It is difficult to know if I should start this tribute from the first day I met her as a child or the first day I truly got to know her as an adult or the last day she spent with us here.
I am sure she is sitting somewhere among the stars right now, about to scold me for making a fuss over her passing and even writing this ‘tribute’, while also chivvying the powers-that-be to let her sweep things clean up there and explaining to them how they can streamline and manage systems better.
I think those are the two things that defined her earthly existence too– a powerhouse of energy, fearless and outspoken, with a fervent desire to make things better for others (along with a complete dislike for being made a fuss of while changing people’s lives!) Not that she could ever be anything other than in the spotlight, given her charismatic presence and incredible intellect.
My first memory of her is from when I was a kid, maybe 10 or so and she was 13. At that age, this is a huge gap because I was still a child, introverted, spending most of my time with my nose inside books. She was already a blossoming beauty and a sassy teenager well aware of her power and charm. She was full of strange poems and word games and inside jokes, with a toothy megawatt grin and a devil-may-care attitude.
She fascinated and terrified me at every encounter 😊!
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As things go, life happened and we moved in very different spheres of life. I was immersed in medical college and then domestic life while she was making her way through creating a new life and a career abroad. Those days before mobile phones and emails meant that someone close to your heart could still be lost to you in communication methods.
Then one day, out of the blue, she called me–perhaps 20 years ago and we picked up the conversation as though we had just met yesterday.
Luckily I then had the chance to meet her in person just a few years later while in Baltimore for a summer course and I can honestly say that the best part of the Hopkins visit was the chance to get to know her again!
We got along like a house on fire and being with her gave me a disconcerting but unique opportunity to be the ‘baby sister’ she continued to see me as and the way she treated me with a loving amusement, often patting me on the head as if to say ‘good girl’, although we were both closer in our 40s and I was no longer the bemused kid staring at this dramatic teenager.
But I think she knew that somewhere inside our souls that connection had been forged already all those years ago and when we met again it was more of a continuation. More of a ‘ah here you are’ rather than a ‘hello, who are you?’
We spoke for hours and hours, in that beautiful way that only a few charmed relationships can give you –of everything under the sun and before and beyond. Books, shows, movies, art, words, civilizations, relationships, people. But the subtext was always a rumination on life itself and how to live it.
I would joke and say I needed to put together all her declarations like a Compendium of Rama’s Laws. ‘When in doubt throw it out’. ‘No regrets.’ ‘Never look back always forward’. ‘Education is the best gift.’ Always passionate and often dramatic, those who know her will remember how so much that she encountered was ‘shocking’ or ‘stunning’ or ‘the best’ ‘or so good it will bring tears to your eyes’!! The thing being described could range from a sabudana wada to a work of art to a comedy film or a fact about the Roman Empire 😊
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She had a way of connecting to people beyond any conventional ‘rules’ and I remember that she had once told a perfect stranger she met while taking a walk that he should eat a lot of orange food and find someone who needs his help and then give them the help.
To me that was actually symbolic of the way she walked through life. This was at the core of her engagement with other people, whether they were family or friends or baffled strangers. She was happiest when she knew that she had helped someone be well fed and empowered enough to be able to help not just themselves but also others. ‘Always find someone to help’ was her constant motto.
Although she was deeply influenced by her childhood experiences (as are we all) she was truly a self- made person in the way that she had emerged from difficult situations and eventually rising above them had even made her peace with them.
She had done a wildly disparate set of jobs from being a travel guide at the Taj Mahal to being a Russian translator (and being offered Champagne for the honor of being the first woman to step on a Naval ship as an interpreter for a visiting Russian Naval team!).
But her most cherished achievement was in being a teacher and a mentor.
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She was generous to a fault. Having come to the US with the proverbial one dollar in her pocket, she worked hard and relentlessly and efficiently and wisely, in order to ensure that she became and remained financially independent. She told me often that the best thing to do was to give away what you have. The Universe will always give you what you need.
She saved and invested wisely and during her last days gave away everything that she could. On Halloween the neighbourhood kids had a real treat as she gave each one of the 20 young children a 1000 USD cheque to start them off on a college fund. Education was always the most important things in her perspective, and she often spoke about the significant influence of her father in having raised her well enough to understand that.
Despite difficult and some strained personal relationships, she manged to extract the best of what life and opportunities had to give her. She travelled far and wide, happily alone on many trips and equally happy in company as I was fortunate enough to find out when we shared a couple of holiday travels.
Her brain was always always working. We would be watching the news and she would tell me that the newscaster looked like a vaat personality or a kapha personality. She would ruminate about someone being an F or a P and how some people have thin boundaries. Everything and anything could be a hook to speculate on life and humanity and purpose and pathways.
We had conversations around Time being the fifth dimension. She would say that Time was the ultimate ruler –the healer, yet the destroyer of cells and bones…..a paradox. Sometimes we would have a conversation on polytheism and the acceptance of existence and gods.
We spoke of Gobekeli Tepe often and she found it incredibly fascinating that such ancient civilizations had existed on this planet way before recorded history. She told me that I must go there someday, even if, as was becoming obvious, she would not be able to join in. We had so many exciting plans– to visit the Northern Lights and South Africa and Japan. She told me to go to all those places and also to the Maldives and have fun. I did nod in agreement but I knew in my heart already that the journey and the destination would not be half as enjoyable without her company.
During these last few weeks we spent many hours watching movies and TV shows as a distraction from the pain and to have fun of course. But she always insisted on watching the news first. She was so happy when the vaccine was announced. She would often tell me that Saturn is heavy on mankind till April 2022 and that the disastrous pandemic will be truly gone only after that.
Sadly she will not be around to see that happen but she is free and at peace where she is. She told me often that pain is a purifier. It makes you focus on the right stuff. And to free you of the desire for ‘things’. In the last few weeks she had been talking about her body as a cage and wanted to be freed. She would laugh and say that if there was some kind of an immersion bath where she could free her body of pain she would have carried on since her mind was still active! She said she would stay floating there, grinning at everyone like the Cheshire Cat.
She wanted to become a single atom. In the last few days she kept saying she was taking up space unnecessarily and just converting oxygen to carbon dioxide. Again, not in a helpless or sad way but because had genuinely made her peace with dying and said it was time to move on and go back to being atoms.
But despite the pain and suffering , her brain was buzzing around with ideas and plans and thoughts right till the last moments –always thinking of others. She sent cheques to students, fruits and cereal to someone who got laid off, anything to make sure that people had food to eat and fees to pay for studies.
She was reading a book called Aranyaka and on what turned out to be her last day we had been discussing some of ideas from it and how life is a balance of the part within us who wants to control destiny through denial of pleasure and rising above them while the other part wants to live in the entangled joy of the pleasures life has to offer.
I had shared with her a Nikita Gill poem then that I thought was apt for our deliberations on this topic.
““One day when you wake up, you will find that you have become a forest. You have grown roots and found strength in them that no one thought you had. You have become stronger and more beautiful, full of life giving qualities. You have learned to take all the negativity around you and turn it into oxygen for easy breathing. A host of wild creatures live inside you and you can call them stories. A variety of beautiful birds rest inside your mind and you call them memories. You have become an incredible self-sustaining thing of epic proportions. And you should be so proud of how far you have come from the seeds of who you used to be.”
Rama had truly become a forest herself, and an intriguing blend of the dispassionate observer as well as the passionate enjoyer of life’s gifts.
She herself wrote poetry and short stories and had self- published two books. Here is a quote from one of the poems that she wrote after the death of a close friend.
The Sphinx
As we peered up at the Sphinx
A flock of brightly plumed macaws flew overhead
The sun cut an oblique path, setting the sands aflame
Mirroring coloured wingspans the birds flaunted
The rainforest is silent in this pre- dawn hour
Only I hear your heartbeat, silent.
And then the trees sigh as the raindrops hit the elephant palms
Wonder of life: water, earth and tree breath.
Your breath is whispering, mossy and deep green.
Are you truly alive, or infinitely dead?
Now the sand is gritty and whipping across my face
I am suspended in dual worlds as always
Like enacting my part in any Salman Rushdie novel.
Here, there and frankly nowhere.
I consult the oracle Sphinx again
Who shrugs with riddled answers:
“He who is dead is infinitely alive
But he who lives carried dreaded death.”
“Glad that time in cyclic and nothing begins or ends.” I add hopefully
At this the eternal, ever vigilant Sphinx laughs
“Time is nothing my dear
A false construct to keep you from bringing to life
Ideas, buildings, bridges, children, garden and futures
Everything created lives forever—just look at me.”
Then I was certain that you were alive
Tall and majestic in the rainforest
And every stone from the pyramids was singing.
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She died the way she lived–generously, confidently, with the courage of her convictions and a fuss free plan for those she left behind.
I am still processing the grief and I know I am going to miss her profoundly in so many ways.
There are so many whose lives were touched by her. She was a teacher, a mentor, a true friend, a pillar of strength. For me she was family and although that does not always imply closeness or a profound bond, I am so grateful that she was in my life as a cousin so that I had the opportunity to know her and enjoy her company during the precious few decades she spent with us here.
This world where the only love that is worshipped and pushed onto us constantly is romantic love and we need to equally constantly challenge that notion by the understanding of so many other kinds of love. I would say I loved her, but the reality is I still love her. On what turned out to be her last day she told us firmly ‘don’t be fooled by the sight of my body. When I die that will go but I will remain.’
I know that those of us who were able to meet her and be with her during her last days said I love you to her in our own ways. But I want to say it again.
Rama–Wherever you are, joined with the cosmic energy and stardust, or terrifying the powers that run this universe, I love you. I thank you for being who you were and I know I will hear your voice in my head every so often, with a cheerful smile. Rani Gudiya, kaisi ho?! Happy? Don’t worry. All will be ok.
And I know that it will be so.
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She grabbed life with both hands, took a wild ride in every possible way, but when it was time to let go, she did that also with her typical deliberate planning and passion. She gave away practically every material possession and asset in advance. She left behind a quiet legacy of a computer school dedicated to the memory of her late husband but more than that she left behind a legacy of relationships and thoughts and ideas.
A friend said she was like the orchids she was so fond of growing—rare, beautiful and totally worth the effort!
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Even as I write this, the condolences are pouring in and everyone whose life she touched is using the same words over and over again. Wonderful. Strong. Generous. Thoughtful. Passionate. Amazing.
So in closing I am not going to say goodbye.
As Rumi said ‘Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.’
** The title of this post is taken from this poem:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi
that which i am 