Challenging day

Manjuka is training us in acknowledging the house-holder’s responses. He says, ‘Forget your agenda. Just have a conversation.’ At tea-break in the kitchen we play at not doing this.

‘Would you like some dinner?’

.‘No, I’m not hungry’

. ‘I’ll just give you this sausage then’

. ‘I’m really not hungry’

‘I could cut it up for you……..’

We fall about laughing.

After lunch I phone Satyaraja. He’s been on retreat so we haven’t talked much since I’ve been here. I tell him something I’ve been scared to tell him before. I tell him that when I’m apart from him it’s hard to think of him with tenderness; it makes me miss him too much. I nervously wait for his response. He says ‘Oh I’m so glad you told me; I’m so glad we’re talking like this’, and he tells me he’s realized he has his owns ways of holding back and he tells me what they are. I tell him I want my heart to be open to loving and grieving; to grieving and loving.

After the call I sit down to write my blog but I can’t settle. To make things worse the people on the Karuna Team in London have started to respond to what I’ve written. Jo e-mails to say she loves it. Santavajri texts to say how moved she is. Sudaka thinks it’s great advertising for Karuna. I try to write about the Pakistani man who looks 55 at 75 because his grandfather taught him to avoid greed. About the elderly lady whose door I nearly didn’t knock when I saw the hand-rail, who was having a computer lesson and who, hearing we were working with ‘Dalits said ‘one can always stretch a little more’, and gave me £2.50. She’d been to India and met a man who told her he could never become a lawyer because he was an Untouchable. But I wrote all this kind of thing last week. It doesn’t work anymore. I’ve used it up now. I press delete; delete; delete.

It’s a difficult night. I thought I was OK but my new street has posher houses and although I imagine my black Alsation at my side, the heat of his body against my leg, my stomach is tight and acid. I almost forget to go back to the man with the Buddhist centre leaflet, walking out of his street and having to double back. But outside his house I remember the intensity of our conversation and suddenly I feel shy. I hope no-one is in and I can push the leaflet through the letter box. When he opens the door I don’t know what to say. We just look at each other. I give him the leaflet. I say, ‘ we might cross paths again one day’. He answers, ‘yes, you never know where life might lead’. Or something like that. Back on the pavement a blustery wind is getting up and the rain is coming on. My umbrella blows inside out and two of the spokes dangle loose. It’s after that that the doors stop opening.

There’s no way I’m going to tell anyone on the team about this man. I’m afraid they’ll think I fancied him. But as soon as I get in the car I tell Lindsay. Back home I tell Jo. Jo listens and says, ‘Grief. It sounds like you felt grief.’ My body starts to tremble. She says ‘it sounds like your feelings took you by surprise’. She says 'are you going to write about this in your blog?’.