3-Apr-20
Kolkata
I can’t eat. Anything I try makes my mouth acidic. G suggested I try oranges. “The acid in the orange will reduce the acid secretion in your stomach and your mouth will feel good”, he said. He was right, oranges never tasted so good.
There is something I have observed many times starting mid 2017. It was when I felt a huge pressure in my chest and abdomen for the first time. He was in India then and a big group would gather at the table for meals. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I felt full always. There was another young friend who was skipping meals. One day at breakfast G said, “Because you guys can’t eat, I have to eat for you.” I don’t know about others, but his words startled me. This time, he didn’t say anything but I saw him eat way more than he usually does. For two to three days in a trot, he asked for extra helpings of rice and curry, after finishing his regular portions. I watched him, unable to eat anything myself. When I asked him if I could write about this, he said, “You can write whatever you observe. I don’t know anything, I just do my thing.”
7-Apr-20
Kolkata
4:33 pm
G said, “There is no such thing as a miracle. The only miracle is the radical transformation of a human being, if someone can do it.” He said these words to me as we were watching the Netflix series Messiah. Then he added, “Remember this always. What is happening in your life will stay with you for a long time after I am gone!”
12-Apr-20
Southend Park, Kolkata
3:39 pm
Today as I was cooking, G finished his shower and came out of his room. I noticed he had trimmed his overgrown moustache and beard!
His face was glowing with a beauty and power that I fail to describe. I felt like fainting! I have never seen anything so beautiful. I started dancing around him and said, “It is unbelievable what is emanating from you! What is this magical thing in you?! I don’t know!”
Then he said the most profound thing to me – “The tiger’s jaw which can crack open the skull of a huge bison, when it holds its baby, the same jaw is most gentle and will never hurt the little one!”
21-Apr-20
Kolkata
10:35 pm
I burned all day. No matter how much water I drank, the thirst won’t go. My head is heavy and tight. There’s so much heat in the body. I wonder what this intense heat does inside. I slept for 2 hours before lunch while he washed the greens in kitchen. He told me to just rest. I slept again around 2:40 pm, he also rested for a while. I took a hot shower in the evening and felt better.
I don’t know but it appears to me as if the body renews and refreshes itself in this way. It wants to throw out images and oppressive ideas. What role the intense heat plays in this I don’t know. I remember him saying once that heat burns off unwanted thought, and that unleashes more heat.
We are watching the series Family Man on prime video.
He is super pleased with the tune I gave to his poem UG Krishnamurti Laho Pranam. I tuned it on 19th April and as I was doing it, G started recording so we didn’t forget! He was ecstatic about the melody and rendition and kept telling me, “You have no idea what you have done!”. Since then he’s been telling everybody how talented I am and that I don’t know it myself. He says he wrote this poem 21 years ago and since then had asked many of his friends to try and make it into a song, but it didn’t happen. He has been announcing since, that I am a genius! I am amused! He is happy beyond happy and told me “It means a lot to me!” Then in the most endearing Bengali he said, “Tui ei burota ke khushi korechish! Er theke beshi aar ki ache?!”
27-Apr-20
Kolkata
11:06 am
What is this unabated ecstasy bubbling inside me day and night?!
This joy, this furious charge in my body … the fullness in my head, chest and stomach … what a symphony … as if everything in me, every bit, all of me … all the pieces are being strung together in a supremely lilting melody to celebrate my expression which is life’s own. It is like all the pieces in a puzzle are falling in their right places. My innate talents – be it in music, writing, communication or reflection, which as G says, are the result of million years of intelligent tinkering by mother nature – are in bloom and are sticky with honey in the nutritious light and rain of Guha, expressing what they were dying to express and resonate with for over three decades.
28-Apr-20:
Kolkata
6:11 pm
Massive heatwaves are coursing through the body all day. Been a few days like this … I don’t know how many days exactly. The intense heat is making me faint. The whole body is aching. After I emerge from it, I feel cleansed, free, full, euphoric.
***
7:29 pm
A while earlier around 6:15 pm today, I woke up after passing out. Intense, intense heat and the body was drenched in sweat as I woke up. Before passing out I felt as if I had a light fever with body ache. When I woke up, G asked me to schedule a video call and send out invites to friends the way I do almost every day. As I was I trying to sit up straight, I experienced myself melting into an immense vastness inside me! There was a euphoric surge of something tremendous in the body. I felt joyfully empty and exclaimed, “Oh my god!” and collapsed back into my seat again! G asked what happened? I couldn’t speak and my eyes shut themselves. He immediately sensed something and himself reached out for the laptop and gently handed it over to me saying, “Here, take it. See if you can set up the meeting.” I took the laptop … I felt so drunk! I started muttering… “It’s all empty inside … so quiet and amazing! Oh gosh!
***
10:30 pm
I have noticed the body coils into a semi circular posture, like a baby inside the womb, whenever there’s a surge of energy. This position feels most comfortable. At those times the body becomes very flexible and supple, I can twist and turn myself easily in many ways. Sitting in a tight posture with a straight back and the right leg in an upside down “V” over the left leg feels good.
Today red itchy rashes appeared on my wrist, right side of stomach, above the navel and the left elbow developed tiny itchy swellings. It is difficult to keep clothes on … my skin feels hypersensitive and supple. So much heat! Healing heat … perhaps cleaning centuries old conditioning from every pore and rejuvenating the entire existence.
I feel as if I grew up under his blazing sun, his sweet shadow and his nourishing rain – my life giving friend! He has slayed me with his love! His unbroken attention is akin to the sun raining it’s light on earth to nourish life.
29-Apr-20
Kolkata
5:03 am
He just uttered as Revathi called, “Entertainment can never enter the territory of our well-being.”
Goal, purpose and agenda, the way I used to know them, are dead. My thought space is shrinking and the trapped energy is pouring more and more into the dynamic space of living and action. The more it pours, the more it tastes its own incredible rhythm and power, it is beginning to gather the crucial momentum needed to crack open all gates, clear every obstacle to gush forth into its very own field – the playground of the living energy.
***
5:40 pm
There is a swelling above the navel. It is itching severely and burning as if I spilled hot oil on the skin. The solar plexus area is burning and reddish.
The swelling on the stomach suddenly reminded me of something my parents told me long long back. When I was born there was a big blood-red patch on my stomach in exactly the same place which is now swollen and burning and slightly red. Mom said when they saw the flaming red patch on the newborn, they were worried and consulted a doctor. I think the doctor asked them to leave it alone. The red colour started fading and completely disappeared by the time I was 7 years old. I told this story to G. He rarely explains these physical events to me. Sometimes he would give a subtle hint, sometimes his body language would tell me just enough. He wants me to just let the body be and not use thought to interfere in its rhythm. He told me a couple of times before when I reported some swellings and burning, “You don’t need to understand anything. Don’t talk to yourself.” This utterance was enough to stop every endeavour of mine in every direction to understand what was happening to me.
I am applying aloe vera gel on the area all day. The burn is so sharp and intense! I can barely keep my clothes on. Tremendous heat waves … and sweat bursting out every now and then.
I can barely eat. I am full in the head and everywhere.
***
9:30 pm
Adiba keeps writing almost every day on whatsapp. I can sense that she can’t help it. I never write to her on my own, but she texts everyday. She was my roommate in Kolkata and I like her. Today she wrote to me that she was miserable mentally and physically. She can’t sleep and feels dreadfully unwell, has headaches etc. I felt my inside twist as I read her text. “What is this girl going to do? What can I say to her?”, I exclaimed aloud. I told G, “Why am I feeling such pain for her? What can I even do?!” He simply smiled.
I asked her to start jogging in the morning and reduce carbs, salt and sugar intake and increase greens and protein in her diet. I learned these things from G. Then I told her, “Start tomorrow and keep it up. Your well-being is in your hands. Why should you let yourself suffer? What for?” She seemed to understand and readily agreed to get going. I really wish she gets back on her feet soon.
30-Apr-20
Kolkata
9:19 pm
I feel I am living inside a boiler. Heat is melting me from inside out. Today, for the first time I felt I was getting used to being so hot. I didn’t turn on the fan although I was drenched in sweat and felt red hot. There was a peculiar comforting sensation of being cleansed from inside. In the absence of the constant buzz of thoughts, I sense a calm alertness that generates a euphoria, a high without any reason. I feel the body’s rejuvenating power is rightfully taking over the control of the neurobiological system from the clutches of thought. I have never felt so alive, so fulfilled ever in life. It is not the thinker’s doing. Its relentless chatter is anti-life. The thinker has to surrender to the life force within. It must melt into the ocean of life’s energy and surface only when necessary.
I got knocked out again today after breakfast. In this state, my mind almost stops, there is hardly any mental movement. An acute alertness hears every sound, smells everything without any translation. The body freezes completely, the eyes shut and every pore gets charged with a huge surge of energy. Sometimes some fleeting mental images surface but they burn out quickly and there’s a discharge of heat in the body. Then the energy withdraws and the spell breaks, allowing me to move again gradually. Every time this happens, I feel more and more lighter and euphoric. I feel drunk with my body’s own energy. I woke with the thought of chopping off my hair. Who wants to take care of long hair and stuff? There’s no time for such things in my life anymore!
Today evening before coffee time, I suddenly felt a sharp prickly sensation in the back of my head where the neck meets the skull. It was as if the area was being pricked by sharp thorns. It was also burning. It vanished after 20 mins or so.
Today I finished translating Manush, his Bengali poem. It was an intense exercise and I am really surprised by the level of focus that has developed in me. It is a fiery concentration that penetrates whichever subject resonates with me. I would say the translation got done pretty quickly, given how complex and extraordinary the subject is, and how brilliant and classical his expression in Bengali is. Still, the English version is a pale shadow of the original Bengali masterpiece. My body was on fire and drenched in sweat as I worked on the piece. I felt my focus is like a blazing fire that rips right through me and spills words onto the page. I felt severely feverish when I finished. Something funny happened then … Wanting some relief from the heat, I gulped down some chilled coke and lo and behold, the feverish heat subsided exactly like how a fire is doused by pouring water over it!
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