Daughter of Fire

by Irina Tweedie

  My heart is glad today. I cry for Him and keep crying till the milk of His kindness boils up …. All day long I do jap. Am full of stillness and peace. When the mind strays it is easily brought back.

  The mind returns gladly to His Name like a strayed child running to its mother with delight.

  When the sun rose, still low on the horizon just over the edge of the opposite hill, the cosmos flowers looked transparent against the light. Permeated with luminosity they were—pink, red, white…

  and the rays of the sun shining in between the delicate, feathery foliage—it looked so lovely. The garden is a riot of flowers. Cosmos grows here wild in the hills, and marigolds too. They seem to run down in cascades, in yellow patches, down the hills. And everything grows so tall here, as if every plant wished to compete with the high hills. Marigolds, some of them taller than me. Cosmos, six, seven, and even eight feet high. When I stand amongst them, I am hidden behind a screen of star-like flowers. On one plant I counted fiftyseven blooms! And sunflowers nine, ten feet high. Our Ashram garden is lovely, and Patel planted the entire slope full of cosmos and marigolds, so the approach to the Ashram looks like a valley of flowers ….

  2nd October

  I WAS BORN TODAY FIVE YEARS AGO… and for the past ten-and-a-half weeks I have been an orphan already…. Why did you go and leave me alone, my dear? Alone? No! I do my jap all the time. The heart is at peace. God is very, very near sometimes. And my heart is full of love for Him. Help me! I cannot do it alone! I cry to you for help. Do you hear me, my dear! Do you listen to me sometimes? To my longing, my endless longing and pain? Who knows?… Hear me, my dear! I am crying to you! I am an orphan after such a short time, a few years only…. Others enjoyed your presence for many, many years, thirty, forty years some of them. I was with you only two years and four months, and over two and a half years in England.

  Help me, help me, my dear!!

  3rd October

  THE WHOLE NIGHT I SUFFERED from headache. The first one since I have been here in the hills. Took two aspirins, but the head is still heavy and a dull pain is there. The snows are clear since sunrise.

  Swami Ananda told me the names of nearly all the peaks. I loved especially the Panchancholi; the five Pandavas and Draupadi; the dog leading, and Judishtra holding the tail of the dog went from there into the Heavens. The nicest story I have heard for years…. Actually from this mountain descends a large glacier; this was the road of the Pandavas, leading to Heaven.

  6th October

  LAST NIGHT I HEARD A STRANGE SOUND about three a.m. Auu, Auu and the echo repeated softly and far away: Auu-Auu… I listened.

  All was still. Deep silence with the Great Sound in it…. Then again Auu-Auu and the echo repeated Auu, Auu… it was not a dog. It was a wild creature; the sound came from behind the opposite hill. Again and again it came: Auu-Auu, at regular intervals. What could it be? A deer? No, the voice of a deer in autumn calling his female is rather like a kind of a roar. I listened, could not make out what it was, and decided to ask Patel in the morning. By now the dogs in the village began to bark in unison as well as the dog on the next farm. Now, I knew there will be no sleep for me anymore because this nuisance of a dog will continue to bark for several hours without stopping, and will howl in between. (It did.) But in between the barking I listened as well as I could. It was lovely, this lonely sound echoing in the stillness of the hills. A wild creature is calling. A wild creature of God. My heart became so tender. I blessed it mentally. Whoever you are, lovely wild thing (all wild creatures are beautiful), whoever you are, I hear you, I listen to you, and I bless you….

  Patel, when asked, told me that it was a fox. Himalayan foxes are larger and taller than our breed, have tails like a dog, and do look like a dog of a sandy color, the fur not so long as our European foxes. So he told me. I would like to see one.

  12th October

  EVERY MORNING NOW, I get up long before sunrise. And I watch just the promise of dawn, coming up slowly in the east. Only a shade lighter is the sky, at first, but so faint that one has to look hard to notice it at all. The waning of the moon in the sky, every day getting smaller, every day its light more ghostly on the white walls of the Ashram… every day it is nearer the eastern horizon. And the sky is a blaze of stars. Nowhere, not even in the Indian plains where the stars seem so near, have I seen such a sky. Deep. Dark. And the stars, millions of them, like jewels, like winking lanterns. There towards the south, just above the hill, one beautiful object, large, shiny; it flashes blue and red as if signaling. Lovely. Orion is above my head with his sword and his dog. And the other day when I tried to find the Great Bear which I knew must be northwards, I discovered it just rising, standing on its tail above the snows. And not a sound. No more crickets or cicadas in the night. Only during the day.

  Sometimes, far away, there is a call of a bird, like the double sound of a small bell: ting-ting, ting-ting. That’s all. But it is not so every night.

  LETTER TO A FRIEND

  Dearest,

  This letter comes to you from a solitary retreat in the Himalayan hills. I am writing seated on my doorstep, facing the snows. The hills are clear this morning and last evening too. The whole range was coral pink, the glow after the setting sun dying gently away on the glaciers. And so near they seem… only fifteen miles away in direct line as the crow flies.

  It is a glorious morning. The Ashram garden is a riot of color: sunflowers, zinnias, dahlias, and above all, cosmos and marigolds.

  The air is vibrating with the hum of the bees, and the crickets are busy filling the garden with the gay monotonous sound which seems to belong to the sunshine… sheer joy of living, bringing back to us childhood memories of summer days, blue sky and much hot, lovely sunshine.

  Everything grows so tall here, as if the vegetation is trying to compete with the high hills around and the huge mountains.

  Sunflowers are nine, ten feet high. The one nearest to my door has thirty-two blooms and at least the same amount of buds. I did not count them, got fed-up counting. There are zinnias three, four feet high, and they become shrub-like here, covered with large blooms four inches across, looking rather like dahlias. And cosmos! Never have I seen anything like it! They grow wild here on the slopes, and in the clearings of the jungle and in our garden we must have several thousand plants; the slope leading to the motor road is covered with them: six feet tall, shrub-like with feathery foliage. On one plant I counted fiftyseven blooms. They come in five colors: crimson, white (four inches in diameter), deep pink, pale pink, and pink with crimson heart. Near the veranda, there is a marigold six-and-a-half feet tall; usually they are not more than four, five feet. Our Ashram garden looks like a valley of flowers just now.

  The other day I went into the pine forest on the opposite hill and I had this impression. But actually it is not a valley at all; we are on a hill. The houses are built on a small plateau not so high as the surrounding hills. From here is an enchanting view into the three valleys. The valley of Garur (seen on the photo I enclosed here) with the snows behind it, then of Kausani and of Chenoda river. All around are high hills, the famous Kumaon Hills (Kausani is right in the midst of them), covered with pine forests at this altitude and jungle lower down on the slopes. The Ashram is at 6,075 feet above sea level. Kausani, a village of only one thousand inhabitants, is about six hundred feet below.

  Once a week I go down to the village to do my shopping. It used to be a small expedition in the rainy season which is just about over now. All the paths became muddy and it was very slippery. The villagers seem to grow things only for themselves and are reluctant to sell anything. For the moment we get plenty from the Ashram garden. It is terraced, like all the cultivated land around, and the soil is good. We get even a certain amount of tea plants. The tea, fresh, only a few days old, tastes wonderful. It is of a very good quality; it is something in between Darjeeling and China tea. I mix it with Booke Bond and get a lovely drink. When there will be no more vegetables about the middle of
November, then I will live on milk, rice, chappathies and dahl. Rice grown here is of excellent quality, and Himalayan wheat is sent to the hand-mill, and chappathies are lovely and soft. In England even when I bought the best flour from the health food stores, my chappathies were never really nice—far too many chemicals are added to flour; it makes them hard. Milk is also very good. Nowhere in India I dared to buy milk. It is so much watered down that it has a nasty bluish color and even loses the taste of milk. But here it is thick and creamy, lovely stuff. It is not cow milk, but buffalo milk. Water buffaloes are like outsize black cows, shiny, no hair on their bodies. Only on the very end of the tail they have a kind of small bunch of hair and that is all. When a herd of them wallows in the muddy rivers or pools, they look something in between a primeval cow and a hippopotamus. The milk is like cow’s milk, only creamier and sweeter. What a heavenly thing it is, to drink a cup of cold milk seated on my doorstep at dawn. I seem to live on my doorstep lately, since the snows are clearly visible. During the rains they were always hidden for weeks on end.

  My room is facing northeast. Every morning I am up long before sunrise. The green, livid transparency of the sky changes gradually into a pale yellow, the harbinger of dawn. It is perfectly still. The snows are somber, forbidding… no sound from anywhere…

  Nature is waiting. Then from the village below, sounds begin to come of life awakening. Children’s voices, laughter, dogs barking, an occasional snatch of a song interrupted by voices. The sound of water running into the buckets, smoke begins to rise, the lovely acrid smell of wood fire. But the forest and the jungle are still. And then, all of a sudden, as if obeying the signal of an unseen music director, the birds begin to sing on the slopes and in the valley. At first hesitantly—it sounds so lonely, the soft modulation—one feels the bird is cold and hungry. Then all join in. As in the West the blackbirds are the first to begin. Here they have yellow beaks like our blackbirds. I was told it is the only part of the Himalayas where they have yellow beaks; as a rule it is black like everywhere in the hills.

  And I sit and listen and the sky is orange now with shafts of light behind one of the peaks. One knows exactly where the sun will rise each day when one observes these shafts of light. Every day it is more to the south, every day a little more. And now the most dramatic moment arrives—the tips of the snows get the first glow. It is as if a Deva would light a crimson lantern on the tip of the highest mountain which is Nanda Devi (over twenty-five thousand feet), and one by one all the other tips begin to glow. The deep red light slides lower and lower, and in the meantime the tip of the peaks becomes coral-red, while at the foot of the mountain it is still deep red. Then as by a magic wand the whole range becomes coral-red, then deep gold, then brilliant yellow, and becoming paler and paler they will stand white, glistening, unreal in their purity, and all this at first against a livid, yellowish sky and later as though suspended in the blue…. Unreal. Colossal. Massive. And seemingly so light, so ethereal, that one can hardly believe one’s eyes….

  The director of the Ashram, Jiva Bhai Patel, whose room is on the other side of the veranda, will be singing his bajans, morning hymns to the rising Surya (sun), and the air will be smelling strongly of pines, and a cold, cold breeze springs up coming from the glaciers.

  A Canadian tourist came here a few days ago; he stood a long time contemplating the range and photographing it, and then he said in his broad Canadian accent:

  “Well, I never imagined that mountains could be so high and that there could be so many of them…. “Actually one looks from here on 250 miles of an uninterrupted wall, peak after peak losing themselves in the distance.

  The breeze is at first just like a sigh, hardly noticeable, smelling of snow and ozone, becoming stronger as the morning goes on, biting the cheeks.

  The nights are mostly completely windstill. It was explained to me that it has to do with the climatic conditions; usually there is no wind after nine p.m., except when it is raining of course; then the rain of the monsoon will hammer mercilessly on the metal roof making a great noise. But when it happens to be windy in the night, rare as it is, it is lovely to lie in bed and listen to the pines. The wind is mostly on the heights; on our hill which is much lower the pines don’t stir. But all around, coming from one hill or another according to the direction of the wind, one can hear the wonderful song of the wind in the pines increasing or decreasing. Himalayan pines have a very feathery aspect because the needles grow in bunches and are very long, eleven, twelve inches or even more. They are also of much lighter green than our pines, a kind of silvery sheen on them, and each bunch of needles is dark green just in the middle. So the branches have a dancing quality; they look very lovely standing stately all together near each other in the forest, or running gaily down the slopes to the rice paddies below. And in the wind they give a kind of hushed rustle like a raucous breath when the wind bangs down on them from the glaciers, or comes hurriedly blowing from the south, from the plains. Seems to be always in a hurry, brother wind. And clearly, distinctly, when one lies very quietly and listens, but not with the ears only, then one can hear the sound of Om, repeated, reverberating amongst the hills, coming from nowhere, and from everywhere around with the breath of the wind amongst the whispering pines….

  But the nights of perfect silence are even better…. There is something very special about the silence in the Himalayas. I never experienced anything quite like it. Not even in Switzerland which is full of lovely mountains. I mean the Sound. Has it to do with the special atmosphere? Or climatic conditions? Or the geological structure of the incredibly high mountains? I don’t know. But everywhere I went, in Darjeeling, in Kashmir, on the border of Nepal, and here, of course, I heard it, louder than ever. The Sound, like a distant melodious roar. Something in between a supersonic whistle of a bat and the singing of the telegraph wires. It seems to come from afar, and at the same time it is very near, outside you and in the head. When the Silence is absolute, it has a Sound. I wonder if it works in the same way as with Light. It is said that Absolute Light represents Absolute Darkness. That’s why God is called the Dark Light by Mystics and Rishis. I call it the Roar of the Silence, Nada, the first and the last Sound of Creation.

  As soon as I arrived here from the plains on the 5th of August, I heard it. I woke up in the night. I didn’t know what time it was; it was pitch dark; it had just stopped raining. Here is no electric light, so I couldn’t see what time it was. I had a temporary accommodation in Sarala Ban’s Ashram on the hill opposite, a small room above the cowshed, right in the pine wood. As soon as I woke up in the night I heard it. And my heart was suddenly glad; it was like a greeting from the homeland… There was this Stillness and the Sound. The silence is so compact, so dense, almost physically felt; it seems to descend on you, to envelop you; you are in it, lost, immersed in it, drowned, and there is nothing else beside it in the whole wide world…. This Sound is not the sound of the blood in our ears which is always with us and which we can hear when all is still. No, it is not. The sound in the ears is there, but the Other Sound is also there, very much so, deep, endless, eternal.

  I was told by Yogis in Rishikesh that it is Nada, the first Sound of Creation, the Breath of Brahma, who can never sleep, can never rest, otherwise the Creation will disappear into Nothingness; and they also told me that one can hear it in the Himalayas much more easily than anywhere else in the world, because so many Rishis have meditated in those hills for thousands of years, creating thereby a spacially favorable atmosphere. Perhaps it is true, I don’t know. But the Sound is true and very real. And it is impossible to say from where it comes, from all around, from very far and from very near.

  Just in front of my door is a large bed of zinnias. And when I lie in bed and the door is open, at the level of my eyes are the vivid reds, oranges, yellows, pinks of the zinnias, and immediately above rise, as though growing out of them and suspended in the blue; Nanda Kunti, Trisul (the trident of Shiva), Nanda Devi (only the tip is seen, 25,800 feet
), and Nanda Kot looking like a snow-white tent, perfect in its symmetry.

  No wonder my heart is longing to remain here forever, so long as this physical body lasts…. I am so deeply happy here, of a happiness never experienced before. Prayer is easy and God is near.

  I close with best wishes to you, and we will meet again in April ‘67.

  My love to you

  89 Seven Colors of the Rainbow

  14th October, 1966

  SEATED AT MY DOORSTEP WATCHING THE DAWN I repeated His Name and what a consolation it is against all the ills, disappointments in life, all the harassments to which the human being is subjected; just to say His Name, call on Him, and the heart is immediately filled with sweetness.

  I tried to analyze this feeling. Perhaps I can say it is as if my heart was carrying a sweet burden, the softest, sweetest pain. As if the heart was wide open, full of helpless love. It is like a continuous call, like one single note sounding ceaselessly, a call, a signal, transmitted on and on. The Call of Longing.