Freedom of the Spirit

The last thing she did in her life was to smile. She was bedridden with paraplegia which descended on her quite unexpectedly. She was dancing merrily with a few of her colleagues in the staffroom when she suddenly collapsed. She never danced again. She never got up on her legs anymore. But she kept smiling. Until her last breath.

Etilda Lalu was her name. I called her Kong, which was the Khasi way of addressing women respectfully. “Call me mommy,” she told me many times. “I’m your mother in Shillong.”

I was a young man who had just joined a convent school in Shillong as a teacher. Etilda was a senior colleague of mine who extended to me her friendship that bordered on maternal concern, without any inhibition.

On this Gandhi Jayanti Day, why did Etilda rise in my memory?

I was wondering what I could write about Gandhi on this day? I had written on every Gandhi Jayanti Day and there seemed to be nothing more to say, especially since present India has packed off Gandhi to some alien planet on a Mangalyaan. For the sake of a ritual, flowers will be offered at his Samadhi and some rhetoric will be delivered with the help of a teleprompter.

That’s when Etilda floated along from the depths of my consciousness.

“I have nothing new to teach the world,” Gandhi said famously. “Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills.” Gandhi defined truth as the harmony of thought, word and deed.

Etilda was a unique harmony of thought, word and deed, as perfect as humanly possible. And the grace of it lay in its spontaneity: she never paused to check whether what she said matched what she believed, or whether what she did would square with what she said. There was no gap to check. That harmony was the essence of her soul, not an achievement of discipline. She had arrived at it without any grand vision of life, without any philosophical underpinnings, without theological dogmas, without a political ideology. Goodness that is as old as the hills ran in her veins as naturally as leaves grew on trees.

She inspired one of my stories later, some 15 years after her death.  I called her Anna in the story. “Anna was in love with life,” I wrote. “Life was a sweet music to her and she danced to the delightful tunes of that music.”

That joyful yet noiseless passion for life was what Kong Etilda reminded me on Gandhi Jayanti Day. What really egged Gandhi on all along was a similar passion. Of course, unlike Etilda, Gandhi had a grand vision which was solidly founded philosophical and spiritual moorings. But the purpose of all that vision was the creation of human beings who are “free” in every sense. Not just politically free. Freedom of the spirit was what Gandhi envisioned for every individual. Etilda was one such free spirit.

The photo in this post was taken a few weeks before she passed away. She had been bedridden for some months. But her characteristic smile danced like an eternal song on her face.

“I want to take a photo with you,” I said towards the end of my visit.

“Sit here by my side and take it,” she beckoned.

I never knew then that the dance of her life was reaching its grand finale.

Her life was her message. Simple and noiseless. Life is a song; sing it to the last line as joyfully as you can.

Her song didn’t have a religion. It didn’t require any shrine or gods. A soothing and joyful melody that was an embodiment of freedom of the spirit.