Memoir (Part 1)
In May 1997, during the Buddha Purnima festival, I visited Baba’s ashram in Whitefield.
During the morning Darshan, Mr.Ryuko Hira guided me to the patient bench in the Darshan Hall. When I sat on the bench, a man, who seemed to be in charge of the venue, appeared and told me that I couldn’t sit there and should take a seat elsewhere. Although Mr.Hira advocated for me to be allowed to sit there, eventually, I had to move to another patient bench away from that bench. The patient bench to which Mr.Hira guided me seemed to be a seat for special people.
I had forgotten about this incident.
Two days after that day, in the afternoon, while I was waiting for the Darshan Hall to open, sitting on the stone stairs beneath the venue, a little girl, about 3 years old, came up to me and offered me a “dirty, partly torn cushion”. Wondering if she meant for me to use it, and casually looking behind her, I saw a man, presumably her father, standing a little distance away. He was gesturing to me, suggesting that I should use the cushion because the ground was hot.
Having damaged my spinal cord and experiencing reduced temperature sensation, I was unaware that the stone stairs were heated by sunlight and were hot, as I was sitting on them with thin trousers. Realizing that the stairs were hot from the sunlight, and appreciating the kind offer, I decided to use the cushion. Had I continued sitting there as I was, I might have burned my buttocks. But, by using the “dirty, partly torn cushion”, I was able to wait for the Darshan Hall to open without burning myself.
When it came time to enter the Darshan venue, I tried to return the cushion to the little girl’s father, but he said it wasn’t his and was reluctant to take it. However, I insisted and returned it to him.
I had forgotten about this as well.
If each of these incidents had ended as a single event, they probably would have been forgotten as things of the past.
This happened during the afternoon Darshan on the day before returning home. I was sitting on a patient bench, located towards the back of the Darshan venue, with two Japanese men; I was in the middle, and we were sitting in a row. After sitting for a while, an elderly Indian man came up to me and said, “There’s a seat for you, come with me. “
I didn’t know who he was and had no recollection of being told anything like that by him, so I declined to go to the seat. Nevertheless, he kept saying that a seat had been prepared for me and wanted me to come. Trying not to negate his offer, I tried to pass the seat to the Japanese people sitting on either side of me, but he insisted it had to be me. His persistence was such that, although I was puzzled as to what he meant by a seat being prepared for me, I decided to go to the seat he mentioned.
When he led me to the seat on the patient bench that was supposedly prepared for me, there was a cushion there. The moment I saw that cushion, I remembered the cushion that had saved me from a burn a few days earlier. The cushion in front of me was unmistakably that “dirty, partly torn cushion “. Furthermore, the seat where the cushion was placed was right next to the patient bench where I had been denied a seat when Mr. Hira guided me before – a place not meant for general disabled people or patients to sit.
The moment I saw the “dirty, partly torn cushion ” and the seat it was placed on, I recalled the two incidents that had happened to me here. When those two incidents were connected by this incident, I came to remember it as an event that could not be experienced in everyday life.
translator：Makoto Ishii