SF Notes #1
I met Krishnaji on December twelfth in Rishi Valley. As soon as I arrived, I went to greet him. He was in his bed having lunch, with only Parameshwaram there. He was, as always, warm and friendly; concerned about how I and the others were, and curious about the details of our trip. He insisted that Parameshwaram get a tray for me, so I joined him for lunch that first day. He began right away telling me much of what had transpired since he arrived in India, but he gave me only a summary sketch. He was too tired to do more. It was his tiredness and weakness, frailty, and the fact that he had lost weight that most struck me. His hand when he shook mine had nothing of the strength it had had before, and it was thinner and unusually cold despite the warm air temperature. His health had suffered terribly since he left Brockwood a month and a half before, and I agonized at seeing him. He ate slowly and without relish, eating only for his well-being.
He told me that all the time he was in Delhi—which I believe was for about five days—he couldn’t eat and he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to go to Pupul’s, but he felt he had committed himself. In fact, before he left for India he said, “I don’t know if I will be able to stand it there,” and he asked me if the sum of money he traveled with was enough for him to check into a hotel. He had some traveler’s checks that were bought for him many, many years ago so that he would have some money in an emergency, as he often traveled alone. But he never spent it, and he didn’t know if it wasa sufficient sum for him to check into a good hotel should he have to. I assured him it was, but said also that Friedrich Grohe would be in Delhi and could take care of anything like that. The problem was the atmosphere that Pupul was generating, and he didn’t know if he could stand being in that. As it was, he stayed there, but he didn’t eat or sleep for five days.
When he got to Benares, which is where he went after Delhi, he was in such a weakened condition that, on at least two occasions that he told me about, his legs couldn’t hold him. On one occasion he had to crawl up the stairs to get to his room. Obviously help was offered, but he refused it. He felt that if he allowed himself to be carried, it would not encourage the body to get its strength back. At another time he just collapsed on the ground outside after a short walk, and he just had to sit there until his legs got some strength back. He still had the surprise of it in his voice when he told me about it.
By the time I saw him in Rishi Valley, he had already begun to have an occasional fever. It was not very high at that point, but it seemed to come and go, regardless of Dr. Parchure’s efforts, and showed an unusual persistence.
He was extremely upset by all the conflict with the Indian Foundation. For months before he left for India, he talked frequently about it. He had a marvelous capacity for not thinking about a place when he wasn’t at that place and being fully occupied with the place where he was. He would come to Brockwood, for instance, and he would give his full attention to Brockwood; being absolutely full of the place, with its problems, its projects—even noticing very small changes in the gardens, etcetera. He would then go off and be somewhere else and not think about Brockwood at all. It was a really wonderful capacity to be completely where he was and to give it his full attention. But ever since he arrived at Brockwood from Ojai the previous May, he had the Indian difficulties on his mind.
During that first meeting in Krishnaji’s bedroom, with Krishnaji obviously ill and weak, he began summarizing the events since his arrival in India. He reported things with a conciseness, completeness, and lucidity that I am sure he often wished I had when he asked me to report on things. Most of what he told me about was really not any of my business, but for some reason he felt the inclination to inform me of everything, and I interrupted only to ask questions and clarify certain matters.
He was obviously avoiding being completely frank to Pupul, as that was only going to cause a conflict, which he always tried to avoid, but he had said hundreds of things to her which—had she been sensitive—she would have picked up and probably been quite devastated by. But she wasn’t, and so the need to be more conflict-oriented to make himself heard remained. He was setting the meeting with the trustees in India as the date when he would finally have to say some things. Basically, he wanted all the copyright and the editing of his books to be done in England, and he wanted not only to withdraw from the Krishnamurti Foundation of India but also even to withdraw his name. Krishnaji was weak, ill, alone, and having to struggle with some very powerful, entrenched, personal interests. I listened, barely eating, and felt a remorse beyond words at the injustice of the situation. Krishnaji had no self-pity or depression in his voice. He was just bravely, steadily meeting it with the meager resources he had left.
One of the things that Krishnaji was very upset about was all that happened to Sathaye and that resulted in Sathaye having to leave as principal of the Rajghat school. He felt that Sathaye had not been able to handle a very difficult circumstance, but it was clear that Sathaye was up against some very difficult obstacles in the form of Pupul, who never wanted him to be the head of Rajghat, and Hiralal, who Pupul had installed at Rajghat and who had done a great deal to stir up trouble against Sathaye. Krishnaji said at one point that perhaps Sathaye had been ruined by coming to the West, which he had done the previous summer; yet the previous summer Krishnaji had been very enthusiastic about Sathaye’s being at Brockwood and Saanen and seeing something of how things were there. But as a result of all this terrible business with Sathaye, Krishnaji had found someone else for the Rajghat school about whom he was very enthusiastic, and this is Dr. Krishna. Krishnaji told me, with what seemed to be some surprise on his part, what he had done and how he had really just seen Dr. Krishna (although he had met him on one or two previous occasions), and that he pretty much just asked him to run the school, right out of the blue.
He told me to come and see him often, every day, and to just come in. I had hoped that this would not cause difficulties or hard feelings with the people in India who were responsible for looking after him, and rightly keeping people from doing just what Krishnaji had asked me to do, which was just walk in. Eventually, in Madras, it did cause some trouble, but since it was something that I was doing at his request, it was not something they felt they could bring up with me, I suppose. He told me to come for a walk with him that day and every day, so after finishing our meal, I went to find the others from Brockwood and to find my room. That afternoon when we went for a walk, two or three other people from Brockwood or Ojai joined us as well as did several people from the Indian schools. I can’t remember who they were. I believe it was David and Vivian Moody. Radhika and I always went on these walks, and Krishnaji asked me to invite on a rotational basis different people from Brockwood and Ojai to come on the walks so that everybody would have a chance. It was very nice: he would walk with one and then he would walk with another, and by the end of the walk he had walked a bit with everyone.
The walk that we went on was almost the same every time. He didn’t walk every day, because he was sometimes too tired, but when he walked he usually began by greeting people at the bottom of his steps at the front of the old guest house. These were people, generally, who had come to do namaskaram and to have what they thought were the blessings of his look or returned greeting. He would then walk down the main drive past the assembly hall and out the front gates, down the road, turn left up the drive to the rural school, and walk past the rural school, turn left through the wheat fields—which had in wetter times been rice paddies—and walk past the large open well, go through the mango grove, and then past the banyan tree, which the school used as a setting for theater and which is reported to be one of the largest banyan trees in India and also to be one of the reasons why Krishnaji chose that site for the school, though that may be just a story. From there he would walk up to the farm buildings and left along the road past the laundry and back to the old guest house.
There were sometimes small variations on this so that Krishnaji could see different things, which he felt it important for him to see. On one occasion he went to see the dairy, and on another he went to see two locations for the study center he was asking to have built at Rishi Valley. But the variations on the walks were out of necessity and not really out of a joy and enthusiasm to see different parts of that beautiful place. In fact, there was very little joy and enthusiasm for the walks compared to the way I had always known him before about walking. It was really a kind of medicine, something he was doing because he knew it was good for him, not because he was taking joy in it.
At one point along one of the walks, I noticed while walking behind him that he was leaning slightly to one side. He always walked so bolt upright and with such a straight back, and I was worried about him because this meant that his balance was off and that he could fall and hurt himself. When I told him he was leaning to his left (and it wasn’t by very much), he corrected it and asked me to keep an eye on it and tell him. This I kept doing and noticed that it was a consequence of his exhaustion. It would get worse as his tiredness got worse and would disappear when he was under less strain and more rested. But from then on, through the rest of my trip in India and during all the walks, I would occasionally drop back and walk behind him to check on the straightness of his back, and I would make a small sign to him when he wasn’t quite straight.
The educational conference was scheduled to begin soon after our arrival. This was the first conference for all the Krishnamurti schools, and there was a sense of it being something very special and of our beginning a new unity and working together. After discussing the agenda of the meetings and the topics with some of the people from Rishi Valley, Oak Grove, and Brockwood, it was decided that we would begin with the different schools, discussing “What is a Krishnamurti school?” Krishnaji was not scheduled to come to this conference, as it was recognized that he was really ill, and it was felt that he should be resting up and trying to recover before the strain of the Madras talks and the trustees’ meetings there.
On one of the walks—I believe it was the day before the conference—Krishnaji, Narayan, and I (and someone else, but I don’t remember who) were talking about the opening topic (What is a Krishnamurti school?), and Krishnaji was wondering whether he should be there, because he obviously wanted somewhat to hear. Narayan and the other person were very reluctant and hesitant to have Krishnaji present while we were all expounding on what a Krishnamurti school was, and suggested that if Krishnaji did come it should be at the end and he should talk instead of just listening. I was actually very much in favor of our expressing openly in front of him what we thought a Krishnamurti school was, as we had no hesitation in doing so when he wasn’t present, and that we should be willing to have what we say examined by the only man who knew if what we were saying actually made any sense. Krishnaji was amused by this and felt it was quite right, and I think he was rather looking forward to us all making idiots of ourselves. He left it open whether he would come or not, but he did definitely say he didn’t want to come and give a talk.
The next day he thought that he was well enough to come and listen at the conference, and so he came and sat on the side and listened to what seemed to me to be a very boring series of discourses. Luckily, toward the end, he decided to put us out of our misery and asked if, as a member of the audience, he could ask some questions. As usual, it was lovely, searching, and poignant. He wanted to know why the schools had not brought about a different human being. I believe it was during this discussion that Krishnaji asked, if one took the name “Krishnamurti” out of the school, how would it be different from other schools?
On the third and fourth days of the conference, Krishnaji again participated, which, of course, made all the difference. He asked about the nature of mind and brain and what the schools were developing. He talked about flowering in goodness. It was painfully obvious that none of us were living up to the task.
All through the time at Rishi Valley, Krishnaji was extremely cold. It was colder than on any of my previous visits to Rishi Valley, but Krishnaji simply could not get warm and often had blankets on top of blankets, and he really suffered miserably from it. Toward the end of his stay at Rishi Valley, he was very much looking forward to the period in Madras, just so he could get warm. I kept wishing they could do something to heat up the room or have a good electric blanket.
The people at Rishi Valley were very conscious of his frailty, and all the students and staff were very gentle and cautious with him. There was a sense of foreboding in the air. People were not openly speaking about it—at least to me—but there were lots of broad hints that they did not expect Krishnaji to ever come back to Rishi Valley. Krishnaji must have been preparing the people for this, because gradually it became accepted that he would probably not come back to India.
Radhika was playing hostess to everyone, running this conference, and trying to take care of Krishnaji, as well as meet her continuing responsibilities in the school. I remarked several times to myself that she did this very well and was handling a very, very difficult situation as well as it could be done.
In Rishi Valley, there was a bird with which Krishnaji formed a most peculiar relationship. It was a hoopoe bird, a rather funny-looking woodpecker-like bird with a short tail, a very long beak, and an exaggerated crest. When I first came into his bedroom, the bird was on his windowsill looking in through the window and pecking at the glass. Krishnaji’s windows were the only ones I know of in Rishi Valley that had anything like a screen or glass in them. Krishnaji was saying to the bird, “All right, all right, we will talk later.” He told me he would talk with the bird and that one time the bird had managed to get in. He had told the bird he didn’t mind sharing the room with him, but that once he (Krishnaji) had left, the room would be shut up and he wouldn’t like being in there at all. The hoopoe bird would stick his beak in the screen and try to pry it off. It was really most peculiar to see this bird working so hard to get in, and yet Krishnaji never fed it and it had no motives in our common understanding of birds for wanting to be in there. But Krishnaji said that they were friends, and that he would talk with it and that it liked the sound of his voice.
To my knowledge, Krishnaji hadn’t been eating in his private dining room in the old guest house the way he always had before when I was in Rishi Valley, and which served as a way for him to meet people and speak with them less formally than in an interview. He certainly never did that when I was there this year. He took all his meals in his bed. Occasionally he would ask someone to join him, and they would have a tray of food at the foot of his bed.
On several occasions he would say to me when I was eating with him, “This is the same food everyone else is getting, isn’t it?” as he didn’t want to have better food than other people were getting. I would always agree with him, although it was only partly true, because it was nothing that could be changed, and I didn’t want Krishnaji to have less than he was having. The fact is that Parameshwaram cooked personally for Krishnaji and couldn’t do much more than just direct the cooking for the rest of us, and although we were having the same menu (and the food for all of us was excellent), the difference in the actual dishes was enormous. The food Krishnaji received from Parameshwaram was absolutely extraordinary, and he would always have a few little extra things as well that Parameshwaram would prepare for his health. This is only worth mentioning to indicate how keen Krishnaji was to not have more than the other guests who had come to Rishi Valley. Krishnaji was well aware of how difficult Western visitors often found India, and he was very concerned with their comfort and their well-being. It was really very touching.
As usual, when Krishnaji was at Rishi Valley, there was a performance of classical Indian dance by the students, at which he was the guest of honor. Also as usual, he would refuse any chair and would insist on sitting on the ground with the younger students. Knowing that he would do this, people would put a blanket on the ground for him to sit on, and, as usual, Krishnaji wouldn’t sit on it but would sit just off the edge and encourage students to sit all around him, so that it was students who would be sitting on the blanket and Krishnaji who would be sitting on the hard ground. This year, for the first year in my experience, the performance was not under the banyan tree but in the assembly hall. Krishnaji said he would not stay all the way through it, as it was too late, too cold, and he was too weak, but he did sit through it.
There was also a performance of students doing some of the classical chants that Krishnaji liked so much. The venue was to be the assembly hall, but it was changed to the small open meeting hall (upstairs in the old guest room) between Krishnaji’s bedroom and the dining room. It was absolutely packed with students, staff, and visitors, and the chanting was led by Vikram, Dr. Parchure’s son, who had been working with the boys on their chants. As always, Krishnaji joined in when and as he could, and when they had exhausted their repertoire, he asked for chants that he remembered and that only some of them knew. Eventually, there were chants that only he and Narayan and Vikram knew. It was an occasion that Krishnaji enjoyed and it was lovely seeing him have a good time.
Krishnaji was encouraging Rishi Valley to build a study center, and they had received a donation to do so from Friedrich the year before, but there was a great deal of discussion about what a study center was for. Krishnaji would talk to me about the Brockwood Center, and then he would talk about the way it was being considered at Rishi Valley and at Rajghat (there was to be one there as well), and what he was saying to people about it and what they were saying to him about it, and what they thought it should be. At one point, he asked me to have a talk with Radhika and Mahesh in his presence (Friedrich was also there) about the center at Brockwood and the idea of a study center in general. He prompted me before the discussion, and then during the discussion he used me as a foil and played a little bit of devil’s advocate. He had done this at another time but never so openly. He wanted the discussion taped, which it was.
The general idea in India was that they would build something that could be used for a variety of things but that essentially was useful for the school, for school activities: for putting up parents, for having seminars, but that could also simultaneously or at other times be a place for people to come and study Krishnaji’s teachings. The Study Center at Brockwood was to be used for nothing but studying the teachings, and was for no one other than those who came to study the teachings, which is what Krishnaji had always been saying to me about it and which he was saying to me even then. After this discussion, when I was quite strong about the unique nature and function of the Study Center (and the confidence I have in this had obviously come from long discussions with Krishnaji about it), I heard Krishnaji on several occasions say to people, “Listen to this tape. Listen to how strong Scott is about this.”
There was an Indian architect from Canada at Rishi Valley who was being asked to give some ideas for the overall design. Krishnaji asked me to talk with him about what we were doing at Brockwood and about the kind of things that Krishnaji had asked for at Brockwood.
Soon after my arrival in Rishi Valley, Krishnaji began asking me if I would accompany him to California. It wasn’t certain at first whether he would give the talks in Bombay, but they were certainly being questioned in his mind. It was clear, and he talked with me about it openly toward the end of our stay at Rishi Valley, that he would never return to India. By the time we left Rishi Valley, which I believe was on December twenty-first, Krishnaji had decided that he was going to skip the Bombay talks, and that he wanted to fly directly to California without stopping in England as soon as the trustees’ meetings were over and he could leave.
He asked me if I was able to change his and Dr. Parchure’s tickets and get a ticket for myself so that we could fly across the Pacific. He obviously felt an urgency in getting to California and he must have had some sense of just how precarious his situation was. I could see how ill, frail, and weak he was, but through a combination of ignorance, insensitivity, and wishful thinking, I did not suspect that he had such a short time to live.
Several days before leaving Rishi Valley, he asked me if I would find out as soon as I got to Madras what flights there were across the Pacific that didn’t stop over anywhere, and if I would get the required tickets. He was obviously saying this to me with some secrecy and not going through the normal channel, which was to have Pama make his travel arrangements. He didn’t want people in India to know his intentions until it was a fait accompli. Presumably they would have tried to dissuade him, which, in fact, they did.