journal d'une transition

869

And today Selvam was in the Chamber ahead of me, for one, all sweet and ready; he said he’d worked all day yesterday casting the slabs for the raised platform we have devised together for his room at the beach…

*8-8-1989, Auroville: I was striving hard to control my own demands, and my apprehension that I might well have botched it, yesterday evening, by blurting out to Selvam the very longing that was troubling me… There was a tension in him too, but it was sweet and determined to see everything right and moving… We did good work… Su had reported to him how Ina and Babu were carrying on about Selvam and I and wanting me to get away from him… Selvam had told me just yesterday that he felt something would try to come between us through other people, but that it would be a test of trust, to make us grow “bigger”… It was so simple and real the way he said it…! … This afternoon I spent time with Ramalingam and Manavelan to work out how to build the shuttering frames for the pillar extension; Ramalingam was in a mood to tell me all of how he feels about Matrimandir and the people there: there is so much bitterness in him about what Auroville has become… … A good letter has come from JYL which allowed me to trace this emotional opening in me to that last time he was here and the experience we had together, working in the Chamber, true brothers belonging to You, to the Force, with the ease and perfect, untroubled intimacy we knew then… It was that experience which opened me, and in that opening Selvam came… *9-8-1989, Auroville: I triggered an explosion this morning at Matrimandir. Bhavani and Narayana have been carrying on for some weeks now, and there hasn’t passed one morning in the Chamber, lately, that Narayana, teased by her constant prodding, didn’t blow at one person or another, screaming his long tirades with that hurtful energy that fills him at those moments… For the last few days Bhavani had particularly focussed on me, wanting to find fault with me, or any sign of offence; but generally they have directed their venom at the Tamilians… So, this morning, they were both intent on detecting any hint of disrespect or misbehaviour… Selvam and I were working on the scaffold to reinforce it; we had of course to be very careful not to drop anything, but we couldn’t help some dust flying; at one point we both had to come down to the Chamber floor, and we each jumped the last level; I saw Bhavani’s close watch of Selvam’s movements; I jumped right behind him, and clapped my hands free of the dust: that did it! Actually it was quite deliberate on my part: it isn’t possible to work like that, and in the Chamber of all places; it seems to me that Bhavani shouldn’t be allowed to come up when she is cultivating such moods… But the issue of racism is hanging like a boiling pot of oil, and so everyone tries to keep quiet and ignore it; and as a result the atmosphere only worsens… They both exploded during the tea-break; Bhavani dipped her hands into cement before coming down and clapped them right in my face; that was alright with me and I told her to go ahead… Beyond a spate of insults in Hindi, that was all… But when Narayana followed suit, it got nasty; he worked himself into a frenzy and spilled all the rubbish he’d heard or thought about me – from Your supposedly forbidding me to be here to my supposed cruelty to Diane – and called me all the