The Cauliflower (20 page)

Mathur Baba is a freethinking man. Who can be sure whether the pandits convinced
him
of Uncle's being an incarnation or not? I love Uncle as much as it is possible to love another human being, but I must confess that I was yet to be fully won over by their many and clever arguments. Perhaps I simply do not possess the kind of mind which would be liable to understand the finer details of such lofty issues? When I dwelled deeply on the matter I would merely flip-flop like a landed fish! Because one minute I would really and truly believe in their decision, then the next I would be terribly confused and perplexed. How could I be absolutely sure? How might I finally decide and feel secure?

It wasn't too long after that conference, however, before Mathur Baba fell neatly into line with the pandits' opinions. Late one afternoon, just before the start of the evening
arati
, Mathur Baba came running to see me as I was rinsing Uncle's
dhoti
in the plate-washing tank. “Hriday,” he panted, “something truly extraordinary has happened! I was standing by a window in the
kuthi
gazing over toward the temple, and I caught sight of your Uncle, deep in thought, pacing up and down on the temple's northeastern verandah. But as I stood and watched him he was suddenly transformed, and in place of your Uncle I saw the Goddess—I saw Ma Kali herself—quietly pacing, deep in thought, upon that same verandah, and then, when she reached the farthest extent and slowly turned around, I saw Lord Shiva walking back toward me again. I stood there for many minutes, Hriday. I closed my eyes several times and I blinked. But when I opened them, still, it was
them
, Hriday, the Great Goddess and her holy spouse, both apparently contained within the earthly form of your beloved Uncle. I swear my heart almost stopped beating there and then. I was so filled with awe and fear that I could scarcely breathe.”

Mathur Baba covered his chest with one hand and then reached out his other to touch my forearm. I could feel that his fingers were icy cold and still trembling violently. Yet before I could speak and offer any sort of consolation, he quickly continued. “I left the
kuthi
and I ran straight to your Uncle, Hriday, and I confronted him. I told him what I had seen.…”

“How did Uncle react?” I wondered, almost to myself.

“Your Uncle was not at all happy!” Mathur exclaimed, astonished. “In fact, he reprimanded me quite severely. ‘Stop all this fuss and commotion,' he snapped, ‘and please leave me in peace! Is it not bad enough already that everyone in this temple thinks I have cast a wicked spell on you? Take control of yourself! What will they think if you continue to behave in this way?' And then he sent me off with a flea in my ear. That is why I have come to you with this news, Hriday. For who else might I possibly confide in?”

Mathur burst into noisy tears, and I—humble and lowly Hriday, Mathur Baba's newest spiritual confidant—was obliged to shake water from my callused working hands and embrace this great and soft and wealthy patriarch as if he were merely a sobbing village boy.

In that instant I was possessed of a most powerful feeling, not of fear, nor even of compassion, but of overwhelming triumph. Perhaps I had not been so foolish after all to dedicate my services so wholeheartedly to Uncle? Because of what real import was the mere “truth” of the matter? Whether Uncle was an incarnation of God or not was surely just a trifling issue if we had the belief and the loyalty and the support of a wealthy, powerful, and influential man like Mathur Baba.

Hmmm
.
Interesting
 … [
plucks at chin, thoughtfully
]

Sri Ramakrishna—

Why did you choose to marry

Then live as a monk?

If you are a god

So your wife—by extension—

Must
be a goddess …

Mustn't she?

?

Okay, so we're still coming to terms with the sudden shock of the Rani's passing (although she will doubtless pass again—and again, and again—in a variety of media), and we've also painstakingly created a little elbow room for the elusive Brahmini (seamlessly! quite seamlessly!), and before too long, we'll probably need to engage with the self-effacing conundrum that is Sri Ramakrishna's wife, Sarada Devi, aka the Holy Mother—but before we do that:

Some minor wrangles—or, well, perhaps just the one
:

Remember
lobon
?

Salt
?

Bangladeshi for “nun”?

And remember Hridayram? Or Hriday? Who
serves
his great master so dutifully (and through this service, the saint claims, will find God)? Well, the English translation of his name, Hriday, actually means “pure heart.” And sixty-two years after the death of the great Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna—a prophet without a prophecy, a
guru
without a system, a bizarrely exclusivist egalitarian—will come another saint (
gasp!
), hot on his heels, to this lost and chaotic and sprawling metropolis, who will breathe sharply down his neck (Ramakrishna wears his unpretentious white
dhoti
with its bright red trim; this other “impostor” saint wears an unpretentious white
sari
, fringed in blue) and even (dare we say it?) threaten to partially overshadow his startling Calcuttan legacy.

She will be unconventional, too. She will sidestep all traditional formalities. She will refuse to accept government funding for her charitable endeavors because she will not waste so much as a precious second on (argh—yawn—eye roll)
pen
-pushing. She will not embrace modernity,
per se
, only the dignity of work, of rolling up one's sleeves and mucking in, of good, honest sweat and heartfelt sacrifice.

Like Sri Ramakrishna, she will eschew aversion. She will actively embrace filth. Which is fortunate. Because she is here, right here, in the heart of the slums of this belching, rotting, teeming city. She will love the unloved, the unlovable. This is her
mantra
. And there will be
no official record of her work
. Neither saint will leave a private paper trail. To them, books, articles, lectures are all silly and worldly and stupidly vainglorious.

Ah. They are close, so close, these two.

In 1952, this other saint—this new (let's just come out and say it)
foreign
saint—will establish her Home for the Dying a stone's throw from Kalighat, the most famous and ancient of all the Kali temples, and it will be a place of selfless service called Nirmal Hriday (Home of the Pure Heart). But here their parallel journeys take somewhat different routes. Mother Teresa (for it is she—who else?) will dedicate her life to an entirely practical kind of service. She will pitch in and get her
sari
filthy. Then she will trudge to her un-air-conditioned cell, utterly exhausted, and wash it, herself, in a bucketful of cold water. Sri Ramakrisha? Although his legacy—in the hands of Swami Vivekananda (his beloved Naren)—will be improving and altruistic, the saint himself (the source of this great movement which will inspire the likes of Mahatma Gandhi) will be surprisingly indifferent to human suffering. He will not focus on anything—
anything
—barring the pursuit of God. He is not remotely political. He is not remotely social. He is not remotely incensed or incendiary or indignant.

Sri Ramakrishna is constantly united with God through ecstasy. But the Devi—the Goddess—has told him (many times, in many visions) that he must remain in a state called
bhava
samadhi
. The Hindu scriptures teach us that once God has been fully realized the human body will naturally just shrivel away. But Sri Ramakrishna has been given a mission to serve humanity by teaching us to
see
God. And to do this (on a practical level) he develops various techniques to try and keep the waves of ecstasy that naturally infiltrate his body and his consciousness—hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second—at bay. He smokes, he chews betel, he drinks iced water. He tries to maintain a few tiny vices. It's as if he is a hot air balloon, floating, inexorably, up and up to heaven, but every so often he turns down the heady stream of helium, just to lose a bit of height. And this is where we meet up with him—as he draws a quick breath before taking off again—on this strange planet we call earth.

And Mother Teresa's story? It couldn't be more different. But it is still curiously intertwined. Because she is here—is she not?—at Kalighat (a place which Sri Ramakrishna regularly frequented) and she is extremely unwelcome to begin with. The building she takes over to commence saving the dying in was a former Kali temple, but by 1952 it has been abandoned, has fallen into a state of chronic disrepair, and is inhabited by a group of local thieves and pickpockets who make a living out of preying on visiting pilgrims. The local council is persuaded to hand over the building to her. But the local people are not happy. And why would they be? Why
should
they be? Because what kind of a message does it transmit (uncomfortable? Embarrassing? Colonial?) that a tiny woman—a Catholic, more to the point—should've come to this sacred Hindu spot to perform her do-gooding services here?

The nuns are regularly menaced and threatened. But they refuse to be intimidated. On one occasion the chief of police is called to try and calm down an angry mob which is marching on the place, intent upon its destruction. He holds back the crowd with an outstretched palm and calmly informs them that he will rip the home down himself, with
his own bare hands
, if a single man or woman among them is willing to step up and promise to perform the miserable work that the nuns are undertaking. Nobody volunteers. The crowd disperses.

Not long after, one of the priests of the Kalighat Kali Temple collapses in the street, dying of consumption. He is covered in blood and froth. No one will approach him. But the saint, on hearing of his predicament, rushes out and gathers him up in her tiny, powerful arms. And she gives him temporary respite—a wash, a bed, a sip of something, a meal if he can manage it. She offers this poor priest of the Kali Temple a place to die, with dignity. And he gratefully accepts her offer. And all the muttering and the rumbling soon ends, after that.

But before we get
too
carried away with this … let's just … let's just retrace our steps for a moment.…

In the popular mythology of Rani Rashmoni we are regularly informed that she established (way, way earlier than Mother Teresa; in the first half of the nineteenth century) a home for the dying in a place called Nimtala—where a burning
ghat
was first built in 1828. Did the Rani herself build the
ghat
? We know that she built several
ghat
s (Babu Ghat, and another in Ahiritola). Nimtala Ghat and its cremation ground would later be much frequented by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and others of his ilk. Whether the Rani funded the
ghat
itself isn't made clear. But the home for the dying is a dead cert. Such homes get their first mentions—historically speaking—in association with the early Christian Crusaders. And what is Mother Teresa, if not a Crusader of sorts? Although at the saint's home in Kalighat, the residents are not preached to. They are not converted. They are offered only basic care, companionship, dignity in death (insofar as that is possible), and perhaps a small mouthful of sacred Ganges water as they draw their last breath.

Mother Teresa sees God (or Jesus) in all of the hopeless. When she dresses a gangrenous limb, or cleans up a pile of vomit, she is serving God in man.

It's worth noting that in 2010 plans were under way to upgrade the legendary but severely dilapidated burning
ghat
at Nimtala. The great Bengali Renaissance poet Rabindranath Tagore was cremated there. They built a small monument in his honor. It was thought that it might be nice to change the name of the
ghat
as a mark of respect. Although when we look back to the original name—Nimtala—we discover that its origins are in the old neem tree which stood on that very spot for many centuries, and under whose holy and welcoming shade, it just so happens, Job Charnock first landed in Kolkata—which was not even yet Calcutta—on August the 24th, 1690.

Sometimes, when you read the assorted literature on the subject, it feels as if Mother Teresa (does she take her prefix from Ma Kali, we wonder?) was the first person ever to invest any concerted energy in Calcutta's lost and her dying. But what of the Rani's home? Where was it, exactly? Who ran it? And what did it consist of? History is hoarse—it has no proper voice to tell us. But what we can be quite certain of is that these are two women—two good, clever, inventive, powerful women—working, together, in Calcutta, under Ma Kali's forbidding glare. They are creating a legacy shaded by the
Paramahamsa
's great white wings—of faith and unity and tolerance and service and care.

How curious, to have two great saints in such close proximity! What does this tell us about Calcutta, I wonder? Perhaps only that it is a place most in
need
of faith. In
need
of hope. A lost place. A hungry place. A desperate place. A city run under the brutal, clear-eyed, and merciless auspices of the Goddess Kali. The creatress, the destroyer. The mother, the murderess.

And this is enough (isn't it?). Enough of Mother Teresa? For this book? For the Cauliflower ™, with its bad haiku and its sketchy budget? Simply to know that she was there? That sixty-two years after the main event this tiny, industrious, inventive, creative, ferocious, prune-faced saint came along and took a low bow? Isn't that enough?

Yes?

Yes?

Although there is a bizarre footnote.… Because one thing we now know, much to our consternation—to our astonishment—of this blue-tinged saint (unlike her so recent predecessor, whose servant she quite unwittingly named her Home for the Dying after), is that while
he
was overwhelmed by the presence of God,
she
was signally
under
whelmed by it. This great modern heroine, this mysterious power, this taut nerve of a woman who was driven almost to distraction by her urge to serve, to save, was actually
without
God. But nobody—aside from her spiritual confessor—knew it. Because such was her love of God that she made an oath to live and serve
without
him. Without solace. Without comfort. Without inner peace. She gave it up. She sacrificed it. And more to the point, her God
took
it. He snatched it away from her. He left her dry and alone. Empty. Hollow. A spiritual husk. And so she became—in her own words—a saint of darkness. A black hole. And she gave up any hope, any comfort (“consolation,” the religious call it) for a period approximating—her secret oath promised—
infinity itself
. To serve. To inspire. She gave up her very
soul
for all eternity, to live without love, for love.