O. K. - Previous post described my first encounter with U.G. I think we heard from him via a letter to my mom in the early 60's but that was it. Fast forward to my first lunch in Madras 1971.



As I sat at the round, white linen table cloth table - I waited for my friends of the airport/taxi ride/hotel register rescue - to arrive. I stick with my tea, toast & jam with some fresh fruit for my lunch order. I look up and what do I see? A young lady roughly my age, attractive & with a smile wide as can be that lights up her whole face. She sees me and is at my table directly from the door and makes herself at home. We hit it off as partners in crime - in seconds. She is from a different part of the U.S. and "social strata". Thousands of miles from home that means jack sh*t. We are filling in the important parts of the back story when Mya and White Bearded Guy (wbg from now on) join us and introductions around. There was an Indian young man at the table too, people just seem to join in a group without formalities. He is the informer who told us about the discotheque in the very hotel we were in.



The wbg asked me what I was planning to do and if I had any connections with Southern India and if I knew what I was actually getting into. In the conversation that rambled around I mentioned that my mother had an Indian family from Madras living with us for awhile when I was a little girl. We called him Krishna but his name actually was U.G. Krishnamurti. The bwg kind of blinked and asked "U.G". Yeah, I replied - now get this - he knew him and knew when he would be in India in October. He had gone through a "transformation of some sort" and become a "non-guru" and sat in a room put up by friends and for some unknown reason people would come and ask him questions. Hummm and Hummm.



I came to India to go to Pondicherry and read the books of Sri Aurobindo (again someday I will learn how to insert links meanwhile there is google). I hung around Madras for a couple of weeks. In that amount of time I had made a set of friends, that except for the dearly departed, are still around. I met a guy. Now what 22yo hasn't met a guy that really rocks her socks? I will spare details - mainly as he is still alive - happily married - and I don't want to bring embarrassment to him. The unfortunate aspect of this encounter was that it sort of dampened my enthusiasm for hanging out in an ashram for 6 months.



I did swallow hard and get on the bus and head out for the ashram. I was glad I had spent that first couple of weeks in Madras as it did get me familiar with human excrement around in the open and cows taking a dump and someone - always a female - swooping in from nowhere to scoop it up - and all the stares. I will spare you the sights and smells of the trip. Warning! I will not always spare you but poop stories get old after a short while.



When my bus pulled up to the bus stop. I looked for a taxi. All I saw were Rickshaws powered by bicycles (pedicabs) - or even worse (in my mind) an elderly barefooted man pulling it himself. I opted for the pedicab. It was some minutes past sunset, the sky had a crescent moon with a star (probably a planet I now know) that was beautiful. As the driver pedaled along with his bell ringing, my mind wandered back to the guy back in Madras.



In those days I was subject projecting my inner thoughts into "visions". I could see him smiling at me in the crescent moon. Oh boy. I was truly under the delusion that when I stepped off the plane in India I would have a "transformation" and my "self" of drugs, sex and rock&roll would fall off like the mold from a casting. (please see the previous post regarding drugs). Guess what? Did you see the word delusion? That is exactly what it was. I was still the same person I always was.

The biggest difference was that I was a young, white, free spirit, not bad looking, female traveling alone in a foreign country. This made me even more attractive (sort of a deployment 10 where I would be a 6 when the plane touched down in the U.S.A.). As many deployment 10's (I imagine they also are young) don't understand, the attention is inflated, I didn't either. I had never lacked for male attention in the states but back in Madras I had a guy banging on my door in the middle of the night claiming his undying love for me and that just seeing me caused his heart to leap with joy. Very poetic these suitors. It took time "in country" to realize that they are looking for a ticket out.

The worldly pulls were still pulling and the love of fun, music and dancing etc. was there in full force - fueled by the money in my pocket - which went very far in India and being the bell of the ball. India has ganja, beautiful fabrics a tailor can stitch into whatever you want, food that may take getting used to but is really good, music places, places to hang out and do nothing and I discovered in Madras the Theosophical Society headquarters (more about in future - see google). So where to start and being a 10 to boot. Now that is a pull.

Back to my poor guy on a bicycle taking me to a place to stay. With my English he did understand ashram and deposited me at a closed gate. Great. I wandered around until I found someone to ask about a place to stay and he directed me to the "western styled" guest house. I managed to drag my stuff over there and knocked. They did have a room available. People were forever being blown away by the fact that I would just show up without any plan whatsoever.

The gentleman in charge, a German by birth, showed me to my room. As he was giving me the tour we came to the bathroom where there was a dead rat the size of a 2mo old kitten. He just picked it up by the tail and carted it out. ? Was it alive and running around the room before it keeled over? will I have a huge rodent running around my room in the middle of the night and how do I get this gentleman in my room in 2seconds flat should that event occur? When he returned from his rat disposal, he informed me that he baits with poison and seldom do they get to the stage of running around the room and he did give me a way to dial him in the middle of the night - no guarentee of 2 seconds flat. Some comfort.

Next post will be breakfast the next day. Slept like a rock and if there was a kitten sized rat running around my room that night, it didn't get in bed with me and I didn't wake up until daylight. 'till later

This blog will jump around - but what the hell - it's my blog. So, when I was 8 years old my father was killed in an auto accident - that is a whole story in itself. Sometime in the following year we (bro & Mom) trained our way across the glorious West & Mid West to Chicago. (this was a 2night, 3day trip or reverse). It was the Empire Builder with the real Pulman cars, dining rooms with silver pitchers, silverware and starched white linen. It was still the day when all of the porters were black and we had a most precious "Sam the Pillow Porter". I think he worked that route every time we traveled and when I made the trip alone at 9 years old he was my Guardian Angel. Bless his soul - the best thing was that all boundaries of race were eliminated in me at a very young age. On one trip there was a television personality of great note - lost to antiquity so I will not mention his name - Sam asked him if he would see 2 little kid fans. TV Star agreed and we were ushered into his Pulman Suite, he talked to us and signed autographs. Forget that - if you can - as a little kid. Wow.

Anyway, we made it back to the homestead my mother was raised in - again this house is a tale in itself. It was broken up into rooms or apts, depending on who was renting it - an old fashioned rooming house. In the upstairs apt (where my uncle & aunt lived just a few years before when we all lived there) there was now a family living. They were from Madras, India. Humm. The family consisted of wife, in a sari and all the traditional dress, husband - standard issue dress, and a son. The son was in our age range (bro & I being 7&8, I'm the oldest) and cool. He had polio as a small child which affected his legs - he could wrap them around the back of his head without it ever being a yoga posture) and loved Batman and Robin as much as we did. Side note - this is the Batman of comic books in 1957 & 8 - not the Dark Knight of 2008. We hit it off well.

I had just lost my very loving father. He always made me feel as if I could do anything and that I was very smart. He taught me the lessons that have held me in good stead all of my life. #1. I cheated once and he caught me. His lesson was that "If I cheat then he couldn't know where I needed help and he didn't think I ever needed to cheat, that I was smart enough to figure out the right way. He never told my mom.

#2. Caught me playing with matches. Lesson: I was so beautiful and pretty that I should never do anything willingly that would disfigure me. Note he did not rant about the house or others, but focused on what a 5yo child cares about THEMSELVES!!! When someone handed me a vial & spoon of drugs (snorting type - figure it out) I took it and went to the restroom with it, feeling so very cool and sophisticated - I looked in the mirror and at the drugs and thought to myself ("Do I want to look aged beyond my years, selling my body to support a habit for this?) my dad's words came back to me as if he were in my head and I never did it. Take care the things you say to your children.

Back to this Indian family living with us. The father's name is U.G. Krishnamurti. This is perhaps one of the few actual names I will use. He has since passed but if you Google him you will see how much of a story this really is - especially in the "search for spirituality".

So - you have a little girl - crying herself to sleep every night - missing her father (mainly because bro & I figured out that Mom was F*cking CRAZY) discovering a kind and sensitive father was under the same roof. He had 2 daughters in India, left behind while they sought medical care for their son with polio, so he had some understanding of children and maybe he missed them. He would visit me when I was in bed at night crying my eyes out and just sit there - sometimes he would put his hand on my head - I mean only my head - nothing weird or anything - I have a very good memory and never have blocked anything out - I do remember others not so supportive - so there. He would talk to me and encourage me to talk about my father or anything else - he is the person I told I had a tooth cavity - not my mom. He told my mom (by the time she did anything about it is was so huge that I had to have it pulled. Thanks mom).

So that is my first encounter with U.G. He and his family lived with us for several months and we were neighbors a year or so later - but that is really another story. end for this post