Bringing Ratna’s coffin to the Jyothi Seva Home

                                             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.

His Holiness Dalai Lama on Achieving World Peace

World Peace—have we made progress?

His Holiness Dalai Lama acknowledges that we are overwhelmed, “When we rise in the morning and listen to the radio or read the newspaper, we are confronted with the same sad news: violence, crime, wars, and disasters. I cannot recall a single day without a report of something terrible happening somewhere. Even in these modern times it is clear that one's precious life is not safe. No former generation has had to experience so much bad news as we face today; this constant awareness of fear and tension should make any sensitive and compassionate person question seriously the progress of our modern world.”

We are industrially and technically advanced; we are educated and literate; yet we continue to suffer restlessness, discontent, and feelings of anxiety.  We are surrounded by living masters, but we lack joy.

Our Beloved Lama notes, “We can only conclude that there must be something seriously wrong with our progress and development, and if we do not check it in time there could be disastrous consequences for the future of humanity. I am not at all against science and technology—they have contributed immensely to the overall experience of humankind, to our material comfort and well-being and to our greater understanding of the world we live in. But if we give too much emphasis to science and technology we are in danger of losing touch with those aspects of human knowledge and understanding that aspire towards honesty and altruism.”

What more could we do?  The Embodiment of Compassion explains, “In order to bring about this great adjustment, we need to revive our humanitarian values.” 

Maybe we need to be more public in our practice.  We could write blogs, editorials, articles, even share uplifting news on social networks. What’s more we might give talks on regional radio and TV stations where talk-show hosts are generally in need of guests. We don’t have to be political or well-known to do this volunteer work.  We only need to love deeply.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14^th incarnation of Dalai Lama says, “We must remember that the different religions, ideologies, and political systems of the world are meant for human beings to achieve happiness. We must not lose sight of this fundamental goal and at no time should we place means above ends; the supremacy of humanity over matter and ideology must always be maintained.

If you are not the “public-speaking” type, there is much peace work to do behind the scenes.  Nature offers opportunities to serve. “Whether they belong to more evolved species like humans or to simpler ones such as animals, all beings primarily seek peace, comfort, and security,” the Great Bodhisattwa says.  “Life is as dear to the mute animal as it is to any human being; even the simplest insect strives for protection from dangers that threaten its life. Just as each one of us wants to live and does not wish to die, so it is with all other creatures in the universe….”

Sai Baba on Children

(A short Essay)

Have you ever been the victim of ill-behaved children?  They scream and holler if they don’t get their way and the parents just smile with frustration. I was once at a five-star hotel restaurant and two children, attending what appeared to be a family function, actually walked on the dining tables.  Even the staff could not control them. How do children get so spoiled?

According to Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba children are precious treasures that must be brought up in an atmosphere of devotion to God.  He said, “Today the parents give unlimited freedom to their children which is highly disastrous.  If the children are not controlled at the tender age, they can never be controlled.”

But who should be doing the disciplining, and in what kind of an environment?  Puttaparthi Sai is direct,” The homes in which the children grow, as indeed all homes, have to be clean with vibrations free from hatred, envy, greed, spite and hypocrisy.  The food that the child takes in has to be sathwic and pure.”

Some believe that a child does not absorb information until she enters school.  However, Sai has a different message, “Between the ages of two and five the child’s mind is profoundly affected by the behavior of those nearest it; so the parents must take care to set a good example.”

Is the child’s behavior totally dependant on the parents?  The Beloved Lord said, “Children have unselfish love; they are innocent onlookers; they observe the actions of the elders and they learn their lessons from the home much earlier than from school.  So, parents have to be very careful in their behavior with the children and between themselves.”

These so-called “modern times” do not offer any respite from parenting.  In fact, Swami pointed out, “The child should grow with the mother for the first five years of life.  Many children do not know what the Prema of the mother is like.  The mother should not hand over her responsibility during those years to some one else and be called simply ‘Mummy’ as if she is some doll with which the child likes to play.  Now the children of rich and educated parents are severely handicapped.  They are deprived of the care and love of parents.  They are handed over to the care of servants and nannies and they grow up in their company and learn vocabulary and habits and styles of thought.  This is very undesirable.”

The child is witness to all that transpires. Therefore, Sathya Sai insisted, “Take great care not to infect the spotlessly clean minds of children with a sense of distinctions between one child and another.  Impart instructions and inspiration equally to all.  Select stories from the scriptures of all faiths to interest the children in the values of a good life.  Speak to them of the moral heroes of all lands, the saints of all faiths, for they are all of the same stamp.”

And, please, no walking on the dining tables.

Final business regarding the purchase of Ratna’s coffin

As we drove toward the surreal location of the coffin maker’s shop, Kaleem reminisced about how Ratna used to cling onto him with her stiff, stick-like arms when he carried her to the many events we attended with the Jyothi Seva children.  He recounted how she would nestle her head up under his chin.  In fact, the last time he had carried her was only four months ago, he said, when the children went by van and by his rickshaw to the Little Sisters of the Poor Old Age Home in Lingarajpuram.  All dressed up in their costumes, they were going to present a Christmas pageant, Joy to the World, a play that I had written just for them.

 “Do you remember, Madam?”  Kaleem wanted to know.  I would never forget.  And he knew it. On that day, Holy Little Ratna played the part of an angel, dressed in white.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, she stole the show.

I felt confident that our chore would be completed by nine. Kaleem, though he had never been to the coffin shop before, and  was going on Sister Agata’s verbal instructions and his wondrous intuition, managed to maneuver the maze-like  pathways, just wide enough for a rickshaw, as if they were speedway roads. The streets and alley ways surrounding us were flooded with people, other rickshaws, motor bikes, and as we approached the address, we saw that there were many coffin shops.

Nevertheless, Kaleem found the exact place where Ratna’s coffin was waiting.  When we drove up there were several Muslim coffin makers busy sawing and planing wood.  They all wore crocheted white skull caps, not unlike Jewish men’s yarmulkes. I got down out of the rickshaw and stood in the middle of the actually pleasant atmosphere, looking around for a child-size coffin. Obviously, everyone there knew what I had come for because Ratna’s coffin appeared quite soon, brought out from around the back of a tin-roofed shed.   The child-size casket looked like a giant white jewelry box with a cross, painted gold, on the lid.

Earlier that same night Sister Agata and I had gone shopping for Ratna’s burial dress. I had been standing in front of the Kamat Hotel waiting for her to arrive, watching the crowds roll by like waves, and wondering how my once-luxurious, suburban-housewife-writer life had been pulled out from under me, like an expensive Kashmiri rug, and how I was now standing on a dirty sidewalk being washed in the toxic smoke of hundreds of vehicles.  Where had I come from and where was I going?

 Suddenly, Sister, still quite tom-boyish at 42, arrived on her motorcycle, a common mode of transport in the over-crowded city, and mercifully my musings were interrupted.  I never liked to think too deeply about what I was doing with my life.  For whenever I did, I got very depressed and went into fits of self condemnation.  After she parked her Suzuki, Sister and I, without so much as a greeting, plunged into the ocean of humanity and wrestled our way into each children’s clothing store we encountered. We had to get the business of the death dress over as perfunctorily as possible.

Few shops had white satin dresses, what the nuns had wanted.  Fewer had them in Ratna’s nearly toddler size.  Then we saw it!  Perfect!  But the price, especially created for our foreign faces, was totally inappropriate—800 rupees.

The child is only going to wear this dress once, I negotiated.

  “But later, another child can wear it, Madam.”  The shopkeeper made a reasonable bid.  “Perhaps I can give you a discount,” he said sensing my determination to get the dress, but not at his inflated price.

  This dress is for a dead child to wear, I said loudly in the very crowded shop.  She’s going to take this dress to the grave!  She’s going to be buried in it the day after tomorrow! It’s not going to be worn by anyone else but her!  It will be eaten by worms!

 In desperation, the storekeeper, stuffed the dress into a bag and took the 200 rupees I handed him with no complaint.  He was obviously eager to have us off the premises.  Death talk is not appropriate in a children’s clothing shop.  Nevertheless, Sister Agata was thrilled with my bargain-by-intimidation skill.

      When we parted, she handed me an envelope with 4,000 rupees in it, the price that she felt Jyothi Seva could afford to pay for Ratna’s elegant coffin, and what the shop owner had estimated. But I knew that this amount would involve great future sacrifice for the Jyothi Seva Home and cut backs on the little things that were already too little—like sweet biscuits and the occasional ice cream that the kids enjoyed so much.

At the coffin shop I was not in the mood to try and skin off any rupees for what I knew would be a fair amount.  Nonetheless, I asked somberly: How much?

     “Four thousand,” the owner said gently. “That is the correct price.”

     No problem, I said, opening my purse to remove the envelope that sister Agata had given me with the money in it. But then I was seized with the knowingness that the Jyothi Seva kids would probably have to go without ice cream for months, not weeks!  Simultaneously, I was seized with my own inadequacy. I could barely manage to keep a roof over my hard-working head; and every extra cent I got I was continuously tossing at the poor and the needy, acting like a big benefactor, and now when I really could have used some cash to purchase the coffin on my own so that the kids could go on eating ice cream and sweet biscuits I didn’t have jack!  So, I did the next best thing to producing the money out of my own cache, I drew on my negotiating skills which were midway between my heart and my gut. At the heart was the courage to make a fool of myself and at the gut was the fear that I was doing just that.

I reached into my purse.  I produced the envelope. I opened it up and took out 2,500 rupees.  I handed them to the shop owner.  He stared at me.  I stared back.  He looked confused.  I didn’t dare to blink.  Inside myself, I said a silent prayer.  Please, God, help the Jyothi Seva kids.  Finally, the owner understood what I was trying to do.  He took the 2,500 and didn’t say a word.  Kaleem picked up the coffin that suddenly didn’t look nearly as tiny as Ratna and he carried it to the rickshaw.  I followed a few steps behind. 

      And if it weren’t so dark in the coffin-making yard, squat in the rush and crush of the Commercial-Street area, and if there wasn’t a slow-moving puff of cloud covering the Muslim sliver moon, maybe I could have been certain that the eyes of the coffin makers, the eyes of the shop owner, and the eyes of Kaleem were flooded with tears.  As it turned out, I could never be sure.

………to be continued in next instalment of Terry’s Words.