Cloud Messenger, a memoir by Karen Trollope-Kumar about “Love and Loss in the Indian Himalayas” resonates, in understated yet evocative prose, with many passages that cling to the reader. Try this: “……I could see that flowers had burst into bloom. But something strange had happened. The world around me was like a black and white photograph – the colour had disappeared, leaving nothing but shades of gray…. Weeks passed and I remained lost in my shadow world……. The long hours of daylight dragged on, until I was desperate for night to come.” If you’ve known depression, or maybe if you’ve avoided the blunt fact that you are depressed, or could be, you may shiver in recognition and awaken to new unsettling depths in yourself.
But Trollope-Kumar’s subtly seductive narrative is many things –including a firm yet humane account of her many realizations during her spiritual development. This is shown as by no means an easy journey: “I had come to Garhwal filled with naïve enthusiasm and I had created naïve expectations for myself about building a medical program with specific outcomes and goals. The failure of these expectations had perhaps been inevitable…. Yet my outer life had always been intimately related to an inner movement of mysterious dimensions……That inner journey had led me to ever-deepening layers of understanding: how people of a different culture live and work, how they experience their bodies in health and illness, how they create meaning within their lives. At another level I had experienced the meaning of love – for Pradeep and my Indian family, for my children, and for the people of Garhwal.”
At a profound level, the author “felt a sense of unity or oneness with the natural world” and “deep” connection “with others.” She sums up, “My spirituality lay in the mystery of pattern, within nature and within human lives.” And later “I offered a prayer to remember the attitude of the true pilgrim – to be open, aware, humble, and mindful.” This she concludes after eleven years as a Canadian who, with her Indian husband, works as a medical doctor in remote regions of the Himalayas. Here she gradually grows into the culture, becomes more at one with it, as it were, and both the country and the author develop in complexity before the reader’s eyes.
The reader, however, does not remain a neutral observer, since both the country’s revelations and the author’s awakening require a thoughtful reader to share Trollope-Kumar’s probing attitude and to question so much that is taken for granted by a Westerner. Try this passage, one that I reread several times to let its implications start to settle in: “My brain swirled in confusion. I’d never seen a condition like this in my medical work in Canada and the symptoms just didn’t make sense to me.” Her husband, Pradeep, a doctor raised in the pulsations of Indian culture, comments in response: “This problem of safed panni is very common in India…. In Lucknow, we were seeing many women like her.”
To which Trollope-Kumar responds: “But a condition like that doesn’t even exist in Canada…. It’s as if people’s cultural background affects the way they experience their bodies – even someone’s symptoms can be different depending on the culture they grew up in. Isn’t that amazing?” To which Pradeep replies: “Maybe it’s because we people in India never used to think of the body like a machine with lots of parts. We think of the body as having flows of energy – something that is always changing. It’s a different idea completely.” Trollope-Kumar becomes “lost in thought: “Perhaps to become an effective doctor in India, I’ll need to decipher the language of the body……I suspect that this is a skill far more subtle than simply learning to speak Hindi.”
One beauty of Cloud Messenger is the frequent and clear articulation of nearly ineffable spiritual wisdom and of potent personal realizations. Friend Bill observes: “The problem with you is that you are still attached to the idea of ‘I’ as the doer. You need to pray to understand the movement of Divine will in your life. In that moment of surrender, you will find the peace your heart is seeking.”
Trollope-Kumar then reflects: “God, pray, Divine will, surrender, these are all words that arise in a faith tradition in which the Divine is perceived in the most intimate terms in an ‘I-thou relationship…. Yet what do these words mean for a Buddhist, a Daoist, or for an agnostic? What do these words mean for someone like me, who has so many questions? ……If we think about the universe as a dynamic dance, can we transcend the need for words like God and Divine will? The dance of the universe is revealed in the richness of the world, in the myriad names and forms that surround us. Suppose the seeker strives to attune herself to that cosmic dance, to move in its rhythm – will she then find the peace her heart is seeking?”
Meanwhile, Pradeep’s determined spiritual search has led to one realization that he should move with his depressed wife to Canada – “You’ll feel better in your own country”- and also this: “I am no more interested in NGO work. In fact, I am no more interested in the practice of medicine at all. It is time for me to take a new direction in life.” Before, when his wife teased him that he could have been a well-known guru, his response was: “Having disciples is the last thing I want…Too much power comes with being a guru, and most people can’t handle it.” Meanwhile, Trollope Kumar worries that “all that work” the two have done will “go to waste.” And she reflects, “Perhaps I was drawn to India in pursuit of that adventure. Perhaps Pradeep was just part of that romantic fantasy…”
In Cloud Messenger, we learn much, say, about India’s culture, everything from daily diet to the ways of childbirth and the treatment of women. Also about the perils of trying to deliver health programs, with limited resources and undertrained staff, to rural India. Also about a westerner’s unending adjustment to an intensely complex and elusive way of life that India is. Also about ideals confronted by a hostile world – a swami does get murdered, after all. Also about the fibre of love and friendship in their many manifestations. Also about human need and denial and the impact of each one.
Like the country she describes, the author’s intensely personal memoir draws one in and doesn’t sit still for passivity to be one’s response. It’s a fascinating and very readable tale, often rich with subtle humour and insightful lightness of being, that begins: “’Expect the unexpected,” I had been told when I left Canada for two months of medical studies in India.” Cloud Messenger shows itself to be a wise and gentle life shared. It’s a life that – by trying to move beyond intention and expectation and denial of one’s truer self- indeed earns its wisdom.