Gayathri Narayanan
My Time with Guru Nitya: Lessons in Love and Wisdom
It has been one of my life’s greatest blessings to have floated into the orbit of Guru Nitya around age 11 in 1981. Through meetings and interactions in Bangalore (where my family lived) and Fernhill Gurukula, peppered over the next 18 years till Guru Nitya’s samadhi in 1999, I received his love, teachings and blessings, not realizing the extent to which they would transform and inform my life.
My maternal grandfather, Dr. T.K. Rithuparnan, had a close relationship with Nataraja Guru and through him, with Guru Nitya. His home in Coimbatore was a resting place and refuge for the Gurus and their disciples who traveled with them. Coimbatore, a city at the foothills of the Nilgiris, was a place they passed through often on their way to and from Ooty on their various travels. Guru Nitya continued a close association with my grandfather even after Nataraja Guru’s mahasamadhi. On one of our visits to my grandparents from Bangalore during our school vacation (around 1981), Guru Nitya happened to be there with a few disciples. I was about 10 or 11 years old then, running around the house with my cousins. It was a noisy, full house with people bustling about everywhere. Guru called me, inviting me to sit close to him, and asked me my name. I remember vividly the sofa chair he was sitting on and my grandfather sitting across from him. When I replied ‘Gayathri’, he asked me if I knew the meaning of my name, and I said no. He then held my hand and chanted each line of the Gayatri mantra and asked me to repeat after him. He explained the meaning of the mantra to me, which I didn’t remember or understand till many years later when I practiced the Gayatri meditation as part of my daily sadhana. This practice opened me up in a most profound way. I understood much later that I had probably experienced an informal initiation that day in my grandfather’s house.
During that same visit, Guru Nitya and several of us went to the theater to see the film ‘The Gods must be Crazy’. I was sitting next to him in the theater and while we were waiting for the film to start, I had a burning question in my mind. I asked Guru, “Who irons your clothes?” It was my way of trying to make a connection with this intriguing, grandpa-like figure who everyone seemed to be attracted to and who exuded a warmth and love I hadn’t experienced before from a total stranger. He looked at me with a bemused smile replying something to the effect of “I have many loving friends who help me wash and iron my clothes.” Of all the important questions I could have asked Guru, I don’t know why this one came to my mind. I must have been impressed with his clean and well-ironed clothes!
Sometime soon after this initial meeting, Guru happened to be in Bangalore giving a talk to an audience in a hall. My mom took me to this talk so we could meet Guru again. She prepared me by saying that I was to touch his feet when I met him and took me up to the stage after the talk to greet Guru. I have a vague recollection of this, but my mom remembers it well. She says I walked over to Guru to touch his feet as instructed and somehow tripped and fell flat on my belly at his feet - a full prostration (sashtānga namaskāram)! I can believe it because I’ve always been kind of clumsy. Guru apparently laughed at this scene. My heart’s deepest intention is to arrive and settle in this form of full surrender to the Universal Source and Guide. It is also true that this surrender cannot be planned or orchestrated and happens much in the way I tripped that day—in a flash and when you least expect or want it.
Guru visited our home in Bangalore many times in the following years. I remember him cooking in our kitchen, having meals with him, going for morning walks with him around the neighborhood, and sitting in on the talks he would give in our living room to friends and disciples who came to meet him. It was in those years that I began to understand that Guru was “special” and had something that I wanted. His wisdom was shared with me in small, bite-sized chunks in those years—sometimes through a story he told me during our walks, or in the way he paid attention to things and people, or in the way he cut tomatoes in the kitchen, or something subtle he would point out in a twig, leaf or flower. I began to see him not just as another loving grandpa figure, but someone who was wise, had profound knowledge and stood for deeper values that I too cared about.
On one of his visits to our home, he wanted to go to Gangaram’s, a Bangalore institution and popular bookstore that has been around since the 1970s. My dad gave me some money and asked me to go with Guru and to make sure that I paid for the books. I remember feeling very important accompanying Guru on this bookstore adventure. He was like a kid in a candy store and came back with multiple bags filled with books! Better books than candy, I guess!
Guru had expressed a wish to get the videos of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. My dad looked around for them in Bangalore and eventually managed to get them from a friend in Calcutta. When Guru visited us next, we watched the movies together in our living room. I remember noticing tears falling from Guru’s cheeks as he watched Pather Panchali, and thinking how human and real he was. It seemed like a very non-Guru type thing to me to be crying while watching a movie, and yet it made Guru all the more endearing to me.
When my parents built their own home in Bangalore, and it was nearing completion in early 1991, Guru happened to be in town, and he offered to do the housewarming homam to bless the home. I remember it being a very special time for our family. He explained every step of the homam and its significance. Later that year, he visited again after we had moved into our new home. When he was returning to Ooty, my maternal aunt, Gita, who was traveling with Guru at the time, urged me to join them and stay at the Fernhill Gurukula. My parents were hesitant to send me, but I had holidays and didn’t have classes to attend. So I pleaded with my parents and traveled with the gang back to Ooty.
I stayed for about three weeks, the longest stretch of time I’ve ever spent with Guru Nitya. The feelings I had when I was with Guru in those days are hard to describe. It was a mixture of curiosity, closeness (but not wanting to get too close either), wonder, moments of deep presence and inner silence, wanting to please and impress, and wanting to learn and soak in everything I could. Looking back, it was in those days that Guru planted seeds in me that still continue to germinate and grow to this day. I remember a particular moment on one of my walks with him when I was holding his hand and felt a physical transmission/blessing of some kind that was very real. It began as a pulsation in the palm that he was holding and then shot like an electric current through my arms and body. I didn’t say anything or ask Guru about it. In fact, I didn’t mention it to anyone till very recently when I told Scott about it, and he said he and Debbie had also experienced something similar with Guru. I don’t know the significance of it, but at least I know I wasn’t imagining it.
I attended the morning and evening classes, took notes and tried to understand. I understood very little, but as I’ve meditated on Guru’s teachings over the years, they have become like ambrosial nectar to me. They’re the living voice of truth that have opened me to fresh, deep insights and have served as a steady source of inspiration, solace and strength, helping me stay sane while navigating a very full life with my work, home, husband and two children.
The night before I was to leave the Gurukula to return to Bangalore, I went over to Guru as he was settling for bed. I was tucking him under his sheets and told him how much I was going to miss being with him and at the Gurukula. He held my hand and said to me, “Mole (daughter), you stay here. Don’t go back. We need your love here in this place.” I still remember the tug I felt in my heart and the tears pricking my eyes. I replied, “But, how Guru?! I need to go back to college.” Then he looked at me as if he were looking through me, beyond time and space and said to me, “No. You’re right. You need to go. You have places to go and things to do.” While I don’t regret any part of my life as it has unfolded so far, I often wonder what my life would have been like had I stayed back with Guru at the Gurukula.
After my undergraduate in Bangalore, I applied and got admission to the University of Southern California for my graduate studies. Before I left India in 1993, my parents and I drove over to Ooty so I could get Guru’s blessings. It was a short visit, just for the day and before we left, he hugged me, gave me a rose and said to me, “Treat me like your cricket wicket. You run off and do your thing in the world, but you have to keep coming back to touch the wicket.” I took his words very literally and every time I went back to India between 1993 and his passing in May 1999, I would make the trek to Ooty to see him, usually for just a day or two. When I heard of his samadhi, I was devastated because it was just around that time that I had become serious about my spiritual life and had started reading Guru’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. I grieved his passing for several months, often asking him mentally, “How could you leave now, just when I really need you?” I also remembered Guru saying many times, “The Guru is not a person in a body. It is the guiding universal principle that resides in each heart.” Slowly, I came to understand what he meant by him being the cricket wicket. All I needed to do was to close my eyes and become internally still to touch the cricket wicket. No need for long trips to Ooty!
Guru was supposed to come to my wedding in Bangalore in April 1998, but he fell ill. He called me the night before to give me his blessings over the phone. After our wedding, my husband, Kaustav (Joy), parents and I drove to Ooty to get Guru’s blessings in person. Joy was skeptical of Gurus, ashrams and such. During lunch, Jyothi brought a small bowl of a special preparation for Guru (probably due to a diet he was keeping for his health). Joy told me later that he remembered thinking at the time, “Look at the special treatment this Guru is getting! He gets special food while the rest of us have to eat the regular food.” As soon as he thought this, Guru apparently passed the bowl of food that was made for him to Joy saying, “Please have some.” Joy was taken aback and a little embarrassed, having the distinct sense that Guru had just read his mind! That was the last time I saw Guru in person and the only time Joy met him.
Guru Nitya as the Guru principle guides me every day. I was 29 when Guru Nitya entered mahasamadhi. Now at 54, I can most definitely say that my relationship with Guru is even more intimate, and in a most blessed way. The teachings, teachers, messages and guidance come to me in many forms, and when I receive them, I know that the Guru principle is at work. I’ve learned to recognize and trust it. There are no words to express the depth of gratitude I feel for Guru Nitya. He is the only person I’ve known who loved me for no reason, with no expectation, making no demands, and who gave freely of his wisdom and love. To have known such a being is true grace. Deep bows of gratitude to the forces of this universe that conspired to have him be a part of my life, in this lifetime.