And Laughter Fell From the Sky (26 page)

“So far, so good.”

“I have been coming here annually for years,” Nandan said. “I am a physician in Chennai. My life is full of stress, noise, crowds.” He spoke slowly, reclining comfortably in his chair. “I come to Auroville for a rest. It is so peaceful here. My wife and my children find it dull, but I love the quiet.”

Abhay was surprised. Didn’t Nandan realize that Auroville was not some sort of retreat or resort? But maybe to Nandan, Auroville was just a place with a lot of trees and fresh air.

“Tell me about yourself,” Nandan invited. “Where are you from? How did you decide to visit Auroville?” He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table, looking expectantly at Abhay, as though his only concern in the world was Abhay’s life.

There was something so calm and friendly about his eyes that Abhay started talking, and soon he was telling him everything—growing up in Ohio, his parents’ expectations of him, his time at Rising Star, his move to Portland, and now the visit to Auroville.

“I just want to find a place to fit in.” Abhay frowned up at the blue sky through the leaves above his head.

“And you see that every place has its faults.”

“I’m not expecting perfection.”

“You want to belong someplace, and you find yourself always an outsider. You are like an oyster.”

“An oyster?”

Nandan curved his hands into two closed shells. “You have a pearl inside, but you do not know it. You are searching everywhere for something that you already have, but you do not want to open up.”

Abhay had no idea what Nandan was talking about. He wasn’t reluctant to open up. He was trying everything. Nandan was apparently like so many Indians—eager to give advice to strangers.

After breakfast, Abhay rented a bicycle at the shed near the reception hut to go see Kianga. The bicycle turned out to be a rusty, one-speed vehicle. It was better than nothing. He hopped on and started out slowly over the earth road.

Immediately, he was lost. He hadn’t remembered such a plenitude of red roads the night before. According to his map, he was to connect up with the main road and circle around to the other side of the Matrimandir grounds, where he’d pick up another path to Kianga’s farm. He had no idea how to reach the main road. There were paths meandering everywhere through the trees, with no road signs anywhere. He struck out along one track and encountered no one at all for several minutes. He was already sweating in the humidity. He saw someone walking along—a dark Indian man bent under a load of sticks on his back—and he shouted, “How do I get to the main road?”

The man looked at him quizzically. Maybe he didn’t speak English.

“Matrimandir,” Abhay tried.

The man pointed back the way Abhay had come, so Abhay turned around and tried again. After a few more false starts, he reached the main road and saw the shining gold globe of the Matrimandir in the distance. He kept this on his right and pedaled around the road surrounding the walled grounds of the temple. At the next crossroads he saw a series of road signs. Abhay followed the arrow for “Guidance” and kept pedaling and pedaling among the trees. He didn’t see any more signs, nor the landmarks Kianga had mentioned. He approached a hut along the side of the road, with a rooster tied by the leg to one of the support poles. A woman in a sari sat in the doorway of the hut with a baby on her lap. He wondered if these were Aurovillians, or a village enclave in the middle of Auroville.

“Guidance?” he asked.

The woman inclined her head in the direction he was going, so he continued. In this way, by pedaling into the unknown and asking anyone he came across, he rode into a clearing with a brown barnlike structure and a wide brick-sided well. He pushed down the kickstand of his bike and looked for Kianga. No one was around. In a field nearby were a cow and two calves. Auroville was so different from the rest of India. There were so few people, and many of the people who were here were Europeans. The place was not exactly desolate. Not lonely. Full of solitude, maybe.

As he stood there, wondering how he might find Kianga, she appeared along a path under some small trees with umbrellalike leaves. She was tanned and muscled, wearing a pair of shorts and a faded tank top. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and one of her calves was smeared with mud.

She walked over to him silently and gave him a hug and kiss. She smelled musky with sweat, and felt warm and firm.

“How do you like Auroville?” She spoke quietly, stepping back and observing him.

“I’m not sure yet. It’s so much bigger than I thought it would be. How do you like it?”

“Wonderful.” She passed her gaze over the landscape. “It’s a magical place. People are really committed to experimenting in all sorts of ways.” She headed closer to the well, and he followed. Water glimmered far down the brick sides. “This fills up after the monsoon, and we use the water all year for irrigation.”

“There aren’t too many people here,” Abhay remarked. “I thought a farm would be full of workers.”

“It’s Sunday morning,” Kianga reminded him. “Tomorrow it’ll be a lot busier.”

They walked between rows of papaya trees—those were the ones with the umbrellalike leaves—and small banana trees with their huge rectangular leaves. The earth here was dark, amended with compost, probably. “We interplant the trees with crops.” She pointed out rows of low plants. “Right now we have lettuce, basil, and pineapples.” He had always thought pineapples grew on tall palm trees. Here he saw low circular structures of spiky leaves, like a yucca or cactus, in the centers of which appeared small reddish pineapples.

They walked slowly in single file. He was behind her, and he gazed at the symmetrical, delicate tattoo draped over her shoulders and upper back. The air was still and warm. Black and green butterflies flitted past. Abhay and Kianga stopped to watch, holding still, trying to see if the insects would land so they could get a better look at their beauty.

Another field was filled with cream-colored flowers with a dark red center. “This is a kind of hibiscus,” Kianga explained. “We make a jam out of the fruit.” She plucked what looked like an orange bud, pulled off a fleshy petal, and gave him one. It tasted sour and fruity. He started to feel a calmness seeping into him, from the dark earth and the penetrating heat of the sun.

As they wandered among the plants on the brown paths, he didn’t see anyone else on the farm at all. It was like a Garden of Eden, with the blue sky, the rich earth, the green plants. It was so strange to be in this Indian place, in this humid, tropical climate, without the culture of Indians around him—no aunties and grandmothers cajoling him to eat more, no uncles disapproving of his lack of career, no pushy crowds, no noisy temple rituals.

“We have about eighteen acres here,” Kianga said. “We keep cows for the milk and manure. In the corporate farming structure, animals are raised miles away from crops. On the animal farms, no one knows what to do with the manure, and on the cropland, they have to use artificial fertilizers for the soil.”

In the next field, past a gnarled, spreading tamarind tree, she dug up, with her bare fingers, the root of some plant. “This is jicama, from Mexico.” She held up the bulbous tan root. “Devi, the manager of the farm, likes to try different plants from around the world, to see what’ll do well here. The plant produces a kind of bean, and we use those for a natural pesticide.” She brushed the soil off the tuber, pulled a penknife out of her pocket, and peeled and sliced off a section of white root for him.

“So, you think you’ll stay here?” He chewed the fresh, juicy jicama. “Seems like you feel really at home already.”

Kianga squatted down next to some low plants with heart-shaped leaves. “I do feel at home. These are sweet potatoes.” She reached under the spreading dark-green leaves and pulled out a few weeds. “I only heard about Auroville a few months ago, but I felt so pulled to visit.” She stood up and gazed over the green and brown fields. “Now I love it here.”

“Have you finished your degree?” He tossed the rest of his jicama root onto the soil and slid his hands into the pockets of his shorts.

“I haven’t graduated, if that’s what you’re asking. But I’m realizing how limited that training was. There’s so much more to health than the physical. I can learn about holistic health right here.”

“Sounds like you would like to stay here.”

“I have to get the logistics worked out. If I want to live here, I’d have to be able to pay for a year’s stay, and find my own housing. That’s the rule for newcomers. I could probably keep staying here. I’m living in a hut with Nick. A year’s worth of expenses would only be about fifteen hundred dollars. I’m sure my folks would send that to me, if I asked them.”

“Is Nick—he’s your boyfriend?”

“Not really. There’s a housing shortage, and Nick said I could stay with him. We dated in high school, and then we had a stupid fight. He was jealous because I paid attention to his friend. So we broke up. When he e-mailed me about Auroville that was the first I’d heard from him in years. We’ve both matured a lot. He understands that I need to be able to love anyone I choose.”

Under the umbrella of a papaya tree, she slid an arm around him. He put his arm around her waist, feeling the motion of her hip under his hand as they walked. He tried to imagine himself living in Auroville near Kianga. Immediately, he thought of Rasika. What would she think of a place like this? Would her curiosity allow her to appreciate it?

When they reached the well, where Abhay had left his bike, Kianga led him past it to a little shelter—it looked like an outdoor kitchen—where she filled a tall glass of water for him. “It’s filtered,” she reassured him. He drained the glass and set it into the sink. She sliced open a yellowish green papaya to reveal its orange flesh and cache of black, glistening seeds. She handed him a spear. They consumed the sweet, juicy, slightly bitter flesh, and threw the peels to the cows.

“Do you have your pass for the Matrimandir?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know if I want to bother with that.”

“You should. It’s the soul of the community. You can’t understand Auroville if you don’t visit the Matrimandir.”

“I read in the guidebook that there are no ceremonies there. No one is required to visit the temple, or meditate, or do anything.”

Kianga wiped the counter. “The Mother didn’t want the Auroville experiment to become a religion. There are no rituals in the Matrimandir, no flowers, no incense. The Matrimandir is not a temple; it’s a shrine to the universe’s feminine energy. It’s a place you can use to help raise your consciousness. It’s about each person’s own inner enlightenment and transformation, not about any of the other stuff that usually goes along with religion.”

“How can it be the soul of the community if nothing in particular happens there?”

She stood in front of him and took his hands in hers. Her palms and fingers were tough and calloused. “A lot of the people who live in Auroville have been drawn here by the Mother’s words. When Nick first e-mailed me, he sent me a quote of hers.” Kianga paused and closed her eyes. Sunlight glinted off her eyebrow ring and brushed over her pale eyelashes. “ ‘Humanity is not the last rung of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each individual to know whether he wants to participate in the advent of this new species.’ ” Her lids lifted again. “That was so exciting, to be part of this divine evolution. Even though the Mother is no longer inhabiting a body on earth, I felt like she was speaking to me personally. And when I first visited the Matrimandir, it was like her words were around me. They had taken form.”

The Mother’s quote was odd. It reminded Abhay of the introverted French socialist Charles Fourier, who inspired a series of short-lived American communities in the 1800s. Fourier also believed that his communities would cause humans to evolve: they would grow to seven feet tall, live for 144 years, and would develop a tail with a small hand at the end of it.

Abhay dropped her hands. “I feel like you’re trying to convert me.”

She laughed. Her eyes crinkled and her face grew pink. “Come on. Just experience what you experience.”

After Kianga had changed into a skirt and braided her hair, they pedaled in the heat to the visitors’ center and got two passes for the Matrimandir gardens for later that afternoon. They had lunch at the outdoor restaurant where Abhay had made his phone call the day before. After lunch, they got on their bikes and started again down the dusty path. Kianga took him through the back gates of the Matrimandir grounds. Almost the first thing they encountered was a giant yellow backhoe rumbling around. The ground sloped away from their path toward the shrine. Abhay could see scaffolding over one part of the globe, which was as yet empty of the golden scales, which covered the rest of the structure. Far down a path, on a cart, he could see a stack of the glinting disks. Abhay heard sounds of sawing and clanging. “I didn’t realize the place wasn’t finished,” he said lightly. It seemed odd that Kianga hadn’t mentioned this.

“It will be finished in time for the fortieth anniversary celebration next month.”

They sat down on some blocks of stone near the path, which gave them a good view of the entire scene. Kianga was gazing at the shrine. “It’s been a real challenge to translate the Mother’s ideas into reality. She had repeated visions about what the inner chamber should look like. She worked with an architect to design the outside of the sphere, and the gardens. She died in 1973, and since then people have been working on making this a reality. The gold disks were a problem. It’s turned out to be difficult to put the ethereal vision of the Mother into reality. They first applied gold leaf to glass disks, but the foil got damaged by birds. Then they designed a way to sandwich the gold foil between two glass disks. Now it’s really dazzling, isn’t it?”