drifting onwards

1/30/23

Since the immersion at Sangam Mahuli, people told me: don't cry now. The general idea is that having offered reverence to the ashen remains and ritual food to the lingering soul, one should encourage that soul to disentangle from earthly connections and achieve peace or union with the divine. Too much mourning and crying tends to hold a soul back. That is one reason the ashes in the water are gently pushed out into the current.

The rest of us also drifted on. Jaye and Jeff returned to Pune right after the ritual, and I went a day later. After seeing Jaye and Jeff off on their travels home, I was invited by friends to a few days' retreat at the Hotel Kailash located right next to the Ellora caves. It's a lovely place, made more peaceful by the fact that the caves were closed for a holiday, thereby reducing the inevitable ruckus of auto horns and roaring buses. The stay there was mainly in memoriam of a decades-long Pune friend lost during the covid shutdown who had loved to retreat there. We were each at different stages of learning how to balance on the thin path between succumbing to the surging pain of loss, and accepting the necessity of continuing - remembering, appreciating - but continuing. The beauty and comforts of the hotel and gardens helped with the balance. 

From Hotel Kailash it was an easy walk to visit the 18th century Ghrishneshwar Jyotirlinga temple, one of 12 Jyothirlinga sites in India. Photography and phones are forbidden there as in most temples, but google will serve up images. Unlike visits to the Jnaneshwar samadhi site in Alandi, which does evoke my appreciation especially because of the piety of those who come to pay respect, this Shiva site was beyond my capacity to respond.

Eventually we returned to Pune, where I met with several more friends from years past, and continued in my efforts to revive my small capacity in Marathi language. Walking around the Prabhat Road area where Lee and I had a flat in the mid-1990s is an unnerving swirl of memory and now-ness. I left some saris with a street-side laundry service near where we had lived, and encountered the owner, who remembered Lee from that time. Later I sought out a young woman who sits on a corner selling fruit. Selling me two bananas, the small sweet kind, she asked me what I was doing here. I told her that 30 years ago I had stayed in an apartment just a block down the street. She agreed that everything has changed, noting the tower being built across the street where a modest bungalow had long squatted under trees. Thirty years ago she had not even been born, but the change here has been fast and intense, and everyone speaks of it. Some of it seems for the better, such as a more reliable supply of electricity and water, but the pollution, traffic, cement, westernized chain stores…ugh. Still, I was buoyed by her lovely smile as she wished me to come back again soon. Next door to our former four-story apartment building, huge machines drilled deep into the earth to root yet another highrise. I drifted on down the street, amazed, not sure where to find a point of reference.