Going to India

After a year or so, Guru told us that it was time to move my yoga centre because we now needed a more spiritual home for our yoga classes. He told us to find an appropriate place and he would make sure that it was suitable. He was about to leave on his first trip back to India since his arrival in America.

Around this time, my husband’s teaching job allowed us the opportunity to plan a trip to India too. Guru specified that we must begin our travels on January 25th to guarantee a safe trip for my husband. That meant we would have to leave on our trip before Guru’s return.

A prelude to my trip

When I was ten years old, my mother took me to see Uday Shankar and his Hindu Ballet (everything Indian was called ‘Hindu’ in those days). An aside: Uday Shankar’s younger brother, Ravi, was playing in the company’s orchestra. I am sure that I still have the programme from that concert tucked away somewhere.

The following day I went out to Woolworth’s Five and Ten Cent Store, where I found some little silver jingle-bells. I strung them on shoelaces and tied them around my ankles, then jingle-jangled around the house, rippling my arms and moving my head from side to side. I was completely captivated by my new exposure to Indian dancing. That was when I changed my childhood ambition from being a bakery lady (so that I could eat all the cake and cookies that I was never permitted) to being a ‘Hindu’ dancer.

That goal was fulfilled while I was a dance major at Bennington College. During World War II, to save on the cold Vermont winter fuel costs, the college closed for three months in the winter and gave us a shorter summer break. Most of the students used this three-month break to work or study in their field of interest.

While taking classes at The New Dance Group Studio in Manhattan, I used to go out for an ice cream soda after class with a new friend. One day she said she would skip the refreshments because she was going to a Hindu dance class. She was going where?! "I’ll go with you!" I cried. She could not have shaken me off if she had tried.

I watched the lesson, in the big, dark, exotic Caravan Hall, which Bhupesh Guha had leased with his partner, Sushila, for the time they were to be in New York. It was large enough and oriental enough to make a perfect place for performances, as well as for their living quarters.

Afterwards, the Indian dancer offered to teach me Indian dancing if I would agree to learn to play the drums for his performances. He might as well have said, "If you will eat this big piece of chocolate cake, I promise to give you an ice cream sundae." I still have no inkling as to why Bhupesh Guha thought I would be able to become a drummer in the one month that remained before his first US performance, as I had never touched a drum before.

Actually, the drumming, along with the dancing, came to me naturally, and for the three months of my winter field period I danced and drummed in heaven, rehearsing all day, every day and dancing as well as drumming in his concerts. I had about three hours of mostly private instruction in dance every morning, or occasionally with other members of a small group, if a performance was coming up. After my lesson I would follow my teacher up a ladder into a small loft in the Caravan Hall. The walls of the loft were hung with Indian instruments and tapestries. A fascinating variety of drums stood on the floor. We would have lunch and then after that there were a couple of hours of one-on-one instruction on drums. One memorable performance of Bhupesh Guha and Sushila, along with their small group, was in a variety programme which included Zero Mostel. I was thrilled to be in the same programme with him.

My trip to India

When I met Guru, although I was already teaching yoga and had been meditating on my own for some time, I knew nothing much about India except that I was eager to go there. My husband’s sabbatical leave presented the golden opportunity.

I asked Guru which fabulous places I should visit, never realising that, since he had spent most of his life in the ashram, his acquaintance with interesting itineraries was not much greater than mine. The Taj Mahal was already on my sparse list. Guru did suggest that I try to see Anandamayi Ma, a realised soul who lived in Benares (Varanasi). Visiting her proved to be the highlight of my Indian adventure.

I had been a disciple of Sri Chinmoy for one-and-a-half years when I left for India. I am not sure that Calcutta is very different now than it was in 1969, except for the addition of lots of cars and trams and tourists. The city was kept clean then by the thin, bony, always hungry sacred cows who wandered the streets freely, eating anything they could find, including discarded paper. I quickly learned to keep a keen eye on their whereabouts after a bovine head appeared over my shoulder and grabbed a hard-to-come-by piece of melon out of my hand one day.

The locals scooped up whatever cow flop they could find and plastered it against the walls of the buildings to dry. Later the patties were used as cooking fuel, over little fires they built on the sidewalk.After our arrival in Calcutta, we headed for a travel bureau to decide which sites we would visit while in India. The woman we spoke to there was extremely friendly and helpful, especially when she learned that we were mainly interested in visiting spiritual sites. She did not mention Anandamayi Ma, so I expressed my intention of going to Benares to see her. To my surprise the travel agent quickly told us that it was no accident that we had come into this particular travel bureau. Here we had unknowingly stumbled upon one of Anandamayi Ma’s most intimate friends, who had also been her secretary for many years.

The woman smiled and said, "Anandamayi Ma is not in Benares now and her staff there are instructed to say nothing to anyone about her whereabouts. I am probably the only person in India who can tell you where to find her. She has gone to Poona for the season. I will give you the address of her head-quarters in Bombay." What an auspicious beginning to our journey!

We first went by train down to Madras, sharing space with all manner of strange baggage, including crates of chickens. The train had no windows—or, rather, it had huge windows with no glass in them. The hot sand blew in and covered everything. We coughed for days afterward. At each stop, people sold bhajia, buffalo milk and other food, passing it in through the windows. The ever-present beggars also reached their hands through at every stop.

Near Madras, we visited the wondrous natural rock temples that seemed to grow right out of the ocean along the shoreline. The water had washed away the ground around them. I have not been able to find any information about these rock temples. I am afraid the water may have covered them completely by now, since they were not very tall. Unfortunately I was not yet a photographer in those days, so I have no pictures.Of course, we went to see the magnificent Taj Mahal and we took a trip in a shaky little plane that had all the passengers praying to their various deities. Guru had guaranteed our safe journey, so we sat there thinking, "Stop worrying. This flight is blessed!"

Nobody I met in India seemed to know Hatha Yoga or meditation. Indians were constantly asking me to teach them. One woman, who had a Guru but said she couldn’t meditate, followed Guru’s basic instructions that I had offered her. The next day she thanked me profusely for the best meditation she had ever had.

After the Taj Mahal, we went to a lot of places, including the Ramana Maharshi Ashram, which was a wonderful place to meditate despite temperatures of 114 degrees Fahrenheit; Rishikesh, the famous place of pilgrimage, which is one of the many sources of the Ganges; and a long bus-ride across a huge desert.

When we finally got to Bombay, it took some searching to locate Anandamayi Ma, but we were lucky. It turned out that she was at the headquarters that day, and we found her on a long porch, reclining on a sofa, surrounded by devotees.

Anandamayi Ma was an elderly woman who looked remarkably like my grandmother. Her heavily oiled brown hair, with a few gray highlights, hung loosely. Like all her women disciples, she wore a white cotton sari. After this Darshan, I was able to arrange for an interview with her. Anandamayi Ma spoke no English, so a slender gray-haired disciple was assigned as my interpreter.

While I was waiting patiently for the interview, I noticed that my translator was getting very fidgety as the time passed. She finally told me that she kept a daily vow of silence from noon until 1:00 p.m. and now it was getting uncomfortably close to noon—so close, in fact, that when we went in, Anandamayi Ma gave her disciple dispensation to miss her silence hour that day.

Anandamayi Ma welcomed me with a warm smile, asking me a few questions. When I told her that I was teaching yoga, she said it was not a good thing for a seeker to be doing. I did not answer, as I did not want to be disrespectful, but thought to myself, "I know, but my Guru has told me that he wants me to teach; otherwise I would not be doing it."

After a brief silence, she smiled again and, obviously reading my mind, said, "Of course, if your Guru has told you to teach, then it is quite all right." At one point, she said that she saw my Guru standing right behind me. When I asked her to describe him, I could tell that she had seen my Guru.

A few times Anandamayi Ma spoke to me at considerable length, but a brief summary is all I received from her translator. Dispensation or no, the disciple was too eager to get on with her silence hour.

I only recently learned that Guru and Anandamayi Ma had enjoyed inner conversations while walking back and forth past each other on the beach. (Maybe at the Ashram?) In view of my interpreter’s eagerness to end this interview, there was, unfortunately, little further conversation with Anandamayi Ma. I was simply grateful for having had the good fortune to meet with her at all.