THE FACTS OF VIMALANANDA’S dying are as easy to recount as they were tortuous to live through. Somehow I succeeded at cremating him at Bombay’s Banganga Smashan, just as eight years and three months previously he had prophesied that I would. And, just as he had promised all those years ago, his wife and children did not come to watch the pyre, for their egos still smarted from his failure to attend his daughter’s wedding. As the flames devoured him the mournful tones of his last request—“Precious Lord, Take My Hand," sung by Jim Reeves–ascended toward the heavens with the smoke. I kept rewinding the tape until when it finally snapped I concluded that he had had enough. Thereafter I sat silently, dreading the moment that the fire would die down and I would have to leave Vimalananda’s hands be hind me for good.
When Vimalananda decided to teach a lesson he was always prepared to suffer himself to drive his lesson home. His passage and its aftermath were the final lessons he could teach. They were delivered them with all the sever ity he could muster. Though Guru Maharaj shed no outer tears over his disci ple’s end I knew that Vimalananda’s stiletto had indeed hit home. I visited Guru Maharaj in his southern eyrie at least once a year thereafter and on each occasion saw him shrinking further away from interest in external reality. Despite all the efforts of his well-meaning devotees he finally became totally fed up with physical existence and left his body on June 6, 1993.
Guru Maharaj’s withdrawal from the world shocked but did not really sur prise me, for Vimalananda was one of the few reasons he had for living. His de parture did not blindside me, as Vimalananda’s had. Though I had watched Vimalananda slowly deteriorate over the previous months I had also witnessed his sudden retreat from death’s door on so many other occasions that I was cer tain that he would escape the noose again-or at the very least, rise again
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within a few hours of depature. When he did not I was thoroughly devastated, and passed the next several months in stupefied disengagement from life.
But life goes on. Though stunned I had to deal with that event’s fallout. Soon it dawned on me that Vimalananda’s death was not his death. He had been in such a hurry to go that he had elected to exit by suffering through the karmas of one Mr. Writer, a 99-year-old Parsi who wished to live to be a hun dred. Mr. Writer was the uncle of Fanny Sodabottliwala who, with her hus band Pesi, had served Vimalananda diligently on Mr. Writer’s behalf that he might achieve his goal. Pesi and Fanny put on an excellent show, spending money freely on Vimalananda and on me without even an insinuation that they considered the sums they contributed to be loans instead of gifts. Less than a week after Vimalananda’s cremation, however, Fanny shocked me with her sobbing over how much they had spent on him. Pesi, who had ap parently itemized each expenditure, was moaning over how his business had not developed as speedily as Vimalananda had promised. Though a few months after Vimlananda’s demise Mr. Writer did make it to 100 and then died, the Sodabottliwalas showed not the slightest thanks for Vimalananda’s largesse toward either to her uncle or to her son Farokh, munificence which he had conferred at the expense of his own life.
Miss Bambhani also popped up to claim that she had paid Vimalananda more money than she was able to extract work from him. Bashermal, mean while, who Vimalananda used to call “my mature, mellow wine," who had been the most“senior" of Vimalananda’s spiritual “children," underwent an inflation. Having concluded that Roshni and I should now obey him in the stead of our dear departed he attempted to impress us into submission by the unskillful means of imitating Vimalananda’s evening talks. As neither of us could withstand the agonizing boredom of these well-meaning chats, we were overjoyed that the simple expedient of infuriating him caused him to give up on us as hopeless cases. His parting blessing was to direct his disciple Mundromal, the lawyer who was handling Vimalananda’s will, to mishandle that document in such a way that Roshni, the executor and sole heir, ended up with nothing to inherit.
Kalubhai, Doshi, Harshbhai, and some of the others continued coming round to Roshni’s place for a while to pay their respects to Vimalananda’s photo until Mundromal’s son began to claim that he was channeling Vima lananda’s spirit. He set up one of the rooms in his flat to resemble Vima lananda’s room, complete with an easy chair resembling the one into which Vimalananda had used to ease himself. Most of the “spiritual children” now shifted their focus to these channeling sessions. Roshni and I were also in vited to attend, but both of us were certain that Vimalananda would never
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Epilogue
have deigned to tenant the body of such a mediocre individual. This certainty attained rock-like status when we learned that Mundromal’s son had even kept a little dog, like Vimalananda’s Lizoo, for the channeling sessions. But while Lizoo was a Pekinese, this canine was a Pomeranian. Vimalananda would never have sunk so low as to possess a Pom! I can hear his indignant bark now: “A Pom! What would I want with such a miserable breed of dog?”
Vimalananda’s great hope, Redstone, died of equine cough in 1984. As ex ecutor Roshni then disposed of the remaining horses, keeping only Malika, Meherunnissa’s daughter, racing in the name of Vimalananda’s estate, for it was her desire to keep Vimalananda’s colors active at the racecourse as long as she could. Ramakda went immediately to stud and produced two foals for the estate, both of which were sold. After winning a number of races, Malika was sold to a stud farm not long back, and then there were none.
Mamrabahen and Jhendu Kumar continue their interest in racing. In my capacity as Racing Agent for the Estate of the Late Mr. Vimalananda I began to accompany Roshni to the Paddock before races in which Malika was run ning, but I lost interest in the whole show on the afternoon that the disrepu table Bapsi succeeded in rubbing suggestively against my leg as I strode through a crowd toward the Ring. Though Vimalananda had once declared that his cock would not get hard even if she jumped up and down on it, I had at one time thought she was rather cute, in a slatternly sort of way. On that day, though, I saw exactly what he meant, for when I looked into her eyes I saw naked, sticky lust, the kind of lust I had once seen in the “come hither” eyes of a debauched young male in Morocco. It was a clandestine, tawdry lust, one that smells of a rarely-aired room in which semen has been regularly and furtively ejaculated. Taking her frottage as a clear omen of what sort of circumstances lay in store for me if I continued my pilgrimages to the track I turned my energies elsewhere.
I continued for some years to make occasional tours of Bombay’s stables to chew the fat with my friends there. Whenever I showed my face everyone who knew me invariably made me stop to reminisce about the days when it was a second home for me and the old man.” My visits ceased when the great doping scandal that rocked the Club to its very foundations closed those sta bles to casual visitors. It was a good time to escape; racing in today’s India is growing hazardous to life and limb. In 1996 one famous jockey was threat ened with death if he did not hook a horse and the daughter of another was kidnaped after he failed to boot home the favorite in a prestigious race. In 1997 two gunmen shot one bullet into the ground and two past the ear of Irish jockey Mark Gallagher outside the Bangalore Turf Club Gate. His ear required fifteen stịtches to be made whole.
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
Like every individual I create my own universe among the many universes that coexist on this terrestrial globe. Like everyone else I continually find for myself the environment that my karmas require of me. The racecourse was a sizable slice of my universe for almost a decade, but when those karmas were done I left it to create a new cosmos for myself. Vimalananda remains a ma jor part of this new universe and always will be, just as his Junior Guru Maha raj and Lord Shiva are ongoing residents therein. They are three of my constant companions on the long road of my life.
One of the daily practices Vimalananda suggested to me is contained in a verse from the Shiva Manasa Puja (“The Mental Worship of Shiva”) that he used to recite each morning when he lived alone on Mount Girnar. In trans lation it goes something like this:
You are the soul, O Lord of the Mountain-Born. The body’s pranas are Your attendants, the body Your home; The sequence of enjoyment of sensory objects is Your worship, and sleep Your samadhi. All my movement is Your circumnambulation, All praise is Your hymns; Whatever karmas I may perform, O Happiness-Bestower,
I offer them all, without exception, to you as my worship. Parvati, the “Mountain-Born,” is the Kundalini Shakti, born from the range of mountains that the vertebrae form as they string together into the spine. Her Lord is Lord Shiva, the indwelling soul. Spiritual development oc curs as Kundalini relinquishes her hold on the limited self and, turning her face toward her Lord, begins to act not from desire for personal gain but for the greater glory of That Which is Real. This creates true happiness. So long as I continue to realign my own Kundalini toward that soul I know that someone will correct every mistake I make and, dragging me out of whatever ditch in which I may have dropped, will return me to the path. This was the parting blessing of my friend-philosopher-guide, the token of his Aghori’s love, the benediction he could bestow because he had so utterly devoted him self to offering himself to his Self. May the blessings of Shiva and Shakti at tend everyone who seeks honestly to live up to the words of this verse, as Vimalananda did all the days of his extraordinary life.
And may those blessings fill them, as they filled Vimalananda, with the endless plenty of unconditional love.
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