Chapter 2: Life at the Hermitage
I looked at him. He was an imposing and handsome man of seventy years. His eyes captivated my attention, piercingly blue and crackling with energy. His hair was long, white with yellow blonde tips and grew luxuriantly. He wore cheap silver hoop earrings and his ear lobes were large. His forehead, his cranium were huge. Everything about him was massive. His hands were scary, huge with padded finger tips and dangerous thumbs. He had a good sized belly and his skin was shiny with health.
Oddly I can’t remember how he was dressed or if he was naked. It was winter and early morning, so I assume he was wearing a long orange robe, a kufni, to keep off the morning chill. He handed me his card. “Shri Gurudev Dadaji Mahendranath.”
“Oh! No wonder you were so hard to find this morning. I had the wrong name!” I laughed.
“I am called Dadaji. It is an affectionate term meaning grandfather.”
“Dadaji. My name is Kristen. I come from Canada, but I’ve been in India off and on for many years”
“Well Kristen from Canada, would you join me for a cup of tea?”
“Yes, please.”
A moment later Kaliben, tiny, aged, bright and spry woman came into the room with two cups of sweet, milky chai.
“This is Kaliben. She and her husband Chotabhai own this house. I am their guest here and have been for many years.”
I pranaamed to her respectfully (bowed with my hands held together in front of my face) and she smiled back, warmly but uncertain of me at the same time. She gathered up two or three pieces of laundry and left the room with a protective glance back towards Dadaji.
He sat down on his low wooden bed, the only furniture in the room. He indicated a mat that I could sit on, as the floor was cold terrazzo. We sipped tea and both lit up cheap Indian cigarettes.
“You come from Canada. Where are you going?”
“I had an idea to go to the Gir forest.”
“Ah. You will of course go to Girnar, on the holy mountain. I spent some time there. It is one of the most sacred pilgrimage places in all of India.”
I didn’t know that.
“And your mission is enlightenment?” he said with an amused twinkle.
He had just asked the three traditional questions. Who are you? Where are you going? What is your mission? “Kristen from Canada” was a mundane answer. “Girnar” was at least a good destination, but in my case haphazard. My mission? Good answer, but painfully naive. How much can be learned in so few words.
Suddenly a small bundle of a boy burst into the room and took a long slide across the floor and landed at Dadaji’s feet. “Ha! Has Janak been a good boy?”
He pulled the little lad up and gave him an inch on the bed. He tousled his hair and laughed.
“I doubt it” he said.
Then he playfully tapped him on the head as a blessing and introduced him as the youngest member of the household and one to whom special dispensation was given to sit beside the Guru on his throne. Janak looked boldly back at me, his eyes full of mischief.
A moment later, Sangeeta, his sister, a self-contained young girl with a long braid, came in. She was accompanied by Matti. They both approached the bed and bowed to touch the guru’s feet. He gave them both his blessings, speaking in Sanskrit and thumping their bowed heads. Sangeeta was quiet and Matti had a paralyzed tongue, was slightly mad and only spoke in loud croaks. The young sister and her old auntie began sweeping and washing the floor, cleaning up the tea cups and dusting. Meanwhile Dadaji questioned Janak about school. Janak wouldn’t be caught speaking english so he just nodded and laughed. The eldest brother, Nitesh, was at college in Ahmedabad and wouldn’t be back until evening.
The morning rush of activity was over as abruptly as it had begun. The kids went off to school and Matti went about her domestic chores in the other part of the house.
We continued to smoke and chat. He explained that these people the P. family were very, very dear to him. Even before he had moved into their home “due to antiquity” they had sent one of their sons to his kutir (hut) on the Vatrak River with warm rotis and a cooked vegetable dish every day for years. Ramesh had recently moved to London and was deeply missed. I would meet his brother Dinubhai, son of Chotabhai and father of the children, as the day progressed. Then he explained that it was common practice in Gujerat State to end female names in -ben which means sister and to end male names in -bhai which means brother. Thus Kaliben was sister Kali. The men’s names could be used either as Ramubhai or Ramesh, Dinubhai or Dinesh. Gujerati was a singular language in India and the Gujeratis have many peculiarities, opposite to all their neighbors. Their cooking is admired all over India.
In walked Kailashben, daughter-in-law, mother to the three children and wife of Dinubhai. All the family seemed very content, but Kailashben was the physical embodiment of that contentment. She was round and beautiful, simply dressed in a soft sari, gentle and sweet.
I had been invited to lunch. Except for Dhinubhai who always sat with him while he ate, Dadaji ate alone in his room. I was sent out to eat with the family in the other part of the house. We sat in a semi circle on the floor in the kitchen. It was a big group so we ate first with the women and children and the adult men as they came in from work. First came Chotabhai, the elderly head of the household. He welcomed me to his home with grave dignity. He showed neither curiosity nor suspicion. He sold vegetables in the village market place as his family had done for generations. A year hence I would look up from my stitching and ask, “How was business today?” He would look appalled at my rudeness of spirit. He delivered a few sharp, short sentences that conveyed precisely his lack of interest in the vagaries of his fortunes in the marketplace.
I had just finished eating, washing my hand into the plate with the last of my drinking water. I was planning to get up and help with the clean up when I was summoned back to Dadaji’s room by Janak. Dinubhai was there. He and Dadaji had obviously been conferring. As there were no hotels anywhere near and the railway station was a simple village one without waiting/sleeping rooms I had been invited to stay the night, possibly two nights. The family could make room for me among the large metal drums of stored beans and rice and the large stone wheat hand-grinder in the corner. They would even give me a rope charpoy (bed) to sleep on, which looking back, was probably one of the elders beds, because normally we all slept on rolled out mats on the floor in India. I accepted their invitation immediately.
After lunch we all went down for a short nap in our various spots. When we were all awake again Dadaji showed me the workings of how and where to bathe, wash clothes, draw water, know drinking water from washing water. As there was just one water tap, by the backyard steps, all household water was kept in a variety of large amphora style pots, placed strategically all around the house. In those days the water supply was sporadic. Everyone in the village rushed to fill pots while the water ran. It was also a new colony of cement houses and wasn’t yet entirely hooked up to the small grid of those days.
He showed me that it was possible to discreetly pee at the shower drain which ran into the miniature canal system that snaked through the garden outside. His watered down piss, he assured me, was the secret to the luxuriant growth of bougainvillea which this house, out of all the other houses in the colony, enjoyed. The flowering bushes already reached the roof and blossomed a glorious red.
The sun always sets at 6 p.m. and that first evening we went up the back cement stairs to the roof. Dadaji had two lawn chairs stacked behind the door to the vestibule that sat over the stairs on the roof. We took them out and put them up. The roof was edged by a three foot high wall made of decorative cement blocks, and was, of course as big as the entire downstairs. From this roof I was to watch the world outside the house for many an hour.
That first evening was typical. The sun set and evening twilight began with the flight home of huge, furry fruit bats. They flew so close I could have reached up and stroked their fur. They had great leathery wings and their passage was accompanied by the strange sound those wings made. Minutes later in a cross current a stream of loudly cawing, brilliantly green, little parrots flew to their night home tree. Swallows swooped past on their way over to the mud cliffs by the river. The breeze would always come up the moment the sun slipped below the horizon and with it came the smell of the little fires all over India, being lit to cook the evening meal. The cows raised dust as the herds drifted home and the dust mixed with the light of the sunset. It is the eternal moment of evening home coming and is the most celebrated, evocative expression of endless India. I looked at the card which Shri Gurudev Dadaji Mahendranath had given me that morning when I had just arrived. Under his name it continued. Hermitage of the Cosmic Oracle and Lunar Laboratory of Twilight Yoga. I looked over to where Dhinubhai and Dadaji were sitting together listening to the BBC World News on the radio. The stars were coming out one by one above. The night air was fresh and cool.
