We went off to a different part of the hospital that, to my untrained eye, seemed to have bigger and fancier machines. This new combination of equipment finally came up with a reading for Anna-Marie. Our curiosity had been piqued by this long complicated process so we tried through sign language and the few English words she knew to discover how Anna-Marie’s eyes had come to be so peculiar. After a few false starts she realised what we were asking. It turned out that she had fallen out of a building in South America and had landed on her face. Having watched her behaviour and activities in the previous two days, I found this to be an entirely believable scenario. I don’t think I have ever come across someone who was so accident-prone.
Her eyes had been damaged in the fall and had been stitched in various places. As a result of this surgery there were places on the eyeball that had a very eccentric curvature. This accounted for the first optician’s inability to work out what she needed. Even the big eye hospital took almost an hour to figure out what she needed.
I got to talking to the eye surgeon and discovered that we had a mutual acquaintance in Tiruvannamalai. In fact, he knew quite a few of Bhagavan’s devotees. Like the optician before him, he decided to take us under his wing.
‘Where will you go to get this prescription fulfilled?’ he asked.
‘Well, the first man we went to, the one who brought us here, was very helpful to us. I would like to go back to him to give him the business since he was so kind to us.’
‘No, no,’ said the surgeon, ‘he only has a little shop. He won’t be able to fulfill an order like this. It is too complicated. I will take you to the biggest optician in Bombay.’
He too closed down his office and took us on another trip across Bombay. As we walked through the front door of the store he was taking us to, everyone jumped to attention. He was clearly a very respected figure in the eye world.
‘These are my friends,’ he announced, waving at us. ‘They have a difficult prescription to fulfill. Please do it as quickly as possible because this woman can’t see anything without glasses. She is virtually blind.’
He left us in the hands of the manager of the store and went back to the hospital. The manager’s big, beaming smile lasted as long as it took him to read the prescription. He put it down on the counter and started to talk to us very apologetically.
‘Normally, we keep lenses for every possible prescription here in the store. We have a huge turnover, so we can afford to make and keep lenses that we have no customers for. Sooner or later somebody will come and buy them, and everyone appreciates the fact that they can get what they want on the spot, without having to wait for anything to be made. But this prescription is such a ridiculous combination, no one would ever think of making it or keeping it. Until I saw it myself I would have guessed that nobody in the world had eyes that corresponded with these numbers. We will have to make a special order and that will take a long time because the glass grinders are out on strike at the moment. Even if they go back to work, it will probably be weeks before we can get them to make an order like this because they already have a lot of pending orders. I’m sorry, I can’t help you, and nobody else in the city will be able to help you either because this prescription is just too unusual for anyone to stock.’
This apology took about five minutes to deliver. While it was going on one of the boys from the store, who obviously didn’t know any English, picked up the paper and went to the storeroom to look for the lenses. That was his job: to pick up the prescriptions from the front office and find the corresponding lenses in the storeroom. Just as the manager was coming to his conclusion, the boy reappeared with two lenses that exactly corresponded to the numbers on the prescription. The manager was absolutely flabbergasted.
‘This is not possible,’ he kept saying. ‘No one would make and keep lenses like these.’
He finally adjusted the impossibility by saying that someone must have ordered these lenses long ago and had forgotten to collect them.
Because we had been declared friends of the great and famous eye surgeon – we had only known him for about two hours – we were given a massive discount and about half an hour later Anna-Marie walked out of the store wearing what I was absolutely convinced was the only pair of spectacles on planet earth that she could actually see the world through. Now, was there a miracle in there, or were we just the fortunate recipients of an amazingly serendipitous sequence of events?
‘I’ decided to pick the initial optician who agrees to close down his store and take us to the one eye surgeon in town who happens to be interested in Ramana, who then takes us, against my wishes, to the only store in Bombay where lenses can be found for Anna-Marie. I am a bit of a sceptic, and in my jaundiced opinion there are too many good things in that sequence to be attributed to chance alone.
My own belief is that when you go to the Guru, the power of that Guru takes care of any physical problems that may arise. He doesn’t do it knowingly; there is just an aura around him that takes care of all these problems. We never even told Maharaj about Anna-Marie’s glasses. When we set off that morning, I just assumed that she had fairly normal eyes and that within half an hour or so we would be able to buy some glasses that would bring the world into focus.
This was not the end of the story. I told you it was a long one. Anna-Marie was sitting with Maharaj every day for about a week, but of course, she couldn’t understand a word of what was going on. There was no one there who spoke Spanish. Then, one morning, she appeared very red-eyed and I asked her what was the matter.
‘I was up all night,’ she said, in very broken English, ‘praying for a Spanish translator to come today. There is something I have to tell Maharaj, and I need a translator to do it.’
Later that morning, as we were all sitting in a café on Grant Road in the interval between the end of the bhajans and the beginning of the question-and-answer session, we noticed a new foreign face at an adjoining table – a woman who was reading a copy of I am That. We introduced ourselves and discovered that, surprise, surprise, she was a professional Spanish-English translator who worked in Bombay and who had recently come across Maharaj’s teachings. She had decided in a general sort of way to come and visit Maharaj, but only that morning did her general urge translate into positive action. Anna-Marie, of course, was over the moon. The translator she had spent all night praying for had miraculously manifested on the next table to her about fifteen minutes before the question-and-answer session started.
We all went back to Maharaj’s room, curious to find out what Anna-Marie wanted to say to him. This is more or less what she had to say via the translator.
‘I was living in Venezuela when I had a dream of a mountain and two men. I found out soon afterwards that one of the two men was Ramakrishna, but for a long time I didn’t know who the other man was or what the mountain might be. Then, last year, I saw a photo of Ramana Maharshi and realised that this was the second man in the dream. When I did some research to find out more about him, I soon realised that the mountain in the dream was Arunachala. In the dream Ramana Maharshi looked at me in a very special way and transmitted a knowledge of his teachings to me. He didn’t do it verbally. He just looked at me, and as he was looking, I just felt that he was filling me up with an understanding of his teachings, a knowledge that I could articulate quite clearly, even though no words had passed between us. I knew that I had to come to India to find out more about him. I persuaded a friend of mine to bring me here, even though I knew that Ramana Maharshi was no longer alive. I knew I had some business here and something was compelling me to come. While I was in Tiruvannamalai I heard about you, and I knew that I had to come and see you as well. That same compulsion that made me come to India to find out about Ramana Maharshi has made me come here as well. I don’t know what it is, but I knew that I had to come.’
Maharaj interceded at this point: ‘What were the teachings that were transmitted to you in the dream? What did Ramana Maharshi tell you as he was revealing his teachings in silence?’
Anna-Marie talked in Spanish for about five minutes without any translation being given by the interpreter. At the end of that period the translator begin to explain what she had said. We all sat there, absolutely dumbfounded. She gave a perfect and fluent five-minute summary of Maharaj’s teachings. They were quite clearly not Ramana’s teachings but Maharaj’s, and this woman was giving a wonderful presentation of them. I think it was one of the best five-minute summaries of the teachings I had ever heard. And remember, this was from a woman who was on her first visit, someone who had had very little acquaintance with Maharaj’s teachings before coming there that day.
Maharaj seemed to be as impressed as everyone else there. He stood up, took Anna-Marie downstairs and initiated her into the mantra of his lineage by writing it on her tongue with his finger. I mentioned earlier that he would volunteer to give out the mantra if anybody wanted it. If someone asked for it, he would ordinarily whisper it in his or her ear. This is the only case I know in which he gave out the mantra without being first asked, and it is the only instance I know of in which he wrote it with his finger on a devotee’s tongue. What does all this mean? I have absolutely no idea. I have long since given up trying to guess or rationalise why Gurus do the things they do.
Harriet: That’s a great story! So you would say that Maharaj was looking after the welfare of devotees, in the same way that other great Gurus were?
David: I would answer a conditional ‘yes’ to that question. ‘Yes’ because it is the nature of enlightened beings to be like this – they don’t have any choice in the matter because these things go on around them automatically. However, on a more superficial level the answer might be ‘no’. If people took their personal problems to him, he might get angry and say that it was none of his business. He didn’t perceive himself as someone who dealt with individual people who had problems. I saw several people go to him to tell him that they had had all their money or their passport stolen, and his standard response was to tell them off for being careless. I told him once that I was worried about how much I was sleeping. At the time, though, I did think this was a legitimate spiritual question because I had read many teachers who had said that it was bad to sleep a lot.
His answer, though, was ‘Why are you bringing your medical problems to me? If you think it is a problem, go and see a doctor.’
In that particular case his advice turned out to be perfectly correct. I discovered later that I was suffering from a major infestation of hookworm, almost certainly as a result of walking around India for years with no footwear. Hookworms eat red blood cells and if they get out of control, they eat more than the body can produce. Eventually, you get very anaemic, which means feeling tired and sleepy all the time. So, in this particular case, what appeared to be a cranky, dismissive answer was the most useful thing he could say. I would say that the Self put the right words into his mouth at the right moment, but at the time neither of us knew just how right they were.
Despite his generally irritable response when people went to him for personal help, I think he was fully aware that he was looking after all his devotees’ well being, even though it may not have looked that way a lot of the time.
Harriet: Again, can you give me an example of this, or is this just guesswork?
David: I remember a large fat man from Madras who came to see Maharaj with what he said was a problem: ‘I have been doing japa for many years and I have acquired siddhis as a result. If I am very pleased with someone, very good things happen to him or her automatically. I don’t think about it or do anything. It just happens by itself. But if I get angry with someone, the opposite happens. Very bad things happen, and sometimes the person even dies. How can I stop these things from happening?’
Maharaj told him, ‘All these siddhis have come on account of your japa. If you stop dong the japa, the siddhis will also stop.’
‘I don’t think I can do that,’ replied the man. ‘The japa has taken me over so completely, it is no longer voluntary. It just happens by itself whether I want it to or not.’
Maharaj repeated his advice, but the man wasn’t interested in carrying it out. He looked very pleased with himself and I got the feeling that he had just come there to show off his accomplishments. My opinion was confirmed when he announced that he was now willing to answer questions from anyone in the room. He hadn’t come there to receive advice; he had come to give it out.
Maharaj asked him to leave and said that if he was really interested in his teachings he could go in the evening to the house of one of his women devotees, a Sanskrit professor who sometimes did translations for him, and she would explain them to him. He was told not to come back to the room. I suspect that Maharaj wanted to keep him away from us because there was something strange and threatening about him. I am not a very psychic kind of person but I could definitely feel an unpleasant energy coming off this man. It was something that made me feel physically queasy. He really did have an aura of bad energy around him. I checked with some of the other people afterwards, and some of them had felt the same way.
All this took place in a morning session. That evening the Sanskrit professor showed up an hour late, looking very flustered. Maharaj immediately wanted to know what was going on.
‘This man from Madras came to my house and I couldn’t get him to leave. I told him that it was time for me to come here, but he wouldn’t get up and go. I didn’t really want to force him to go. He might have got angry with me, and then I might have died.’
Maharaj appeared to be outraged. He puffed out his chest like a fighting cock going into battle and announced, very angrily, ‘No one can harm my devotees. You are under my protection. This man cannot do you any harm. If he comes to talk to you again, throw him out when it is time for you to come here. Nothing will happen to you.’
This was the only occasion when I heard Maharaj make a strong public declaration that he was protecting and looking after his devotees.
Maharaj himself had no fear of people like this. He told us once about a yogi who had come to his beedi shop to test his powers. This yogi apparently had many siddhis and he came to see if Maharaj, of whom he had heard great things, could match him. Maharaj just went about his business in the shop and refused all challenges to show off what he could do. Eventually, in an attempt to provoke him into doing something, the yogi said that he would curse him and make something very bad happen to him.
Maharaj apparently looked at him with complete unconcern and said, ‘You may be able to pull down a thousand suns from the sky, but you can’t harm me and you don’t impress me. Now go away.’