Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

I sat at the tree next to his feet. They were big, dirty feet with nails that looked as if they were made from the horns of cows, but I was used to them. I loved everything about him now. His face did not look ugly to me any longer, his scar did not look grotesque. I loved his hoarse voice, but I also loved the way we could work side by side together and he let me be.

Once there was a woman, he said, called Shabari. She was a hunter’s daughter, yet she hated the thought of killing animals and she ran away from home on her wedding day when she realised animals would be sacrificed at her marriage ceremony. She lived in a deep forest after that, in a hermit’s cave, serving the hermit. When the hermit grew very old and very ill and he was on his deathbed, he said in a sad voice to Shabari that he had spent all his life serving Lord Rama, and was leaving life without a glimpse of Him. That would not be her fate, he said, she would never be alone. She would always have Lord Rama by her side and one day He would appear before her, so she must be ready. After this, the hermit left his body.

Shabari understood his last words to mean that she would have to be prepared. She would have to feed Lord Rama and honour Him when He appeared before her. She would have to wait for Him in the very same place, otherwise how would He find her? Shabari was a simple-minded woman who thought of God as someone very like herself, as a friend of hers.

So she went on living in the forest, in her guru’s cave, even though she was now all alone and sometimes she lost hope. Every day she cleared the forest path to her hut and every day she collected berries from all over the forest so that she would have something to offer the Lord if He came to her home. She tasted each of the berries after picking them, to see if they were sweet enough for Him.

In this way the years passed. She waited and waited. She became a crazed, half-starved, white-haired old woman in rags and the Lord did not come. Still, every day she hobbled out and swept the path and collected berries for him. And as always she tasted each berry for its sweetness, then arranged them on a clay plate and placed a pitcher of cool spring water beside them.

At last one day Lord Rama did arrive. He was with his brother Lakshmana and they were in the forest searching for Lord Rama’s wife, Sita, who had been kidnapped. They came to Shabari’s cottage. They told her who they were. The old woman wept. The Lord had come at last! She had her plate of berries ready, as every day. Lovingly she offered them to Lord Rama.

Just as the Lord was going to eat one of the berries, his brother said, “Stop! These are half-bitten, all of them.” Lakshmana’s eyes were fiery. He opened his mouth to scorch Shabari with a reprimand.

Rama, serene, put the once-bitten berry into his mouth. He picked up another and said, “These are the sweetest berries I have ever eaten. And they are sweet because they have been collected for me with such deep love. She has tasted each one because she could not bear to feed me a sour or poisonous berry. How can I do otherwise but bless her with heaven?”

“At last her wait ended,” Jugnu said, “and why was that? Tell me? What is the moral of this story?”

He always asked me the moral of his stories. I usually came up with one, but that day I had to look away from Jugnu. I had no answer to give him.

Jugnu said, “The moral is that true, simple devotion is worth a hundred such. .” He waved his hands around, pointing at our ashram. “A hundred such displays.”

I went back to my own work feeling as sad as the first day, when I had cried out for my brother and he had not come. The story had done something to me. I thought I would cry, my throat felt stuffed with an emptiness I could not swallow. I thought of how Shabari had waited. In stories, waiting was never for nothing. But I knew by now that our weathervane would never point north. I would never be free. I would wait all my life and never again see my brother or my mother. Jugnu’s story had made me older. It was then that I realised I was old enough to know fairy tales were not true.

*

The first time I saw a display of the kind that disgusted Jugnu was when we were taken to the grand audience hall beyond the barbed wire. It was in a winter month. I know this because we strung marigolds into garlands for three days before the event and the scent of those flowers still brings back that day. We had been at the ashram for four years or more but had never been allowed to cross to the other side until now.

Across the fence were cottages with red roofs among groves of fruit trees. Tall, shiny lamp posts with curly designs on them stood between the cottages. One of the squares between the cottages had a tiled pond filled with pink lotus. Each cottage was surrounded by a fence and inside the fence there were patches of garden. A fawn-coloured cat with fur that shone looked at us from the verandah of the first cottage. Its eyes were as cold as glass. Another cottage had birds in a cage.

We walked through the gardens, led by Padma Devi. We had not left the ashram since we were brought there. A few among us, I think Jui, Champa, and Minoti, who were older than me when they came, had clear memories of the world outside, but mine were muddled and faded. These cottages and the high-roofed auditorium that stood at the end of the path looked like a different world to me.

That morning, we had been told, the chief minister of the state was coming to the ashram. He was Guruji’s disciple. Guruji had other rich and powerful disciples who respected his powers and this was why even illegal boat girls were safe inside the ashram. That morning, he was to preach a special sermon. Everyone who lived in the ashram would be there. Hundreds of his disciples visiting from all over the world would be there too. He had devotees everywhere, and ashrams everywhere. The outer room of his cottage on our side of the fence had photographs of beautiful ashram buildings in Vienna and Geneva and other places we knew about only from books. The ashrams abroad were in wooden buildings with sloping roofs and had pine trees and snow peaks behind them. Guruji even had his own aeroplane. There was a picture of him climbing into it to go to one of the foreign ashrams.

Everywhere Guruji went that morning, he was surrounded by followers who picked pinches of dust from the ground he had stepped on, and sprinkled it on their heads. We could see columns of people walking towards the hall. Although there were many people, there was no shouting or pushing, only the buzz of low voices and the shuffle of bare feet. We were taken in through a back entrance. We had been told we were to stay together, and to listen, not talk.

Guruji sat on a high stage on a velvet-covered throne with golden armrests. Behind him, all over the back wall of the stage, were oil paintings of the kind I had seen in his room, but much bigger, of birds in trees, among leaves and fruits. I saw a huge one with many parakeets, each of which looked like the bird I had seen in a cage during my first punishment.

A satin cushion kept Guruji’s feet off the floor. Some favoured devotees sat at the edges of the stage. They came one by one, stretched themselves full length and touched their foreheads to the floor in front of his feet. Dazzling lights shone on Guruji, changing from gold to orange. His skin gleamed under the lights. The people in the hall craned their necks for a glimpse and chanted his name. Only I knew he had a stump between his legs oozing slime.

Guruji began his discourse and everyone went quiet. He spoke from the books of all religions and as he did in our own assembly every day, he said that all religions were paths to the same God. He spoke of how the Buddha left home in search of truth. He spoke of Sufi saints and Jain monks. He recited a sacred Hindu poem and then quoted from the Bible to show how the love for God sounded similar everywhere. He spoke of how true mystics, such as he was, had been thought of as madmen by ordinary people. Nobody understood where the mystic’s strangeness came from. Would people not behave strangely if unseen by all, a star dropped into their hearts from the sky and lived on there, pulsing, burning? The things mystics did, or demanded of the people around them, these often seemed to make no sense, but this was only because ordinary people could not see the workings of God.