In India, a guru is a teacher and spiritual guide who dispels darkness and guides one toward the light – from ignorance to insight. They serve as a counselor who shares experiential knowledge as much as literal knowledge. They are an inspirational source and one who helps mold values and guide the spiritual evolution of a student.
I came to India thinking I’d find an old bearded Wiseman—a guru—that would teach me the ultimate wisdom of life. He’d be meditating in a bamboo hut or in an ashram speaking words of wisdom between Yoga asana sequences. Romanticized visions of such yogis or gurus are all too common in the imagination of today’s seekers. The guru I found was nothing like that.
My guru wasn’t old, nor a man, but a dark-skinned gypsy girl with a dirty pink t-shirt, short-cropped hair and a huge smile. She was around nine years old, with the spirit of someone much more mature.
She skipped up the dusty beach road to my friends and me with an armful of bright beaded jewelry and asked, “Where going?” My first thought was that this was an attempt to sell one of the colorful necklaces hanging from her arm, and it probably was. Upon our disinterest, she quickly put the beads in her bag and followed joyfully, speaking broken English.
“Where from?” She asked.
“America, Where do you live?”
She giggled, pointed toward the Tamil Nadu backwaters and said: “Me live Poonjeri!” She grinned.
After a moment of silence, she asked, “Where going?”
“Right there,” I said, pointing just ahead to Sea Waves Guest House. I was eager to get rid of her but had already been struck by her good spirit. Strangely, I felt that I knew her.
“What’s your name,” I asked.
“Me name Jodika.”
“How do you spell that?”
She turned up her little arm showing a barely visible henna tattoo and pointed to each letter: “J – O – D – I – K – A,” she read aloud.
“Well, Jodika, we have to go to our room. Maybe we’ll see you later.”
Her face changed. The happiness gave way to sorrow. She put her five fingertips together and moved her hand back and forth to her mouth as one would if eating. She said bashfully, “baby eating?” and pointed toward Poonjeri. The emotion of the moment prodded me to give to her. But I know how these things go. The baby probably didn’t exist. “Maybe we’ll see you later,” I said, and went upstairs.
The temples and stone carving of Mahabalipuram drew the photographer in me. My mission was to explore and get some unique photos of the area. I walked around scouting for subjects. In my wandering, I noticed the packs of gypsies wandering about, selling beads, begging, or otherwise hustling. Jodika and I crossed paths often. She’d see me walking through town and run to me, her little bare feet skipping over cow pies in the rough rocky road, and open her arms wide for a hug.
“Hey, friend! Where going?” Before I could answer, she’d put her little hand in mine and join me as I wandered around town taking photos. It was strange, but once I’d warmed up to her, I enjoyed having a little gypsy sidekick. She was unique and vibrant. She was quite intelligent. Joy flowed from her soul as naturally as the nearby waves met the seaside. The more I opened to her presence, to her humanity, the more of it I got.
Jodika had the freedom—and appetite—to eat with a friend. Since I did too (and had a pocket full of rupees) our bond grew over vegetable curry and fried rice. She normally ate with her hands. She would watch me eat and copy me, fumbling with the fork and knife in an effort to impress me. She’d wipe her mouth after every bite and in her giggly little voice say “thank you” when she finished.
One time after eating, she took me to a chest freezer in the restaurant and pointed to clay cups of ice cream inside. Of course, she played the sheepish smile and giggle. “Me having ice cream!” she’d exclaim. I bought her a cup of vanilla and opened it for her. She offered me the first bite with the included wooden spoon, she said, “Here friend, you take.”
Her selfless gestures struck my heart like an arrow. I felt like a parent teaching her the basics. But all this time, she was teaching me the art of giving – and perhaps the art of living. Being selfless to each other made my day, and it seemed, hers as well. Making a difference is easy if you set aside ego, suspicion, and be nice. It made me wish it was this simple everywhere, and that everyone could experience this.
Late on a hot sunny morning, Jodika, her sister Nandini and friend Ramia took Raj and me to Poonjeri to see their home. We jumped on a rickety old local bus for a short five-minute ride to the edge of town. The driver looked at us, and at the girls, and only made Raj and me pay our own fare.
The moment we stepped off the bus, Jodika ran ahead. “Come me home!” she shouted. The girls led us to the end of a dirt road winding through a field of dead grass. We came upon rows of concrete block cubicles similar in shape and size to storage units back home. But their storage unit sized home was for living life, not for storing stuff they didn’t need.
Chickens clucked in the road. Villagers peeked out windows in curiosity. The girls were eager to show us their home. They ran into a door. I looked around. A hole in the dirt between the pigeon coop and hen house smoldered from a fire the night before. “This must be the kitchen,” Raj said.
“Come, come!” Jodika said. I stepped into the doorway. An old woman wrapped in a colorful blanket sat on the floor in silence. She didn’t knit or play Sudoku. She just sat. Content. The main room was the size of a small American kitchen with a smaller side-room not much bigger than a king-size bed. There was no kitchen or bathroom, no furniture, no running water.
After introducing us to the old woman, the girls sat on the floor and began taking things out. Jodika took out old schoolbooks and showed us she could write words in Tamil, the local language. The others showed us piles of special camel bone jewelry they’d made. We inspected their crafts with interest.
Easily distracted, Jodika quickly put away her books and took a green and white beaded necklace from the pile. She came to me and carefully put it on my neck. “Me gift giving!” She came around and looked at me with her big smile. I told her, “Jodika, I don’t need.” She insisted, “Me gift giving!”
Again, I was struck in the heart. I didn’t usually wear necklaces, but it was the most special gift I’d gotten in a long time.
The girls put away the necklaces and led us to another cube. This was where Jodika lived. She rummaged through a pile of things in the corner. It was all that was in the house. She pulled out a little metal box and brought it to the middle of the room. She opened it and began sifting through papers and photos. From the box, she pulled a photo album of her family and slowly flipped the pages. Many of the photos were her family posing in front of the nearby Shore Temple in Mahabalipuram. The women were adorned in colorful dresses. They were clean. I couldn’t tell if she was in the photos or not because she would have been one of the babies.
I looked around the room as the reality began to set in. Life for them was clearly different now. Then she told me why.
Jodika pulled out a portrait of her mother. “Look, me momma. Me momma die.” She said it like a cold, hard fact. I felt tears well up in my eyes. That was it. Emotion had built in the background of my mind long enough. All I wanted to do was care for her. I wanted her to be my daughter. She was too bright and full of life to have to deal with the challenges of the life she’d been given.
My scarred heart, which I often protected with a wall of false indifference, got warmer and softer every minute I spent with her. As I looked around the cubicle, I found myself thinking about my lifestyle and the culture I know. Looking at little Jodika and her life in India was confusing and thought-provoking.
In the U.S.A., the average home has clean running water, carpet, themed bathrooms complete with ‘comfort height’ toilets. We have so much food in the refrigerator that some spoils before we get to it. Those who can afford it drive their cars to warehouse-sized stores to buy anything they need – or don’t need. Kids go to school for twelve years and the fortunate ones go to college and on to a career that won’t break their back. Then they can afford their own houses, cars, toys and storage units. Benefits include health insurance, a retirement plan, and vacation time.
Yet, as many American’s are coming to find, this life of desire for “more” and “easier” are not necessarily fulfilling. More, by definition, never ends. Life, by definition, is about survival no matter how we spin it with our Western programming. With houses and storage units full of stuff, there remains an emptiness seemingly impossible to fill.
Later, when alone back at the guest house, I thought hard about the difference between my little gypsy friend and me as a little boy. When I was Jodika’s age, my parents had been divorced a few years. I lived with my mom. We were on public assistance and she often worked multiple jobs and wrote bad checks to pay overdue bills. Too often, things weren’t working out so we moved to a new city. We lived like modern American gypsies, if you will, moving place to place, struggling to make ends meet. Our lives were based on a constant search for “more” or “better.” We looked at what others had, which was usually much more. We lived in a state of constant craving for that which we didn’t have, and aversion for that which we had to deal with. It was the way of life we knew, what society taught us. When I think back on that part of my life, I feel anger and resentment stored deep in my soul. I didn’t need that negative association to life. Nor did I want it. But it seemed to be attached.
Despite the challenges of life at that time, I had a mom, my own bedroom with a bunk bed, posters and a Nintendo. I went to school and ate at least something a few times a day. Yet for most of my adolescence, I thought I was disadvantaged. My inner child felt like what my first impression of Jodika was: a poor outcast, always wanting.
Jodika was disadvantaged, according to Western standards. She didn’t even realize it and dealt with whatever came her way – usually with a smile. Jodika’s mother died of tuberculosis when she was a few years old. Her father is an alcoholic. She sleeps on the dirty floor of a concrete cube or on the dirty beach where cows and people poop. Rather than school, Jodika and her siblings beg and sell necklaces to unwilling tourists so their family can eat rice. She didn’t envy others or feel poor. She had no reference of social class or prestige, no reality T.V. or advertisements teaching her what social standards she had to meet to be “cool” or “happy”. She wore that beaming smile and dirty shirt and wasn’t bothered about a diet based on rice, sleeping on the dirty beach or calling a concrete cube home. In fact, she seemed to relish such freedom.
As my time to leave Mahabalipuram approached, I was curious about Jodika’s hopes, so I asked her. (translated by a friend)
Jodika, what is your biggest wish?
“I want my father not to drink, to not be around fights and for my house to be clean. I want nothing else to make me happy. …It would be very nice if my mother were here. I want that more than anything else.”
What was supposed to be a few days photographing the Shore Temple in Mahabalipuram, south India became three weeks of life lessons with a wonderful little gypsy girl I wanted to adopt.
On my last day, before the tuk-tuk pulled up to take me away, I knelt down to Jodika’s level, looked into her eyes, rubbed her short hair and said:
“Jodika, you make me happy. Me miss you.”
She looked down at the street for a moment and was quiet. I thought she didn’t understand me, but she looked back up to me and said “Me same,” and gave me a hug. It would be the part of the movie that shows nine-year-old Jesse hugging a wise old guru. A tear of joy, of sorrow, of love and pain, of every emotion, came from my eye and landed on the dusty beach road where she had first run toward me, smiling with the sunshine.
Maybe the reality was different. Maybe under the emotion and typical “westerner meets poor street kid” narrative I was just another source of food for her, quickly to be forgotten. But I didn’t want to believe that.
This was originally posted on my blog InspirationTravels.com July 12, 2015. I’ve since edited it for clarity and have seen Jodika again. Story coming soon!
One Response
A beautiful article that had me in my feelings since the first paragraph! So often when people travel, we tend to have this mindset full of assumptions about the things we’re going to see and the kinds of people that we’ll interact with. I feel like this article emphasizes that important point about looking too hard for something and missing out on having an amazing experience when it’s right in front of you. Even though I’ve never met Jodika, your article makes her just jump off the page. You’re such a gifted writer!