In the mid-1990s, Mother Meera diverted funds from Germany and bought several properties in Madanapalle, a municipality in Andhra Pradesh three hundred miles from where she was born. She intended to build schools near the town center as well as a retreat house for visitors and indigents on thirteen acres of farmland toward the outskirts of Madanapalle. Ever the frugal farmer’s daughter, she is said to have negotiated a rock-bottom price for the real estate, according to an inside source, while Adilakshmi, whose family had been prominent for generations in Madanapalle, finessed the relationship with the seller. There was a problem finding a water source on the farm site after the property was purchased, causing great alarm all around. The next time Mother visited India, she looked around and suggested that the workmen try a spot a hundred yards from where they were digging. That’s where they found their water source, to everyone’s relief.
She chose pink-and-gray marble from Rajasthan for the floors of the main school (the Mother Meera English Medium High School), and ordered a plaque for the front gate to commemorate Mr. Reddy. On one side of the campus, a visitor finds a Hindu temple devoted to the god Shiva; on the other stands an ancient Sunni mosque, while around the corner is a Catholic retreat center, transforming Paramatman Way (the name Mother chose for the street) into a cul-de-sac of world religions. The main school was to offer a standard English school education for children aged three to sixteen, many of whom would be poor and on scholarship. There would be three levels—referred to as “baby school,” “kids school,” and “teen school”—and a large hall to use for darshan after the children had gone home. Mother Meera invited her parents, Antamma and Veera, to live on the school grounds, as well as her younger brother and three surviving sisters and their families.
Creating this school was far from easy. Ulrich Reinhold, a German IT specialist and one of Mother’s closest aides, described the grueling process she’d been through, working with the locals. “Mother ran straight into a wall of tamas,” said Ulrich. “Very, very difficult.” In the Hindu energy system, there are three primary qualities: rajas (passion and activity), sattva (purity and goodness), and tamas (inertia or resistance to action). “Basically, no one did what she asked them to do. We saw Mother become angry for the first time.”
“It’s hard to imagine her angry,” I confessed.
“Not anger like yours or mine, where it’s personal. More like Kali,” Ulrich said, referring to the ferocious, ignorance-slaying aspect of the Divine Mother. “She’d get angry when people ignored her instructions. Or wasted money. Or forgot to take care of someone. But Mother’s anger would be gone like that.” He snapped his fingers. “She’d be laughing and smiling in the next moment, as if nothing had happened. Mother responds to the needs of the situation, that’s all. She does what’s necessary to get the job done. But avatars lose their temper, too, you know.”
This is an important point. Smiley-faced pictures of enlightenment—blissful, beatific, ever serene—have never been a part of Indian spirituality (or any authentic tradition, for that matter). The saintly are known to be hell on wheels when it comes to relieving suffering. Think of Mother Teresa railing against Calcutta bureaucrats who were trying to interfere with programs for feeding the poor. Or the Dalai Lama fuming privately over the Chinese occupation and the massacres of the Tibetan people. Or any of the outraged sages and prophets with which the Bible is populated, as well as the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhist sutras on anger and hatred. It’s naïve to imagine that enlightened people are milquetoasts incapable of fiery emotion, cheek turners who never lash out when pushed beyond their limits. I’ve known a number of masters from various traditions, and not one of them was without a temper. Still, it was hard for me to picture Mother Meera—the most unflappable and detached of all—losing her cool over worldly matters. Ulrich proceeded to set me straight with the story of a husband-and-wife team, childhood friends of Adilakshmi’s, who had volunteered to help educate the children in Mother Meera’s family. In gratitude to these teachers, Mother had given strict instructions to her family that a container of fresh milk from the cows that grazed behind the school be delivered to the couple every day. These orders were carried out faithfully until once when Mother Meera was visiting from Germany and her relatives forgot the delivery. While eating dinner with her family, Mother asked about the milk and was told that the delivery had been forgotten. She stood up from the table, apparently, regurgitated her food, and went to apologize to the teachers right away, complaining that her family couldn’t be trusted to carry out her wishes without her keeping an eye on them.
“She doesn’t forget a thing,” said Ulrich.
I wanted to see Mother for myself in India, and booked a trip to Madanapalle. My partner, David, and I planned to volunteer at the school, where I’d have the chance to ask Mother a number of questions that I badly needed answered. I’d spent a year trying to create a portrait of her that was true to life and free of sanctimony. Mother Meera had given me carte blanche to write whatever I wanted, but her story continued to elude me. There was a missing link I had failed to uncover and it was my hope that she would help me dispel this mystery while we were in India. Before we left for India, I telephoned Mother in Germany to remind her that I would be at the school during her monthly visit and looked forward to interviewing her there. I’d seen her on a few occasions in Connecticut for darshan but had spent almost no time alone with her for a number of years. “There are so many things that I need to ask you,” I told her, trying not to sound like a pushy reporter. “For the book.”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I am busy now.”
At the airport in Bangalore, David and I were met by the driver we’d hired to take us to the school. For the next two hours, scenes of rustic India flew by outside the window: tea stands with oversized, rusty tin pots; buffalo knee-deep in flooded rice paddies; swarthy women on the side of the road, balancing great earthen jugs on their heads, dressed in bright cotton saris and flip-flops. What would it be like, I wondered, seeing Mother Meera in her native country? Those frightening dreams from the night we met, when she came at me with her talons and fangs, were carved into my memory, along with the image of my ripped-apart body, hanging in space like a gutted doll. What if that happened in real life? What if Mother Meera tore me apart for some unintentional mistake or other? How would I respond to her fury? I pulled out a copy of Answers: Part II and reread what she’d said about her own temper: “Sometimes I become angry while working with someone who insists on doing something his or her own way when I know it will take too much time and is not good,” she explained. “But this anger which is rare arises only in work situations. I do not become angry at a devotee who does something bad to another,” she promised. “I change him or her.” I only hoped that this was true.
When we arrived at the school, David and I were met at the gate by Hilda, an anxious-looking German woman in her fifties, who stopped what she was doing to greet the new volunteers. “Ach, we are so busy with the children!” she said, shaking her head and looking toward heaven. Hundreds of kids in green-and-orange uniforms were streaming out of buildings, into the courtyard. I saw a familiar face emerge from the crowd; it was Maurice, a French devotee of Mother Meera’s whom I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. He welcomed me with a wide grin before leading us to our room, where he suggested that we have a rest before darshan started, at seven P.M.
I sat down on the bed and peered out the window. Beyond our terrace was an empty dirt lot. At the center of the lot was a tractor, and next to the tractor a small tree, its root ball diapered in white fabric. Beside the tree, a young man was striking at the earth with a shovel, surrounded by a group of fellow workers wearing head scarves to protect themselves from the brutal heat. He seemed to be having trouble digging the hole. From out of the group stepped Mother Meera—so short that I hadn’t seen her at first. She took the shovel from the worker with one hand, placed her foot on the hilt, and plunged it into the dirt. Then she wiped that hand on her sari, put a rag to her forehead, and squinted down at what appeared to be a cellphone she’d been holding in the other hand. Mother turned and walked back toward the school, followed by a couple of minions. It was weird that with so many men present, it had fallen to her—a bareheaded, fifty-four-year-old woman standing in ninety degree heat—to start the digging on this job. Then I remembered what Ulrich had said about tamas and Mother Meera’s headaches with her labor force.
A few minutes before seven, we made our way to the darshan hall on the ground floor. Next to the door was a whiteboard inscribed with a couplet from Emily Dickinson: “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.” Inside, three dozen people were seated in an incense-scented, dimly lit room that could have held five times that many. A group of children were being led in Sanskrit prayer by a sweet-voiced, ample-bodied woman sitting to the side of Mother Meera’s chair. This was the first time I’d heard music allowed before darshan; everywhere else, the hall is kept silent. Behind the song mistress sat Adilakshmi, whose black hair had gone gunmetal gray in the twelve years since I’d seen her last. An adorable child with a Louise Brooks bob marched up and down the aisle with the confidence of a military commander, escorting newcomers to their seats. Hilda hurried around the room, shushing people who were whispering; then she’d hold up her hands, palms pressed together in the namaste sign, as if to say “I’m a very nice person under this scowl.” Across the aisle, Maurice was sitting in a row by himself, with his arms crossed, eyes closed, and bare feet splayed on the pink marble floor. In the front of the room, the school’s temporary administrator, an American-born engineer named Mohan, watched over things with a tense expression, frail as a wren in his gold Gandhi glasses, slender arms clasped around his chest.
Suddenly, the singing stopped and Mother Meera walked in from the back. At a glance, she was hard to recognize as the same perspiring, loose-haired woman I’d seen an hour before in the open dirt lot. Mother seems to change physically during darshan—the word that comes to mind is “condensed.” Her body appears to lose a fifth of its mass. On the street, Mother Meera looks like many a fiftyish Indian woman with an umber complexion and good taste in saris. In darshan, she’s unmistakable. Sui generis.
She settled onto her chair, and the process began. Adilakshmi went down on her knees first and lowered her head with some difficulty, resting it in Mother Meera’s hands. How many thousands of times had she done this in the past forty years? What was passing between them, I wondered, watching Adilakshmi look up at Mother, hands folded beneath her chin. When Mother lowered her eyes, Adilakshmi touched her feet and made way for Mohan, who brought up a plastic chair to accommodate disabled visitors. A mountainous grandmother in a purple kurta was followed by a ragged old Indian man, a teenage girl with a twisted leg, and a Western lady clutching a walker. The Louise Brooks coquette summoned those in our row to take our places in the waiting line. I pushed forward on the floor till it was my turn, then gazed into her eyes after pranam. Not a flicker of personal recognition passed between us. I wondered if she knew that I had arrived.
I was blasted awake at five A.M. by a pandemonium of amplified prayers blaring out of the stadium speakers from the Shiva temple next door. Outside the window, the courtyard was empty except for a single worker bent double over her pail, sweeping the ground with a handful of straw as the school’s canine mascots, Ambika and Puja, lazed nearby. A flock of green parrots perched in the mango tree behind her, and a family of monkeys picked at each other’s fur on the branches near our balcony, eyeing the open box of biscuits on the dining room table.
When eight o’clock rolled around, I found Mohan in the volunteers office and was given my duties: to type English lessons from outdated workbooks and act as a hall monitor when students were moving between classes. Mohan showed me where to station myself at the top of the stairs, opposite the latrine in progress, and how to keep the kids in line when they were in transit. A few minutes before the buses arrived, I took my position on the stairs and waited. Inside the bathroom, a group of workers were already installing the plumbing. I didn’t notice at first that Mother Meera was among them, overseeing the job. Fascinated, I watched as she chatted with the men, who seemed easy and relaxed in her company. Maurice came bounding up the stairs, carrying a length of plastic tubing, which he handed to Mother Meera. She looked at it and said, “This is wrong.” Maurice ran past me and back down to the courtyard, grumbling under his breath.
The buses began to arrive, and then the schoolyard was swarming with hundreds of children of every imaginable shape and size, from toddlers clutching lunch boxes to their chests, smiling with mischievous, curious eyes, to young adolescent boys and girls who separated into cliques and watched one another from a safe distance—most of them decked out in their uniforms. Crowding past me on the stairs, the smallest ones paused to greet me one by one. “Good morning, Uncle! What is your name, Uncle? That is a beautiful name, Uncle! My name is Pupul!”
We’d been warned not to indulge them with conversation, which was hard to resist, and I did my best to keep the children in a single file as poor Hilda marched up and down the halls, clutching a sign that read SILENCE. Two of the volunteers, a Danish kickboxer and his gray-haired father, greeted the kids as they came through the gate, and the eight young teachers (all female but one) began to take their places for the morning assembly, dressed in the school colors. When the children had lined up in front of their teachers and the stragglers had been herded into place, Adilakshmi rang a bell to bring the assembly to order. A pretty young teacher barely out of her teens stepped to the microphone and led the student body in morning prayers. “May He protect both of us,” they recited in Sanskrit, chanting slokas from the Bhagavad Gita. “May He nourish us. May we both acquire the capacity to study and understand the scriptures. May our study be brilliant. May we not argue with each other. Aum, peace, peace, peace.” As the masses of children chanted together, Mother Meera looked down from the landing, her hands covered in plaster dust.
Once the children were in their classrooms, I looked for Adilakshmi and found her in the library, reading a newspaper, bifocals slipping down her nose. “Welcome to the Mother’s school!” she said, warmly taking my hand. “How long has it been since I have seen you?”
“Twelve years, Adilakshmi.”
She bobbled her head and offered me a chair. Adilakshmi chatted to me about the school and how hard it was to run, with a thousand students and too few qualified administrators. I asked how she had found the adjustment, settling back in her hometown after so many years in Germany. Mother Meera had asked her to remain at the school, to keep an eye on things when she wasn’t there. For the first time in over three decades, Adilakshmi was living apart from Mother. “How has that been for you? Is it strange to be so far away from Mother?”
She smiled. “The Mother is always with me. She is never far away.”
“Of course,” I said. “But what about the physical distance? She relied on you for everything, didn’t she?”
“Relied on me? Not at all!” Adilakshmi waved away this suggestion, though she’d been Mother’s constant companion, helper, and watchdog for as long as I’d known them. “You can see how strong she is. It has been this way since the first day I met her. Nothing has changed.”
“Really?” I asked. “But a lot has changed, no? Mother is out in the world now. Constantly traveling. All of these projects—”
“But what is that to the Divine?” Adilakshmi interrupted me. “The Mother has always worked twenty hours a day. This is nothing new. India is difficult, of course. She often gets tired. But she is not affected by these things. Not in the same way that we are.”
“It’s hard to understand.”
“For all of us,” Adilakshmi agreed. “But it isn’t for us to understand. The important thing is to open to God. The rest we cannot know.”
“But you knew. Didn’t you?”
Adilakshmi smiled again. “It is true that I recognized her,” she admitted. “From the moment we met, I trusted the Mother. I had seen her in my dreams. It was obvious to me, how great she was. And yet, the Mother remains a mystery. Even to me.”
“In what way?”
“I know her better than anyone else,” she told me. “In an earthly way. But even I am aware of how secretive she is, how hidden from our human knowledge. The Mother is becoming more and more withdrawn, I think. More and more secretive.”
Before I could press her further, a teacher came into the library, complaining about a problem with a student. Adilakshmi turned her attention to the matter at hand. Thinking about what she’d just told me, I wondered about this secretiveness and was struck, as always, by Adilakshmi’s unwavering devotion—her ability to trust in what she did not understand. Spiritual devotion, or bhakti, is an enigma for skeptics like myself who lack the gift for selfless surrender. Fortunately, there are other approaches to God than the bhakti path for people of different temperaments. There’s karma yoga (the path of service), raja yoga (the path of self-purification), and jnana yoga (the path of inquiry), the latter best suited for doubting types whose hearts are opened more by questioning than by faith. It’s hard to imagine bhakti more pure than Adilakshmi’s devotion to Mother Meera. It’s humbling to behold such trust and easy to feel like a spiritual novice in its presence.
Once the teacher had gone, Adilakshmi turned back to me. “We will speak again,” she said, then went back to reading her paper.
After two days, Mother had not acknowledged my presence. When I passed her on the stairs, she looked away. The last time I’d seen her, in Connecticut, she’d sent an assistant to bring me to her hotel room, and we’d spent ten pleasant minutes chatting alone. Now I’d come halfway around the world to be with her and Mother Meera had not said so much as hello. The demands on her time were great, I realized. Still, the strangeness of it could not be denied. An army of demons came stampeding in: rejection, confusion, abandonment, sadness, futility, self-doubt, and, of course, anger. My distress reached such a fever pitch by day three that I vowed to make personal contact with Mother the next time our paths crossed.
On day four, I spotted Mother Meera across the courtyard, seated in the shade with a young girl who was brushing her hair. I steeled myself to approach her but was stunned when Mother did not so much as glance in my direction. Baffled and embarrassed, I stood there with my face on fire and finally croaked out a few awkward words about how eager I was to speak to her. Mother Meera grumbled, “Yes, yes,” then went back to chatting to the girl in Telugu. I skittered away, feeling abject and stupid.
I found Adilakshmi in the kitchen. “There is no worry,” Adilakshmi reassured me. “She is like that with everyone! We all want to feel so special.”
“Hello” doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, I wanted to protest. Yet even as the thought popped into my mind, I saw that Adilakshmi was right. I wanted Mother to acknowledge me personally. I wanted her to make allowance for our personal history and the personal effort I’d made to volunteer at her school, the way any polite person would. Ordinary people care about social graces and about assuring others that everything’s fine. Ordinary people are insecure enough themselves to care about appearances and displays of emotional bonding. But Mother Meera is not an ordinary person. She doesn’t care what others think about her; nor does she have a scintilla of interest in smoothing out our ruffled egos. My expectations were all about me. Also, her relationship to time itself is different from an ordinary individual’s. Mother Meera doesn’t seem to inhabit the same clock-watching, minute-counting, time-running-out dimension most of us live in. She appears to live closer to nunc stans, the timeless present, the eternal now. Nunc stans is closer to nature’s rhythm, the cosmic rotation of planets and stars, than it is to man-made ideas about time, that ever-dwindling commodity. Notions of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are said to be free-flowing—arbitrary, even—in nunc stans, which is why making plans with mystics can be such a challenge. In one of his books, Eckhart Tolle illustrates this point well.
Imagine the earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Would we still speak of time in any meaningful way? What time is it? The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. “What time?” they would ask. “Well, of course, it’s now. The time is now. What else is there?”
Waiting for Mother Meera to plan a meeting was like waiting for the oak tree or eagle to pencil you in on its calendar. Caught up in my ego, I might also be overlooking the possibility that Mother Meera was communicating with me already in ways I might be able to sense if I could get through my emotional tantrum.
Adilakshmi seemed to pick up on my thoughts. “You imagine that the Mother is ignoring you because she is silent. But that is not true. Mother has allowed you to stay in her home. She is giving you the freedom to observe her here and allowing you to write this book,” Adilakshmi said. “She is showing you where you need to grow. Shedding light on problems that cause you suffering. Impatience. Pride. Insecurity. Putting light on the qualities that stand in your way. And teaching you to trust her even when she’s distant. To trust God.”
“You’re probably right. But it feels terrible.”
“Who said the divine was easy?” Adilakshmi asked, chuckling. “People imagine that to be close to the Mother is to live in a state of continual bliss. But that is untrue. Life becomes more difficult around the divine, not easier. The Light reveals every weakness. Every knot that is binding us. All of our darkness comes to the surface.”
“What should I do, Adilakshmi?” I asked.
“Be patient. Try to surrender. Find out what she is trying to teach you.”
Describing Mother Meera as “distant” is an existential understatement. She’s a complete outlier, the most enigmatic individual I have ever met. Having been an interviewer for more than thirty years, I’ve come to know a thing or two about drawing out secretive people. But Mother Meera is undrawable. When asked a question, she tends to supply just the facts, generally leaving out a riposte. Standard shortcuts to verbal connection—gossip, seduction, commiseration, breast baring (or beating)—do not work with her. Her lack of interest in small talk is quite unfathomable.
And then there’s the challenge of cognitive meltdown. My mind has disintegrated on more than one occasion while trying to interact with her. I’m not alone in this; it’s a common phenomenon among devotees. One psychiatrist described her personal mind melts with Mother as having her brain turned into “a fondant fancy under a grill.” While sitting with Adilakshmi and Mother in their living room, with snow falling outside the window and a log crackling in the fireplace, I once attempted to interview Mother for a magazine article. In mid-sentence, my mind disappeared—simply blanked out—and I froze in my seat, unable to speak, while Mother gazed at the fireplace and Adilakshmi drifted away. The three of us sat in that deepening silence together for several blissful minutes; and then, as quickly as it had descended, the silence passed, my mind reappeared, and I knew that it was time to go. Once I’d left Mother Meera’s presence, I had the clear impression that she had orchestrated this silence somehow. Rather than spend our time together discussing philosophical questions, she’d given me what I truly wanted: a glimpse into the world she inhabits, a taste of what the divine world feels like: soundless, mysterious, vast, and profound, underscored by a pulsating wonder.
Now, in Madanapalle, I did my best to tune in to her frequency and decode what she might be saying to me with her silence. My confusion reminded me of a story about the Buddha. Near his eightieth year, Siddhartha Gautama was walking through a park in autumn with a group of his loyal monks. The Enlightened One stopped to pick up a handful of dry leaves. “This is what I have said,” the Buddha told his followers. Then he turned to the great expanse of leaves on the ground, stretching as far as the eye could see. “And this is what I have not said.”
Was I waiting for a handful of dry leaves and missing the wisdom of the tree? I wondered. Was I being deceived by my own preconceptions, skipping over something else? I vowed to keep an open mind.
On day five, I was given the task of reading to the baby class before the assembly. The toddlers sat cross-legged in a row in the dirt while I read to them from a picture book called The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Each time I turned a page to reveal a new illustration, they squealed and cheered, calling out the animal names in English. “Tiger!” “Rabbit!” “Snake!” “Please, Uncle, read some more!” they begged when I finished the book, so I started in on The Cat in the Hat. With their age-old faces and tiny bodies, they couldn’t have been more adorable. There were only two troublemakers, a pair of rambunctious boys at the rear of the group who were cutting up instead of listening. In the middle of my reading, from overhead, a woman’s voice came booming down: “Boys in the back! Stop! Now!” I looked up and saw Mother Meera standing on the roof, one hand on her hip, a ferocious expression on her face. The boys lowered their heads and quieted down. Later that same day, one of these naughty boys started to misbehave again, during closing prayers. As if on cue, Mother Meera appeared out of nowhere, pinched the little hoodlum’s ear, and led him out back for a talking-to.
That afternoon, we hired a driver to take us to the Rishi Valley School, seven miles up the road from Madanapalle. The school was founded in 1926 by Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), a remarkable sage known for his razor-sharp intellect and radical take on the spiritual life. K, as he liked to be called, was a native of Madanapalle and Mother Meera’s opposite in temperament and teaching. Brilliant, vain, and obsessed with reason, K focused on ruthless inquiry and disregard for all forms of tradition. He was the blade to Mother Meera’s chalice, penetrating, pointed, and severe. Yet K also shared qualities with Mother Meera. Like her, he recommended that followers exercise common sense and self-reliance. His famous dictum “The truth is a pathless land” shares with the Mother’s way a rejection of rigid, formulaic practice or adherence to a single creed. Both warned against attachment to the teacher, confusing hero worship with divine connection, and against sacrificing personal freedom when choosing our path to God (a term K avoided). By the time I came to spiritual seeking, K had just died, but his books and video teachings soon became foundation stones of my spiritual life. I was eager to visit Rishi Valley and pay respect to this great teacher.
In the taxi on the way to the school, I noticed a dashboard ornament of the white-bearded, kerchief-headed Sai Baba of Shirdi, one of India’s most popular saints. “Is that your guru?” I asked our driver, Raju.
“All holy people are guru,” he said, meeting my eye in the rearview mirror. “Mother Meera is guru, too.”
“No,” I said. “At least she doesn’t think so.”
“Mother Meera saved my life,” Raju continued, ignoring my objection. Then he proceeded to tell us his story. Raju had grown up on the street as one of those urchins in India who knock on the windows of stopped cars, begging for a few rupees. “When Mother first came here, I had no prospects. My friend brought me to her ashram for darshan. I sat down in front of her and there was so much love coming from her eyes!” Raju put his hand to his heart. “I began to have confidence after that,” he went on. “Before Mother, no one loved me. She gave me good advice one day. She told me to find a job, any job, and stop this begging. She suggested that I should learn how to drive. That was seven years ago. Today, I have my own fleet of taxis. Other drivers work for me! Next month, I will be married. This is all because of Mother Meera.”
“And your own hard work,” I added. “Do you believe that Mother is divine?”
“The whole world is divine, no?” Raju answered. “The mahatmas like Mother, Sai Baba, K, they come to earth to remind us.”
Raju pulled off the highway and left us at the entrance to the Rishi Valley School. David and I walked around for an hour, touring the bucolic campus, hundreds of acres of farmland dotted with freestanding buildings, groves of eucalyptus trees, vegetable gardens, and rain-fed streams. In the eucalyptus grove where K used to give his talks, we sat down to meditate in the shade. The air filled with the scent of menthol, the stillness interrupted by the occasional magpie screeching on a nearby branch. I imagined K as he would have appeared in those days, with his hooded, half-closed owl eyes, ramrod posture, and white-haired comb-over, speaking in his elegant Oxbridge tones about the “Immensity” (his term for God) and the great silence available to us outside our helmet of mental noise when we fully enter the present moment. Eloquent as K’s spoken teachings were, it was his silence that had impressed me most, as it seemed to stream from his very being. The visceral power of his silent presence reminded me of Mother Meera’s. K’s biographer Mary Lutyens once described him as “the efflorescence of an age,” and sitting there in the eucalyptus grove, I realized that the same could be said of Mother Meera, however different their bloom and hue. Both pointed to a new way of knowing God, beyond tribal religions and dogma. The eighteenth-century philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin believed that “all mystics speak the same language and come from the same country,” and it was obvious to me as I thought of the two of them that Mother Meera and Krishnamurti did indeed share a longitude and latitude, however different their dialects or divergent the figures they cut in the world.
Back in the taxi, Raju offered to give us a tour of Mother Meera’s other properties in Madanapalle. We stopped first at the farm site, where a grand retreat house was under construction, then at the Montessori school, where a few dozen well-behaved children waved at us from their classrooms. After that, Raju took us to a second, larger schoolhouse, where we were met by the woman who’d been leading the children in their chants before darshan. Plump and smiling in her peasant dress and sandals, Norina looked every inch the earth mother as she greeted us and led the way into the building, where classes had been canceled for the day. A German citizen of Egyptian heritage, with a girlish voice and infectious good humor, Norina explained that a hornets’ nest in the neighbor’s yard had yet to be removed, making it unsafe for the students. “Nothing happens on time in this country!” she chirped, shooing away a scary-looking monkey crouching on the wall behind us. She walked us up and down the halls and began to tell us about herself. A Coptic Christian who’d trained as a teacher, Norina had moved her life to Madanapalle three years earlier to run the school, at Mother Meera’s request.
“At first, I wasn’t happy!” Norina admitted. “I thought, ‘No! I will be in India and Ma will be in Germany. I will never see her!’ But Ma promised she was coming to India once a month, so I had to trust her.” Norina opened the door to the nap room, the floor lined with mats where the children could sleep. “Now it is nice to see her,” she said, “but I don’t need to be with Ma to be with her, if you know what I mean. I don’t need to live with her all the time in order to be happy.” Norina closed the nap room door. “She brings so much joy into my life, you see. The kind of joy that is inside of myself. It doesn’t depend on anything external. Not even Ma’s physical presence.”
Norina led us up to her private quarters. There were a half dozen photographs of Mother Meera hanging on the walls, unlike any images I’d seen before, taken with Norina’s iPhone in airport lounges and other private spaces. The pictures showed another side of Mother Meera, the jolly, unguarded, gal-pal side. Norina giggled. “Ma and I do FaceTime together. We laugh so much! It is only in India where Ma is so serious. Sometimes, I worry about her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she does not care enough for her body,” she told us. “Ma ignores it too much of the time. But the body needs a little bit of attention, too. Even divine personalities suffer physically.” Norina showed us a photo of a dozing Mother Meera. “You know, Ma hardly ever sleeps. Maybe two hours. She is always working, working, working. No human being could do what she does! She doesn’t like to eat much, either. Whenever I prepare special dishes for her, she pretends to enjoy, but I know she is only doing so for me. Ma always says, ‘I’m not an eater.’ The truth is, she forgets that she has a body. But she and I have so much fun! Ma makes very good jokes, you know.”
“What kinds of jokes?”
“Ma loves to tease. But she’s never unkind. For example, I always buy too much of everything,” Norina said. “So when someone asks Ma where they can get something, she tells them, ‘You can go to Norina. She buys one and gets ten free.’ Or when I show her something really practical and cheap, she asks me if I bought a hundred!” Norina rolled her eyes. “Or when devotees ask her what special foods they should eat to be spiritual—special organic things or whatnot—Ma will tell them that people who shop at cheap supermarkets live longer.”
Norina led us back downstairs to her office. “Ma’s so down-to-earth,” she said, plopping into a chair. “Whenever people come to her, all puffed up with spiritual ideas, Ma always goes poomf!” She gestured as if popping a balloon. “That’s what she did with me. Before I came to Ma, I thought I was holy. I thought I was only good. Well, Ma took care of that right away! She showed me the other side of who I was, the arrogance, the vanity, the self-pity. The anger!” Norina admitted. “When these feelings used to come up in me, I really did not know what to do. I went to Ma and asked her. She said, ‘In everyone’s life, there has to be balance. If you have a happy time, then the sad time will soon be coming. If you always want sunshine, then you will not be happy.’ Ma told me this because she knew it was my nature to always want sunshine. I wanted to be closer to God. What I thought of as God. So, of course, Ma brought me rain. How else could I grow? She knew that I needed to accept both.”
Norina walked us back to Raju’s taxi. “The same goes for our relationship to her. Ma wants us to love her also in all aspects. Not only to love her when she’s sweet and nice.”
I felt secretly guilty when Norina made this point.
“That is not love,” she said.
Back at the ashram school, I continued to observe Mother Meera from a distance, remembering Norina’s words. As she worked at her daily tasks, I noticed how weary she looked and how slowly she moved from job to job, as if plowing through a muddy field. On the morning of day six, I heard Mother reprimand Hilda for the children’s lack of discipline during recess, prompting the poor woman to rush off in tears. That afternoon, there were mistakes with some project or other, and I watched in amazement as Mother’s temper flared at the precise moment when one of the teachers was kneeling down to kiss her feet.
Among the volunteers, there were whispers about the daunting challenges of running the schools to Mother Meera’s specifications. Her extreme frugality was one of the hurdles. Apparently, a staff member had asked permission to spend ten extra dollars a month on better Internet service and been told no. (“That money could feed two children a month,” Mother had reminded him.) Explaining my clerical duties, Mohan specified that I should type using extra-narrow margins, since Mother doesn’t like to waste paper. Her thrift seemed to be more problematic when it came to important administrative decisions. Hiring a professional full-time principal for the school would save a great many headaches, for instance. But this isn’t how Mother Meera does things. When she wants a new house, she builds it herself. If something needs fixing, she figures it out. She packs her own suitcase, irons her own saris, and even, I was surprised to learn, now does much of her own bookkeeping, having hired and fired a few bad accountants. When devotees who know these jobs better than she does make such suggestions at the school, their ideas often fall on deaf ears.
Mother Meera is equally impervious to the human dramas that proliferate in her presence. As Adilakshmi reminded me, physical proximity to the divine often brings out the worst in people. Spiritual communities are, after all, microcosms of the larger world, populated by all sorts of characters, from the wise, cooperative, and tolerant to the pious, obnoxious, backbiting, and crazy. The community around Mother is especially diverse, with individuals running the gamut of religions, economic classes, professional sectors, sexual orientations, and political affinities.
During our visit, this particular group of volunteers ranged in age from twenty-two to seventy-eight and included a German plumber, an Italian designer, a Danish athlete and his father, two schoolteachers (Belgian and Indian), a dancer from Boston, a Malagasy entrepreneur, a well-dressed therapist from Toulouse, and a couple of English pensioners. The disagreements, gossip, and awkward dynamics were frequently in evidence. One of the volunteers was especially caustic and cornered me in the courtyard one morning before anyone else was awake. “I can’t stand these bigots,” he whispered. “You know, the ones who say Mother Meera is the only one. Or the best one. She never encourages this kind of thing!” The fellow looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I’m not interested in dogma or beliefs,” he said. “That is what I love about Mother. She doesn’t care about that kind of power. She knows she’s not the only one! But the people around her?” He bugged his eyes and twirled a finger next to his temple. “Completely bananas, some of them. And bigots!” He seemed quite unaware of how biased he sounded himself.
Mother Meera doesn’t mind such dissent. “God didn’t make imperfect people. He made normal ones,” she often says. In more than forty years of offering darshan, she has never refused anyone her blessing, explaining that this is the divine way. Asked if she would give darshan to Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein, Mother Meera says she would. To most of us, this extreme lack of prejudice is incomprehensible, yet it appears to be normal in the eyes of the divine. Enlightened individuals harbor no illusions about the abysmal aspects of human nature. To me, this is the most glaring difference between Mother Meera and an ordinary person, the most visible “proof” of her divinity: a preternatural tolerance of human failings and the ability to see behind people’s masks to the souls hiding underneath, no matter how monstrous these masks might be. Meher Baba, who shared this divine perspective, referred to his most troubled followers as “broken furniture.” This capacity for godly love, or agape, appears to be possible only among those rarefied sages who are not themselves broken and require nothing from those around them. Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982), a beloved avatar of the Divine Mother, described this sacred relationship in a photo book called Matri Darshan. “A saint is like a tree,” she once said.
She does not call anyone, neither does she send them away. She gives shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child, or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it.
Requiring no reciprocity, divine representatives feel no need to divvy up their fruits like the rest of us, trapped in our patterns of tit-for-tat. Their gifts are offered selflessly to whoever might need them, regardless of their failings. “I want you to be completely yourself,” Mother Meera has said. “Come to me exactly as you are. Everyone grows in a different way. Everyone has different needs. And everyone is unique for me. My love is equal for all.”
Mother confirmed this to a devotee who, like me, was having her doubts. “One day, I screwed up my nerve to talk to Mother,” this lady told me. “I had a lot of trauma in my family background and said, ‘Mother, I’m so closed down. I need your help so I can actually feel love. I don’t think anything but divine grace will help me.’ She said, ‘Okay.’ Then I asked, ‘Mother, do you ever hug people?’ She smiled and said, ‘Not so much.’ The truth is that I’d seen her hug people a couple of times over the years, and it made me so mad and upset, even though I knew it was silly and immature. Anyway, the next thing I knew, Mother just gave me this huge hug. Not a little-touch kind of thing but a real hug. I was stunned. When it was over, I said, ‘Mother, I love you so much I don’t even know what to say.’ ‘Do you really think I don’t know that?’ ” she answered.
On the day Mother Meera left India to return to Germany, we’d eaten dinner in the town center and made our way back to the school, along the dung-strewn, dusty streets, past Brahma bulls tethered to washing machines, grazing on garbage, past yellow rickshaws swarming the intersections like bees, and shopkeepers chatting in storefront doorways. Beyond the Colony Gate, we walked by the Catholic retreat center, with its glassed-in, dark-skinned Virgin Mary, then on to the Shiva temple, with its twenty-foot, Pepto-Bismol-colored statue of the god flanked by his car-sized bull Nandi, and around the corner to Paramatman Way.
Mother Meera was sitting on the porch, surrounded by a group of ashram kids. These disadvantaged children were her original inspiration for starting the school, a group of orphans without families to support them, whom Mother Meera invited to live in her private home. A brain-damaged boy with a crooked leg was making whooping sounds and laughing, spinning in circles around Mother, while a mob of little girls stroked her hair and her sari, as others sat adoringly at her feet. Mother Meera seemed entirely at ease with the children. Instantly, I was consumed by envy. The ashram kids weren’t prodding her with boring questions or feeble esoteric inquiries. They wanted nothing from Mother but her love, a little attention, a word of kindness. By contrast, I was exploding with questions and overflowing with neediness. What had it been like for her, being an incarnation inside a child’s body? How had she managed her little-girl feelings, and how had these emotional beginnings translated—or not—to Mother Meera? Was Kamala still inside her somewhere, or had she simply disappeared? Perhaps I would never know.
Mother Meera had continued to keep her distance, so all of my questions had gone unanswered. I’d struggled not to take this personally but mostly failed. Whatever lessons she might be sending me with her silence remained unclear. I’d had personal insights since arriving, but had they been intended by her? I was far from certain. When news had reached me in the morning that Mother was leaving that night, I’d been devastated. My window of opportunity was almost closed, and I was the last to know. As one last Hail Mary pass, I’d decided to send her a message, in the hope that she would change her mind. The note was imploring but polite, thanking Mother for letting us stay at the school and regretting very much that we hadn’t spent any time together. I’d given the note to Mohan to pass along to Mother during their morning meeting, and had waited on tenterhooks for her reply. When Mohan returned after lunch, he’d handed me the unopened envelope and told me that Mother would not take it.
“Wouldn’t take it?”
“She handed it back.”
I wanted to pound the desk but didn’t. There was now nothing more that I could do. Hidden in the shadows, watching the children as they played with Mother, I felt like a genuine outcast. I went to our room and moped for an hour. At nine o’clock, Maurice invited the volunteers downstairs to say our goodbyes. We stood in the driveway, the fifteen of us, and after a few minutes, Mother emerged, followed by a helper carrying her suitcase. Maurice opened the car door so that she could slip into the passenger seat. As the car pulled away, Mother turned her face and grinned at us through the window, looking happier than she had all week. I didn’t manage to catch her eye.
The following morning, before David and I left for Pondicherry, I found Adilakshmi to say goodbye. She was back at her desk, reading the paper. Adilakshmi asked how my time at the school had been, and I told her honestly what had happened. “You must learn to trust,” she repeated, folding the paper in half.
I assured Adilakshmi that I was trying.
“Then you will see how the Mother works.”