Part 1: Homeward Bound

This is the story of the time that I spent in Amritapuri some years ago. It is an ordinary tale, nothing dramatic, but I wish to record it for reasons not entirely clear or sound. Perhaps I wish to scour my mental garbage bin for little nuggets I can take home, or maybe, I want to reach out to an audience and share the confusion and mystery of the spiritual life. There may also be a creative/literary impulse at work behind my production. It is entirely possible that I am getting a kick out of experimenting with and showcasing my limited literary ability. Anyway, we shall leave questions of motivation aside for the time being and start the story.

I arrived at Trivandrum airport late one night and was driven up to Amritapuri in an ashram taxi. The ride was comfortable and unremarkable. I had company - an American returning to the ashram after seeing his son off at the airport and of course, the driver who was a local. I had a brief dialogue with the American in the course of which we exchanged basic information about each other. He told me that he worked as a checkout clerk in a supermarket in the States and that every so often he would save up and blow his savings (of many months presumably) on a trip to India just to be with Amma. He was an old-timer around Amma, apparently, having first met her in the early nineties and this was his third or fourth trip to HQ.

He was nice to talk to, mild-mannered and pleasant. He talked a fair bit about expenses - about how expensive it was to fly down to India and how he had to work for x months to spend y months with Amma and so on. He also gave me well-intentioned warnings about some of the ways in which Indians might try to rip me off. I was touched by his solicitude but did not feel the slightest bit of alarm given that I was very much at home in Kerala. Being Malayali might have had something to do with my confidence! I had been a 'local' years before, and now here I was, years later, returning as an 'expat' with dollars in my pocket and Hushpuppies under my soles. Nobody was going to take me for a ride, I thought to myself, least of all in Kerala.

As our taxi tumbled Ashram-ward in the middle of the night over familiar pot-holed roads, I looked outside through the windscreen and felt comfortable. Little did I know that before the night was over, someone with a heavy vehicle license was going to drive a 16-wheel truck over my smug, budding ego. No prizes for guessing who that trucker turned out to be; it was Amma! I was about to get my first taste of Amma as Kali several months before I had even begun to think, in conscious terms, of Her ego-slaying aspect.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah