(I just stumbled across this essay in my ‘drafts’ file. Can’t remember why I didn’t publish it. I wrote it while teaching and living in Vrndavan this winter. It was a comforting find for me, since now I am in America again for the summer and missing my home there terribly.)

Today as I entered the main gate leading to a friend’s house, I noticed an old woman sitting on a cot in the cold winter afternoon, knitting, her back facing the sun. As I passed, glancing at her, she turned her head just enough to glimpse at me, and enough for me to catch the sparkle in her eye. I’ve seen her there a few times now, I thought.

“Radhe Radhe, Amma.”

As I greeted her, she replied in a voice strong and matter-of-fact with a soft overtone of genuine caring,

“sraddha, sraddha.”

I was startled all at once. The message seemed to electrify me and nearly stopped me in my tracks.

“Faith, faith.”

Her words echoed in overlapping swirling whispers through my mind’s ears.

It was a statement; it was an answer; it was an emancipation proclamation. It was as if all of my tangled thoughts, worries, and questions to the universe were read by the cold wind and whispered into her ear. Her answer was pronounced just as I was thinking “Whatever can be the solution???”

“Faith, faith.”

My center of gravity seemed to drop for a fraction of a second and a sort of heat spread instantly to the tips of my toes and fingers; it was weirder than a de ja vu. It was more like falling through a hole where three phases of time intersect; where everything is everything. All at once.

Continuing on briskly and glancing back at her, I smiled and chuckled at myself; no. I was mistaken. She had said, “sri Radha, sri Radha.” Quite normal for this neck of the woods.

Yet, as I climbed the stairs to my friend’s flat on the third floor, I reflected on that moment of wind and time and stream-of-consciousness inner monologue which reached the fervor of spilling into and through the environment.

Sraddha; sraddha.

The thing is, I had heard it. But who had uttered it?