by Asha Miro
Hopeful and anxious at the same time, I go to the room and put on the orange and purple salwar kameez. I run a black eye pencil over my eyes, pack a small bag, and go out to the jeep.
The nuns are happy to see me so excited and explain how worried they were when they saw me arrive looking so feeble and feverish. Pushpa has prepared a package of the medicine and injections I shall need while away for the next two days. I will have to find someone who can administer them.
Getting into the jeep, I find myself with the whole group from Barcelona. We haven’t been together like this for many days and there is a lot of catching up to do on all the adventures we’ve been having. They are very attentive about making sure that I don’t feel ill, and have saved me the seat next to the driver, Divaker—a very cheerful young man. My inner strength is all ready to go, it’s just that the rest of me is not quite ready to follow. I ache all over and every movement brings moans and groans that I try not to let anyone hear.
Nasik is 184 kilometers from Bombay, but the roads are in such bad condition that the journey feels endless. A heap of destroyed cars and trucks abandoned on either side of the tarmac does not paint a very encouraging picture. We had already been told about the number of fatal accidents that have occurred on this route. I didn’t pay it much attention, but now that I see it with my own eyes I am quite shocked. Divaker is singing and telling jokes, but the truth is that I am suffering, because I feel very weak, because I don’t know what I shall find, and because everyone drives like a lunatic.
As we get farther away from the city, the greens become more intense and the mountains more whimsical.
The last stretch involves traversing a steep mountain pass, one bend after another and another, until we arrive on the Nasik plain: fields and rice paddies.
Aside from my personal research, the purpose of this trip is to visit the volunteer camp at Dindori, close to Nasik. This project consists of building reservoirs to store water from the monsoons so that it can be used during the dry season. The fact that the people have abundant water only at certain times of the year determines the way they cultivate the land and, thereby, their way of life.
The earth cannot absorb the huge quantities of water delivered by the monsoon rains and a great deal of it is lost. This runs into the rivers and from them to the sea. So, building these reservoirs will make the most of the underground water basin. The water can be pumped up from there to higher levels. This technique eliminates a lot of erosion, guarantees a supply of water until the next monsoon, and helps with the cultivation of rice, which needs a lot of water during a short period.
The group working in this camp has come from Majorca and Menorca. They are headed by a Majorcan Jesuit priest named Perico Massanet, who has lived in Dindori for years and has put all of his energy into making cooperative and ecological land use possible in the area. With his team and people from the village, Massanet has managed to set up a small network of agricultural experts. They are learning new techniques and exchanging their expertise. The organization also provides interest-free loans for people working the land who want to start new plantations.
Perico Massanet offers us his house in Dindori for the night. Once we have sorted out who is to sleep where, I phone the convent at Nasik to tell them about my visit the next day. Everything is set up, they are expecting me tomorrow, but for now we get back into the jeep and drive from Dindori to the neighboring village of Yambucke, where they are celebrating the Pola festival. This festival gives thanks to the cows for their help with the work in the field. They adorn them, paint their bodies with their fingers, and draw patterns on their horns in very lively colors. A seemingly never-ending procession of cows and more cows is led along the esplanade.
The whole village has turned out to receive us and without doing anything I become the center of attention. They are all looking at me, and saying things that I can’t understand but that from their tone seem to be terms of endearment. Once more I am from here and I am not, caught in the eternal conflict between how they see me and how I feel. The fact is that I am rather proud to belong to these lands. After a first moment of awkwardness the ice breaks and everyone immediately wants to invite us to have tea with them. A man who appears to be the head of the village takes us to his house. We sit on the porch while they offer us tea, a declaration of their friendship. In this warm and inviting atmosphere we sip from steaming glasses. The setting sun provides the finishing touches to a perfect scenario. The houses, made of mud, absorb the red and copper rays of the sun. I expand my lungs as much as I can to try and draw a breath deep enough to take in all the sensations that evoke my erased past and make them a part of the present. They will now be with me forever.
I reflect by on the middle of all the festival’s tumult, when a little girl came up to me in the square, took my hand, and did not leave me for a second. She didn’t say anything, just stared fixedly and smiled, as if she had known me all her life. She made me feel at home but her little friends were quite jealous.
While the cows file past, the herders struggle to make them nod to us as if in greeting, while the village boys break open coconuts and hand them out to everyone. Since you cannot refuse anything that is offered to you, I accumulate an armful of coconut pieces that I can barely carry. I wander from one side of the esplanade to the other and around the temple without thinking and climb up onto a rock to get a better view. That’s when I really put my foot in it! Everyone stares at me, amazed, because the rock is used for making offerings. I feel like sinking into the earth, and apologize as best I can with a lot of gesturing. In a few moments it is forgotten by all.
Once back at Dindori, one of the volunteers gives me my injection: Eduard, who is a veterinarian. I freeze when I hear this, and cannot stop thinking that I am neither a cow nor a horse, and I panic that the needle might get stuck, but there is no alternative. The operation goes perfectly, without complications of any sort. After that we eat and then go to sleep. Tomorrow will be a day that I am sure I will never forget. In a matter of hours I shall arrive at the place where I was born. I can find no word to describe the kind of anxiety I feel.
The next morning, after I spent almost the entire night awake, Toni, one of the group, offers to accompany me to Nasik. He thinks I look a little too worn out to make the journey on my own. The truth is that I feel physically revitalized and am greatly looking forward to returning to my town, and visiting the nuns who took care of me until I was three. All the nervousness has taken away my appetite and I have hardly eaten any breakfast before we board the bus for Nasik. The first rays of sun reach us and the bus is now full of people and different animals.
We arrive in Nasik. I can’t believe I am here. My worries lift and I feel as though all I have to do is set foot on the ground for someone familiar to come up and say hello. The emotions, the chills running up and down my spine—it’s all so intense that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Finally, I let out a peal of nervous laughter: I am laughing at myself.
Nasik is one of India’s sacred cities, a place of pilgrimage. Centuries and centuries ago, the gods and the demons who had been fighting to win a jar (kumbh) that contained the nectar of immortality, joined forces to rescue the jar from the bottom of the sea. Once the jar was on land, Vishnu took it and fled. After twelve years of battling one another, the gods finally defeated the demons and began to drink the nectar. In the struggle, however, they spilled four drops of the precious liquid, in Allahabad, Hardwar, Nasik, and Ujjain. This is why they are known as sacred cities and every three years one of the four celebrates the festival of the jar (mela kumbha).
I was lucky enough to have been born in a sacred city. I am sure this must have marked me in some way, like the name I was given. Asha means hope or desire. I believe that when they give you a name they are giving you a clue as to what will become of your life and certain strengths to help you achieve that. Desire and hope have always existed in my life.
The photographs and documentaries I have seen
of the Ganges, the sacred river par excellence, now come to life in the form of the Godavari River. The Godavari traverses Nasik and along its stepped banks rise numerous temples and shrines.
In the river, women are washing clothes, and others are bathing in their saris to receive the purification of the waters. There are also funeral pyres, and, just as on the Ganges, the ashes are thrown into the river. I can’t stop taking photos to try and preserve a memory of each image, each moment. So many emotions are triggered by what I see—the smells, the music, the water, the earth; I hope I am able to capture them in my diary, so that I can relive them in the future.
Despite the poverty, life is more dignified here than in overpopulated Bombay. The rhythm is more measured. How lucky that my illness did not stop me from finally coming here. Now that I am in my homeland I don’t think I would ever have forgiven myself if I had missed it.
We cross the river and arrive in the marketplace. On one side of the square the are stalls selling fruit, vegetables, spices, and clothes. On the other side are two cisterns of water from the Godavari: one for washing clothes and the other for carrying out the rituals of life and death. The men are saying their prayers. The women are washing their colorful silks and spreading them out on the ground to dry. Held down with a stone at each corner to stop them from flying away, they create a multicolored mosaic. The children play at chasing one another around the square. All of life in this town passes through here. The sacred water cistern reflects the cycle of death, life, and death again as a daily event. The people bathe in the waters, which have received the ashes of the dead, and so receive the spiritual life, the life of the body and the spirit.
As someone who has faith, I have found myself changing a lot of ideas that I had held out of pure habit. I now see religion in a way that is broader, more spiritual, and more sincere rather than dogmatic. I think of the father of the family that put us up in Bombay. Naresh never goes to the temple, he does his prayers in the kitchen at home. God is everywhere and so all you have to do is look at the sky or have a good thought in order to communicate directly with him.
Finally, we arrive at the convent. It is like an oasis of tranquillity. Luxuriant trees and abundant vegetation fill the garden with an intense green. The silence contrasts with the noise on the streets of Nasik. An arch bids me welcome. I cross under it and start up the path leading to the building, skirting past a fountain. The nuns greet me with joy, they were expecting me, and desire and reality become one: I feel at home. I was very small when I left Nasik and I have no memory of it. I don’t recognize the nuns or the building, but what I sense through every pore of my skin seems familiar. The nuns talk to me in English and all of them shout my name, Asha, Asha, our little Asha, and one of them, unable to speak a word, has tears filling her eyes. It is Mother Nirmala. Between hugs and kisses, she manages to recover herself and say, “How big you have grown … how pretty … who would have believed it!” I am surprised at how young she is, she can’t be more than fifty, if that. I think she must have been very young when she took charge of me, and later when she decided to take me to Bombay and put me in the hands of Mother Adelina. She is petite, with glasses that hide her face. Almost immediately she leads me toward a little stone house just behind the convent, the place where I lived until I was three.
We sit on a bench in the garden, close to a robust tree with a swing. It is almost as if the flowers knew I was coming and decided to dress themselves in the purest white, the happiest yellow, the brightest pink, and the reddest of reds. While my senses are trying to take all of this in, Mother Nirmala is staring straight at me. Before I’ve said one word she knows what I have come to find. With a voice that sounds as though it might break at any moment she starts to tell me the story of my past. She knows that it will be painful for me, so she dresses it up as though it were simply a story.
One stifling-hot afternoon in the month of November I opened my eyes for the first time. The land in which I was born had been flooded for two months because of the torrential monsoon rains and was saturated with water. The ground longed for the first rays of the sun to break through. After the storm, the fields began to turn green. Filling the air with their intense aroma, they cried out to be sown. In those muddy stretches of water the first tender shoots of rice began to appear, a green that was fresh and new, an indisputable sign of the emergence of life. Cropping up around the square basins that were like a patchwork quilt, there emerged rounded brown hillocks, which resembled the breasts of the women who trod these humid lands, accompanied by the ring of tiny ankle bells at every step. From the break of day to the dark of night these women, small and insignificant, with bare feet and the grace of gazelles, carried the jugs full of water. Their brown bellies, the same shade as the earth, darkened by the sun, bore the shoots of new life. New babies, new fruits, new tears in an unstoppable torrent of playful laughter.
It all began and ended in a small city bathed by the cleansing waters of the sacred river of life and death. A place of pilgrimage that stands out as a magnet of supernatural attraction, whose force explains how Nasik became a cardinal point, for me as for so many other people.
At that most beautiful moment, when night and day embrace each other, in that precise instant, pleasure and pain, life and death, all come together. The testimony of life passes from one hand to the other. One is extinguished to give fruit to the other; the new arrival elbows its way in to stake its claim in a world that receives it in a hostile form.
My father, who was a farmer, was married for the second time. He had other children from his first marriage and in the context of Indian society he was quite old, around forty. When my mother died while giving birth, my father became desperate and did not have the heart to raise me. He felt old, without means, and had to take care of the children he already had; in short, my arrival posed an obstacle for him. At the end of the 1960s, Nasik was not a highly populated town, it was more like a large village where everyone knew one another and so were aware of any new births that happened. As a solution to his difficult situation, my father decided to leave me on a street corner with the hope that I would be found by someone who could take care of me. The first person who discovered me delivered me back into his arms with all manner of recriminations for his having abandoned me.
My father tried again and the result was the same, because everyone knew of my birth and which house I came from. The third time it was a nun who stumbled on that little bundle. The story of the widower who abandoned his child in desperation had passed through the entire town and over the walls of the convent. The nuns found the house and suggested that if he was not capable of taking care of me, they would do so.
From time to time a tear spills down my cheek, but there comes a point when the story is drowned out as my sobs erupt uncontrollably; they fill my chest and I can’t breathe. From between the leafy trees a young nun appears carrying a tray. She offers us a jug of cold lemonade to wash away the pain.
Now, for the first time, I know where I come from. I know that I have a place of origin and I know where it is; until now my past has been a well into which you could pour bucket after bucket but it would never be filled. This pain and resentment, which for years I have put aside and ignored so as not to be impeded or conditioned by it, is all at once made real in the form of having been abandoned three times. Three crosses to bear, each of them a potential threat to that most sensitive part of me, my soul. But now that I have spent three weeks immersed in this culture, so much a part of me and yet so foreign, I understand the attitude of a devastated man who, in unfavorable circumstances, had to bear the loss of his wife and my arrival, which, rather than being a joy to him, represented a heavy burden.
Clearly, it is difficult to comprehend, but Mother Nirmala gives me the tools to see it with Indian eyes, in its own context. These facts have marked my existence, otherwise I would not be here trying to decipher the tortuous paths that led me to a second life. Between all the crying and the effort required to absorb
so much information, so many conflicting sentiments, there is also room for more cheerful anecdotes. Mother Nirmala tells me about Johnny, the little boy I used to play with. She points to the swing, which is only a few years old, and says that if that swing had been there when Johnny and I used to run about this garden, we would have managed to break it. We were little rascals and didn’t think twice about anything, just carried on with one prank after another until we could get the nuns to give us a treat for our amusing antics.
When I was three years old, the nuns decided to send me to Regina Pacis in Bombay. I would be able to go to school there. They would teach me and prepare me for the moment when I was grown up and ready to spread my wings and fly on my own. None of them ever imagined in their wildest dreams that their little girl, that busy little bee, would fly so high and so far away.
As I look out at the garden, sitting there on the bench next to Mother Nirmala, it feels almost as if time has stopped. I see the trees, the new swing, which wasn’t there twenty years ago, the flowers … and I imagine chasing barefoot after Johnny, in that funny way little creatures run. This is the frame of the first chapter of my life, it is real. But I still need the last pieces of the puzzle, those that will give it its final shape and ensure that it is never incomplete again. They are in the Church of Saint Anne, where I was baptized. Mother Nirmala goes with me, as does Toni, who has been taking photos of us since we got here. We walk there as it is only a few meters from the convent, and on the way she explains that she made the dress for my baptism, covered in ribbons and bows with no detail spared. My godfather was the father of one of the nuns, and the sister of another acted as godmother. After the ceremony there was cake for everyone.