with Sri Ganesh

And this was somehow the clearest, most direct and tangible expression of the Grace’s choice to keep me here.

Almost at once I began to clean and tidy up. Entering the house I saw at a glance that Parthy had barely been able to maintain it, even with the help of his wife, who has no experience at all of keeping material harmony, and I understood this would be my most fulfilling task for the next period of time: to clean and put everything in order and improve on the condition of the house, especially now that Parthy would be sharing it with me for some more time to come. And that’s how it went for the next several weeks. To clean and scrub and polish and sort out and throw and re-arrange everything in the house, room by room, occupied me fully and gave me some measure of constant exercise for the body, without straining the abdominal muscles. I was ravenous for the first month or so and Parthy also needed to rebuild his strength and so we ate more meals than we had ever eaten. We settled in a fairly harmonious routine: he would go alone – he was now able to drive his motor-cycle himself - every morning to tend to Sri Ganesh; I did not want to go as yet: I wanted to be fit enough to tend the garden as well before I returned to do service… In the afternoon, he would also take up some simple cleaning task in the house and in the evening we would both exercise and I would give him his bath and have mine afterwards and at night I would massage his leg and put him to sleep… Vikram had vetoed my driving a motor-cycle for the time being but, on the 9 th of December, I decided to drive down to town on my own: this would be exactly 40 years since I first saw You, Mother, and I wanted to be at the Samadhi for a moment and I had thus arranged to also have a dentist appointment that very afternoon. I borrowed Parthy’s softer bike for the occasion and once I did reach the Samadhi, it all became simpler and I felt safe. In the first initial period of recovery when I was still in Jipmer hospital and beginning to walk the length of the corridor an increasing number of times every day, I had almost felt sure that this entire episode had at least served one good purpose by ridding me of the trouble with motricity in my legs; I had briefly mentioned it to Vikram, but he had dismissed any connection without any hesitation…!

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