A few months after settling in the Pacific Northwest, an event occurred which finally opened my eyes and FORCED me to understand that my ongoing nightmares were an exact depiction of reality. At last, I realized that Satprem in person and in the flesh was involved in the nightmares I lived day after day, that he was behind each decision, each inflexion and insinuation, each misguided assessment, as he had been earlier behind each act of courage and determination, each breakthrough and success — that he was human like everyone else, small and fallible like everyone else. And that I was partly to blame for putting him in this false position of infallibility above humanity, for missing my cue in playing the opposite part.
Many years before, Satprem had entrusted packets containing hundreds of personal papers and letters to close friends for safekeeping. Because of the urgency and haste with which these packets had been prepared and transported at the time, no precise inventory of the letters had been kept. On several occasions, I had taken suitcases filled with papers to the United States, which were then duly filed away in a strong box at home. From time to time over the years, he would ask me to open one file or another in order to check a letter or a paper. At one point, I had even toyed with the idea of recording the most important letters by theme in our computer so they would be easier to find in their folders, but I had abandoned the idea when confronted with the magnitude of the task. Before moving to the Pacific Northwest, Satprem had requested that I send back to India all his personal papers through postal sacks, which we had done with all the care and guarantee offered by surface mail.
But now he claimed that some letters were missing!
On July 17, 1993, responding to a telegram where I stated, once again, my total ignorance about the missing letters (Susie and I had searched our house from top to bottom), and where I strongly hinted that forces of disharmony were behind this bewildering confusion, Satprem wrote me the following in his own hand:
We are in receipt of your telegram from New Jersey.
Sujata and I found it shocking.
It also brings pain in the heart — and in the body.
So we undertook the difficult ordeal of looking through the ‘postal sack’ that you sent us in Jan. 92 [In fact, two postal sacks had been shipped to India]. And I then realized with dismay the extent of the pilfering of my correspondence.
Since you no longer seem to see clearly the Truth, I am enclosing with this letter some photocopies of your own letters where you explicitly mention my folders, transported in your house and recorded on ‘electronic files’ in your computer.
I have often spoken to you about this ‘hidden Foe’ that a person must conquer or miss his higher Destiny.
Falsehood is everywhere.
I am going to be seventy.
But I keep struggling.
I am waiting for Luc, who I used to call my brother, to wake up at last.
I was stunned.
Right there in black and white, the person I had placed above everything else in this world, perhaps even above myself when it came to decipher right from wrong; the person who had guided and understood me so well, who had taught me so much — the very one Mother had chosen to receive her secrets — not only was accusing me of lying and stealing, but seemed to be possessed with hysterical blindness, as if nothing would ever stop this wild lunacy, these mechanical tirades filled with “Falsehood” and “Truth,” “Destiny” and “Foe” and “struggle”… yet missing the one elementary fact that stealing those letters would have been a material absurdity.
Of course the case was sealed. And all my denials would be lost in interstellar vacuum. This is what my night-time and daytime nightmares were telling me. We had long passed the point when an erupting volcano can be stopped — by admitting, for example, that a small grain of sand had gone into the gears, that we needed to stop and review the situation together, and perhaps revise some preconceived ideas… But the words sounded so convincing, the contrived expressions so compelling that no presumption of innocence had any place in that discourse. Despite everything, despite my heavy heart, I called up all the strength of reason and calm I could muster to draft a precise, irrefutable demonstration that they had embarked on a wrong track, that I could NOT have stolen those letters. On August 5, I answered:
This whole episode is absurd from beginning to end, a sort of ‘air bubble’ — overblown by what? I believe it is not so much an ‘awakening’ that is needed at this point as a simple act of elementary logic.
If I had wanted to ‘pilfer’ your correspondence, which was with me for some ten years, would it not have been easier (and more discreet) for me to make photocopies of the letters I wanted to keep and send you back all your originals intact? Why leave all these gaping ‘holes’ so conspicuous in your correspondence when it would have been so simple to do my ‘pilfering’ incognito?
If ‘pilfering’ there was, then I will go straight to hell, for I do not see what else is possible after such an act. But if there was NO ‘pilfering’, then, really, I would ask you to try and comprehend how such accusations could have arisen in the first instance. You alone can throw light on this confusion.
I never received any reply to my letter.