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Then, she realised, in her frantic urge to join Janaka, that the plants of Datura we
had planted – for the name You have given to their flower, “Tapasya” – were
bearing fruits: and she would only have to swallow several of them, seed-pods
rather than edible fruits, and that would be likely to take her to the other side.
She asked me then to seat her near enough to the plants, and I did. She herself
plucked a bunch of them and started to eat them up. We were still alone; everyone
else was in the front of the house or outside of it.
But later on, as people started to move around and come to her, it became
confused; she told someone, perhaps more than one person, that she had taken
the Datura; I was among the others then; I felt that I had done all I could by her
and by Janaka; the “community” was there now, and my role was perhaps over… At
some point she must have agreed that she should try to vomit, or be helped to
vomit the poison she had ingested; and the rest of the afternoon was spent trying
to make her body reject it, but to no avail.
Yesterday, as Janaka’s condition had got so critical, D.M had finally accepted to call
for “ordinary means”, even if that meant taking him away.
Datta came, then. It was late afternoon. He accepted to admit Janaka right away in
the Ashram Nursing Home.
We took him in a van.
Datta and his staff settled Janaka in a separate room and plugged him onto the
whole apparatus; I stayed alone with him all night; he remained mostly comatose,
but there were a few moments of conscious acknowledgment…
Why did I feel relieved that he was finally out of the atmosphere with D.M at
“Ravena”? I still couldn’t believe that such a tedious, painful and maddening agony
over so many days would lead to waste and death only; still I could not believe that
the entire thing of their joint offering, of their living commitment to build “Ravena”,
would end up in a waste…
I still was confident we would come out of this.
When Larry came in the morning to replace me, I was so very tired; I didn’t feel
very clearly; I was perhaps overwhelmed by the need to rest; so I left Janaka. I left
the Nursing Home. I came back home.
And soon after that, he left his body.
I now feel that the answers will be long in coming.
D.M’s father, whom she had loved so very much, had died on the same day…
… I had to see to so many details of organisation then; to prepare for Janaka’s body
to be laid in the big house, to have a box made ready, to select the spot in the
garden for the burial…
I returned to “Sincerity” much later… I didn’t see D.M again.
*15-10-1986, Auroville:
D.M left her body last night, some time around 11.30 or 12 pm. No one is sure.
They had taken her in a van to bring her to Jipmer Hospital and try to flush the
poison from her system, but when they reached, she had already passed. The
Hospital staff tried to revive her. It was too late.