By this time, Abhiseleka about three and a half months old, having been born in the early summer time. It was the Indian Region of Assam, a largely agricultural region. Abhi and his parents lived in a thatched roof and mud construct home. The floors were dirt with bamboo mats to cover them. Deepaneeti and Brihkendra, his parents, did a lot with what they had, which was much more than most around them. They were agriculturalists, Patils, who owned the small farm in the Himalayan foothills, having inherited the land as a wedding dowry from her parents. There were six lower-casted families who lived and worked the land on their nearly six-acre farm. The primary crop was tea, but there were also other subsistence crops such as rice grown on the small estate.
The workers were housed in much more modest thatch roof huts, with bamboo walls that minimally kept them from the elements. Still, the Patils, Abhi’s parents, were better to their workers than most. They had lived and worked on this land for many generations, and were gifted as property with the land.
The most elaborate building on the premises was the Kamakhya temple, whom the couple were charged with the maintenance, not only of the actual building, but of the daily religious duties they had inherited. He saw these duties mostly as a necessary chore, but in his wife, he found his spirituality. She lived absolutely enthralled with her duties as cook and maintainer of their ancient ways. They were both just sixteen years old, yet they had been matched and bethrothed eight years earlier, by the temple priests in the big temple, a little further up the mountain.
Their religious duties, which they were expected to uphold for the rest of their lives, were daily pujas, fire ceremonies to the goddess Kamakhya. Along with this he was expected to continue to grow in his knowledge of the holy books of their particular sect, memorizing and chanting daily what added up to thousands of pages of Sanskrit texts, which had relatively recently started to become written documents. These were written on palm leaves and stored in a library located behind a curtain, which was housed behind the effigy of the goddess. He also had a lifelong project devoted to writing down these texts, systematically and with absolute exactitude. It was a task that he saw as his burden to bear in life, often wishing he could surrender it all and become a menial laborer like the people who worked for him. It was however, not in the cards. There was, coupled with his admiration for his wife, a resentment that her duties did not include such mentally taxing chores.
He saw her major task, caring for their child, Abhi, as not a chore, but as an absolute joy he was largely deprived of. His moments with the boy were few and far between. They were, as he saw it, what made his life worth living. As all parents, he saw his child as special. But, he thought, there was something that stood out about Abhi, a special glow to him that he had not noticed in other children, but in the religious fanatics in the villages. He actually abhored the fakirs in the village, begging for alms, and contorting their bodies. They seemed to be a mirror for all his inadequacies. Who was he, to have inherited land and workers? Did everyone live in a prison? Though the shudras were beyond poor, they seemed somehow free to him. The look in their eyes, of utter contentment. The same look he saw in his wife and son. He knew he didn’t have it.
All he had been given, just handed over, and he didn’t believe any of it. He went through the motions, felt the energy, and honestly questioned all of it. Who was this Goddess he and his wife had been raised to worship? With all the exposure to the ancient texts, chanting, initiations, and mantras, he had only one authentic spiritual experience in his entire life. He had not yet recovered from it, either. He had more questions than answers. Once, when he was eleven years old, he was in the worship room, reciting texts to the priest. After he had passed his test, reciting the nearly twelve thousand word text in the correct meter, he and the priest had a conversation.
The priest told him, “Now my son, you know the Goddess. This hymn is the summation of her presence and you have mastered it. You should be very proud.”
He wanted to ask the priest about his experience. It seemed devoid of anything special, just countless hours spent parroting back what he had heard. It was tedious to him, when he really wanted to be outside in nature as some of the sages he had read about had done. He had heard they found the Goddess there, but he was told the place to find her was within the hymn:
“When one has mastered this hymn, there is nothing more to learn, my son. Everything is granted by her mastery.”
He was exceedingly disappointed, and felt very guilty. Was there something wrong with him? He had had no special experience, just endless hours of recitation. Is this what the Goddess is all about?
“How do we know the Goddess actually exists, Swamiji? I see her murti every day. I have learned her hymn, and she has yet to talk to me or show me anything more...”
The priest reached pulled his right hand back as far as he could and brought it hard, his knuckles and the back of his hand contacting Brihkendra’s little head with force. It knocked him to the ground, leaving him dumbfounded and seeing stars.
“You are a disgrace, Brihkendra!,” the priests eyes widened; his face was red and a vein protruded on his forehead. “How dare you speak of such things in her very dwelling place! You are a disgrace to her name and your own!”
At that time, his mother had told him countless times the meaning of his name: Brih Kendra, means “to grow the center.” It had special significance to her and the priests. He was expected to be a prodigy of worship, and to bring honor to his people through his mastery. He always doubted that, and this episode was imprinted on his mind strongly. He now doubted whether he even wanted to live up to his name. he wanted to leave everything, but his sense of guilt and duty was just too much for him. The priest spoke softer now, but with the rage permeating everything,
“Sit down. Let’s get back to the Sahasranama. Let us start from the beginning,” he said. He recited the first words, and Brihkendra parroted them:
“Meditate on that Ambika, who has a body of the colour of saffron, who has the three graceful eyes, who has a jeweled crown, adorned by the moon, who always has a captivating smile...”
So, with all this book knowledge, and the belief that it had gotten him absolutely nowhere, he lived torn between his desire to forgo his duties and his love for his wife and child. He knew he could not do both. He continued to go through the motions, working even harder to become the prodigy of his namesake. All the time he was prodded by his mother, who spoke with tears in her eyes about his dead father and his special destiny.
The authentic experience he had finally had was on the occasion of his son’s birth. His wife had started having labor pains at bed time, so her walked her to the predesignated area. It was a large hut that had been built for the occasion. A few of the field women already had the puja fires burning in the center of the room, as they had for one week previously leading up to this moment. The matriarch of this group came to meet them. She put her palms together at the level of her heart and fire blazed in her eyes, but there was a radiant calm about her. “I’ve got this handled; please go to worship, sir.” She did not speak these words aloud. Brihkendra heard them in his mind, but her lips didn’t move. She must be possessed, he thought. The woman looked at him, then at Deepaneeti. She got down on her hands and knees and touched her feet, then placed her face upon her feet.
At this point, he ceased to exist for her. The woman grabbed his wife’s hands and looked deeply into her eyes. She instantly lightened, as if all the pain had been removed from her body in that moment. They walked hand in hand through the doorway to the hut. He was left standing alone when an unseen force seized his mind. There was a voice. The woman’s voice. Did she have a name? He did not know it.
“Dhumvati is my name. I am the birther of all children. I make straight the way for the divine souls.” The sound of this voice echoed in his mind, and he knew the woman truly was possessed. With the spirit of the Grandmother Kali. Whoever she usually was, was absolutely absent. He dropped all hesitation and headed straight for the temple, as she had instructed him.
When he got to the Kamakhya temple on their property, he found all the fires lit and a deafening silence in the meditation chamber he shared with his wife. It was louder than he had ever heard it before. He felt his wife’s lighthearted laughing presence here as well, and heard her voice now in his head. But it wasn’t. “Sit down, my lover, stay with me for a while.” Who was this now? It surely was not the Grandmother’s voice he had heard earlier. There was a high giggling laugh that he almost recognized again as his wife. “Sri Lalitambika! You know me Brih-Brih!”
He sat down with his face blushing. It was a pet name his wife called him when they made love in the wee hours of the night. At that moment, he saw his wife, in his mind’s eye, in the hut surrounded by all the women of the fields. He saw the puja fire in that hut, burning with many different colors. She was not in pain. One of the women had told her a dirty joke, poking fun at him, and she was laughing. He could not help but laugh as well. It was a high pitched, girlish laugh that echoed throughout the silence of the temple. He looked at the effigy of Kamakhya. She had changed, and now had the same firey eyes he had seen in the old woman at the hut. She was radiating the same calm he had felt then.
“Meditate, my baby,” he heard in his mind. It was not a request. He rose into the deepest meditation of his life, feeling as though he was lifted up off the ground. His eyes were closed. He heard more laughter, and could see his wife’s pain starting back again. She was having contractions. He was distanced from his emotions and his thoughts. He was receiving pictures that played out in the field of his closed eyes.
He saw a man in robes, the orange robes of a Sannayasi, or renunciate. He was conducting a ceremony with other men in robes, reciting in a strange low voice prayers in a foreign tongue. It was the Buddhis, he thought.
He then saw a man with a long beard, emaciated from many years of pennance. He was sitting with matted Jata, dreadlocks, and covered with ash. It was in the middle of a birch forest. There was no one else around but the wildlife, and all the songs of the birds, monkeys, and other animals seemed to be sung directly to this man. He looked like Shiva, breathing only very seldom, in a suspended animation.
“Who are these men?,” he asked. “Why am I seeing these men?”
“Loosen up Brih-Brih, these men are your son, Abhi!” He heard more laughter then and saw another man, leaving in the middle of the night, leaving his wife and children to live at the feet of some guru. He saw this same man, but not the same man, over and over, doing the same thing: starting a family and leaving them for life as a renunciate. He started to cry, feeling so sad for that man and his family.
“Don’t cry. That’s not for his this time.”
He now understood that he was hearing Kamakhya’s voice herself. He loosened up his mind and got what she was saying. This was his son’s previous incarnations. He was some kind of holy man, it seemed. He then saw him, dressed all in white, talking to a large group of dishevelled Mohammedeans. They were gathered around him in a large hall of a palace, barely breathing, afraid they might miss a word from his mouth. He was surrounded by light, bright light of many colors, that the people around him seemed to be soaking up. They were men, women, and children. He could not tell what he was saying. It was in the Mohammedean language. He did not understand it.
“He is saying, my son, all religions are one. None is better than another,” Kamakhya’s ethereal voice spoke.
“This is my son?! He is a Mohammedean?”
“He belongs to no religion, Brih, he is above all that.”
“I do not understand,” he said.
“When the time is right, you will...”
He awoke out of this meditation, floating back to the ground, as it were. One of the field women was there, at the doorway to the temple. He could see the outline of her body through the early morning light. He could not see her face. Had he been sitting here all night?!
“Your son has been born, Sir,” she said. She quickly turned around and ran away. All the spirits and goddesses seemed to be gone. He had a feeling of fire in the center of his chest, and felt, not tired, but invigorated and exited. He started towards the hut to see his son for the first time. His name would be Abhi, which meant fearless.
