Remembering Ramadevi
We moved to Mayapur in 2004, and my mother brought my sister and I to the sewing room so that we could do some service. There, in that big messy room, was Ramadevi Dasi, and she presented to us all the possibilities of service that we might do for Radha Madhava. She seemed to me, quite stern and grumpy and I wasn’t sure how I felt about her at first. But she told my mother later that we needn’t be so formal around her and that we should drop “Mataji” and call her “Aunty Ramram” instead. This we did, and that’s when the fun started.
To spend time with Ramadevi was to learn. She had so much to show us, and she seemed to me to know something about everything. She could sew, knit, crochet, mentally calculate long mathematical equations, fix a broken fuse, she could tell if you needed more iron in your diet, bicker away to the tailors in fluent Bengali, tell the best stories, and converse with anyone about anything. She was a superb midwife and even though she would declare each baby her “last one” she always ready to deliver one more if needed.
She was especially kind to children, she would playfully call us toerags and scallywags and other reverse terms of endearment. If she called you “horrible”, she loved you a lot! She was fiercely protective of all the children of Mayapur, even when they sometimes didn’t care to be protected! She would cry tears of frustration and sadness when she heard of a child being mistreated in the Dham. She inspired a whole generation of young people to think of serving Radha Madhava and Panca Tattva some way, somehow according to our skills and natures. She never discouraged an idea, rather she would nurture and grow our aspirations and let us try things for ourselves.
She could engage anyone in service to Radha Madhava according to their skill set and impart her special way of meditation while doing so. She seemed to be always thinking of the Asta Sakhis, Their comfort in the clothes she made for Their nightly pastimes was tantamount, and she would involve everyone in the room in praying They would accept our services. No undertaking was too big- she found ways to engage the whole community in long, often last minute marathons of hand embroidery or painting, even taking on gigantic projects like a flower outfit for Panca tattva. The atmosphere in these times was always electric, and Rama made it her personal business to see that everyone was enlivened on the job. She would draw us all into a daydream of her latest idea for an outfit, a wistful imagining of what it might be like to sew in the spiritual world, or regale us all in some lila she had heard, and she would impart it with such vivid detail and often with tears in her eyes. She would often cry, easily overcome with emotion at the kindness of a devotee or remembering Prabhupāda.
She trained my eyes to catch beauty and inspiration for Radha Madhava’s clothes in everything- the saree of a passer-by, a bedsheet, or even a well-dressed man! She would stop random strangers and tell them she liked what they were wearing and that it gave her an idea for Radha Madhava. She’d tell me to step back and describe what I liked or disliked about something. There were no right or wrong answers, but if we were in agreement, she would praise me, a 14-year-old, for having discerning taste and style. I always found this very funny. From childhood, I had an eye for the wildly expensive and ostentatious, which had I not met her I most likely would have lavished on myself. But she taught me to channel that indulgence into only wanting the best for Radha Madhava’s service and I felt safe to be myself.
She taught me how to shop in Kolkata. Honestly, this is a vital survival skill in itself. Sometimes we would spend days out there looking for the perfect fabric for the next night dress. She appeared to me to have unlimited stamina for walking the endless pokey alleyways and scouring the shops for the right thing. She always knew the weirdest little places to eat. I learned to trust that if she was recommending some dingy place on the side of the road, it was bound to be good. She was fearless, I have no idea how she found herself in these obscure, out-of-the-way places on her own. One day, as we were shopping in Boro Bazaar, a place not necessarily famed for its refinement, a passing man made some dirty remark which I didn’t understand and almost ignored. But Rama doubled back and dressed him down in fluent Bengali. “What did you say to my daughter?” She asked him. He shrank to the size of a cockroach while she used her choicest insults on him, some of which I suspect were not PG13. A crowd gathered, they jeered at the man and escorted us to our next stopping place. She always had the love of Bengali people for the way she spoke and understood them, even if she was yelling!
She had a very individual sense of dress and encouraged me to try wilder and brighter colours. Some of my craziest sarees were picked out by Rama on our shopping trips, and in my opinion they suit me best. You can see in the picture, she’s wearing a saree that she loved very much, it was much brighter and more striking than appears in the picture, and it suited her very well.
She was an amazing cook, and she was always feeding everyone. If she liked you, she fed you. And sometimes even if she didn’t like you, you were still getting fed. She never cooked anything the normal way, there was always a twist of something you wouldn’t expect. Ever the generous teacher, she would always share her secrets and recipes. When she described a preparation, you could almost taste it. She had that magical cooking shakti. I would sometimes visit her at home and find her pottering about, sewing, surfing Pinterest for ideas or instructing Nandarani, her maidservant and dear friend. She would stop whatever she was doing and feed me something wonderful she had offered to her beloved Giriraja and Sri Sri Radha Gokula Madhava. She was the first person my sister and I invited to take prasad when we first started to learn how to cook in Gurukula. She was very kind to eat what we made and gave us helpful tips.
I loved and idolised her. I wanted to learn everything I could and be just like her. I spent so much time in her shadow, some people thought I was her servant. She joked that I complained too much to be a good servant. She was right, I gained more from her association than I ever gave. Sometimes we didn’t agree, and being very similar in temperament-two Taureans- it created long, stubborn, battles of will. In times of war, I was sometimes petulant, even rude, and in those moments always surprised that she loved me still. We would go back to normal like nothing happened. She never scolded me, she would just wait me out knowing I hated to disappoint her. She understood me very well and played me like a fiddle. Sometimes, she would give me service that I found too difficult or boring. She would listen while I complained and whined, sometimes for days, but she would never release me from the task. “My mother would make you do this three times or more, that’s how you learn” she’d say. I would never tell her but she was right. Thanks to her, I learned to persevere through difficult undertakings.
In earlier days, I wouldn’t wear earrings at all because I just didn’t like to, and this annoyed her very much. She called it “a waste of neck” because, she said, I had a nice long neck and if she had such a neck she would wear earrings down to her shoulders. One day, she randomly phoned me up to tell me that she had decided to call me “Cingola.” “Cin” being short for Cintamani and “Gola” meaning neck in Bengali. Though I am often tetchy about nicknames, mildly amused, and sensing her affection, I simply said “alright then,” and after that, she often called me Cingola. I also got into wearing longer and longer earrings.
When she got sick, I got into the habit of saying a prayer for her every time I used a trick or skill she had taught me. I found myself thanking Radha Madhava for her multiple times a day. You can hear in her final goodbye message available on SoundCloud how unpretentious she was. She was always candid and frank. She could laugh at anything and make anyone comfortable to be themselves.
I hadn’t seen her in five years, and we rarely kept in contact, but she watched everything I did from a distance and would send word that she was proud of me for this or that. I was in mad denial about her leaving, terrified of the real goodbye, and so sure that I would somehow see her at least one more time before she left. I buried my head in the sand and selfishly prayed for more time. But why should Madhava wait for me, when He was so eager to have His dear servant home with Him? And what can I do now but cry and thank Him for the time we had?
I came back to Facebook just to make this post. Sorry if it is not easy to read or if there are gaps, it is largely unedited because it is not for entertainment, it is glorification, outcry and catharsis all in one. In my defense, Rama is a larger than life personality and even if I knew everything about her, I could never hope to cover it all in a single piece of writing.
Pictured: The Toerag Cingola, and her Heroine Aunty Ramram. The temple courtyard in Mayapur, some time around my first initiation, aged 14.
Source: From Facebook Post of Caitanya Cintamani Devi Dasi