Memoir: A couple’s experience in a Himalayan ashram under the tutelage of the charismatic ‘Ashishda’

By the time I was 18, I began to feel I had to unravel something and trace the threads that had wrapped themselves around me to their origin. Family life had overtones of a surreal Pirandello drama in which a group of characters, including me, found themselves in roles that had been interchanged. As I played my role, I was also looking over my shoulder wondering about the part I was originally meant to play. That is how I began an annual pilgrimage to Calcutta in my early adolescent years to visit my natural father who lived there with his second wife and my sisters.

I don’t know what it was I was looking for in the two months I spent there each year, except perhaps, traces of myself in a household to which I could have belonged. It was a house bustling with activity; my sisters had more friends dropping in than I could keep count of, while my father was seldom visible between the pressures of his business during the day and his love for cards in the evenings. Often, he came home with a migraine and withdrew into his room. He was a figure I remembered more for his absences; he was always in the process of leaving, with a briefcase in hand and eyes that were kindly yet distracted.

I loved the energetic bustle in the house. My heart would beat a trifle faster when my sisters would casually introduce me to a friend, “Meet our youngest sister,” as though they had recognised a piece from a jigsaw puzzle that was hard to put together.

My days in Calcutta had a dual quality about them. I felt comfortable, casually included, as though, there, I didn’t have to explain who I was. Yet I knew I did not belong for there was no niche that was only mine to fill. What existed was not permanent.

When I returned to my parents, my mother would always ask, “How was the holiday?” Her eyes alert, her tone studiously casual.

“It was fun, though I hardly saw Uncle.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, the usual. I went to the pavement bookshops, listened to music and ate lots of Chinese food.”

Between us, straining to be heard, were the unspoken words: “Did you want to come back to us?” Sometimes things left unsaid carry much more potency. I felt slightly choked, incapable of answering. How was I to explain to my mother that in Calcutta, I didn’t belong but knew who I was. With her, I felt I belonged, but did not know who I was. Sometimes family friends would ask me, “So how is your father?”

When I began talking about my foster father, they would interrupt me. “No, no, we mean your real father.” Every time this happened, it was as though my present life was not being acknowledged while that which was not mine to keep, was being kept alive.

“Did you want a child of your own?” I had asked my mother.

“Very much, earlier on. After you came into our lives, not at all. You were everything I wanted.”

“But don’t you wish I was your own child?”

“You are my own child. You know when I realised I couldn’t have children I was quite heartbroken. I felt excluded from the magic circle of women discussing birth, labour and the initial days of holding a gurgling bundle of creation in their hands. Slowly I realised that most women don’t love their children from day one. Such a love develops as you nurture and see something grow before you. It’s no different from our relationship, for both are based on love.”

She spoke with an intensity that united us. Love there was; I only wondered why I had been put in a position where I could doubt it. This doubting had unexpected side-effects; one was a steady decline in academic results, to the extent that when I reached Senior Cambridge my mother was told by the nuns that they would have to demote me. My mother stood facing a semi-circle of nuns, like a newly planted sapling battling the winds. Something within me decided then to try and move out of the shadows.

I spent hours poring over books that I had earlier read without understanding. I studied by torchlight when the dormitory lights were switched off, stole down the red-carpeted staircase, hunched up against the cold to sit under the one landing light which burned through the night. When the final results came, I had done well. In the feeling of elation that followed, I felt I had returned something I had long owed my parents.

Maybe that’s when I knew I had a long way to go. Some process had begun which I had to continue with. Each life has its truth, characteristically individual to itself. The discovery of that truth is the secret task we are all entrusted with. A secret that is ours to cage or to free but which struggles to find a voice of its own. Perhaps that was the voice I needed to hear.

On impulse, without telling my parents, I dropped a letter to Ashishda asking if I could visit him.

Excerpted with permission from A Way Within: Seven Years in a Himalayan Ashram, Madhu Tandan, Speaking Tiger Books.