Yes! I know how cold a morgue refrigerator is. I cannot forget Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India, Saint John’s Hospital. And I cannot forget Holy Little Ratna, the almost completely paralyzed spastic child, born into a poor Indian family, who had been given up to Catholic nuns, Franciscan Sisters, Servants of the Cross, whose Mother House was in Laski, Poland—famous for graduating teachers of the blind, founded, in fact, by Mother Elisabeth Czacka, herself a blind person.
Mother Elisabeth devoted her life to serving the blind through education, rehabilitation, and technical or job-oriented training. She was particularly devoted to the care of blind multi-handicapped children who were poor orphans.
Present-day Franciscan Sisters, Servants of the Cross have homes and schools for the blind in many places. The Joythi Seva Home houses mainly blind orphans and is located in Venkateshpuram, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Bengaluru. Astonishingly, when I was a volunteer there, Jyothi Seva had only eight resident nuns and two lay helpers to take care of more than 50 kids from age three months to 18—and not just blind and multi-physically handicapped kids, but some severely mentally challenged as well.
By the mystery of Grace, or Divine Design, the Mother Superior in Laski had allowed Ratna to stay at the home even though she was not blind—this fact in itself I regarded as an indication of the importance of this child within the community. But in a mundane world most miracles, if even noticed, are regarded as luck.
I used to visit the Joythi Seva Home frequently and help the nuns out with the kids there. I liked this volunteer work. I did it because my Guru, Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who lived not-too-far from Bengaluru, in Prasanthi Nilayam, A.P. where I make my home, was always urging his devotees to do social service.
And I spoke Polish, the language of the nuns; it was my first language. I have to tell you, though, I did this type of thing—volunteering to bring happiness, as best I could, to those so much worse off than me—long before I had a Guru. By my own experience, (That’s the Real Guru.) I learned that when I was helping others, my own problems weren’t so big. I inherited this insight as a kid—from my Polish mother and my Portuguese father.
Daddy Jack is always cajoling me into old-age homes and hospitals, especially on holidays, to hand out perfume and chocolates to the ladies and cigars and bottles of wine to the men. Then I have to dance, or tell a story, or sing!
“But, Daddy, I c….”
Slap hard, I can feel the belt buckle before he unhooks it… Mostly, I dance and dance and dance; and there is that psyche-imprint moment when one of the men on the Mary Hitchcock Hospital, Hanover, New Hampshire ward screams out in sudden terror as his intestines burst and the nurses run to pull the curtain around his bed and like marathon runners they wheel him, bed and all, out into the mystery/destiny corridor—his yeti howls still squirming somewhere inside of me, the white-nylon stockings of the nurses still pursuing me.
But I have kept on dancing, on my toes, in ballerina shoes, a Space Voyager of the Emptiness, the Void that Holy Little Ratna never has to jettez across, perhaps. Anyway, out of this spiritual bouquet of blood and guts and screams and Daddy’s belt unbuckling sprang the first yogini I had ever met in crippled child form.
Other ghosts, saints, yogis and yoginis I had met before, appeared in adult bodies or as fully healthy child forms.
Mostly Ratna sat strapped into a white metal high chair at the Jyothi Seva Home and stared out of her flame-bright-seeing eyes at the blind, groping inmates, her brothers and sisters in the Place Between Worlds.
She was so loving to anyone who spoke with her. When I would attempt to feed her, (She hardly ever ate—Teresa Neumann, of the communion-wafer feasts—she would try to stretch her tiny, stiff, almost-bone-china-white hands up to my face. I would bend my head down towards hers and move into the touch, like a punch, really. And I would hold back tears. Why let them drop into her soup? And why feel sad, when she was so happy?
Anyway, one sunny Sunday morning, when the April birds were heady with love songs, on the way to Saint John’s Hospital in the arms of Sister Adella, Ratna, age eight, rasping and gasping for air, and weighing less than a well-fed puppy, died. It was that fast.
What was the cause of death? Post-mortem examinations revealed a blockage in the stomach. It had been there for a long time—undetected. A cauliflower-size appointment with Midwife Death, a record kept by the stars and planets of all the Galaxies. Meanwhile, the good nuns thought, as did Ratna’s pediatrician, that her sewer-stench breath, which huffed out of her for weeks preceding the death, was caused by a very bad case of pneumonia. Pneumonia?
Because the Servants of the Cross regarded Ratna as their very own, none of them could face picking up her body at the hospital’s morgue. Sister Agata, who was in charge at that time, called me and asked me to come to Bengaluru and perform the task. Go to a morgue? Pick up a body? I had done much worse. Besides, I could not refuse a nun who cleaned the excrement and vomit of discarded children, who loved them more than their own mothers, perhaps, who cleaned their ears, cleaned their noses, cut their hair, their nails, gave them baths, rocked them in her arms, taught them human values, and dried their tears.
In fact, one of these kids had actually been found by Sister Adella—one of the Jyothi Seva nuns—on her way to Russell Market in the hub of the city. She heard a baby whimpering in a city trash bin, crowds of people deafer than stones strolling by. When Adella looked into the bin and saw the rustling garbage, she removed a few layers; and there was another precious flower in God’s garden, Holy Little Marta, black as onyx, her eyes already eaten by the maggots…..
