Two Rides, Fifty Years Apart

Every Sunday, Mallikharjun’s car is outside my gate at seven-thirty sharp. No horn, no phone call. He waits, the engine idling, until I come out. We drive to Nikhil Bhayya’s home in Folsom Ranch, where about twenty-five of us gather for an hour of Heartfulness, the meditation practice of Sahaj Marg. The house sits still and hushed, the kind of quiet so deep that people speak only in whispers, and something about the room feels sacred, though no one ever says so out loud. We close our eyes together. Afterwards we watch Daaji speak on a television screen for fifteen minutes, and then the hosts bring out a hot cup of tea, and we leave.

I met Mallikharjun through Dr Karuna, a friend from Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh. I go every week now, and I would call it a spiritual habit, except that a memory keeps interrupting it, one from Bangalore, 1975.

Back then, Sri C. Aswathanarayan Rao of Makkala Pustaka Publications, a true Gandhian who never wore anything but khadi, decided I needed to hear Jiddu Krishnamurthi. Khoday ran a bus from Gandhinagar to the Krishnamurthi Foundation campus in Kanakapura, leaving at nine and arriving by ten. Mr Rao rode that bus every week without fail, past a campus thick with trees and loud with birds. We sat in the open air while an audio tape played, since televisions had not yet reached us, and the crowd listened as though every word mattered.

I never understood a single sentence Krishnamurthi said. My eyes would close within minutes, and I would sleep through the entire talk, undisturbed by whatever profound thing was being worked out around me. What I remember instead is the filter coffee served afterwards, strong enough to wake the dead, poured into small steel tumblers that burned my fingers if I held them wrong.

On the ride back, Mr Rao would sometimes ask what I thought of the talk. I would panic, searching for something to say, having heard nothing. He must have known, at some point, that I was making that trip for a coffee and a bus ride, not for enlightenment. He never said so. He kept inviting me anyway.

Fifty years apart, two men have driven me toward something larger than myself. Both times, I have shown up more faithfully for what came after than for what I was supposedly there to receive. Maybe that is not a failure of devotion. Maybe the tea and the coffee were never separate from the meditation and the talk. Maybe showing up, for whatever reason, gets you out the door, is most of the practice.