The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Read online

  BPL took the news remarkably well. His relationship with Freda had always been based on tolerance and respect for each other’s strong but different personalities. And the right to personal freedom was a tenet they held dear, both on a personal and on a political level.

  Kabir explains, “It was a very good marriage. There were occasional arguments, but never any serious rows in our house, although Mummy could get exasperated with Papa—with his collecting of small animals that grew into very large ones, for example. There was no doubt that they were both the loves of each other’s lives. Papa accepted Mummy’s choice and, as far as I can remember, was not resentful at all. I don’t think there was ever a spiritual separation between them.”

  Another reason that BPL took Freda’s news with such equanimity was that his inner life was running along parallel lines. For some time he had been following his own spiritual quest and was undergoing his own enlightenment experience. It bore all the hallmarks of his originality. “He would sit still for hours without moving. He would babble in voices we didn’t understand. He’d go up onto the roof and stand for hours with his arms outstretched toward a shrine of a Sufi saint,” said Kabir. “We called the doctor, but Papa just smiled at him. ‘What I’m going through is beyond you,’ he told him. The doctor nevertheless insisted on examining him. ‘You won’t find a pulse,’ said Papa. He was right. The astonished doctor left.

  “Father started going on walks, discovering the graves of Sufi saints in the area, telling us where they were, both marked and unmarked. He started to do automatic writing. Word got out and people started coming to the house with their problems. Papa would listen, then begin writing, and eventually hand them sheets of paper with answers to their troubles on them. In time he became quite a healer and was known as Baba Bedi, the name given to a holy man.”

  By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first of the hippies and the Beat Generation were arriving in India, and many found their way to BPL’s door. “Then the house got full of really strange people. Papa always made it quite clear to all of them, however, that he was not a saint, nor was he going to behave like one. ‘I’ll smoke my cigarettes and drink my whiskey as normal—and not be bound by anyone,’ Papa said. Gradually he stopped writing automatic messages and started speaking words that had begun coming through him. At first his voice and way of talking were strange, but then the style evolved and he talked like himself,” said Kabir.

  The family noticed a subtle, definite change in Freda after her Burma experience. “She was calmer,” said Ranga. “Mummy was always rather highly strung and could get impatient if people didn’t grasp things immediately. Not that she was ever harsh. After Burma she was ‘softer,’ and took time to explain. When Father emerged from his religious experience, there was no change at all!”

  The next event to send shock waves through the family was when Freda, for reasons of her own, sent Guli to boarding school miles away in North India. Her daughter was just five years old. It seemed not only cruel but a terrible dereliction of maternal duty, and out of character with her essentially kind, caring nature. In addition, she performed the deed in what appeared a particularly brutal way.

  Guli, now a tall, sociable woman who has dedicated her life to teaching children with special needs, lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, outside Boston, Massachusetts. She recalls every detail of the traumatic event. “When Mummy told me her idea, I told her outright, ‘I am not going to boarding school!’ We children were all strong characters, who had been taught to speak up. She arranged everything extremely well. We often went touring, and this year Mummy took me to visit an old family friend, Auntie Mera (who had adopted thirteen children) in Naina Tal, in the foothills of Uttar Pradesh. When we got there, she asked if I wanted to see All Saints School, which was nearby and run by Christian nuns. I said yes. I remember the oak tree in the garden, which was huge, and I got very animated and chatty with the nuns. I turned around to tell Mummy something and she was gone. I was absolutely devastated. I cried for three days. The nuns, British Anglican missionaries, were so kind. They really cared for me.”

  Guli grew to love her school. “It turned out to be the best experience. I studied the scriptures and I know everything about the Bible. I loved the hymns and the feeling of the chapel, not that I ever felt the need to become a Christian. There was never any talk about conversion! Of course, I missed my mother and I think she felt a little bad. She wrote to me every week. I always got a letter. I could count on it. And when I did return to the family on the holidays, I was always happy to hop on the train to go back to school. When I was older and Mummy had moved to Dalhousie, she asked if I wanted to change schools to be near her and I said no. I didn’t want to leave. I think she was a little browned off.”

  Still, the puzzlement of why Freda had sent her away at such a young age remained. It resurfaced with a vengeance when Guli became a mother herself. Finally she confronted Freda directly. “When I first had a baby of my own, I could not understand how she could have done it. I was just five years old, for heaven’s sake! I wrote to her bluntly: ‘What an amazing mother! With all of your spiritual and religious convictions, how could you forsake your child?’ She never really acknowledged it. ‘I got your letter—thank you,’ was her only reply.

  “Later she answered me properly in person. ‘You never understood why I sent you to boarding school. I was a social worker for many years and I witnessed the absolute tragedy of young girls sexually molested by servants and family members. Your father was a loving man, but he didn’t understand these things. I was afraid he’d leave you alone when I was not there to protect you. That’s the reason I sent you to boarding school.”

  Guli totally accepted her mother’s reasoning. “I got it. By then I’d come across many cases of abused kids myself. Thankfully, I was never sexually abused,” she said.

  To all outer appearances, life in Delhi continued as usual for the Bedi household: Freda working all hours, BPL doing freelance writing, the two younger children being educated at their respective schools, Ranga now grown up and following his chosen career in tea. As usual, money was frighteningly scarce, and the family’s living arrangements were haphazard.

  “I never had a settled family home. In Delhi the family moved from government flat to government flat, so that when I came back from boarding school, I never knew where I was going to live. The longest I stayed anywhere was a year,” said Guli. “And we were always broke. My father was a wonderful man but he had a devil-may-care attitude of ‘the money will come.’ He was a truly free spirit, and the most optimistic person I ever met. He was super-bright, charismatic, and had a presence. I could see why Mummy fell in love with him. Papa never wore a responsible hat in his life. Now I feel like kicking him.

  “Then I look at Mummy. She had to pay school fees and feed us. Mummy had to work so hard. I don’t know how she did it. Her life was real—it wasn’t all ‘ha-ha-he-he.’ I remember one Christmas, which we always celebrated, I really wanted a paint set. It cost fifty rupees. Mummy said she couldn’t afford it. I wept. I’d never heard her say she had no money before. But once Christmas arrived, there it was under the tree. The strain she went through . . .” said Guli.

  “They were very loving parents, and we were taught to love everyone. They ran a very generous home. Whatever they had, they gave. One day we came home and found we’d been robbed. The thieves had taken all of Mummy’s saris. ‘It’s OK, darlings,’ she said. ‘Whoever did this needed it more than we do.’ Mrs. Gandhi used to give her the most elegant, beautiful saris, but she would often give them away. ‘Some poor little girl in the office needs it,’ she’d say.”

  Financially they were poor, but the Bedis’ social life among artists, writers, diplomats, politicians, and hippies was exceedingly rich. Freda’s connection with Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter, Indira, remained strong, and the couple and the young Bedi children were frequent visitors to their house.

  “We shared their box at the India Independence D
ay parades, and were invited to Indira’s sons’ birthday parties,” said Kabir. “Sanjay and Rajiv had a room just for their toys. They filled the entire room—electric trains, Meccano—all gifts from foreign dignitaries. They also had two dogs, Pepe and Maddho. Pepe once bit Guli on the bottom!” he recalled with a laugh.

  “Mummy never took advantage of the friendship. She never asked for anything. We were seven years waiting for a telephone line—all she had to do was whisper to Indira and we’d have got six telephones. But she wouldn’t do it. That’s why Indira trusted her,” he said.

  Freda was certainly never a snob, nor did she ever forsake her socialist principles. The family members vividly recall the occasion when the Burmese ambassador and other diplomats had been invited to dinner and the doorbell rang. It was a servant who had been with them for many years but who came and went as he pleased. This time he had been away for over a year and was expecting to get his job back. Freda let him in, pulled up an extra chair at the table, and sat him next to the ambassador.

  For all her full secular and social life Freda still found time to practice the meditation she had learned with Sayadaw U Pandita. Having found her true path, she was not going to let it go. Whenever she could, she traveled to Burma to continue her meditation training under his strict, watchful eye. Sometimes she took Kabir, her “special child” with her, encouraging him to shave his head and don Buddhist robes as a child monk. Secretly she hoped that one day he would be ordained. That destiny was not to be his, however.

  10

  Meeting the Tibetans

  ON MARCH 31, 1959, burdened by grief, exhaustion, and illness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet left his homeland forever and stepped into exile in India. He had only left at the urgings of Nechung, the State Oracle of Tibet, who had guided successive Dalai Lamas through the medium-ship of trance. A unique institution, the Tibetan government took no major decisions without first consulting the oracle. Now the oracle pronounced his life in dire danger and that he could do more to help his beleaguered people if he made their plight known to the outside world. His escape out of Tibet had been hazardous, traversing the highest mountain ranges on earth with the Chinese troops hot on his heels. Finally he reached the sanctuary of India; the Buddha’s birthplace was willing to give him refuge.

  Prime Minister Nehru, prompted by his daughter Indira (who possibly had been prompted by Freda), graciously extended the twenty-four-year-old spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet a warm welcome on the grounds that India and Tibet shared cultural and spiritual bonds that had existed for centuries. Back in Tibet word quickly got out that the Dalai Lama was not dead, as rumored, but was alive and living in India, whereupon thousands of monks and laypeople promptly abandoned their homes, gathered up a few possessions, and followed their revered leader into exile. They were following not just a leader but a person they believed was the embodiment of the Buddha of Compassion, a figure who would preserve their unique Buddhist way of life, which was currently being systematically destroyed by the invading Revolutionary Chinese forces. The Tibetan diaspora had begun.

  They arrived in India traumatized, starving, ill, filthy, and utterly disoriented. Their escape to freedom had been pitted with unimaginable horror—snow, ice, crevasses that suddenly opened up under their feet, and Chinese troops who shot on sight. They had seen many of their countrymen lose their lives. Not sure what to do with this great influx of lost, battered humanity, Nehru sent for the one person whom he knew was qualified to help: Freda Bedi. Nehru knew from firsthand knowledge that she had handled the refugee crisis in Kashmir after Partition with consummate skill, was an excellent administrator, and furthermore was currently engaged in social work throughout the subcontinent. He’d also heard she had a newfound affinity with Buddhism. He duly appointed her adviser on Tibetan refugees in the Ministry of External Affairs. She readily agreed.

  A letter she wrote to Olive, however, suggested that it was she who had subtly put the idea into Nehru’s head. “I felt that as a Buddhist and part of the Social Welfare Board—with a particular interest in women and children—I might have some role in helping to rehabilitate them and the lamas. Pandit Nehru agreed that a woman’s eye might be useful.”

  She immediately headed for Missamari and Buxa in West Bengal, where the majority of refugees had been accommodated.

  T. C. Tethong, later private secretary to the Dalai Lama, was a twenty-four-year-old Tibetan studying medicine in nearby Darjeeling when the Dalai Lama crossed into India. He was called upon to act as interpreter from Tibetan to English and vividly recalls Freda’s arrival on the scene. “The first time she came to help, she was in such a hurry that she hadn’t got the necessary permit to enter the camps—which were designated a restricted area because of the delicate political situation. So she returned with the right documentation and after assessing the situation got down to work. She was a great humanitarian. All those who knew her respected her enormously. She helped whomever she could, whenever she could—continually struggling to keep pressuring the right people for aid.”

  The situation that Freda found herself in was overwhelming and chaotic. Contractors were working day and night frantically erecting bamboo huts that could house fifty to seventy refugees each. Initially there were over seven thousand people, nearly all men—monks, government officials, and freedom fighters. But

  T. C. Tethong also remembered among the throng a Chinese military man and his family who had been posted to Tibet and who took the opportunity to escape too. The second wave of refugees came through Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Kinnaur. Places had to be found for them all. Many were sent to settlements in South India. They kept pouring in, their numbers rising from thirty thousand to seventy thousand.

  It was a grim, pitiful, and overwhelming sight that greeted Freda on her arrival. The Tibetans were ill, starving, disoriented, and highly traumatized. Their journey out had been long and fraught with danger. They staggered into India wearing their unsuitable heavy wool, fur, and leather clothes, now stinking and thick with grime, and found an alien world, as frightening as the one they had left behind.

  To begin with, the climate was unbearably hot for people born and raised on the clean, clear, cold air of the Tibetan plateau. Used to eating yak meat and barley (the only foods their terrain could sustain), their stomachs could not digest the rice, vegetables, and hot spices—the subsistence food offered to them. Nor could they safely drink the water, which had an unusually high iron content. Consequently they became sick, picking up tropical diseases and, worst of all, tuberculosis, which spread like wildfire among them.

  It is unknown whether Freda recognized the irony that the great socialist ideal that she and her husband espoused had caused the greatest suffering the Tibetan people had ever known, destroying their most precious possession—their unique religion, the faith that Freda now proudly called her own.

  Freda rolled up her sleeves and got down to work, moving between the camps at Missamari, Buxa, Sikkim, and Kalimpong. She worked around the clock, greeting the newcomers with cups of tea and words of comfort, tending to their sores and sicknesses, and trying to soothe their emotional scars. To the refugees she must have been an unlikely sight. Tibet had been locked to outsiders for centuries, and its inhabitants had never seen a Westerner before. Moreover, they had been taught to view them all as barbarians, “red-skinned devils,” primitive beings who had not been refined by the Buddhadharma. Now they opened their hearts to the tall, fair-skinned Freda, who was helping them so selflessly. As one they began to call her “Mummy” and then “Mummy-la” (this suffix being a mark of high esteem).

  Freda was moved. She learned that within Tibetan culture the figure of the mother (any mother) was universally held in the highest regard, even reverence. The mother was the person who brought forth life, nourished that life with her own body, and was prepared to sacrifice her own life for the sake of her child. In short, the mother was the highest example on earth of selfless love. Freda was ready to take o
n the title. “Technically I was welfare adviser to the Ministry; in actuality I was Mother to a camp full of soldiers, lamas, peasants, and families. Women and children were barely thirteen hundred in number, but how precious they were, for on them depended the continuance of the old Tibetan culture. We struggled with commercial baby formula and barley to save the babies, whose mothers’ milk had dried up on the escape or as a result of their suffering. Others had worms or diseases contracted during the arduous journey. There were no office hours. Sunrise was the signal for the first visitors,” Freda wrote to Olive.

  “We had no electricity, so work slowed down when dark came. But even after that, we used to go round the barracks and into the hospitals with volunteers and interpreters to pick up the sick and solve the day’s problems. I can’t begin to tell you of the tragic stories all carried in their hearts. We even avoided inquiring, so that old wounds would not be torn open again, and gave instead positive hopes of work and resettlement. Much of my time was spent keeping friends and family groups together when the dispersal to work sites and centers was taking place. For those who have lost home, country, and almost every possession, family and village ties are all that is left, and they assume tremendous importance and significance.”

  The Tibetans were scrutinizing the unaccustomed personage of a white woman, and Freda in turn was certainly regarding them. She, like other Westerners, had never come across Tibetans or their culture. Secreted away within their mighty Himalayan fortress, the forbidden country of Tibet had remained a mystery to the rest of the world for centuries. In 1959 that isolationist policy had been rudely crushed, and the Tibetans were thrust out into the world. Their appearance may have been dirty and bedraggled, their bodies broken, and their demeanor utterly disoriented, but Freda was deeply and immediately struck by a certain quality she had not encountered before.