with Sri Ganesh

Matrimandir, and a whole other chapter of her life seemed to be closing: that team-work and team-spirit and that great, vast, deep aim we had shared at Matrimandir seemed to be halted, if not cancelled, by a play of influences we could not make sense of; she felt deeply distressed by it all and, particularly, by what she couldn’t help but see as the victorious revenge of the ordinary human nature that had always prevented any new creation. Not that she was partial to us to the point of blindness: she was perceptive and honest and she could discern our own faults and defects straight on, but she had that certainty that each of our team was basically and centrally sincere in our commitments and that a grave injustice had been committed. She felt herself to be insufficient to the task. She tried to occupy her days usefully, to study, even to practice her singing again; we would meet as usual and continue with our shared work at the temple. In April, 2004, she begun to feel poorly; one morning, she fainted. I was called. She complained of some soreness in her abdomen, but insisted on simply resting at home. But after a few days, she herself arranged for an appointment with a doctor friend of us in Pondy and asked me to accompany her. The tumor was large and hard and hurtful. She was taken to the Ashram Nursing-Home, and given a strong allopathic treatment. The doctors worried. Only one reputed surgeon was available, but the procedure would have to take place in Cluny Hospital. Vijay, our friend doctor, decided to call Madhu, Kusum’s elder son, in Ahmedabad; Madhu asked for the operation to be postponed a few days, to give him time to come. The surgery was done on April 24; it seemed to be successful and the opinion of both our friend Vijay, who assisted the surgeon and the surgeon himself, was that this had been a case of inflamed appendicitis spreading to the intestines. However, from those days, when Madhu was called in and had the procedure postponed till his arrival – the communications went directly between Vijay and Kusum’s family members in Gujarati, a language I do not understand, and Kusum herself appeared to be uncertain and confused as to what she wanted to happen – I had to stand by, without interfering; the entire approach and understanding of things, of life, of choice, was different, and it felt like Kusum was somehow arrested in the middle. My whole instinct was to turn to Mother exclusively, seek from Her directly what was needed for what was

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