The Cauliflower by Nicola Barker

Author:Nicola Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627797207
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

For the main meal:

“Eat a little rice,

Perhaps a little spinach—

Chant God’s name all day.”

And as a quick digestif:

“Bite on a chili—

By accident or design,

Your tongue will still burn.”

16th April 1886, the Cossipore garden house, Calcutta

or

The perplexing tale of Pagli*

(* in Bengali, pagli means “madwoman”)

“Please remember God,

But if you cannot do that—

Then just think of me.”

—Sri Ramakrishna

Ravaged by the final stages of throat cancer, barely able to eat, walk, or speak, Sri Ramakrishna is staying in a large upstairs room at a beautiful garden house rented by devotee Surendra Nath Mitra in the leafy suburb of Cossipore. The Master’s small band of exhausted and heartbroken disciples are nursing him around the clock and are eager to ease his evident—but unspoken—discomfort in any way possible. It is mid-April and very hot. Surendra has purchased some blinds for the windows to keep out the worst of the scalding light. But now it is nighttime (if still airless) and the full moon shines with an almost supernatural brightness.

In the garden, a woman suffering from acute mental illness (the disciples call her Pagli) is crying and entreating whosoever may listen to be granted access to the bedside of the dying guru. Pagli has chosen to worship Sri Ramakrishna (“the guru is God, God is the guru”) in the spiritual attitude of the lover, and so she torments him, at every opportunity, with her passionate, crazy, and utterly inappropriate displays of affection.

The disciples are sick of Pagli. She is prone to breaking into the house and forcing her way into Sri Ramakrishna’s room to demonstrate her deranged love for him. She tortures him from her post in the garden with her hysterical screaming and her perpetual commotion. Recently, overtired and exasperated, a couple of the disciples went so far as to beat her up. But still she returns, battered and bruised. Still she chides and wheedles and yells.

The guru (who will not be called Guru) is quiet and uncomplaining. He receives visitors, even though speaking often causes his throat to hemorrhage. He has been banned from talking—he talks only of God—but he whispers hoarsely, nonetheless. When he is no longer able to talk he signs with an emaciated arm and fingers.

The Master(who will not be called Master)’s doctor (a spiritual skeptic) has forbidden him from entering into spiritual trances. During Sri Ramakrishna’s trances, blood and energy automatically mass at his throat (might this be the reason for his cancer? Or perhaps his lifelong attachment to the hubble-bubble, or to chewing betel nut, a known carcinogen?). Of course, Sri Ramakrishna has no control over his spiritual moods. If he is inspired by thoughts of God, if he hears religious singing, if he talks of the Mother, if he smells a particular flower used in worship or a whiff of incense or of camphor, he will enter a state of ecstasy. He cannot help it.

His faith is killing him.

The disciples know that the Master has great supernatural powers (although he rarely uses them—he disapproves of them. God should be sought through love and devotion, he holds, not magic—magic confuses and inflates the ego.

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