Nothing is permanent.
The words repeat in my head. Not even my sadness at Ratna’s quick exit into The Safe Place can last. I’m suddenly giddy with suppressed laughter. What will Kaleem think if I just burst out with it? The sight of his rickshaw scooting through the streets on our way to the Jyothi Seva home in Venkateshpuram is causing heads to turn. We look like a little black and yellow plane, or a huge flying bug with a single Cyclops’s Eye (that third-Eye again) lighting up the grimy night.
He’s at the helm; I’m in the passenger seat balancing the coffin on my lap, its head and foot sticking out considerably on each side. At first the people just have a quick glance; then, when they realize what they’ve just seen, a rickshaw with a coffin sticking out on two sides of the back, they stare in disbelief. Children are the first to notice. They burst out laughing. Finally I do too. Kaleem smiles at me over his shoulder. “Looks like airplane, Mama,” he says.
I am eating exhaust fumes as we fly toward the Joythi Seva Home. Intoxicated and dying my mind separates, dissociates from my body. It goes to The Safe Place that children being abused, victims being tortured, the starving escape to—beyond duality. Saints like Holy Little Ratna dwell there, immersed in ecstasy, and from time to time re-enter the world to bring comfort and joy…..
I am writing a letter to my daughter Shaila, she who Destiny ripped from me, and who I keep trying to have returned to me. My prayers and actions are like ice in the hot sun. She continues to reject me. But from The Safe Place we are united. I am telling her how I am totally addicted to plants, their beauty, and how I want to immerse myself in their effulgence. I was like a wild bee at the flower nurseries each week, I tell her.
In the gardens of her childhood I constructed outside, I planted trees and shrubs and bushes and perennials. Inside, I grew exotic African violets, gloxinias, miniature orange trees, and ferns. I crowded together clay pots stuffed with pink and salmon and bright red geraniums on the window sills. I believed the devas of the plants would save us.
In the winter I forced daffodils and tulips into bloom, along with piercingly fragrant hyacinths. During the grey and blizzard days of February, I brightened every empty space in the house with forsythia in full bloom, and sometimes I managed to force quince and apple blossoms to open slowly making mystic the mundane. These earthy fragrances mixed with the smell of firewood roaring and hissing in the living room fireplace. I had, in spite of my many duties, time for meditative and reflective moments while you and Lee Michael and baby Gene took afternoon naps. My favorite spot for introspection was in front of that fireplace.
Shaila stares at the letter, unable to comprehend my longing for her to come back home to my heart. She sighs with boredom. She does not remember me at all, perhaps.
Sometimes the dry logs burst loudly, waking the snoozing cats. But none of us, so cozy in our authentic first home, the salt-box-style nest, could have known then that a mother-killer tornado was just around the corner about to blow our family to bits.
Now I am left with blind orphans, nuns who see me as an instrument of God, a rickshaw driver who does not know of this other world where I tread water constantly, trying not to sink into Hell.
When we arrive at the home, it’s very late. Kaleem puts the coffin in the tiny chapel where the funeral Mass will be said in the morning and where the nuns and the blind orphans and some of the neighbors will say their good-byes. While we were picking up the coffin, Sister Agata and the nuns had prepared Ratna’s body. I watch as it is brought from the guest-room bed where it had been put into the lovely white-satin dress, the hair combed and held back with a white-satin head band.
Slowly and solemnly, Sister Agata lowers the body into the coffin which is at the top of the aisle leading to the altar. Sighted persons entering the chapel tomorrow will see Ratna easily, as she faces the doorway, her feet aimed towards the altar.
.............to be continued in next instalment of Terry’s Words.
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