The maverick with a dolphin smile

I met him during a meditation course at a Bengaluru ashram. Our friendship grew as we shared a room. A slender physique, an innocent, expressive face and radiant eyes — he was a likeable person full of laughter and sunshine. But his ever-present dolphin smile somehow irritated me.

Having worked as a computer professional with IBM in the US for three years, he had suddenly resigned and returned to India. “It all seemed useless somehow. I just sold my car and came back,” he said while introducing himself at the inaugural session, and added with a mischievous smile, “Oh, an ordinary Toyota, not a Ferrari!” The obvious allusion was to Robin Sharma’s famous book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Since that day, he came to be known as ‘Monk’ in the ashram.

Our conversations touched on a variety of topics. He told me about his mother who lived in Pune, but there was no mention of his wife or children.

The course consisted of rigorous breathing exercises and meditation routines. Sitting cross-legged for hours made my back and calf muscles ache. But I was enjoying this interlude of spiritual retreat. And the no-holds-barred discussions with Monk at bedtime were more stimulating than anything else.

Then came Shivratri and thousands of devotees converged on the ashram. The main hub of activity was the open-air auditorium where puja and bhajans continued all night. I was passing through the crowd at one of the gates when my pocket was picked and my smartphone was stolen. The next morning, Monk took me to the ‘Lost and Found’ section of the ashram. We reported the matter to the police, but to no avail.

I felt disconcerted at the loss of my phone and was a bit uncommunicative during my bedtime chat with Monk. He tried to console me with the thought that I might get it back as the police had nabbed a few pickpockets and some stolen articles had been recovered. In the end, he added in a comforting tone, “Moreover, you need not get yourself upset over the loss of small things!”

“Small things?” I burst out. “Do you know how much an iPhone costs? If you had lost yours, I wonder how you could have smiled so peacefully.”

My voice had turned slightly acerbic, but Monk was unprovoked, his dolphin smile intact. After a while, he said, “I have lost many things in life, perhaps more important than an Apple mobile!” Then, on my repeated insistence, he told me how he had lost his family less than a year ago. His 15-year-old son had died of meningitis, and his wife had passed away about two months later. I gaped at his face, wondering how a person could smile all the time after suffering so much. We fret too much about the loss of things that are not very significant in life, I thought.

On my return, I realised that I had learned more from my maverick room-mate than all the painstaking workouts during my ashram sojourn.