, we end up at a different place that where we set out to go, with a different perspective on each aspect of the journey. It will probably take an entire lifetime, if that, to figure out how or why karma exactly works. But I can just see Pundit-ji jumping excitedly at the prospect of my meetings with the lucid Arjuna, and the mysterious munchkin, both of whom had obviously shown me the light in Munich.