It’s about 40°C, about as hot as it gets here in summertime. A visit to the Khadhi Bhavan revealed it to be incredibly dirty. The staff were sitting around talking to each other, it was difficult to attract someone’s eye to get attention or service. Gandhi, who’d been instrumental in founding these shops all over India would be very disappointed. They now look rather like that once admirable institution, the English Cooperative shops when they had, as all things do when they’d lost sight of the dynamism and vision of the founders and run out of steam. Begun to sell the produce of the Indian villages, they even sell now polycotton. In one dusty picture frame but there’s a sign that says something like “Khadhi is the integrity of the country.”
The newspapers here are full of scandal - who has been caught doing what and since everyone’s doing it the ones that get caught are just the unlucky ones.
The hotel porter told me that the taxi return trip to the Khadhi shop would be Rs 30. On arrival there, the driver demanded Rs250. There’s no shame even when their bluff is called. If the big guys do it why not me?
Somewhat to my surprise Mr. K told me that there were to be marriages here in Kolkata and he asked me why I don’t get married? Shock! He also suggested that learning Hindi would be the thing for me to do to. He was not short on advice, Mr. K and in the manner of Indian SY leaders I am told, not shy in dispensing it.
He said that his driver would pick me up after 12. It is now 1.15PM. Again, more practice in detachment, well needed in my case.
Tuesday, April 11, 1995
Shri Mataji’s plane from Kathmandu was two hours late. Some two to three hundred yogis sat quietly in the airport lounge. The Austrian leader was there, a lady from Geneva, a lady from Ukraine who’d married an Indian. I also met a very nice Austrian woman, Gisela Matzer, who’s children had grown up and under Shri Mataji’s guidance was starting a home in India destitute Muslim women.
I felt really well since I arrived here. There was some anxiety at first, the long wait at the airport, the uncertainty of where to stay, my apparently suspect return ticket. All these matters were resolved during the day and I felt at complete ease for the first time since my arrival at the home of the Roy family last night.
It’s an unfamiliar feeling not knowing where I’m going next, or even where I’ll be spending the night, it’s pleasant once one surrenders to it, childlike even.
I’ve exchanged the private, isolated familiarity of an international air-conditioned splendor of my hotel room for the heart, sticky, humid and human warmth of the real India courtesy of the Roy family.
Even after only two days it’s been revealing for me to see a lot of my own conditioning, the problems of my attitude towards my own mother, there’s a huge sense of release and the acknowledgment of this in witnessing my anxiety at the prospect of insecurity in travel, of things that go wrong, the necessity to live a more surrender life. If some of these can be absorbed the trip is already worthwhile.
As for Mrs. Roy, well she lives here, an Indian middle class life with the almost total absence of material comfort, at least by today’s European standards. Angelica Roy is a lovely German lady who married an Indian in Germany in 1965 and has been living here since 1972. She offered to put Gisele and I up for the night.
She told us that she met her future husband while traveling on a bus in Germany. She’s now a Sahaja yogi, he is tolerant of it but uninterested.
When we arrived at their house we had an excellent meal and a really good meditation. Angelica travels one hour on various buses to get to work, over by the Salt Lake. To think she exchange her life in Germany for this . But she exudes peace, satisfaction and tranquility.
When Shri Mataji arrived at the airport She looked really lovely. At one point She saw me and smiled and said, “How lovely to see you, I didn’t expect to see you here.” I felt like $1 million, actually much, much better than that and to be in the attention of the Adi Shakti is beyond price or expectation.
Angelica explained that whereas in Europe bring bread goes hard when it gets stale, in the humidity of Kolkata it goes soft and moist. At certain times of year when the humidity is 100% it’s impossible to dry clothes after washing them.
I sleep without covering just wearing a lungi, or dhoti as they call it in southern India, and a khadhi shirt
I should explain that Gandhi told the Indians that the way they should peacefully protest and support themselves in trying to force the British out, was that they should return to wearing handmade, homespun cotton, that they should give up their jobs and sell Khadhi as a means of making a living. At one time Shri Mataji’s father cut up and burned his British woolen suits. Thus the Khadhi Bavan was begun across India, shops that sold handicrafts from the villages of India because Gandhi saw that encouraging the expansion of village life and culture was the way forward for India. It can now be seen as an idea that has run its course, even at the time, people like Nehru laughed at it, he saw Gandhi, an educated barrister, wearing Indian peasant clothes as a bit of a joke.
A taxi arrived and took us to another place, Loic a French Sahaja Yogi was in it and the lovely Mr. Brahman Banerjee who told me his job was translating from Bengali into English. At the recent birthday Puja in New Delhi he said that Shri Mataji categorically stated that any Sahaja Yogi who lives a pure life is guaranteed no more reincarnations! I find myself initially disappointed at first by this thought, after all having lived so many previous lives in an unrealized state, why wouldn’t one want to come back and enjoy one or two more in this newly evolved condition? Then, on second thought, I was utterly inspired by the fact that the endless cycle of Maya, the great game of winners and losers, could be over in this lifetime. What a goal to strive for.
10 PM. This new place, called Banini Dharmsala is a huge building, with large rooms with marble floors, each with their own basic cooking facilities attached which are open for rent to the public. Hindu religious ceremonies go on constantly, lasting virtually all day with individuals coming and going at random. The priests spoke and sang into microphones and the overall sound echoed and resonated through the building reached deafening levels at time.
The operator of the one elevator in the building curiously enjoys a lunch break between 1 PM and 3 PM, the very time which when it appeared to be most needed.
Loic came back with me to the Kenilworth Hotel where the laundry awaiting me was from room 406 whereas my room was 604.
Driving through the crowded and corroded city streets was something to be remembered. Even though I’ve experienced it before in Delhi and Bombay, the sheer turmoil of an Indian street is always a shock to the system. The streets are awash with activity, from top to bottom of society including the flotsam and jetsam, and every conceivable type of vehicle contributes to the chaos. There are rickshaws seating two people, although I’ve seen six in one, pulled along by one man. There are carts made from long strips of bamboo supported on cross members atop car wheels, laden high with jute sacks. Up to six men will be pushing and drawing these through the streets There are cyclists and motorcyclists, scooterists – the record number I’ve seen on a motor scooter is six, and drivers of curious three wheeled contraptions, a cross between a lorry, a three wheeler and a car. There are motorized rickshaws, cars, vans and trucks, the latter extravagantly decorated with Hindu symbols and painted in the brightest colors.
The drivers of this cornucopia of transport do their best to contribute to the cacophony of sound, with shouts, bells and horns that range from the flat, two-dimensional squawk of the motor scooter, to the deep resonance of the old-fashioned bulb squeezed airhorns. Our taxi driver had two, a tinny excuse of a horn mounted on an inner ring of the steering wheel and affected when any part of the ring was depressed and the bulbous air horn as previously described.
As with users of city streets everywhere, all, despite the evidence to the contrary, are apparently convinced that the noise they generate will magically open a way through the congestion. Or perhaps, more plausibly, that the exercising their rights to bellow, shout or squawk will in some way ease their frustrations at being stuck in such hell.
No evidence to be found here of the detached witness state.