Mother of the Unseen World Read online

  Herbert met me at the airport in Frankfurt. When I asked him what had actually happened, he smiled, shrugged, and suggested that I talk to Adilakshmi. It was all “a big misunderstanding,” he told me. Herbert wouldn’t elaborate.

  I was in my room the following day, putting off the inevitable, when Adilakshmi knocked at the door and asked me to come up to Mother’s apartment. The familiar butterflies rose up in my stomach as I followed her up the white marble stairs. Mother Meera was waiting for us on the sofa, outfitted in a housecoat and slippers. Adilakshmi pulled out a chair and I sat, facing the two of them. Mother Meera greeted me warmly, asked about my health, and gazed off into the middle distance. Nobody said a word for a minute. Then Adilakshmi launched into the subject at hand: “We are very glad you have come,” she said. “Have you spoken to Andrew lately?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

  Adilakshmi gave a knowing smile. “Andrew is angry. But the things he is saying are not true.” I looked at Mother, who barely seemed to be paying attention. “The Mother’s love is equal for all. Andrew did not understand.”

  “I’d really like to know what happened.”

  Adilakshmi gave me the gist of it. For many years, Mother had trusted Andrew to speak on her behalf. As an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Andrew had been outspokenly gay, suggesting in public statements that “the return of the Mother” was especially good news for homosexuals, who could now celebrate their otherness. “People began to write to the Mother, asking if it was true that she prefers gay people,” Adilakshmi said. “Some of them were very upset.”

  “These are simple people,” Mother Meera said. “With families. It was confusing to them.”

  “When Andrew came,” Adilakshmi continued, “we only asked that if he wishes to speak in the Mother’s name, then it is better not to discuss these things. If he wishes to talk about them on his own, that is no problem.”

  “That’s all that happened?” I asked. Adilakshmi nodded her head and a weight was lifted from my heart. Still, the question of the marriage remained. “What about asking for Mother’s blessing? Is it true that he was told to marry a woman?”

  “Andrew can love anyone he wants!” Adilakshmi waved away the suggestion. I speculated that perhaps there had been some hesitation on Mother’s part to the particular man he had chosen. When I suggested this, Adilakshmi glanced at Mother, then back at me. “These are personal matters,” she said. “For Andrew’s sadhana. Now I would like to ask you for something, Mark.”

  “Anything,” I told Adilakshmi.

  “Will you write an article that tells the truth? We love Andrew. He is an old friend. Will you help?” I wanted to say yes but hesitated. Instead, I assured Adilakshmi that I believed her. The room fell silent after that; eventually, after a minute or so, Mother Meera stood up and walked me to the door. I expressed gratitude for her hospitality. “You are always welcome,” she told me.

  “Will you write the article?” Adilakshmi asked.

  I promised her to do my best.

  —

  In fact, I wrote nothing—not a word—to contradict what Andrew was saying. I was too confused by these conflicting stories—and too repelled by Andrew’s vitriol—to reckon fairly with what had happened. I was also too much of a reporter not to remember that I was nowhere near the scene when all of this had transpired. I could never know the precise truth about what was said, the tone and innuendo, what had been distorted, misheard, badly translated, or simply unintended. Could Adilakshmi have misspoken? Perhaps. Was it possible that Andrew pushed too far or overstepped some boundary? Yes. Could Mother’s resistance to Andrew’s choice of husband have had something to do with the guy’s character? Certainly. Did I believe that Mother Meera was homophobic? Absolutely not. It seemed clear to me that this collision between them had been a long time coming. Was it my job now to pick up the pieces? Not at all. My only responsibility was to protect the sacred relationship I had with Mother Meera. There was no need for me to dive into a pile of dirty laundry that reeked of half-truths and hidden agendas.

  Still, my connection to Mother was not immune to the Andrew debacle. Our inner bond remained unbroken, but I instinctively stepped away from the conflict. Mother’s photograph remained on my desk, my sense of her power remained undiminished, but I kept my distance from Germany. My personal life had radically changed as well, which shifted my attention and focus. First, I’d gotten my future back when drugs appeared to treat my condition. Next, I had followed Meher Baba’s injunction to “dig in one place” (and meet God wherever you are), creating a home with my new partner and working on my writing career. I’d taken Mother Meera’s advice to heart as well, and never attached to her physical presence or treated her like a guru—a detachment that served me well in those years. Our bond seemed to grow even stronger during this physical absence, in fact.

  Friends in Thalheim kept me abreast of the changes in Mother’s life during this period. By the early 2000s, she was traveling the world, emerging from her decades-long seclusion, because, in her words, “not everyone can come to Germany.” I read about Mother in magazines, watched video footage of darshan online, and waited for the right time to see her again.

  This finally happened in April 2006. Mother was giving darshan at a hotel in Connecticut, and I couldn’t wait to be in her presence. When the time came, I sat in the crowded ballroom, feeling excited and nervous, the way you are before meeting a long-absent friend, hoping that they haven’t changed too much. When the door finally opened and she made her entrance, I was relieved to find Mother just the same, aside from a few more gray hairs at the temples. She still lowered her eyes as she walked, avoiding the audience’s gaze, then settled quickly onto her chair, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for the first head to be offered. Darshan was also more organized now, due to the size of the crowd; each of our rows was called one at a time, with a seated queue down the center aisle. One by one, we were asked to slide forward as the space in front of her cleared. When my turn came, her fingertips locked on the top of my head, I smelled India in the folds of her sari, and when I sat back on my heels to meet her eyes, they offered no sign of recognition. Mother stared at me for an especially long time, it seemed. Then it was over, I was back in my seat, my eyes were closed, and that eerie calm came over me, an intimation of something eternal, the long-delayed return to stillness. My mind went quiet. I could hear myself breathing. I knew there was nothing to be forgiven.

  7

  SHADOW IN LIGHT

  In the mid-1990s, Mother Meera diverted funds from Germany and bought several properties in Madanapalle, a municipality in Andhra Pradesh three hundred miles from where she was born. She intended to build schools near the town center as well as a retreat house for visitors and indigents on thirteen acres of farmland toward the outskirts of Madanapalle. Ever the frugal farmer’s daughter, she is said to have negotiated a rock-bottom price for the real estate, according to an inside source, while Adilakshmi, whose family had been prominent for generations in Madanapalle, finessed the relationship with the seller. There was a problem finding a water source on the farm site after the property was purchased, causing great alarm all around. The next time Mother visited India, she looked around and suggested that the workmen try a spot a hundred yards from where they were digging. That’s where they found their water source, to everyone’s relief.

  She chose pink-and-gray marble from Rajasthan for the floors of the main school (the Mother Meera English Medium High School), and ordered a plaque for the front gate to commemorate Mr. Reddy. On one side of the campus, a visitor finds a Hindu temple devoted to the god Shiva; on the other stands an ancient Sunni mosque, while around the corner is a Catholic retreat center, transforming Paramatman Way (the name Mother chose for the street) into a cul-de-sac of world religions. The main school was to offer a standard English school education for children aged three to sixteen, many of whom would be poor and on scholarship. There would be three levels—ref
erred to as “baby school,” “kids school,” and “teen school”—and a large hall to use for darshan after the children had gone home. Mother Meera invited her parents, Antamma and Veera, to live on the school grounds, as well as her younger brother and three surviving sisters and their families.

  Creating this school was far from easy. Ulrich Reinhold, a German IT specialist and one of Mother’s closest aides, described the grueling process she’d been through, working with the locals. “Mother ran straight into a wall of tamas,” said Ulrich. “Very, very difficult.” In the Hindu energy system, there are three primary qualities: rajas (passion and activity), sattva (purity and goodness), and tamas (inertia or resistance to action). “Basically, no one did what she asked them to do. We saw Mother become angry for the first time.”

  “It’s hard to imagine her angry,” I confessed.

  “Not anger like yours or mine, where it’s personal. More like Kali,” Ulrich said, referring to the ferocious, ignorance-slaying aspect of the Divine Mother. “She’d get angry when people ignored her instructions. Or wasted money. Or forgot to take care of someone. But Mother’s anger would be gone like that.” He snapped his fingers. “She’d be laughing and smiling in the next moment, as if nothing had happened. Mother responds to the needs of the situation, that’s all. She does what’s necessary to get the job done. But avatars lose their temper, too, you know.”

  This is an important point. Smiley-faced pictures of enlightenment—blissful, beatific, ever serene—have never been a part of Indian spirituality (or any authentic tradition, for that matter). The saintly are known to be hell on wheels when it comes to relieving suffering. Think of Mother Teresa railing against Calcutta bureaucrats who were trying to interfere with programs for feeding the poor. Or the Dalai Lama fuming privately over the Chinese occupation and the massacres of the Tibetan people. Or any of the outraged sages and prophets with which the Bible is populated, as well as the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhist sutras on anger and hatred. It’s naïve to imagine that enlightened people are milquetoasts incapable of fiery emotion, cheek turners who never lash out when pushed beyond their limits. I’ve known a number of masters from various traditions, and not one of them was without a temper. Still, it was hard for me to picture Mother Meera—the most unflappable and detached of all—losing her cool over worldly matters. Ulrich proceeded to set me straight with the story of a husband-and-wife team, childhood friends of Adilakshmi’s, who had volunteered to help educate the children in Mother Meera’s family. In gratitude to these teachers, Mother had given strict instructions to her family that a container of fresh milk from the cows that grazed behind the school be delivered to the couple every day. These orders were carried out faithfully until once when Mother Meera was visiting from Germany and her relatives forgot the delivery. While eating dinner with her family, Mother asked about the milk and was told that the delivery had been forgotten. She stood up from the table, apparently, regurgitated her food, and went to apologize to the teachers right away, complaining that her family couldn’t be trusted to carry out her wishes without her keeping an eye on them.

  “She doesn’t forget a thing,” said Ulrich.

  —

  I wanted to see Mother for myself in India, and booked a trip to Madanapalle. My partner, David, and I planned to volunteer at the school, where I’d have the chance to ask Mother a number of questions that I badly needed answered. I’d spent a year trying to create a portrait of her that was true to life and free of sanctimony. Mother Meera had given me carte blanche to write whatever I wanted, but her story continued to elude me. There was a missing link I had failed to uncover and it was my hope that she would help me dispel this mystery while we were in India. Before we left for India, I telephoned Mother in Germany to remind her that I would be at the school during her monthly visit and looked forward to interviewing her there. I’d seen her on a few occasions in Connecticut for darshan but had spent almost no time alone with her for a number of years. “There are so many things that I need to ask you,” I told her, trying not to sound like a pushy reporter. “For the book.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I am busy now.”

  At the airport in Bangalore, David and I were met by the driver we’d hired to take us to the school. For the next two hours, scenes of rustic India flew by outside the window: tea stands with oversized, rusty tin pots; buffalo knee-deep in flooded rice paddies; swarthy women on the side of the road, balancing great earthen jugs on their heads, dressed in bright cotton saris and flip-flops. What would it be like, I wondered, seeing Mother Meera in her native country? Those frightening dreams from the night we met, when she came at me with her talons and fangs, were carved into my memory, along with the image of my ripped-apart body, hanging in space like a gutted doll. What if that happened in real life? What if Mother Meera tore me apart for some unintentional mistake or other? How would I respond to her fury? I pulled out a copy of Answers: Part II and reread what she’d said about her own temper: “Sometimes I become angry while working with someone who insists on doing something his or her own way when I know it will take too much time and is not good,” she explained. “But this anger which is rare arises only in work situations. I do not become angry at a devotee who does something bad to another,” she promised. “I change him or her.” I only hoped that this was true.

  —

  When we arrived at the school, David and I were met at the gate by Hilda, an anxious-looking German woman in her fifties, who stopped what she was doing to greet the new volunteers. “Ach, we are so busy with the children!” she said, shaking her head and looking toward heaven. Hundreds of kids in green-and-orange uniforms were streaming out of buildings, into the courtyard. I saw a familiar face emerge from the crowd; it was Maurice, a French devotee of Mother Meera’s whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. He welcomed me with a wide grin before leading us to our room, where he suggested that we have a rest before darshan started, at seven P.M.

  I sat down on the bed and peered out the window. Beyond our terrace was an empty dirt lot. At the center of the lot was a tractor, and next to the tractor a small tree, its root ball diapered in white fabric. Beside the tree, a young man was striking at the earth with a shovel, surrounded by a group of fellow workers wearing head scarves to protect themselves from the brutal heat. He seemed to be having trouble digging the hole. From out of the group stepped Mother Meera—so short that I hadn’t seen her at first. She took the shovel from the worker with one hand, placed her foot on the hilt, and plunged it into the dirt. Then she wiped that hand on her sari, put a rag to her forehead, and squinted down at what appeared to be a cellphone she’d been holding in the other hand. Mother turned and walked back toward the school, followed by a couple of minions. It was weird that with so many men present, it had fallen to her—a bareheaded, fifty-four-year-old woman standing in ninety degree heat—to start the digging on this job. Then I remembered what Ulrich had said about tamas and Mother Meera’s headaches with her labor force.

  —

  A few minutes before seven, we made our way to the darshan hall on the ground floor. Next to the door was a whiteboard inscribed with a couplet from Emily Dickinson: “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.” Inside, three dozen people were seated in an incense-scented, dimly lit room that could have held five times that many. A group of children were being led in Sanskrit prayer by a sweet-voiced, ample-bodied woman sitting to the side of Mother Meera’s chair. This was the first time I’d heard music allowed before darshan; everywhere else, the hall is kept silent. Behind the song mistress sat Adilakshmi, whose black hair had gone gunmetal gray in the twelve years since I’d seen her last. An adorable child with a Louise Brooks bob marched up and down the aisle with the confidence of a military commander, escorting newcomers to their seats. Hilda hurried around the room, shushing people who were whispering; then she’d hold up her hands, palms pressed together in the namaste sign, as if to say “I’m a very nice person under this scowl.�
� Across the aisle, Maurice was sitting in a row by himself, with his arms crossed, eyes closed, and bare feet splayed on the pink marble floor. In the front of the room, the school’s temporary administrator, an American-born engineer named Mohan, watched over things with a tense expression, frail as a wren in his gold Gandhi glasses, slender arms clasped around his chest.

  Suddenly, the singing stopped and Mother Meera walked in from the back. At a glance, she was hard to recognize as the same perspiring, loose-haired woman I’d seen an hour before in the open dirt lot. Mother seems to change physically during darshan—the word that comes to mind is “condensed.” Her body appears to lose a fifth of its mass. On the street, Mother Meera looks like many a fiftyish Indian woman with an umber complexion and good taste in saris. In darshan, she’s unmistakable. Sui generis.

  She settled onto her chair, and the process began. Adilakshmi went down on her knees first and lowered her head with some difficulty, resting it in Mother Meera’s hands. How many thousands of times had she done this in the past forty years? What was passing between them, I wondered, watching Adilakshmi look up at Mother, hands folded beneath her chin. When Mother lowered her eyes, Adilakshmi touched her feet and made way for Mohan, who brought up a plastic chair to accommodate disabled visitors. A mountainous grandmother in a purple kurta was followed by a ragged old Indian man, a teenage girl with a twisted leg, and a Western lady clutching a walker. The Louise Brooks coquette summoned those in our row to take our places in the waiting line. I pushed forward on the floor till it was my turn, then gazed into her eyes after pranam. Not a flicker of personal recognition passed between us. I wondered if she knew that I had arrived.