Requiem for an Ashram

The large-scale destruction and the human tragedy that has unfolded in its wake in Uttarakhand has been truly heartrending. Apart from villages and towns, the affected zone houses some of the most revered shrines of the Indian subcontinent, as well as several ashrams and hermitages where spiritual adepts lead lives of quiet contemplation.

One such adept is she who is known simply as Nani Ma, an Englishwoman who came to India some 40 years ago, never to return. She devoted her whole life to intense and single-pointed spiritual sadhana, initially with her guru, Mastram Baba, who lived in a cave near Rishikesh. After he passed away, she decided to go to Gangotri to be near her “mother” — Ganga Ma. They are the two poles of the axis of her life – Babaji, her guru and spiritual father, and Ganga Ma, without whose ‘hug’ she never begins her day, no matter how freezing her waters might be.

With the passage of time, it became increasingly difficult for Nani Ma to live in the high altitude environs of Gangotri. She moved a little further down, finding a small patch of land next to her beloved Ganga Ma on the road from Uttarkashi to Gangotri. Here, with some help, she built a few simple huts for herself and visitors. Over the years, she planted and nurtured a beautiful garden of Himalayan flora, and the fauna it attracted — birds that would flutter around her and swoop at the raisins she offered them, and kittens who she would comfort and keep warm on cold nights.

Outside her hut, where you could constantly hear the roar of Ganga Ma, there stood a plain wooden bench. Here, she would meet visitors who came to her from around the world. They would find her heart open to receive their stories of sadness, anger and frustration, and offer them advice and hope. Anybody who knocked on her hut returned with the prasad of love, and perhaps a few green lemons from her garden.

For a few years now, apart from her spiritual sadhana, or one might say as an extension of it, Nani Ma had become involved in a ‘worldly’ activity — a hospice project to provide spiritual, emotional and physical succor to terminally ill cancer patients. The Ganga Prem Hospice (www.gangapremhospice.org) has already begun working for the desperately poor cancer patients of the area, even without a building, the team of dedicated volunteers making home visits with medicines and caregivers and organising free cancer screening and advice camps.

Through it all, the pain she encountered, the disease, the sadness, and the deaths, Nani Ma has always maintained the compassionate equanimity of a jivanmukta, one who is liberated while alive. As I think of her now, sheltering in a school building, her home taken away by her mother’s torrent, and yet unwilling to leave, I cannot imagine her any other way.

Swati Chopra writes on spirituality, mindfulness and contemplative practices.