Arunachala and Ramana Maharshi

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Feet of the Guru

[As with an earlier post a few weeks ago, some of the material appears in white boxes. There is no significance to the white bits. Just ignore them. I can't get them to disappear.]

When we speak of the Guru, mention of ‘the feet’ is never far away. We surrender to the feet, we sit at the feet, we give offerings to the feet, we touch the feet, and if we are lucky enough to be graced by them, we ultimately merge with the feet. The feet exist physically, of course, and all devotees consider it an honour and a privilege to touch them, but they are also a potent symbol of the transcendent state of the true enlightened Guru. In Padamalai, for example, Muruganar portrays Bhagavan as ‘the foot’ (padam) in every verse. In this long poem he used the term padam to denote the physical form of Bhagavan, the state in which he constantly abided, and the power that emanated from that state through that particular form.

Though Bhagavan did admit on a few occasions that the physical feet of the Guru had a special power, he went out of his way to minimise the importance of his own. In the last few decades of his life devotees were actively discouraged from attempting to touch them. A low railing was erected around his sofa to keep would-be foot-touchers out of range, and whenever Bhagavan went for a walk, one of the principal jobs of the attendants who accompanied him was to ensure that no one would impede his progress by attempting to prostrate and touch his feet.

In Living by the Words of Bhagavan Annamalai Swami recorded the following incident, which is a typical Bhagavan response:

A devotee once approached Bhagavan and asked him if he could prostrate to him and touch his feet.

Bhagavan replied: ‘The real feet of Bhagavan exist only in the heart of the devotee. To hold onto these feet incessantly is true happiness. You will be disappointed if you hold onto my physical feet because one day this physical body will disappear. The greatest worship is worshipping the Guru’s feet that are within oneself.’

Sadhu Natanananda, in Sri Ramana Darsanam, also recorded two key replies from Bhagavan on this subject. The first comes from a section entitled ‘The real meaning of touching the Guru’s feet’; the second is entitled ‘True namaskaram is only surrender of the ego’:

A certain lady, who had a lot of devotion, performed a traditional ritual for worshipping sages whenever she came into Bhagavan’s presence to have darshan. She would prostrate to Bhagavan, touch his feet and then put the hands that had touched Bhagavan’s feet on her eyes.

After noticing that she did this daily, Bhagavan made the following remarks:

‘Only the Supreme Self, which is ever shining in your Heart as the reality, is the Sadguru. The pure awareness, which is shining as the inward illumination ‘I’, is his gracious feet. The contact with these [inner holy feet] alone can give you true redemption. Joining the eye of reflected consciousness [chitabhasa], which is your sense of individuality [jiva bodha], to those holy feet, which are the real consciousness, is the union of the feet and the head that is the real significance of the word ‘asi’. As these inner holy feet can be held naturally and unceasingly, hereafter, with an inward-turned mind, cling to that inner awareness that is your own real nature. This alone is the proper way for the removal of bondage and the attainment of the supreme truth.’

Invoking that lady devotee’s natural experience, Bhagavan revealed the true meaning of the gracious feet that unite the jiva with Brahman. Mature ones should attach themselves to these feet….

Some of those who came for Maharshi’s darshan used to perform ashtanga namaskaram in the traditional way. It was their belief that this practice, done devoutly, was indispensable for those who wanted the grace of the Sadguru.

In order to drive home the point that in spiritual life mere mechanical observance of any sadhana, without knowing its inner meaning and without experiencing its fruit, will not make one blessed, Bhagavan, addressing one such devotee, said:

‘The benefit of performing namaskaram to the Guru is only the removal of the ego. This is not attained except by total surrender. Within the Heart of each devotee the gracious Guru is giving darshan in the form of consciousness. To surrender is to offer fully, in silence, the subsided ego, which is a name-and-form thought, to the aham-sphurana [the effulgence of ‘I’], the real holy feet of the gracious Guru. Since [this is so], Self-realisation cannot be attained by a bowing of the body, but only by a bowing of the ego.’

Some devotees were lucky enough or privileged enough to touch Bhagavan’s physical feet, but Bhagavan made it clear that no special transmission was involved when this happened. This subject was brought up by Devaraja Mudaliar in Day by Day with Bhagavan:

A second edition of Sri Ramana, the Sage of Arunagiri by Aksharajna has recently come out. Sampling it here and there, I came across the passage that Bhagavan blesses his disciples in various ways, the ‘mild’ by sight, the middling by thought and the advanced by touch.

Once when I was reading Kaivalyam in Tamil, I asked Bhagavan, ‘Many books speak of Gurus blessing disciples or giving diksha by touching the head of the disciple with their hands or feet. How is it then Bhagavan never does any such thing?’

Bhagavan then told me, ‘It is true the books mention the three ways of diksha, viz., by sight, touch and thought. But diksha by thought is really the best.’

So I asked Bhagavan today about the above passage in Aksharajna’s book, saying, ‘He also knew Bhagavan well. He must have had some reason for saying so.’

Bhagavan said, ‘I don’t know,’ and added, ‘I might have touched some by accident or for other reasons, not with the intention of giving diksha’.

While Bhagavan made it clear here that he never initiated people in this way, he did on a few rare occasions transmit power through touching devotees. Palaniswami, his mother and Lakshmi the cow all benefited from Bhagavan’s holy touch in their final moments. In these cases, and in the few others that appear to be similar transmissions, Bhagavan used his hand, rather than his foot to transmit the necessary grace.

I do believe that Bhagavan did have power in his feet; he just never publicly acknowledged it or voluntarily used it to transmit grace to devotees. Consider the following story, narrated by Kunju Swami in Reminiscences, which dates from Bhagavan’s early days at Arunachala:

One of the earliest people to recognise Sri Bhagavan’s greatness, and to inform others of it, was Achyutadasa, a famous poet and scholar. When Sri Bhagavan was staying in Gurumurtham in the 1890s, a holy man with a bright face came with his disciples for Sri Bhagavan’s darshan. After performing bhajans for some time, he sat near Sri Bhagavan, caught hold of his feet and hands and immediately went into a state of ecstasy.

When his disciples also approached Sri Bhagavan to catch hold of his feet, Achyutadasa stopped them saying, ‘This is a huge fire. None of you can get close to it.’

He then sang some excellent vedantic songs. As Sri Bhagavan was still remaining in silence at that time he merely witnessed that scene without commenting on it. Finally, the visitor bowed to Sri Bhagavan and left most unwillingly. Only after a few days was it learned that the visitor was Achyutadasa, a famous person who had composed many vedantic songs in Tamil. He later sent a book of his vedantic songs for Sri Bhagavan’s perusal.

This seems to be the case of a mature devotee recognising, by direct experience, the power in Bhagavan’s feet, and then warning others who were not so mature not to touch them in case the power turned out to be too much for them.

In the next incident, narrated by Krishnamurti Iyer in The Power of the Presence, part one, something strange happened when Bhagavan’s foot accidentally came into contact with a nearby devotee:

Ranga Aiyer, another member of our Madurai group, was a frequent visitor to Sri Ramanasramam. In one of our talks in Madurai he told me about a very remarkable incident that took place in the mother’s samadhi at the time when it was still a mud-walled building with a thatched roof. Sri Bhagavan had been sitting on a bench close to the wall. Ranga Aiyer, Ramaswami Pillai and a number of other sadhus were sitting on the floor in front of Sri Bhagavan. The group began to chant the Tamil verses in praise of Sri Bhagavan that are known as Sri Ramana Stuti Panchakam. As they began the chanting Sri Bhagavan was seated in the sukhasana [cross-legged] pose on the bench, while Ranga Aiyer was sitting on the floor just in front of him. Ranga Aiyer was sitting so near Bhagavan, his head was only a couple of inches away from the edge of the bench.

The fourth stanza in the third decad begins, ‘Let me place your soft, holy feet on my head...’.

As this line was being chanted one of Sri Bhagavan’s feet descended, came into contact with the top of Ranga Aiyer’s head and stayed there for quite some time. The whole group, including Ranga Aiyer, was more or less hypnotised by this act and went on repeating the same stanza over and over again. It seems that they were quite incapable of proceeding any further. Only when Sri Bhagavan withdrew his foot and resumed his former sukhasana posture was the group able to continue and complete the chanting. The devotees all viewed this as a rare example of pada diksha [initiation by being touched by the Guru’s foot]. I have spoken to Ramaswami Pillai about this incident, since he was present when it happened, and his own account agrees in every detail with Ranga Aiyer’s.

Given that Bhagavan has already said in the citation I gave from Day by Day with Bhagavan that he never gave initiation by touch, I think it would be safe to assume that he would deny that he had given initiation in this particular case. However, the power of Bhagavan’s foot in this instance cannot be denied.

Though Bhagavan never consciously used his own feet to bring about experiences in devotees, he did seem to accept that the power in a Guru’s foot was enough to bring about liberation in advanced devotees. Here is a story, which he frequently told, of a saint who attained liberation in this way. The story is from Letters from Sri Ramanasramam and the narrator is Suri Nagamma:

That devotee then said, ‘There is a similar incident in the story of Namadeva, is it not?’

‘Yes, that is so,’ said Bhagavan and began relating that story thus:

‘Namadeva used to pride himself on the fact that Vittal [Krishna] was always more fond of him than others and so once Jnanadeva and others took him to the house of Gorakumbhar for a feast. After food, all of them sat in a row and, during conversation, one of them said in an allegorical manner to Gorakumbhar, “You are used to making good pots, aren’t you? Now tell us which amongst these pots are good and which are bad?” Gorakumbhar thereupon took a potter’s testing rod and began hitting them on the head one by one.

‘They all kept quiet out of regard for him and just kept their heads bent. When it came to the turn of Namadeva, he expressed his resentment at the procedure and refused to undergo the test. Kumbhar forthwith declared that that was an immature pot. All the others burst into laughter at that. Poor Namadeva could not contain his anger. He began saying that they all had conspired together to humiliate him thus and went to Vittal with tears in his eyes to complain. “Well, what is the matter?” asked Swami, and Namadeva related the whole story. “That is all right; but tell me what did the others say when they were tested?” asked Swami.

‘Namadeva: They all shut their mouths and bowed when tested with the rod.

‘Vittal: And you?

‘Namadeva: Am I like them? How intimate I am with you! Am I to be beaten like that for a test?

‘Vittal: That is called ahankara [ego]. All of them knew my real Self and had a contented mind. You are not so.

‘Namadeva: But you are kind to me; and what more is there for me to know?

‘Vittal: That is not it. You must serve elders if you want to know the truth. What am I? If you dance, I dance. If you laugh, I laugh. If you jump, I jump. If you find out the truth, you will not have these jumpings and bumpings.

‘Namadeva: You say, “elders”. Who is there older than you?

‘Vittal: Who? There is a temple in the nearby forest. In that temple there is a sadhu. Go to him and you will realise the truth.

‘When Namadeva went to that temple in the forest, he saw an unkempt man lying there. “How could this man be a sadhu?” he thought and, when he went closer to that person, he found the legs of the man on a linga. Shuddering at the sight, he said with trepidation, “Sir, what is this? You are putting your legs on the head of God!” That man said, “Oho! Nama, is that you? Vittal sent you, didn’t he?” Taken aback at this and wondering how the sadhu could know about him, he asked again, “Sir, you are a sadhu, aren’t you? How could you put your legs on a linga?” “Is that so, my dear son? I don’t know all that. I am unable to lift my legs. Will you please lift them for me and move them away from the linga?” he said. Namadeva, agreeing to do so, lifted them and tried to put them elsewhere but found that there was another linga there also. Thus wherever he tried to put the legs, he found a linga there and so finally, he placed them on himself, when he himself became a linga. That is to say, by the touch of those holy feet, he had jnanodaya [dawn of knowledge of the Self]. Namadeva stood up dazed. The sadhu asked, “Yes, do you now realise [the truth]?” Saying “Yes I have realised,” he bowed before Visobakesar, disciple of Jnaneswar, went home, sat in his room and got immersed in dhyana and stopped going to Vittal.

‘After some days, Vittal came there running and asked him, “Nama, how is it you haven’t been coming to me of late?” Namadeva said, “Oh, Prabhu [Lord]! Where is the place in which you are not present? I see you here at all times. I am you and you are me. That is why I do not go to you.” “Oh, I see, that is good.” So saying, Vittal vanished.’

In more recent times there is the famous incident in which Ramakrishna touched Vivekananda with his foot and gave him a powerful experience that almost resulted in the extinction of his individual self. I don’t think the full story of this encounter has appeared in a Ramanasramam publication, but the story was known by both Bhagavan and his devotees. Here is a version of it I found online. I will give Bhagavan’s comments on the incident afterwards:

Naren’s [Vivekananda’s] doubt about Ramakrishna would not disappear, and perhaps he feared that he would be drawn into the orbit of his lofty spiritual presence. Not until a month had elapsed did he return to Dakshineswar. Ramakrishna was in a strange mood, Naren was to relate, and he was apprehensive that Ramakrishna would once again enact something crazy. Indeed, no sooner had that thought passed through his mind than Ramakrishna placed his foot on Naren’s body, and Naren at once had a ‘wonderful experience.’ Naren was to add:

‘My eyes were wide open, and I saw that everything in the room, including the walls themselves, was whirling rapidly around and receding, and at the same time, it seemed to me that my consciousness of self, together with the entire universe, was about to vanish into a vast, all-devouring void. This destruction of my consciousness of self seemed to me to be the same thing as death. I felt that death was right before me, very close. Unable to control myself, I cried out loudly, “Ah, what are you doing to me? Don’t you know I have my parents at home?” When the Master heard this, he gave a loud laugh. Then, touching my chest with his hand, he said, “All right, let it stop now. It needn’t be done all at once. It will happen in its own good time.” To my amazement, this extraordinary vision of mine vanished as suddenly as it had come. I returned to my normal state and saw things inside and outside the room standing stationary, as before.

Bhagavan was asked about this foot-touching incident in Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, talk 252:

Question: Sri Ramakrishna touched Vivekananda and the latter realised bliss. Is it possible?

Bhagavan: Sri Ramakrishna did not touch all for that purpose. He did not create Atma. He did not create realisation. Vivekananda was ripe. He was anxious to realise. He must have completed the preliminary course in his past births. Such is possible for ripe persons only.

The key to success is clearly maturity. In the 1890s Achyutadasa, a mature sadhaka, felt the power of Bhagavan feet and warned his group not to touch them; Vivekananda, as Bhagavan explained, was ready for this experience of samadhi by virtue of spiritual work done in previous births; and Namadeva, despite, his bouts of petulance, was a pure enough soul to be spending large portions of his time with Vittal.

Bearing this in mind, I should like now to narrate two more modern and very dramatic stories that illustrate the power inherent in the Guru’s feet.

Jillellamudi Amma (1923-1985) was a modern-day Telugu Guru who had thousands of devotees in Andhra Pradesh in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. She received her title from the village of Jillellamudi where she spent the latter portion of her life. She claims to have been born in an enlightened state and said that she never needed to do any sadhana or attain any spiritual goals. Though she was a simple village woman who went through the usual life trajectory of marriage, children and family life, she knew throughout it all that it was just a body performing its allotted karma. Her daughter Hyma was also a highly evolved soul who died in a Guntur hospital of smallpox in 1968. After her death her body was brought back to the ashram, which was about sixty kilometres away.

Jillellamudi Amma declined to have her cremated and instead made a samadhi shrine for her, a sign of her saintliness. This is a description of the burial rites, taken from Mother of All by Richard Schiffman.

Jillellamudi Amma first garlanded her daughter’s corpse, tied flowers garlands to her hair, put kumkum on her forehead and placed the body in siddhasana, facing eastwards.

For some time Mother stood at the edge of the pit with her foot placed squarely on the crown of Hyma’s head. When Doctor Potluri Subba Rao prepared to take a photo of this, Amma gestured towards the pit and asked, ‘Should I also get in?’

Then she smiled and remarked somewhat wistfully: ‘How can I get in? Haven’t I got some more things to do? I won’t stay here.’

Mother gazed down at her foot on Hyma’s head and said, ‘My fire has entered her. My foot is getting roasted by the heat. The pulse may also return, but what would be surprising about that?’

Amma gestured for the doctor to check and he discovered, to his amazement, that Hyma’s body was indeed hot to the touch. Even more surprisingly, a slight breath had returned and her chest heaved visibly, as the doctors and several others who were nearby could easily observe. Mother placed her own gold bangles into the grave, picked up a hand fan and began to fan Hyma. Meanwhile, devotees were filing past with offerings of vibhuti, kumkum and flowers which they threw into the pit....

For some time Amma sits quietly at the edge of the pit with her eyes closed. When she opens them again, she looks towards Doctor Subba Rao and says jocularly, ‘If I sit like this, people will say that I am transmitting power’. ‘That is exactly what I am going to say,’ the doctor answers with a smile.

Then Mother offers another coconut and places some vibhuti on the top of Hyma’s head. At just this moment the electricity fails and the lights that have been placed on poles around the pit blink off, leaving the area in total darkness. When they come on again a few minutes later, Mother points to the flow of blood coming from the uppermost crown of Hyma’s head, the place where, according to yogic science the thousand-petalled lotus, the highest of all the chakras and the final barrier which must be punctured before the individual soul can merge with the infinite, is located.

Then Mother covers the pit with a white silk sari of hers and turns to Doctor Subba Rao: ‘Doctorji, my work is over,’ she says, and together with her husband, waves a tray of burning camphor, a final arati before this covered pit.

This account came out in 1983, and I probably read it soon afterwards. On my next visit to Lakshmana Ashram I told Saradamma about this story of the Guru apparently reanimating the disciple’s body after it had been dead for quite some time, and then (my conjecture) making the jiva leave the body through the crown of the head. She told Lakshmana Swamy about it later that day. He was curious to learn more since transmissions of this kind were something that interested him very much. I obtained a copy of the book for him and marked the passage where this incident was recorded. After he had read it, he made some interesting comments:

‘If the jiva leaves through the crown of the head, it indicates an advanced soul. Usually, it leaves through the mouth or the eyes. But leaving in this way does not indicate that liberation has happened, even though this is what the yogis claim. A jiva that leaves through the crown of the head will have to be reborn again. For liberation, the jiva has to go down the amrita nadi and die in the Heart. That is the place of its final liberation.

‘This Guru had power, and she was dealing with an advanced devotee. If she had kept her foot on the girl’s head, the jiva might have gone back into the Heart and died. Instead, she took it off and the jiva escaped to take another birth.’

It is worth noting here that Ramana Maharshi also taught that liberation was not attained by causing the kundalini to reach and merge with the sahasrara. He said that for final liberation, it had to come back to the Heart through the channel that Lakshmana Swamy called the amrita nadi.

Lakshmana Swamy had had his own experience of this phenomenon when Saradamma realised the Self in his presence through the power of his grace and, more specifically, the power of the Guru’s feet. This is the account I wrote of that event in No Mind – I am the Self:

The next morning she [Saradamma] came out of samadhi with a strong awareness that her ‘I’-thought was still existing. She remembered the peace of the previous day and night when she had been in samadhi, with the ‘I’-thought temporarily gone, and she decided to see if she could enter the same state again. She closed her eyes and within a few minutes her ‘I’-thought subsided into the Heart and she went back into samadhi again. The ‘I’-thought emerged from the Heart several times during the day, but each time it subsided Sarada was convinced that she had realised the Self. She was still able to talk and Swamy, thinking that her realisation was near, placed a small tape-recorder near her to record her words. Sarada spoke in short, quiet sentences, with frequent pauses as she was overwhelmed by the bliss of the Self.

‘I have no body. I have no “I”. I am not the body. How I am talking, I do not know. Some power is talking through me.’

Swamy asked her if she was looking, and she replied: ‘Even though I am looking, I am not looking. Where is the “I” to look. When the mind enters the Heart, there is no “I” to tell that there is no “I”. My “I” is dead.’

Swamy then asked her how she was feeling.

‘My whole body is filled with peace and bliss. I cannot describe it. Everything is filled with peace. The Self is pulling me towards it and I am not able to open my eyes. The whole body is weak.’

Swamy remarked, ‘It is like an elephant entering a weak hut. The hut cannot stand the strain. Is it beyond time and death?’

‘It is beyond time and death as there is no mind. As the “I” is dead I don’t wish to eat anymore. I am not able to eat. However tasty the food I cannot eat. I have no desire to eat. Everything is filled with peace and bliss. I am content with my realisation. I have recognised my own Self, so I am content.’

Swamy then told her that her “I” was not yet dead and that she had not yet reached the final state. Sarada replied: ‘As the “I” is dead, there is no you.’

‘Have you no mother or father?’ asked Swamy.

‘No father, no mother, no world. Everything is peace and bliss. Why do I have to eat when there is no “I”? The body is inert; it cannot eat. A corpse will not eat. It is like that because the “I” is dead. As I cannot eat, I cannot talk. Who is talking, I do not know.’

‘Then who is talking?’ asked Swamy.

Sarada remained silent, and so Swamy answered his own question. ‘The Self is talking.’

Sarada continued: ‘Even though I am seeing, I am not seeing. Even though I am talking, I am not talking. Whatever I do I am not doing it because the “I” is dead. I have no body. All the nerves are filled with peace and bliss. All is Brahman. All is bliss. In the veins instead of blood, love and bliss are flowing. A great power has entered into me.’

Three months before Swamy had told Sarada, ‘Even though I sleep I am not sleeping’.

Sarada remembered this, repeated Swamy’s words and said that she was finally able to understand what he had meant.

Sarada continued to talk: ‘I have no thought of doing anything. I have no fear of death. Before, I feared death, but not anymore. I don’t care about death. I have nothing more to do. I shall give up the body.’

Swamy asked her to stay but Sarada answered: ‘What is death to die now? The body is inert, how can it die? My “I” is dead, what is there left to die? Why then fear death?’

Swamy then reminded her that her ‘I’ was not dead and that she was not yet in the final sahaja state. Swamy then stopped the tape we were listening to and talked a little about the state that Sarada was experiencing when she spoke these words.

‘Anyone whose mind completely subsides into the Heart for a short time can talk like an enlightened person. Their experience of the Self is the same as that of a realised person. However, their “I”-thought is not dead and it is likely to re-emerge at any time. Such an experience is not the final state because it is not permanent.’

He then played the final portion of Sarada’s comments on her experience.

‘I am everywhere. I am not the body. I have no body so I have no fear. I am immobile. Whatever I may do, I am immobile. I am shining as the Self. Everything is a great void [maha-sunya]. How can I describe the Self in words? It is neither light nor dark. No one can describe what it is. In the past, present and future no one can describe what it is. It is difficult to describe. Self is Self, that is all.’

Throughout that day Sarada’s mind kept sinking into the Self, but on each occasion it came out again. At 4 p.m. the “I”-thought went from the Heart to the brain and started to bang against the inside of her skull. Sarada said later that it was like an axe trying to split her head open from the inside. Since she was not able to bear the pain she came forward, took Swamy’s hand and placed it on her head. The “I”-thought went back to the Heart, but again it was only a temporary subsidence, Three minutes later it rose again and once again started to bang against the inside of her skull. Sarada came forward, placed her head on Swamy’s feet and a few seconds later the “I”-thought returned to its source and died forever.

With her “I”-thought permanently gone, Sarada had realised the Self. Swamy says that in the final few minutes her “I”-thought was trying to escape and take birth again, and that had he not been present, the “I”-thought would have killed her and escaped.

A few years later I asked Saradamma why holding Swamy’s hands on her head had not worked, whereas putting her head on his feet did. Her reply was short and to the point: ‘More power in the feet.’

Monday, June 16, 2008

Father's Day

Apologies for being completely off-topic today. Those of you who want to read some new stuff on Ramana will have to wait another day. I started this piece yesterday and finished it this morning.

* * *

I was not planning to write anything today, but when I opened my online UK newspaper I discovered that it was Father’s Day. Eight people were telling the story of their relationships with their fathers, and their collective efforts inspired me to do the same. I am also prompted to do so by my memory of his funeral service at which a minister who barely knew him gave a eulogy that I thought was under-informed and uninspiring.

I remember thinking as I listened to the words, ‘That’s not the man I knew. I could do a lot better than him.’

I kept quiet because at British funerals it is still not that common for people who knew the deceased to stand up and pay tribute. However, I resolved that I would put down my own thoughts on his life, and today, almost eight years later, it seems to be the day to do it.

Michael Godman was born in Swanage, Dorset, England, in 1923. His father, Herbert, was a Methodist minister who had apparently started his career, before the First World War, as a wandering preacher in the wilds of Canada, travelling on horseback from one mining camp to another, conducting revivalist meetings. I can imagine him doing that and thoroughly enjoying it. When I knew him late on in his life, he was a life-loving extrovert with a singing voice that was still louder than anyone in his congregation. If he had a particular liking for any of the hymns that he had just been singing in church, he would refuse to stop at the end. Instead, he would pick out his favourite verses and sing them again in his booming voice. His listeners, one by one, would feel compelled to join in and share his bubbly enthusiasm for whatever verse had struck his fancy that day. I never met his wife, my grandmother, because she passed away in the mid-1950s. Herbert remarried in the 1960s, when he was well into his seventies, to a woman who was decades younger than he was.

I remember asking him, in all innocence, when I was about eleven, ‘Granddad, how did you manage to persuade that woman to marry you? You’re old, sick, and you’ve got no money.’

His face broke out into a mischievous grin, and he looked around to make sure that no one was watching him. When he was sure he was unobserved, he unzipped his fly, pulled down his pants and said, with a loud guffaw, ‘Well, it wasn’t for the sex! Look!’

He had a plastic tube where his penis had once been, with a little tap on the end. I was fascinated by it.

He offered me a little plastic cup and said, ‘Go on, try it out! It works.’

I was too embarrassed to take up the offer, but he could see that I really wanted a demonstration, so he showed me himself how it worked. I have to say that this is my abiding memory of him, but it epitomises his fun-loving, non-conformist nature.

Aside from his penis, he had quite a few other body parts missing. He only had one lung, for example, but that didn’t stop him rolling his own cigarettes and filling it with large quantities of smoke every day. He loved life and all the little pleasures that it offered him.

A family holiday in the early 1930s. My father is the boy sitting at the back. The others are his brothers, his sisters and his parents.

Methodist ministers are not assigned indefinitely to a particular church. Every three years they are sent to a new district. Accommodation is provided – often large, rambling houses that are a nightmare to maintain and heat – but these moves are often detrimental to the children’s education since they are being frequently uprooted and moved to different areas with new schools. The church helps out with this by contributing to the costs of a boarding-school education at a private school for minister’s children over the age of eleven. My father went to one of these schools in the 1930s. I can’t remember the name, but when he talked about it, it sounded cheap and grim. It was run in my father’s day by an old-style martinet who believed in caning his students for the slightest infractions. On one or two occasions in later years, when we were pleasantly ensconced by the side of swimming pools in Mediterranean locations, he would bring up the still-raw topic of his school pool:

‘It was open-air,’ he would say, ‘unheated, and we had to swim in it in all weathers, even when it was freezing cold. It was so filthy, there was a permanent scum on top of it. We all used to draw lots to see who would be the first person to dive in and break the scum.’

The Second World War broke out while he was still at school. In 1941, when he was eighteen and old enough to volunteer, he joined the army. After an initial training stint in which he presumably impressed his superiors with his toughness and durability, he ended up in the newly-formed Parachute Regiment. He served with it for the duration of the war, fighting in North Africa and later Italy. It was unremitting, front-line action. He told me once that he walked most of the distance from Cairo to Rome, fighting all the way. It was a bit of an exaggeration, but he definitely had the scars to back up his story. He had a bullet scar on his leg, shrapnel scars in a few other places, and an odd series of round scars on his torso.

My dad, taken in Cairo during the war

When I asked him what these were from, he replied, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, ‘If your whole platoon is racing forward in battle and you come to a coil of barbed wire, you haven’t got time to stop and cut it. The first man there dives on top of it, and everyone behind him runs over his body and jumps off the other side. The last man over helps the first man to get disentangled from the wire. When it was my turn, the barbs stuck into my chest and left these scars.’

Which is why, I suppose, they took it in turns. It didn’t seem to be the kind of job that most people would volunteer for.

In the 1980s, decades after the war had ended, he started to get pains in his lower stomach area and went to his doctor to see what the problem might be. It turned out to be a piece of shrapnel that been lodged in his upper groin area for about forty years.

My father accumulated a whole range of prejudices on a wide variety of topics. I say ‘prejudices’, but that is not really the right word. A ‘prejudice’ is an opinion formed without factual or experiential basis. In my father’s case, one major or traumatic incident would be enough for him to form an unshakeable and life-long prejudice.

When the allies invaded Italy from Sicily, the paratroopers were flown over the Straits of Messina, which are about fifteen miles across, and dropped on the other side to secure a beachhead. My father’s regiment was transported by an American plane whose pilot and navigator were so incompetent, the whole regiment ended up being dropped, at night, 200 miles out to sea. Since they were all carrying over 60 lbs of gear, they all sank like stones, and only those who could get their packs off underwater and swim twenty or thirty feet to the surface survived. And once they were there, they had to tread water for eight hours until a rescue vessel picked them up the following morning.

This one incident produced in my father a life-long scathing contempt for the American military, and in particular for its navigational skills. I remember watching incidents from the Vietnam war with him on TV in the late 1960s. His assessment of what was going on there, and what was likely to happen in future, was derived entirely from his experiences of this one unfortunate incident when a navigation error killed a large number of his friends and comrades.

Incidentally, if you ever see an old newsreel of the allies invading Italy by storming up a beach, one of the figures wading ashore will be my father. It was staged well after the event (the cameras on the shore are, of course, a giveaway). Having failed to arrive in Italy by air on account of a navigation error, he eventually arrived there courtesy of a fake propaganda movie.

He was equally contemptuous of ‘The Guards’, the elite and somewhat aristocratic regiments of the British army. After a long and fierce battle in which several of his own regiment were wounded or killed, he walked back to his base camp to find a contingent of Guards, who were supposed to be helping out in the battle, cleaning and polishing their equipment. Their presence in the battle would, he said, have considerably reduced their own casualties, but for some reason, they never left their base. From that moment on, he called them ‘the rearguards’, and whenever they appeared in ceremonial parades on TV, he would loudly pour scorn on them, saying that they were never interested in doing any real fighting because they were always too busy polishing their equipment.

Year by year the prejudices accumulated, and once they were there, no new facts could assail them. In the 1980s, for example, he used to drive from England to Spain fairly regularly. His progress would often be impeded by striking French farmers who would hold up passing motorists by dumping their produce on the highway. After several such interruptions, my father started a one-man boycott of all French agricultural products. He refused for the rest of his life to eat anything that was grown in France, and if French wine, cheese or fruit appeared on any table he was eating at, they would most likely trigger a lecture from him on the evil ways of French farmers.

Sometime during the war, I think it must have been before he was transferred to the parachute regiment, he did an army course in driving and engine maintenance. He became a skilled mechanic and passed an exam that allowed him to drive any vehicle, including large trucks and even tanks, on public roads. Decades later, in the 1970s I think, I remember him fighting the vehicle licensing authority to retain his right to drive a tank on a public highway. He was then in his mid-50s and hadn’t been in the army for about thirty years, so it was highly unlikely that he would find a tank to drive, but it was a matter of principle for him.

He told me, ‘I am licensed to drive a tank, with no time limit indicated. I don’t see why they should take that right away just because I haven’t got a tank to drive.’

Amazingly, he won his bureaucratic battle and kept his tank license till the day he died.

His mechanical knowledge came in useful when he pulled off a prank in Italy. A general had decreed that soldiers were not permitted to attend a brothel in a nearby town. The decision was not popular with the troops. I have no idea whether my father was a client or not, but he somehow contrived to steal the general’s jeep and drive it to the brothel, where he disabled the engine so that it could not be driven away. It was parked there, in full public view, with the general’s insignia prominently displayed, for the whole of the next day until a member of the general’s staff managed to fix the engine and drive it away.

There was another escapade that I only found about at his funeral when one of members of his regiment turned up and passed it on to my brother-in-law.

As the Allies made their way up Italy, it became a job of the parachute regiment to drop troops behind the retreating enemy lines and blow up facilities that might help the Axis forces. Once that job was done, the paratroopers had to walk or fight their way home, through the enemy lines, and wait for their next assignment. They were not really explosives experts, but they made up for their deficiencies in that department by packing huge amounts of dynamite against the designated objects, detonating them, and hoping for the best. Given their lack of expertise, they were usually equipped with enough explosive to try again if their first attempt failed.

My father, boarding a plane during the war. This photo of him first appeared in an issue of Time-Life.

In this particular story my dad’s crew managed to blow up their target first time, possibly to their own surprise. They took their extra explosives to the nearest Italian town, which they knew had been abandoned by its inhabitants since it was only a few kilometers from the front line. They headed for the town bar, helped themselves to a few free drinks and then, under the influence of the alcohol, decided to rob the town bank with the rest of the dynamite. They blew the safe door and found millions of lira inside. They stuffed the money into sacks, headed off to the countryside and buried the sacks in a secret place. They knew they couldn’t carry them back to their own line. Their alcohol-fuelled plan was to come back after the war to reclaim their booty.

With the treasure buried, they went back to the bar to celebrate their new status as lira millionaires. Everyone got drunk and passed out in the bar. The next morning, when they all woke up, no one could remember where the money had been hidden. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had since the wartime liras had no value once the war was over. I am not surprised that my dad didn’t mention this episode at the family dinner table. It was hardly the kind of example to inspire his children to grow up into honest and worthy citizens. I have to say, somewhat guiltily, that my opinion of him went up, rather then down, when I heard this story at his funeral.

When the war ended in Europe, all the members of my father’s regiment put money in a fund (technically known as a ‘tontine’) with the stipulation that the last living survivor would collect all the money. When he passed away in 2000 there were about six other people still in with a chance of winning.

My father’s war didn’t end in 1945. His superiors, having spotted his intelligence, gave him a desk job facilitating the demobilisation of all the other soldiers who were going home. Apparently, he did that job so well, he ended up being an administrator in Palestine, which at that time was under a British mandate. His principal function there, he told me once, was to help British politicians get away with lying in parliament. The British had troops in Palestine, but were trying to conceal the extent of their commitment there by pretending that there were far fewer than there actually were. If an opposition Conservative member of parliament tabled a question about how many British troops were in Palestine, notice of this would come through to my father, who would then arrange for most of the British troops to get in their trucks and drive to neighbouring Jordan for a few hours.

While they were there, the Labour minister would stand up and declare, quite truthfully, ‘As I speak, I can tell you that we only have 200 [or however many would be politically acceptable] soldiers in Palestine’.

As soon as he sat down my father would arrange to bring all the other soldiers back from Jordan to Palestine. Not surprisingly, this job gave him a deep and abiding contempt for all politicians, particularly Labour ones – another prejudice that lasted for the rest of his life.

When my father finally returned to civilian life, he decided to pursue a career in gardening. He did a diploma course at Kew gardens and then tried his hand as a smallholder, growing vegetables. It didn’t work, and that particular project had to be abandoned.

His professional horticulture training gave him a deep knowledge of plants and trees. When I was a small boy, I remember being taken on walks around my neighbourhood with my father pointing out all the trees and naming them one by one. ‘This is willow, this is ash, this is sycamore,’ and so on. The knowledge stuck and more than forty years later, as I walked the same neighbourhood after my father’s funeral, I saw the same trees and walked past them all hearing my father’s voice saying ‘This is willow, this is ash, this is sycamore’.

When I was about ten my class teacher gave everyone in my class a rolled-up sheet of card and asked us all to collect tree leaves, tape them to the card, and then write the names of each leaf underneath.

‘This is a job for dad,’ I thought. He knew every tree for miles around.

He took me on a leaf-collecting tour and we came back with a prodigiously impressive haul. He spelled out the names of all the ones I didn’t know as I taped them to the card. When I took my card to class, I found out that I had about four times as many varieties as anyone else, and even the teachers hadn’t heard the names of some of the trees I had collected specimens from. My card was put on display in the school corridor as an educational aid to everyone else for the rest of the school year.

In the late 1940s my grandfather, Herbert Godman, was posted to Stoke-on-Trent for a three-year stretch as a Methodist minister. While he was there my father met Elsie, his future wife and my mother. She too came from a family with strong Methodist connections. Both her father and her grandfather were lay officials in the church. They were married in April 1950.

My parents wedding day, April 1950

My mother had trained as a physiotherapist, specialising in physically-handicapped children. She took a job at a residential school where such children were boarders, and my father took a job there managing the school’s extensive gardens. The school, known as Horton Lodge, was about twelve miles from Stoke-on-Trent in rolling farmland that bordered on nearby moors. The grounds of the school were gorgeous and I imagine my father had to put in a lot of work keeping them in good condition. However, a crisis at the school precipitated a change of career.

One winter, while it was raining heavily, the head teacher came out to talk to my father.

‘All the teachers are down with flu this week. Can you come inside and look after the children for a few days until someone gets well enough to teach them again.’

My father told me that after a couple of days of telling the children stories and playing with them, the thought occurred to him: ‘This is more fun than working outside in the middle of winter. Maybe I should switch to teaching.’

He stayed in the classroom and tried out teaching for a while. Finding it more to his liking than gardening, he stayed in the classroom and worked as an unqualified teacher for a few years. In those days it was possible to work as a teacher with no qualifications at all, which seems somewhat odd, but he continued like this until 1958 when he decided it was time to get a proper teaching qualification. He went to college and obtained a one-year teaching diploma. He was a very smart man who nowadays would undoubtedly have gone to a good university, but in that era universities were expensive, and very few people went to them. Britain didn’t have the equivalent of the US GI Bill that sent returning servicemen to college. Many returning British soldiers who had joined the army straight from school ended up in undemanding jobs that didn’t tax their brains too much because a university education was simply not an option for them.

My father joined the college rugby team and found that, even at the age of thirty-five, he could still compete with all the kids who were coming to the college from school. He always prided himself on his strength and toughness. In later years he played competitive badminton until he was about fifty-five.

In 1953, the year I was born, my parents moved out of Horton Lodge and into a house they had bought. It was a ramshackle building with an acre of land that was just on the edge of the city. They paid about 2,000 pounds for it. The property had a pigsty with pigs, a hen house with hens, a duck pond with ducks, bee hives with bees, apple and pear trees, and a few nice rows of gooseberry bushes. My father liked the idea of messing about as a smallholder in his spare time, but there was an ulterior reason for taking on all this extra work. In 1950s England many foods were still rationed. If you had your own supply, you could supplement the rations or trade your food production with shopkeepers. I have dim memories of pigs and chickens in the garden, but the whole farming operation came to an end when I was about four. It was too much work to keep up, and by then food was no longer rationed. Bit by bit the smallholding mutated into a suburban garden, but for years and years the hen houses and the pigsties were great places for me and my friends to play in.

My parents with me and my elder sister Geraldine, sometime around 1955

My mother continued to work at Horton Lodge until she retired, but my father gave up his work there in the mid-1950s and took jobs in other schools. When I was about three or four my father would tie me to the back of his motor bike and take me to the nursery class in his own school. My father taught in three local schools but was probably happiest at the third, Hillside, a school about a mile from where we lived. He worked there from the late 60s until the early 80s when he took early retirement.

My younger sister Megan's christening. I am leaning on my father, and to his left is his father. My mother is holding Megan, and to her right are her parents and my sister Geraldine.

The fashions and trends of modern education failed to make any impression whatsoever on my father. He thought that primary school children (in the UK that’s ages 5-11) should be taught basic literacy and numeracy. He made it his personal mission to see that no one left his school without being able to read, write, spell and do basic arithmetic. This might sound eminently reasonable to some, but he was bucking the trends of a system that was progressively allowing children to learn by themselves in their own time. He contrived to take over the oldest class (ten to eleven year olds) and gave them a grueling one-year crash course in the basics of the three R’s. This approach didn’t make him very popular with either the pupils or the other staff, but I know that at least some of his pupils thought it had been worth it.

I was talking to him once when a group of boys who looked about seventeen came up to him and said, ‘Mr Godman, we hated it in your class, but you were the only person who ever taught us anything. Now we wish that we had had more teachers like you.’

His nickname at school was Napoleon, which should give some idea of his methods. His reputation as a hard taskmaster in class and a strict disciplinarian stood him in good stead in another incident that took place in our neighbourhood. He was driving home from his school late one evening when he saw a group of late-teenage boys attacking a woman inside a launderette. He knew he had to go in and offer assistance, but at the same time he knew that he would probably end up getting attacked as well.

There is a famous story of Abraham Lincoln stopping to help a pig to get out of a ditch it was stuck in. He ruined his clothes but afterwards said, ‘I didn’t do it to help the pig. I did it because I knew I couldn’t live with my conscience if I walked by and ignored it.’

It was in the same spirit that my father walked into the launderette that night. He knew the woman who ran the place; he expected to be attacked himself, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to live with the thought of driving by and ignoring the whole incident.

He walked in, and for a couple of seconds everyone froze. Then one of the boys, looking very embarrassed, blurted out, ‘Sorry Mr Godman, we won’t do it again,’ and the whole gang fled. He told me later that they must have been former pupils of his, but he never found out who they were.

My father did actually care for the well being of these kids. For him it was a case of tough love. The children mostly came from poor, working-class backgrounds; they had usually spent a couple of years running wild and learning little in the lower classes of the school; and he knew that at the age of fifteen most of them would be leaving school and hunting for unskilled jobs. He just wanted to make sure that they could deal with this world by being functionally numerate and literate.

To compensate for this strict regime in class, he also put in a lot of hours on extra-curricular activities, taking the children on trips that he organised, and he was usually involved in one or more of the school’s sport’s teams. He ran the school football (soccer) team for a while, but he found his most rewarding sporting niche in developing cross-country running teams. When I was young I found cross-country running to be something of a punishment. It wasn’t something I would ever volunteer for. In Hillside, though, everyone, particularly the girls, wanted to be on his team. I never understood how he could motivate these children to tolerate the arduous training programme he put them through, but I do know that every year, almost every girl in every class would beg to be on his running team. Perhaps they did it because they knew they were signing up to be on a winning team; there were not many opportunities for girls that age and in that community to shine publicly and demonstrate that they were the best. Being on my dad’s team was one such option.

The key to their success was ‘the hill’. The school, aptly named ‘Hillside’, was situated at the bottom of a U-shaped glacial valley. U-shaped valleys get their name from their very steep sides and their rounded bottoms. My dad had his girls run up the hill behind the school again and again and again and again. It paid enormous dividends in the races, particularly on the hilly courses. I once went to see his girls strut their stuff on a hilly course a few miles from our home. It was two laps of a course, and each lap ended with a steep uphill climb. It was pouring with rain that day, and the wind was blowing the rain into the girls’ faces as they ascended the hill to the finish line. At that time I was a bit of an athlete myself: I had played rugby for eight years, had rowed for my college, and a couple of years before I had been county shot putt champion. However, I doubted whether I would have been able to beat his nine and ten year-old-girls up that hill, particularly second time around. They were awesome. I watched one race – I think it was for the eight-year-olds. About twenty different schools had sent six runners each, with the teams’ best four individual positions determining the final result. At the bottom of the hill second time around there was a group of about twenty runners still in contention, including most of my dad’s team. The Hillside crew leaned into the wind and rain and effortlessly skimmed over the mud on the final ascent. The girls behind got slower and slower and ended up looking like they were wading through treacle. My dad’s top four crested the hill in a line with triumphant, almost ecstatic, grins on their faces. It was another clean sweep for the team. This was not a one-off. Apparently, much to the consternation of the opposing teams and coaches, they did this week in, week out, in every local event they entered. They invariably won the city championships, and almost always won the county events. One or two girls would usually go on to run in the national age-group events. I think he had a national age-group champion in his second year.

An educational decision my father made when I was nine had a major impact on my own academic career. In those days (this was the early 1960s) children in the final year of their primary education took an exam, known as the ‘eleven plus’, whose result determined which secondary school they would attend. About 10% went on to what were called ‘grammar schools’, while the rest went to ‘secondary moderns’. Both were state run. The grammar schools were more academic and children there would normally be expected to go on to university or some equivalent vocational training.

Sometimes bright children took the eleven plus a year early in order to skip a year. I was one of them. I passed the exam and was given a place at a grammar school about six miles from my home. My father, though, made me do the final year of primary school again in order to take the exam a year later and get a higher score. He knew there was a better school that I had a good chance of getting into. It was called ‘Newcastle High School’ and it was located in the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme on the other side of my city. Stoke-on-Trent, my city, had a population of about 300,000 and each year Newcastle High School would take twelve boys (it was a single sex school) from the city, if their eleven plus results were good enough. The following year I took the exam again and did well enough to become one of those twelve. I received an outstanding education there which culminated in my winning a place at Oxford University. Thanks dad, that was a great decision.

When I was about eight or nine, I came home from school and asked my dad, ‘Are we Catholics or Protestants?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘We are having history lessons at school,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes the Protestants seem to be winning the wars, and sometimes the Catholics. I just wanted to know which side we were on.’

The lessons had been about Tudor and Stuart England, where the religion of the country seemed to change every time a new monarch ascended to the throne. I had no idea what a Protestant or a Catholic might be, but I assumed we had to be one or the other.

Dad asked me, ‘Do you know what Protestants and Catholics believe in?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘they never mentioned that at school. We only learned about the fights they got into.’

‘If you don’t know what a Protestant or a Catholic is,’ said my dad, ‘then you are neither. When you get older, you can find out what Protestants and Catholics believe in. You can then choose which one you want to be. And if you don’t like the two choices on offer, you can choose to be neither and either be something else or nothing at all. These are things you have to choose and decide for yourself when you know all the facts.’

My father was a lay official in the Methodist church, a Protestant sect; his father had been a minister in the same church; all of my mother’s relatives were church-going Methodists; an uncle on my mother’s side was a Methodist minister, and both of his sons ended up in the same profession. Yet here he was, telling me that I was not a Protestant, and never would be until I decided for myself which religious beliefs, if any, I wanted to subscribe to. A few more dads like him in Northern Ireland might have spared that country from generations of religious and sectarian conflict.

In retrospect, I have come to regard this as a key encounter in my relationship with my father. In later years, when I dropped out of university and went to India, his friends and relatives would ask him what he thought.

His invariable reply was, ‘I taught my children to think for themselves and not accept other people’s opinions. So, when they started to do that, I had no right to object or complain.’

He never understood what I was doing in India, or why I chose to spend my life here, but he did regard it as a triumph for his educational system that I had thought things through for myself, rejected my parents’ lifestyle and beliefs, and then put my convictions into action. While I never did anything that caused him to boast about my achievements (‘My son, the doctor,’ and so on), he did seem to be proud of the fact that I had gone my own way and not unthinkingly accepted the received doctrine of his society and his church.

To develop this theme a little more, there is one more family story that I have to tell. When I was sixteen and my elder sister Geraldine was seventeen, she got pregnant. In that era, and with my family’s religions background, the only approved option was marriage. My father made all the arrangements, and even bought a house for Geraldine and her future husband to live in. It was a cheap place in a street that was about to be condemned. My father knew that if the local council demolished the house, it would be obliged to provide government accommodation for the couple. It was really a back-door way of getting my sister to jump the waiting list on the government housing programme.

On the day of the wedding, when all the arrangements were in place, my father drove Geraldine to the church.

He stopped the car at one point and told her, ‘I have made all the arrangements for this wedding. I have bought you a house and set up everything for your married life because it was my duty to do this. However, I understand that this may not be what you want yourself. If you want to pull out of it right now, before it is too late, I can take you to the train station and you can go away for a while, to anywhere you want, till the fuss dies down. You don’t have to face the people here. I will go in and explain what has happened.’

If this was a soap opera, this would be the closing moments of an episode. The music would come, the credits would roll, and everyone would be left wondering what Geraldine would decide.

In the real world Geraldine thought, ‘Why didn’t he give me this option last week? Why does he have to tell me this while we are standing virtually outside the church door?’

With everyone inside the church, waiting for her to walk down the aisle, she was too embarrassed to call the whole thing off. She went ahead with it, even though she felt that she had been pressurised into the marriage.

This was a classic illustration of how my dad’s mind worked. He had a strong sense of duty and obligation. He had what nowadays is called a ‘moral compass’. In his own mind he knew what was right, and he acted accordingly. But, at the same time, he knew that, where others were involved, they had a right to think things through for themselves, come to their own conclusions, and then act in what they thought were their own best interests. He might not agree with their choices, but he would always defend their right to make their own decisions.

If I could take the liberty of framing him in a Hindu context, I would call him a ‘man of dharma’. He knew what his duties were towards his family, the children he taught, and the community he lived in, and he fulfilled those duties to the best of his ability. He would, for example, always become involved in the Parent Teacher’s Association of whatever schools my two sisters and I were attending, and more often than not he would end up being a secretary or a treasurer of them. He was the sort of person who publicly exuded a quiet well-spoken authority that people trusted. After a few minutes of speaking in a room full of strangers, someone would usually decide that this man should be on the committee of whatever event he was attending. He was a lay official in the church he attended, Sunday school teacher in another; he was the teacher’s union rep at his school, and on the one occasion he was summoned for jury duty, the other people there took one look at him and appointed him foreman.

He could be publicly outspoken and unyielding on matters of what he considered to be ‘principle’. When our city council tried to save money by issuing instructions that all schools should save money by cutting down on winter heating bills, the thermostats were turned down and some cold lessons ensued. My father checked the rule book and found that a minimum temperature was prescribed for all schools in the city. He put thermometers in all the classrooms. When he discovered that the temperature was below the minimum prescribed throughout the school, he called a teacher’s meeting and persuaded them to close the school down and not reopen it until the local council agreed to stick to the temperatures stipulated in the rule book. The council backed down and all the city’s schools were ordered to keep their temperatures above the required minimum.

One more incident springs to mind. Sometime during the 1960s he publicly resigned his membership of the Methodist Church during a church meeting. The Methodist Church was affiliated to an organisation called the World Council of Churches, and some of its money went to support that group. My father discovered that The World Council of Churches was giving out money to what it termed ‘freedom fighters’ in Africa. These were organisations such as the African National Congress which was fighting the apartheid government in South Africa. My father had no objection to sending aid to Africa; he just objected to the funds being used to finance acts of violence. His political views were always decidedly right wing. When he found out that a tiny fraction of his church membership fee was ending up with such groups, he stood up at a church meeting and said that he wasn’t going to belong to any organisation whose funds were used to aid what he called ‘terrorists’. I have no idea how this particular issue was resolved, but I admired him for taking a principled stand that seemed to upset everyone in his church.

In the early 1980s the British government discovered that it had trained far too many teachers, an administrative blunder that resulted in there being no jobs for many of the young teachers leaving college. The government’s solution was to offer older teachers a cash bonus and a full pension to retire early. My father jumped at the opportunity, partly because he was tired of dealing with city officials who were trying to interfere in the running of schools, and partly because he wanted to move to a warmer climate that would be kinder to his chronic rheumatism. He and my mother both retired and went to live on the south coast of Spain.

In his retirement my father used his considerable intellect and his organisational skills to become an amateur lawyer for all the British expatriates who needed help with buying houses, making wills, getting permission to build, and so on. He learned the intricacies of Spanish law, as it affected foreign residents, and he also mastered the labyrinthine ways and politics of the local town hall where all deals and contracts were scrutinised and approved. Not being a qualified lawyer, he wasn’t allowed to charge for his services, but he did allow his clients to take him out for dinner once, and once only, at the conclusion of every successful deal. Since he had usually saved them hundreds or thousands of pounds, they were more than happy to wine and dine him at the most expensive restaurants on the Costa del Sol. If he had family staying with him, they would be included in the deal as well. I visited my parents there in 1983. In an average week we were probably taken out three or four times. By that time all the big restaurants knew my dad, and his party always received special, preferential treatment.

In 1990 my mother passed away unexpectedly after a long illness that did not at any time appear to be life-threatening. They had been married for about forty years. About a year later, much to everyone’s surprise, my father announced that he was planning to marry a woman called Pat, whom I remembered as one of our neighbours when I was growing up. My father, aware that his family might think this a bit too soon after Elsie’s death, wrote to me and asked my opinion.

I wrote back: ‘You are old enough to decide for yourself what you want to do with the rest of your life. You don’t need my permission or approval to get married again.’

Dad and Pat married and lived together, mostly on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent, until he passed away in 2000.

Marrying Pat in 1991

In 1991 the two of them came to visit me in Tiruvannamalai, the first time that my father had ever been to see me here. I showed him around the ashram, took him to places such as Skandashram and the Arunachaleswara Temple, and tried to describe what I was doing here. My father was a smart man. If he had taken the trouble, he could have listened, asked some intelligent questions, and discovered for himself what I was doing with my life. However, I soon discovered that he had no interest in briefing himself on what his son was doing. He never asked any questions, never showed any interest in the things I had done here, and whenever he initiated a conversation, he would talk about events going on in England: what the neighbours and relatives were doing, how the local football teams were faring, and so on. Information about Tiruvannamalai and Ramana just seemed to slide off him like water off a duck’s back. I decided eventually that he had come to India to see me, his son, and not to get information about what I was doing. He had brought an English bubble with him, and he wanted us all to live in that bubble while he was here. It was a little bit sad and depressing. All children want their parents to make some effort to understand what they are doing, even if they don’t necessarily approve, but my father, on his first and only visit to my world, didn’t even want to try.

Me and my father in England, 1999.

Towards the end of his visit I took him on pradakshina. He managed the whole thirteen kilometer circuit. This was an impressive feat because it was a hot day; my father was almost seventy years old, and he had had a complete hip replacement a few months before.

At the end of the walk I prostrated to the mountain and said, ‘He is not my responsibility any more. He’s Yours.’

I never tried to talk to him again about Ramana or anything else that was important to me. In all our future conversations and meetings we stuck to his agenda and interests.

He was a good man, a righteous man, a man who always strove to do what was best for his family, but for the last twenty-five years of his life he could never bridge the cultural and religious chasm that existed between his world and mine.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

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