by Sachin Garg
‘Swamiji,’ I said, I came here because I needed a new environment and new faces who would not know what has happened and hence would not remind me of it. I would like to keep it that way. I request you to not to make me relive what I am trying to leave behind.’
Swamiji took a deep breath. He collected his thoughts, and only after having weighed what he was about to say, he said, ‘Son, if you think you have been able to leave everything behind by coming here, I have news for you.’
I looked at him with a straight face. The conviction in his voice and the tranquillity on his face disarmed me completely. I took a moment, prepared myself, shed my inhibitions and began telling my story.
Her name was Kanika and she was a year junior to me in college. Love seemed too weak a word to describe the relationship. We were obsessed.
And then, one day, I walked into my room and I saw her with my roommate and best friend, Roy in a . . . compromising position. They were kissing. It was almost an apocalyptic moment for me. Roy was supposed to be a good guy. But from that day onwards I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I regretted having not beaten him to blood then and there when I caught them.
I just took a train and ran away to Goa. Another day of seeing them around would have killed me. I partied for two days and blew all my money and didn’t think of Kanika even once. And then it struck me that I didn’t want to go back.
So I stayed on, in a village called Arambol, in northern Goa. I took up a menial job in a shack called Woodstock Village. I cleaned the floors, washed utensils, managed parties and what not. But more importantly, I started my life afresh and made some friends I will never forget. Each one of them was from a different world. Imran was the fat cook while Joseph was the dominating, but generous boss.
I made through for a few months, until one day, as I was throwing away dirty water after scrubbing the floor, I saw her standing in front of me.
She traced me and came to live in the same resort where I was working. She tried to explain things but I would just not listen to her. She was determined.
And then, one fateful day, her asthma condition went really bad. We rushed her to the local clinic but they didn’t have adequate resources to get the situation under control. It was a small village and it had its limitations. We took an Ambulance to take her to Panjim, the capital city of Goa. But she didn’t make it. She breathed her last in the Ambulance.
And what really broke me was that after she passed away, I got to know that it had all been a misunderstanding. There was nothing between Roy and Kanika when I saw them. Kanika always had asthma and Roy was just giving a CPR, a mouth to mouth respiration to her in the middle of a bad asthma attack. And this is what she had been meaning to tell me all the time in Goa. I was shattered and I despised myself. I got convinced that I was responsible for what happened to Kanika. I held myself guilty of everything. People tried to convince me that it wasn’t my fault. But I knew it was.
They say that cremation of a dead person is an important process because it gives the friends and family a closure. But it didn’t work for me. Nothing worked for me. Kanika’s cremation happened in front of my eyes, but my guilt just got more aggravated. I still spend hours every day thinking about her. I still can’t get over her. I still can’t revert to normalcy.
They say time is the best healer but it didn’t work in my case. Months passed but people kept asking me, why the long face? Why the drop in the shoulder? Why the lack of interest in all things worldly?
And then one day, my friend told me that this Ashram was the place where I could be redeemed. She thought it was in my best interest and three days after landing here, I am still wondering if it was so.
Vandana had damp eyes. She held my hand and pressed it as if to comfort me. But Swamiji’s expressions didn’t change even once. He still had that warm, tranquil smile he had always had. This was the first time I was recreating and stringing aloud everything after it had happened. Until now, my focus had been to not to think about all this. And suddenly, I felt so much lighter, having blurted it out.
I stared at Swamiji. What will his perspective on things be? Will he have some good tips for me, or maybe he would tell me how I should meditate and what would work for me. The room got pregnant with anticipation for his words. And then he opened his mouth.
‘Good job, Samar. Go now. It’s time for Karma Yoga,’ he said.
I gaped at him with an open mouth. I just did something I never thought I ever would. I went through the painful process of unfurling my past and he had no comments?
What an anticlimax.
Like a Melody Gone Wrong
The next day, I entered Swamiji’s kutiya with lesser expectations. His actions were hard to predict. Again today, when we reached, he was deep in a meditative state. He had drifted to a different world and acted like that.
‘The karma of a yogi,’ he began to say as if we had never left last evening, ‘is to be at absolute peace with himself and his surroundings. Have you ever wondered why all great souls have a constant faint smile on their faces?’
‘Why?’ Vandana asked.
‘That’s because they have seen it all. Nothing that happens around them surprises them. They know that we get life just once and spending such huge portions of it on troubles every day isn’t worth it. Hence the constant smile. And to be at peace with yourself, it’s very important to have a positive frame of mind. Today, we will work towards that. It is a pretty simple exercise. Will you do it with me?’
Vandana and I nodded our heads.
‘Sit in proper padmasana and close your eyes. And now, tighten and relax your whole body, one body part at a time.’
We did as he instructed.
‘Now imagine yourself on a small hill, with greenery all around. There is a pleasant wind blowing through your hair. Fragrance of ambrosia occupies your olfactory senses. You can listen to euphonious sounds of birds tweeting. Your body is relaxed and at complete rest.’
He paused for effect. I realized I could feel every word he was saying. My body had really travelled to the place he was describing.
‘Now breathe out anger. Keep on breathing. And with these angry thoughts, you are throwing out all the negative thoughts you have in your body. Keep on breathing angrily. You are detoxing your body as you do that. Keep on breathing angrily.’
‘Now think of the most affable person you can think of. Think of his or her face. Samar, imagine if she were to come in front of you on this mountain, what is the most heart-warming thing she can say to you? Think of what is the best thing you can say to her. Think of her smell. Think of how she looked. Think of how her touch felt.’
I heard every word he said. And imagined everything he said. It was like I was travelling through a marooned subway with an alternating electric red and pale yellow light. I could see the silhouette of a girl standing at the end of it. I started running faster and as I got nearer, the blinding light gave way to a face. And finally, I could see who she was. It hit me too hard. I opened my eyes with a jerk, stood up and stormed out of the kutiya immediately without taking permission to leave from Swamiji. I walked swiftly to my room and laid down on my bed with my head rooted deeply into the pillow. After the few minutes’ numbness, I tried sorting my thoughts.
I didn’t have a right to think of anyone but Kanika. Then where did her thoughts come from? With every sentence that came out of Swamiji’s mouth, it was her image, her touch, her smell that I remembered.
It was Navya Sharma.
I met Navya in Goa when I ran away, like a bird one could not cage. I met her when I lived under the delusion that Kanika had cheated on me.
Incidentally, the Karma Yoga today was to clean the corridors with the wiper. This is what I had done in Goa for a living. Circumstances were throwing me back in time, exactly what I was trying to leave behind. Dinner was to be followed by washing our own utensils, which was another thing I had been doing in Goa.
Before I slept off, I counted the numbers of hours l
eft to see Swamiji again. Swamiji definitely had the power to stir up thoughts and mirror reflections. For better or worse, I could not say then.
When Swamiji asked Vandana and me to sit in front of him, I had a bunch of questions in my head. Why was he giving birth to such profoundly hitting emotions in me? What had he inferred and was he leading me to the right direction? Swamiji, with the same serene smile that he always wore, looked at me.
‘Samar, you are definitely a good student. I am not saying this because you listen intently in your lectures but because you feel yoga when you do it.’
I knew he was referring to my extreme reaction yesterday.
‘You have the focus and the mental strength. The only thing missing is peace within your mind and body.
I nodded and he paused for effect.
‘And now you would have to tell us about what you were thinking yesterday.’
There was no way I was telling that to him. He was Swamiji and I respected him a lot and I wanted to be treated for mental unrest but this was something different. Navya was too personal a memory for me to share it with anyone. And honestly, I couldn’t muster courage to even disburse the news to Swamiji. And once again, I could bet on Swamiji observing every knit on my eye brow and reading every thought in my mind.
‘Would you want to hear a story, Samar?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘I want to tell you the story of Jagdish. His mother and his friends used to call him Jaggi. His father was a carpenter in Allahabad. Jaggi had three sisters. His father was a happy man and he used to infuse his cheery aura around. The family lived together in a small slum.
But things began to go wrong when tuberculosis started consuming his father. Two years later, his youngest sister was killed by a car while she was crossing the road. People died all the time in that slum so the neighbours didn’t care too much. But if one were to zoom in, the family stood devastated. Jaggi’s mother tried but couldn’t earn much. So, at a tender age of twelve, Jaggi became the sole bread earner of his family. His growth had to be accelerated and he decided to dedicate the rest of his life to his family. He didn’t marry till he had married off all his sisters. Until one day, when he woke up three things hit him.
Firstly, his mother had silently passed away in her sleep that morning in her sleep. She was sixty five, which was normally considered a full age to die in the locality. She wasn’t excessively healthy anyway.
Secondly, now that all his sisters were married and his mother was not there, he was alone in the house.
Thirdly, it was his thirty fifth birthday. His male friends, the few of them that were there, had families which kept them busy. With his sisters and mother gone, and having never cared about his own marriage, he was more lonely than he had ever imagined he could be.
He felt extremely depressed about the way his life had turned out. It was as if he had woken up every single morning, trying his best to survive the day without starving. He sat and thought about what he wanted to achieve in life, what would be his goal now. And when he couldn’t come up with anything, he got even more depressed.
So once the condolence meetings and cremation of his mother were done, he locked his house from outside and couriered the key to his elder sister. And took a bus and made way to Rishikesh. Misery has a suction pull which could be ten times powerful than that of gravity. It is so easy to fall into depression but it takes courage to free oneself from its diabolic clutches.
In case you’ve not figured out till now, I am Jagdish. And this is the first time my name has been pronounced inside the borders of this Ashram. There is no pain I haven’t felt or I can’t understand, Samar. I could be your doctor. Open up. Tell me what is bothering you.’
I knew that a lot of pain existed in the world and that I wasn’t the only one who was a victim of those dire happenings but for the first time ever it pinched me. I felt inferior, my pain felt trivial.
We meet a lot of people in life. Some register in our heads while others come and go without us taking notice. Navya was somebody whom everyone ended up taking notice of.
It’s not about the fact that Navya was not a regular girl. A lot of girls are not regular girls. It was about the fact that you had one glance at her and you knew that there was something different about her, as if those matured and sombre expressions were struggling to fit onto her delicate face. Her sharp jutting collar bones and conspicuously strained veins of the neck almost looked unforgiving. Her eyes were steady but her walk, carefree. Her shoulders, unlike all shoulders around her, seemed unaffected by forces of gravity. Navya Sharma. Raised in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, the heart of India.
Navya used to have huge crushes on the authors Charlotte Bronte and Terry Pratchett, although belonging to very different eras and genres, they appealed to the person she was. She quit her pharmacy college in Bhopal and ran away to Goa for a more thrilling life. Tags weren’t something she gave weightage to, so adventurous or escapist, she didn’t care much. She loved mornings and often didn’t sleep all night to watch the sun rise. She pretends that she understands politics but quickly confesses that she doesn’t know shit. She’s complicated to the outer world but to herself, she is simple and consistent. She is bad at many things too. She forgets things and it’ll be difficult to tell apart her room from that of six careless boys. Her phone often gets disconnected for days when she doesn’t pay the bill.
I met her at nineteen. Before me, she dated a shopkeeper in Indore, who had a fashion retail store, and was bald had an ugly paunch but could talk about women brands with the air of a fashion magazine editor. She loved to move on. That was her gift. And most will say her curse too. She got bored too easily and lost interest quickly than most people.
When the first time I had seen her, she was visibly drunk. As she came closer to me, she flashed the unlit cigarette, asking me for a lighter. And the next thing I knew, she bent her head forward and puked all over my shoe.
She was different in every way imaginable. The way she looked at everything, the way she thought, the way she spoke, everything was unique. The way she did things. The way she was more talented than anyone her age. The way she looked: pretty, understated, unkempt.
I had met Navya in Goa, when I had been working there.
The place was called Woodstock Village. It was a shack in Arambol in North Goa. She was a guest there and I was the janitor, the chef, the manager, or anything that the shack required me to be.
When I carried her to her room after she puked on my shoe, the first words she said to me was, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’
I disliked her then. It was instant and easy to not identify with the person she was. What was difficult was to hate her for long.
In the beginning, she didn’t like me either. The second time we met, she got me beaten up by some bouncers. And that would have been the lowest point of most people’s life. But I had seen much worse before and after that.
We learn something from everyone we meet. I think I’ve learnt more from Navya than from anyone else. She taught me it’s not unavoidable to do what everyone else is doing. She was somebody who made her decisions on her own. Her parents wanted her to study Pharmacy in Bhopal. She had instead run away to Goa to spend some time there.
In Goa, she earned money enough to sustain herself by selling her paintings. But her real love was books. She loved reading and collecting books. Literature always remained her first love. It was her religion.
She taught me that it’s important to follow one’s dream. And yet, I had to tell her to follow her own dream, to become a writer, and that it was actually not that difficult.
She always maintained a stoic exterior, her facial expressions impervious to any kind of interpretation. She was an enigma, a mystery, which never really gave away, and chose to stay wound up.
She had a few turquoise highlights on her black hair which playfully kissed her high cheek bones. She commanded attention wherever she went. She just had to speak to win hearts.
&n
bsp; And she could see through me. She could see what others were blind to. It was visible that I was not the guy who runs a shack in Goa and earns fifty rupees a day. But she loved to psychoanalyze me; it simultaneously induced awe and antipathy for her. She once quoted Ayn Rand to me, saying that a man will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. His choice will always be a sum of his fundamental convictions.
We went on endless walks on the infinitely beautiful beaches in Goa. We used to chat until sunrise and I can never forget the hug she once gave me. Those walks, those talks, were some of the most the most soothing memories I had stacked in my heart.
She seemed incapable of undergoing as stable and strong an emotion as love, and yet, she said she was falling for me. She told me so. And that, I think, made everything fall apart. I really liked her but it almost seemed blasphemous to substitute Kanika. I couldn’t reciprocate her feelings.
One random day, I woke up and I found her leaving Woodstock Village, without leaving a trace of where she was going. She went back to the same crowd she had come from. And that was the last I ever heard of her.
A few days after that, Kanika landed in Woodstock. Life got busy again, so I didn’t think much of her. But now that Swamiji had reminded me of her, she was definitely a pleasant past memory. She was the melody gone wrong.
‘You smile spanned the entire story,’ Swamiji remarked as soon as I was done narrating.
‘As I said, she was a pleasant memory.’
‘Tell me Samar, when I say the phrase ‘best friend,’ who comes to your mind?’
I thought of the out-of-place question and after much thinking, I told him that there was no name which came to my mind. If I really had to take a name, it would be Saloni.