Part 9: Preparing For Darshan

After unpacking my bags and settling into my new penthouse ;) I headed down to see about getting a darshan token. As I said before, it was a lean season and the crowds were not that large. Still my number was in the 1200+ range. But I was in no hurry, since I had all day and then some. I had some time to kill before Amma's arrival in the hall of the Kali temple. I tried calling home on my mobile, to give my family an update on my situation, but found that it could not pick up the network signal. So I walked over to the pay phone booth and made my calls. After I was done running up a bill of several hundred rupees, I stepped out and began talking to people.

My first contact was a householder ashramite in his early 40s (I'm guessing). He and his wife had no children and had been with Amma for a number of years. I opened conversation with an introduction and brief sketch of my situation and he responded likewise. While we were talking, I noticed a general flutter among people at large, and guessed that Amma had arrived. She had indeed. I did not see which way She made Her entrance but at any rate, She was now in the temple hall. I tarried for a while longer with my new acquaintance, before going over to the darshan hall.

I sat down cross-legged in the hall, while queues formed on both sides - on the left side for the men and on the right side for the women. I felt some mild excitement, a sense of anticipation but it was nothing to write home about. I went over my agenda in my mind, rehearsing exactly what I would say when my 20 seconds of air-time came up. The complexity and difficulty of the task cannot be overstated. As most of you are probably aware, compressing your life's events and concerns into 3-5 short sentences is not something that is easy to do. I found myself thinking about structure, composition, prioritization and such other technical questions pertaining to the delivery of my intended message.

I also had to wrestle with the issue of language. I had the choice of speaking to Amma directly in Malayalam - my mother tongue, in which I was reasonably fluent but far from being accomplished (my knowledge of spoken Malayalam is fair but I don't know how to read and write in the language) or, in the alternative, of speaking to her via an intermediary in English, a language which despite its foreignness, is my strongest suit. I decided that English would be (sort of) fake, unnatural and even misleading; I did not wish to represent myself as a brown Sahib, an Indian-foreigner, typical of a species that is alienated from its own culture and tradition. Also, at our first darshan, although it had been my wife who did the talking (I had not said a word), the language used was Malayalam. Therefore in deference to tradition, and with regard to continuity/consistency, I opted to sacrifice the higher clarity that might have accrued through my resort to English; I decided I would speak in Malayalam.

While I actively pondered the modalities of speech delivery, a part of my brain was passively engaged with the idea that Amma's omniscience (an article of faith with me and a necessary axiom for any devotee, IMHO) rendered physical communication somewhat redundant. I figured that the superfluity, such as there might be, was extant purely on Amma's side. For my part, I clearly had a need to engage Amma physically and I saw little point in repressing or denying that drive. What then was the true import of verbal communication with Amma? I fell upon the notion that it was a ritual, a shell devoid of meaning on its own but meaningful as an expression of some underlying truth. And what was that underlying truth? Children babble, not always coherently, but the Mother always listens. To Her children, She might appear to respond (or not at all) in ways that seem variously intelligent, empathetic or just abstruse. However, regardless of the quality of physical communication, the Mother or Guru (remover of darkness) is at all times doing what is necessary for the betterment of the child or disciple.

Om Amriteshwaryai Namah