After lunch one afternoon Sidu told me that he’d arranged for me to spend time with a man named Raghu who was now waiting for me out front on his motorcycle. Sidu wouldn’t be going with me but he was sure I would enjoy my day.As it turned out, Raghu had had polio at six months old and has never walked. His feet and legs are twisted into a kind of permanent lotus yoga position and he gets around with flip flops on his hands. At eighteen however, he was tired of being dependent at home with his family in rural India and he caught a bus to the city of Ahmdebad. The first day he made friends with a man who operated a tea stall who then fed and sheltered Raghu for a couple days before telling him to head to the temple where he’d find other people like him. At the temple Raghu saw many people with various disabilities sitting on the steps out front and they said he could join them, that people would help him with money. Raghu didn’t care for this idea as he’d just left home so as not to be dependent. He asked the people at the temple if there was any work he could do for pay and they agreed to pay him a few rupees every day for keeping people’s shoes organized out front. (You need to remove your shoes before entering the temple – and actually before entering most any building or home I went to in India.)

Raghu soon noticed that some elderly women who visited the temple had no families and had trouble feeding themselves. He ended up spending all his money to regularly buy a few of them food, until he ran out of money too. But people started to hear about him and some started to sacrifice a meal each week, giving Raghu the 50 rupees it would have cost them to eat. This grew until Raghu began to deliver meals, twice a day, to elderly women in the slums. He did this on a bicycle that was rigged so that he could pedal with his hands, until someone else then donated a three wheel motorcycle to him. And so this is what I would be doing – sitting on the back of Raghu’s motorcycle all afternoon, zipping through the streets of Ahmdebad, delivering food.
 

Raghu is beautiful. His smile glows with warmth, and as I saw firsthand, he is loved by everyone. But when I first climbed onto the back of his motorcycle, sitting sideways in my dress, with no helmet (I saw no one with a helmet in India…), I was a bit nervous. We entered the streets where motorcycles, cars, bicycles, trucks, lots of cows, and even occasional camels pulling carts, were all competing to move forward with rules of the road that weren’t at all obvious to me. Raghu asked how I was doing and I told him I was a little nervous. He speaks only a little English so he didn’t know what I meant, but he finally understood I was scared. He said, “No scared. All okay – we have love.” And… that actually did it for me. I laughed a little, imagined a love bubble around us, and from then on - all was well. 

This ended up probably being my favorite day in India. We visited many places that day, and at most stops, Raghu would hand me the stackable tin containers with that afternoon’s meal and I would step off into a narrow alley. Almost immediately some kids or a neighbor would show up and guide me to wherever I was supposed to deliver the food. Gratitude and blessings radiated from the elderly women. I hugged them, often for a long time, and then picked up their empty tin containers from a prior meal to bring back to Raghu’s motorcycle. Along my walks I met many, many eyes and shared huge smiles. I even ran into one of the sanitation workers I’d danced with at ESI, a great coincidence given the huge geography and population of the slums.

At one point we stopped at a little school with walls built out of aluminum cans covered in wire mesh. Raghu came in with me and introduced me to the teachers. No one there spoke English but I asked Raghu if he’d tell the teachers that I was missing my daughter and that I’d love to give a hug to any kid that wanted one. Many, many children surrounded me and I got to spend a good while loving all these little ones. Raghu also went with me to visit a couple of the elderly women who lived on streets that were more easily accessible by motorcycle. He knew all their stories, telling me about one who had been ill, (he’d acted as the intermediary with the doctors and delivered her medicine), and he told me which woman had had a love marriage 50+ years ago, (rather than arranged), a beautiful love story that had lasted for dozens of years. The women adored him like a son and he also truly, truly loved them.
At one point Raghu pulled over to a small shop to buy me a bottle of water -- and he wouldn’t let me pay, just smiling and saying “Guest is God”. He means it. Raghu named his motorcycle: Isha Vashyam. Ishwar means God, and Vashyam means Everything and Everyone, so: Everything and Everyone is God. 

_________________________________________________

This blog is an excerpt from Michelle's reflections on her recent visit to India. While on a 6 week sabbatical from her work with BALLE, Michelle decided to spend a few weeks with several inspiring people in the Moved By Love family in Ahmedabad and Pune. You can read the entire compilation on this link. 


 

Posted by Michelle Long on Oct 30, 2013 | permalink