Have spent the past four days dividing my day between two old ladies close to leaving this world. One is a Bengali lady who is over a hundred years old and the other lives at a Goshalla or cow santuary.
The Bengali lady, Prabhavati, or Pishima as she is affectionately called, has been a widow since she was 24 years of age. She married and lost her husband in the same year. She has no children and came to Vrindavan from Bengal shortly after that to live as a renunciant spending her days visiting temples, in prayer or kirtan, or doing ‘seva’ or service at her temple .
Vrindavan has many widows ashrams, some of which have had bad press for the enforced chanting of prayers before they are fed amongst else. Deepa Mehta’s film “Water’ didn’t do much for the reputation of widows either.
Mother Pishima, Vrindavan Sadhu
However Pishima offers a more positive picture of widowhood. She has led a very happy life as a devout Vaishnava in Vrindavan and in these final stages of her life she has many friends who love and care for her. She’s quite a celebrity figure, with many priests and senior religous figures coming to visit her to receive her blessings. She cannot speak or walk, but she lives right beside a temple at a place called Imlitala and can listen to all the temple kirtans from her bed.
I am very happy she likes a head massage and so that is where I spend my mornings these days.
Then on my route back to my room, I pass through a Goshalla and spend some time with a very old cow who has only days to live.By some stroke of good fortune the drinking water bottle I brought from the U.K. has a squeezy top on it that allows me, and others to squirt water down her throat. The only other way she can drink is by being hoisted up on a pully-contraption which is very uncomfortable on her skeletal frame.
Old Mother Cow
Anyway I am happy to have two little services to do here. The returns are so much greater. It seems Vrindavan is teaching me lessons from the later stages of life.
Hindu teaching is that time ravages only the outward frame that the self or soul inhabits. That is the explanation given for the tension between how we feel and how we look as time goes by. Looking into the eyes of Pishima and the old cow an extraordinary vitality meets me that belies the decrepid condition of both.In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna teaches this immortality of the real self to Arjuna and explains that the wise who know this live lives of devotion to Krishna.
W.B Yeats in his poem, Sailing to Byzantium puts it well:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
It seems to me when I look into the eyes of these two old ‘matas’ or mothers as they are called, that Pishima and the old cow are clapping!
Anuradha in India 