[Trichy, Tamil Nadu] I had a flight to catch and had taken a room in a hotel I had stayed in many times over the years. My room was on the top floor and it was possible to gain access to the roof and look out over this sprawling metropolis. The city is quite green as these things go, but the trees were all dwarfed by the new hotels and concrete blocks that had sprung up recently. As usual there were some birds; crows, mynahs, and sparrows, that had adapted to life in the city, and one evening as I watched the sunset I saw scores of eagles soaring in the air above a nearby park. At night the moon came out, but there were few stars to be seen owing to the haze rising from the congested bus stand across the road. There was a continual...
[Shantivanam, Tannirpalli, Trichy District, Tamil Nadu] I had risen early to travel to this place and as I walked up the sandy path with the coconut plantation on either side, all the sights and sounds and smells were familiar, for this had been home for a while. In the chapel there was a hush and a quiet expectancy, broken on occasion by a half-stifled cough. It all took me back to another time, another life.
[Krishnamurti Foundation, Chennai, Tamil Nadu] The compound lay south of the city, in the suburbs, and was large enough to be self-contained. One could eat and sleep there, and the walk around the perimeter or through the grounds was sufficient and varied enough for exercise and interest, though the confusion of the city was still there in the incessant blaring of horns and the sounds of numerous temples competing with each other and the more secular film music blasted out by the various stalls that lay round about.
When the train arrives we get on board and begin the long, slow journey through the plains of central India. The train stops at each station on the way as it carries the villagers from town to home. I find an empty carriage but it soon fills up with women and children, who, once the train is underway, settle down and open their cloth-tied bundles of food – home cooking to sustain them on their way. The children, who clamber about in the luggage space overhead, are wearing torn and unwashed T-shirts, cast-offs from another world and passed down through many a brother or sister; the fading emblems are a pale reminder of the possibility of a more prosperous way of life.
Sitting on a bench in a railway station at the beginning of the journey: the place is dirty and uncared for, with the daily pollution of many machines having grimed the walls and buildings; everything that belongs in this place – the trolleys, the benches, all the fittings – have taken on a grey demeanour, and there is a certain poverty about the place that comes from its purely utilitarian function. Vain attempts have been made to beautify the station, to give it an aesthetic quality, but the pictures of the countryside, with green hills and blue skies, serve only to highlight the squalor all around. The peace of a deserted platform is broken by the sudden and grating noise of a solitary engine, which fills the air with steam and dust...
There’s a part of the walk I like very much, where the road becomes a lane, with high banks on either side that are lined with trees and bushes and rocks. There’s a very different atmosphere here, and though it’s physically unlike, it reminds me of a walk I used to make as a child. I walk slowly so as not to disturb the birds roosting in the trees overhead. This lane eventually passes through our farmer’s fields: he had enough water this year to plant chilli, and following the poor monsoon the crop now commands a good price. I go to the well that’s been dug out, a large affair maybe fifty feet deep; or if the pump is on I go to a pipe that serves to irrigate the land.
One day a friend who had come to see me at the ashram walked with me on the way. He was a man of longing and fear, caught in a net he had woven himself. We talked together for a while, and then hesitantly he told me his story.
Earlier in the year, while Bhaiya was walking in the interior looking for a place where it might be possible to be away from the ashram and its duties for a time, he met a farmer who was digging for water on his land, and as it happened that day he found it. As a thanksgiving he gave the ashram an acre of land on which they might build a hermitage for those wishing to make a more intensive retreat. The gift was accepted, but months went by without anything being done to mark it off or develop it.
With the orchards, flowering trees, and fields under cultivation; and with a river running along the one side, and open scrub land along the other, the ashram provides a variety of habitats which has made this place a veritable bird sanctuary. Between September and December this year I saw over 50 different types of bird in and around the ashram. The first I should mention are the Pigeons, domestic ones, that is, who are rather pampered and never leave the area. Their numbers vary as they reproduce quickly, but are also easy targets for snakes and others. They are very tame and will eat out of the hand. Their close relative, the Little Brown Dove, is quite the opposite, very shy and difficult to get close to.
There’s an ever-changing aspect to the countryside as crops grow, mature, and are harvested, and then a new crop takes its place, and it’s been a joy to watch this process in the ashram’s fields. There are just a couple of acres under cultivation here, and when I first arrived the main crops planted were groundnut, and soya bean intercropped with maize. Following the end of the monsoon we had the late Indian summer of September-October, during which time the crops ripened, and the latter field was full and golden, a delight to see in the evening light as I did walking meditation. When the crop was ready, some brothers who were in the area came and helped us take in the harvest, first with the soya bean, which when later it was gathered...