Walking down this shoreline a few months back, my friend Petra was on my mind, having paid my final respects to her the previous day. It did not take much to figure out that Petra had taken a bunch of pills, made herself comfortable in a park near Utrecht in the Netherlands, and was found by a jogger early morning the next day. Her funeral having already taken place, I was left with the conundrum of what to do now in faraway Puducherry. The following morning while getting groceries, a loudly honking bus with ‘Tiruvannamalai’ painted on its side nearly running me over, gave me the necessary directions.
Tiru, as she would call the temple town in Tamil Nadu, had long been Petra’s spiritual abode, even though she had not visited the temple in nearly a decade. I realised, I had to ‘take her there’ one last time. Yet, while making this decision, I was immediately struck by how hilarious she would have found this — not a spiritual bone in my body, me attending darshan and possibly mingling with the ‘Tiru crowd’.
I first met Petra when I was an anthropology student, and we bonded instantly over our mutual interest in India. Her interest was always far more spiritual, but she never hesitated making fun of Westerners coming to India looking for ‘salvation’. Once having stayed at an ashram in Kerala, she had run away in sheer desperation, unable to deal with all the sanctimony. ‘They drive me wild,’ she had screamed over a bad phone line, having somehow located me on a university campus in Melbourne. She couldn’t handle the hugging, the desperate need to be spiritual, the performance of ‘knowing India better than Indians’.
All this happened some 20 years ago. Petra’s life would spiral out of control. Puducherry and Auroville have long been a refuge for people like her. Earlier, I had observed several people strutting down the Promenade, clad in white, bindi neatly affixed, a look of benevolence and enlightenment in their eyes.
Like a hermit, Petra had once camped out on the slopes of Arunachala, the holy hill of light in Tiruvannamalai that makes the temple town such an incredible place of (Shaiva) worship. If it had been up to her, she would have stayed there. On returning home, she would vow, ‘Never again’, only to backtrack when her irritation with the holier-than-thou attitude had worn off. Oh, Petra, how easy it was to overlook you, shorter than others, certainly by Dutch standards. I will miss her wit, her devilishly ostentatious laugh, her incredible artistry. At Tiru, I paid my respects, walked around the temple and finally rested my back against one of the cool pillars, trying to picture her as I had once known her. Yet, it was only when I found myself meandering down the Promenade the next day that I could truly let her go. How lovely it would have been, though, to have sat on one of its benches for one final chat, a good hearty laugh.
