SF Notes: #4
On the day of the first talk, the twenty-eighth of December, Krishnaji was still running a fever. He had fallen down a day or two before while getting up in the middle of the night, and he had hit his head against the wall. He said that he must not fall again. Parameshwaram slept on the small covered walkway very near Krishnaji’s bed so that he could get up easily and help Krishnaji or be right there should Krishnaji need anything, but Krishnaji didn’t like calling out. Therefore, a small buzzer (a button attached to a bell) was rigged up next to Krishnaji’s bed so that Krishnaji would only have to press a little button to get Parameshwaram’s attention. But Krishnaji didn’t like to use this because he felt it was treating Parameshwaram too much like a servant, even though Parameshwaram was a servant to Krishnaji. Krishnaji never liked the way servants were generally treated in India, but Parameshwaram was beside himself because Krishnaji would struggle with things rather than ask for the help that Parameshwaram so much wanted to give. After that fall, Parameshwaram slept right at Krishnaji’s door, which was a screen door, so that he would know when Krishnaji was stirring.
Krishnaji was weak from falling and from his fever, and it was decided that he would say after the first talk was over whether he felt he could speak the next day or whether the schedule should be changed, and his next talk be on Wednesday, the first of January. As I was sitting, waiting for the talk to begin and worrying, Narayan came up to me and said that he would accompany Krishnaji to the platform, but that Krishnaji wanted me to accompany him back to the house after the talk. My first thought was that this would not add to my popularity, but of course I would do it, although I couldn’t see why he would have asked me.
As the talk was drawing to a close, I got up from my seat and moved to a place close enough to the stage so that I could get to him as soon as the talk was over and before the crowds swelled around him. The Indian crowds have always been terrible in their insistence on crowding around him and even touching him, despite all his admonishments and pleas not to do so. As Krishnaji was trying to get up from the platform, he was completely surrounded, with people touching his feet, and he became quite upset. He kept on repeating to everybody to stop it and to go home. He sat there for quite some time saying that he would not get up until people left, but this only delighted them as they were happy to stand there and look at him for hours. There was such a total insensitivity to him, and such a deliberate ignoring of what he wanted. It was only what they wanted that mattered to them. This dreadful scene was to be repeated after every talk. Eventually, he would get to where his sandals were and put them on and we would start walking back. But after this talk he was especially delicate, and he was angry and almost repelled by the crowds—not exactly fearful, but wanting desperately to be out of reach. I had never seen him like that, and I had never before seen the expression on his face that I saw then.
I would say, “Please clear the way,” and we would just walk our way through. Krishnaji’s hands had trembled so much that he had had, I think, a bit of trouble getting his doti on. It dragged a bit because he had just stepped on it, and he said, “Someone’s holding me, someone’s holding me,” but it was pitch dark. One couldn’t see because the crowds were all over him, which meant that the lighting that there was didn’t get down to one’s feet. There were lots of roots in the ground. He would occasionally trip over them, and he had to hold onto my shoulder walking behind me. I was walking ahead saying, “Please clear the way, please clear the way.” It was a terrible struggle in the dark, with the tree roots, the relentlessly pressing crowds, and Krishnaji’s doti, which had by now almost got to the point of unraveling. As we were walking around the perimeter of the crowd, Krishnaji suddenly, with his hand on my shoulder, directed me to turn right and to walk straight through the crowd and straight to the front door of Vasanta Vihar. He was thinking far more clear-headedly than I was, because obviously the crowd was forming itself around him wherever he was going so that it wasn’t possible to walk around it. Parameshwaram and Narayan were also there in back of Krishnaji trying to keep people away, and Krishnaji was trying to tell them not to be rough or insensitive with people. He was later to tell me that I wasn’t to say as repeatedly as I did, “Please clear the way,” but only to say it once in a while. I think the Indian crowds are used to being pushed and shouted at and manhandled, and Krishnaji didn’t want anything like that associated with him. From then on, I carried a flashlight so that I could shine it in front of Krishnaji’s feet so that he could see the roots and where he was going.
After the talks last year, apparently he would sit down on the steps of Vasanta Vihar and people would crowd around him, so when we got to the steps this time, of course, there were people already in place. He said, “No, I can’t sit this year, I can’t sit this year.” He didn’t go for walks after the talks this year; he just went up and as usual washed from all these people touching him, and went to bed.
We made our way upstairs, with me walking behind him to catch him should he fall. Several people came up to discuss whether there should be a talk the next day. Krishnaji said that whatever it is that sometimes happens when he gives talks happened, and that he felt full of energy. Some people took this to mean that he could do another talk the next day. I pleaded that he not give another talk, and Dr. Parchure also suggested the same. Krishnaji finally decided that he wouldn’t give another talk even though he was full of energy, and so it was announced to the waiting crowds that the program had been changed.
The days in between the talks were all pretty much the same, with Krishnaji needing to rest and wanting to rest, but feeling he could not say no to people who wanted to see him and other people not willing to say no on his behalf. Dozens of people wanted just to come into his room to say namaskaram, which is something like getting a blessing from Krishnaji and which everyone thought took nothing out of him since it only took a minute, and most people had a curious capacity not to really be very concerned with Krishnaji’s well-being, but more concerned with what they could get from him—and he was so frequently telling people to be selfless and they would, by their actions, respond, “Yes, yes, tell me more, give me your blessing so I can get more, give me more.” On one of the days before either the second or third talk—days when he was not supposed to see anybody and have complete rest—I counted twenty-three people who had come in to see him, and I hadn’t been hanging around watching all day, so there could have been many more. That evening, when Krishnaji was having supper in his bedroom with Nandini, I came in and said to Nandini with some gentle chiding in my voice how wonderfully good Krishnaji had been that day, how he had been following the doctor’s orders and not seeing anyone, how he had been looking after himself so well and resting up, etcetera. Krishnaji quickly caught onto my chiding him and started looking up to heaven with his large eyes and long eyelashes, exactly like a little boy trying to get away with something, and, in fact, his face looked so young and so boyish it was quite remarkable. At first Nandini didn’t understand what I was saying because she knew that many people had come to see him, but when she looked over and saw Krishnaji playing the naughty boy and carrying on my joke, she laughed. He then continued by saying, yes, how good he had been. The situation really was hopeless. At one point I had suggested to Krishnaji that he simply close the door of his veranda so that people wouldn’t disturb him, but he felt that it was not right to do that, and that it was not his role to refuse people for the sake of his own well-being, and that it would be impolite, or that some people might take it amiss. He actually practiced the selflessness that others so noisily and greedily tried to acquire. Eventually, on two occasions, someone thankfully did close his door for him, but it wasn’t frequently enough for him to really rest.
More than a year before, I had asked Krishnaji to please measure out his life’s energies carefully enough so that he would be around at least long enough to open the new study center we were going to build at Brockwood. I had had the sense from several things, including things that Krishnaji had said, that the length of his life would be determined by how much energy he used—that he could use himself up quickly or slowly. After all that Krishnaji had said about the center and after all that he had wished of the center, it seemed too large an undertaking to me and one that I didn’t feel we could begin rightly without him. At that earlier time he had responded by saying certainly he’d be around. Now, I asked him again and pleaded with him to take care of himself so that he could begin this, and he responded by saying, “Old boy…” and shaking his head as though it was very uncertain indeed. He was combing his hair at the time, and I think it must have been just before going out for the daily walk. It was the first tangible support for the terrible sense of foreboding that existed.
At some point in between the first and last talk, Krishnaji decided to again move up the date of his departure, this time to the tenth, which really was the soonest that he could leave if he was going to talk to the Indian Foundation at all before he left. Again, he just asked me to do it, and without reference to anyone, I did what he asked. There were now no comments made directly to me. Asit, who was going to fly with us as far as Singapore, told me that since he was only going to be on part of the flight he would like to sit next to Krishnaji because I could sit next to him for the remainder of the journey. It seemed so typical; there was no sense that Krishnaji should choose who he wanted to sit next to. So before I booked the seats I asked Krishnaji if there was anyone he wanted to sit next to and suggested that perhaps he could sit next to Asit, as Asit would only be there for part of the flight. Krishnaji rejected that and just said to book us all together and we would decide later.
Throughout the time that he was in India, he had been making very strong criticisms of the entire Foundation. He only expressed confidence or trust in five members: Dr. Parchure, who was disdained by the powerful people in the Foundation; Upasani, who was wanting to retire from active participation in the Rajghat School; Radhika, whom he was afraid might be too much under the influence of her mother, Pupul; and Dr. Krishna and Mahesh, who were completely new to the organization and may not have had an understanding of the problems in the Foundation and a strong enough standing within the Foundation to do something about them. (He thought that Dr. Krishna and Mahesh might be able to help Radhika stand up to her mother. Dr. Krishna didn’t think that she could.) When Krishnaji knew that he was going to die, he wanted those five people, and only those five people, from India to be there.
He was appalled and angry at how Vasanta Vihar had been misused and how the most powerful people in the Foundation after so many years had created the situation that existed. The constant squabbling about copyright he saw being entirely of India’s making, and the ultimatum that Pupul had given him the summer before in Saanen that either India was to be given what it wanted by the English Foundation or that Krishnaji would have to step in and solve it, had quite determined him to solve it and to solve it for good. I wrote down a few of the things that he said to me about Vasanta Vihar because I was so disturbed by them, and I wanted to record it accurately so that I could think about it with more time.
The things that he said are as follows: “For the first time in my life, I feel this house is completely empty”; “I feel Brockwood is good and I feel Ojai is all right”; “I said to Sunanda that I have been here for a fortnight and there is still nothing in this place. You have killed it.” He also insisted several times that Vasanta Vihar is not theirs (the Indians’); it doesn’t belong to them. It was built by American and Australian money, and only a little bit of Indian, and it was built for his teachings and for him. It was not the Indians’, not for them to do what they wanted to do. He was surprised and disgusted that even his presence there for over two weeks did not bring something alive as it always had done in the past. “No, it has completely gone. For the first time I am glad to leave this place.” I can’t imagine a more biting indictment or a worse thing to have done than what he was saying had been done. He was referring to something sacred, to “the other.” People will and undoubtedly have dismissed these things that he said as being just exaggerations on his part or things that he was saying for effect, or worse, that he was being demented or duped or foolish. All through Krishnaji’s life there had been people who have taken the convenience of dismissing things that he said that they didn’t like as the utterances of a fallible, influenced, foolish man, and maintaining that the things that he said that they did agree with were the utterances of some sacred intelligence. As Krishnaji was saying now more and more that was unpalatable, I began hearing more and more of these kinds of noises. For years Krishnaji had been saying things gently and trying to slowly get people to understand. He now knew that he had no time left to go slowly. He also knew that people would try and dismiss what he said. It seems impossible that he could have imagined, to even a small degree, how adamantly and how frequently people would engage in this self-deception.
While these heartbreaking and often hostile events were unfolding and the talks were going on and people were coming in and out (the older associates often with a tragic sense of their having failed or ruined something, new associates or people he was just casually seeing with the sense that the most wonderful thing in their lives was occurring), Krishnaji would still occasionally look at shirt and trouser materials with me and talk with Kannon, the man who looked after Krishnaji’s tailoring and mine. This seemed to be the only real play and bit of fun that Krishnaji had. At one point, Pama had come to Krishnaji with samples of trouser material for Krishnaji to choose from. Later on Kannon and I went to the shop where these samples had come from and found them all to be mixtures of wool and polyester, of course much cheaper than all wool. Kannon was convinced that the Foundation just didn’t want to spend the money for pure wool for Krishnaji. He saw the materials that I had brought back that were all wool, and he couldn’t believe it and asked, “Where did you find them? Where did you find them?” So I went back and got some more for Krishnaji.
He had someone write off to Upasani, who was coming, to get some more of a special blue silk, etcetera. But when it finally came time to making up the garments, he had almost none of them made up for himself. They were almost all for other people, and it was typical of him to think of others and to want to give things to others. He, of course, wanted lovely things for Mary.