The Beginning

"Come to my temple and see a god that will grant you one wish" my friend commanded on the telephone early one Monday morning. In October of 1996, my Indian friend had begun to call me to invite me to a 2-day retreat at her temple. An atheist at the time, I had no interest at all in going. Quite often she would call and tell me of various miracles and she told me this deity comes out of a picture and embraces you and you experience Divine Love. She had a son that had been labeled mentally retarded with cerebral palsy. She was a warrior mother in the manner that she went about seeking a cure for the child. This was another one of her healing paths, I thought.

Almost every other week she would call me with a tale of some miracle or other that had happened as a result of that retreat. "Come," she would say. "You must come." I would always decline.

I had an aversion to even the idea of India, particularly the multi-armed deities. My great uncle, a British soldier who had traveled to occupied India had a curio room. In it was a statue of Kali. She was adorned with a necklace of skulls like so many gruesome pearls. She was carried a sword in one hand and a severed head in another. She had a lot of arms and I was terrified by the sight of her.

Unfortunately had to pass Kali's room on the way to the washroom. "Time to wash your hands for lunch!" was a phrase that would set my heart pounding at the thought of the dangerous journey upon which I would have to embark upon when we visited my great uncle when I was a young girl. I would take a deep breath and run real fast, slamming the door behind me and I would duck behind the sink, heart racing and eyes wide, hardly breathing, waiting for Kali's footfall. In my mind I could hear her shuffling down the hall, skulls chattering, her anklets jingling as she walked. I knew that if I opened the door and saw her I would faint at the sight or her, and she would have my head.

"Mom!" I would yell as Kali approached the bathroom and began to turn the handle on the door. "Can you come here? Please? Mom!!!!"" My mother was a tigress, a warrior goddess in her own right. She would defend me with her life, and surely not even Kali would be any match for my Mother. I was right. The dark goddess released her hold on the door handle and sidestepped into her room. She was gone before my mother even set foot in the hall. Every time.......

Mom would take my hand and we would safely pass Kali who would stick out her tongue at me if I gathered enough courage to peak though my fingers at her. We would return to the sitting room just in time to see my great uncle demonstrating with a scarf, some coins and his coat rack, how the Thugees would strangle travelers in the night. When the coat rack had been properly murdered, and laid to rest in a shallow grave, he would go to the mantle and take down a small hollow red seed with a tiny carved ivory elephant as a stopper. He would remove the stopper and pour out 100 little elephants and we would count them all. Every one.

I could not imagine, when my friend called, what kind of multi armed being would deliver the wish and in what horrific way. “The Monkey’s Paw” by WW Jacobs came to mind. Still my friend called with repeated invitations.

In November she called and said that at the rereat she had wished for a way to communicate with her sonand on Monday he indicated that he wanted pizza and not spaghetti. The child was clearly communicating. Still he was taking G-Therapy, a homeopathic out of Pune, India with some impressive, almost miraculous results with autism, mental retardation, cerebral palsy and other disorders. At her invitation, I went to see the boy. He held out his arms as if for a hug and laughed and clearly recognized me. It was an amazing transformation whatever had happened!

Early in January or maybe late in December of 1996, my friend called once more. “If you are my friend, you can pray by my side for a weekend for my son. The retreat is next week.” I was cornered. Checkmate. How could I refuse?

“What does this god look like?” I asked. For if something with a lot of arms was going to come out of a picture and embrace me I needed to be psychologically prepared for it.

“Just a guy with a beard in a yellow robe.”

“How many arms?” I asked.

“Just two.”

“Do I have to make a wish?” I asked, still wary.

“Not if you don’t want to. You can give your wish to my son if you like.”

"What is his name?"

"It is a newer god, I think his name is Kalki."

I wrote down the word "Galki" and I agreed to go. He sounded harmless enough. I braced myself for a long weekend visualizing extended prayers in a foreign language, billowing incense and sitars.

The weekend before the retreat was very cold. I was upstairs sleeping deeply, in my Pre-Civil War farmhouse when I woke up to hear Ivan, my beloved Russian Wolfhound barking furiously in the orchard. Huge and silent, Ivan never barked unless there was a real good reason. In that quiet hollow there was rarely any reason at all. Something must be terribly wrong. I grabbed my robe and flew to the window.

Through the lace curtains I saw that there in the road by the barn was a man on a horse. He was dressed in what appeared to be nomadic clothing. He had a beard and a small sword or a dagger. Sean Cneery in The Wind and the Lion came to mind. The man looked very ancient, like he stepped out of some exotic land centuries ago. The horse was small and well bred. I could tell that she was very fast. She shifted impatiently from hoof to hoof and her breath billowed around both horse and rider like some ethereal fog. They seemed to be waiting for something.The man was turned away from the house, looking at the waterfall in the grove in the forest across the road where the deer hunters parked. Ivan had quieted to an occasional "Woof."

I was startled by this. There were rarely visitors. The last one was a man selling flying squirrels out of a basket, if you did not count the gas man who carried a shovel to read the meter because he was afraid of the turkey.

“What the hell?” What does he want? Is he coming to the house? It's the middle of the night! He has to be freezing!" Thoughts of fear and dismay were flying about. I left the window for a moment, reached in the dresser drawer for the 357 and parted the lace curtains to get a better look or perhaps a better shot, depending on what this strange fellow had on his mind.

He caught the movement of the lace and turned his attention to the window. The horse pawed the ground. When he saw that I saw, he tightened his legs on the mare and in one swift motion the she bolted. In a momen they were gone.

Lightening cracked and thunder roared though the hollow echoing against the mountain to the front and the mountain behind. It sounded like the end of the world. A tornado in a trailer park. I could not tell if the sound came from the horse as she thundered down the deserted country road or from the sky.

Then there was silence except for the pounding of my heart. It began to snow. Very softly-gently-beautifully-as if to say, "There, there."

Tiny glittering rainbow specks of snow twirled about before the mercury light on the barn, falling softly on the orchard. Heat lightening flashed on the ridge. The wind drifted down the chimney making the unheated room even colder. The white Victorian rocking horse on the hearth began to slowly rock back and forth, creaking in the draft.

I climbed under the old patchwork quilts watching the white wooden horse rocking in the wind, her amethyst eye sparkling like the snow. I waited for the sound of hooves and thunder. it was as if something had been torn from me. I hoped he would return yet I was afraid he would return.

"Maybe it was a ghost," I thought. The native Americans used to call that area "The Land of the Dark." Mostly because of the thick woods. Still there were rumors of ghostly horsemen.

Then with a start I remembered Ivan. He had long since stopped barking. Ivan had died several years before and was buried beneath the old lilac trees in the orchard next to the barn. I ran to the window and opened it, “Ivan! Ivan!” I cried, I waited for his deep bark. Silence. Just the sound of the stream, icy wind and the shimmering flecks of snow lightly hitting the window.

Heartsick, I went back to bed and rested my face on the cold iron headboard. I could not ever remember feeling so alone or so empty. The white hobbyhorse rocked back and forth as if to nod in agreement. I stayed awake until dawn.

Who was that man? Was it really thunder? What would could raise a dog from its grave. It was clearly Ivan barking. I did not know what it all meant, but I was real sure the visitation had something to do with the following week’s retreat.

I had decided that when the clock struck seven, I would go downstairs, heat up the big stone fireplace with the gas logs and call my friend to tell her I was not going to the retreat. I began to formulate excuses. I had just finished dressing and was heading downstairs to the telephone, when the most beautiful voice imaginable, coming from nowhere that I could see, said, “No. Go. You must go. You must go. “ It soothed me to the very core, bringing with it such comfort and peace. I did not call to cancel.

Even though the following weekend brought the worse snowstorm of the year and my Ford truck was terrible to drive on ice and in snow, I made the 70 mile trip, almost half of which was over country roads, in under an hour. I started to turn back as I was pulling out of the driveway, thinking that there was no way that I could make that trip on such a day, and again the beautiful voice said, “No. It’s all right. You must go.” I passed numerous jeeps and SUV’s with tire chains that were stranded in ditches. Even the salt truck had slid off the road. But the Ford F-150 just flew through the snow as if it had wings.

Each time there was fear, the beautiful, majestic voice came bringing with it peace and courage.

At the retreat I learned that the symbolic form of Kalki, the Lord of Enlightenment- the tenth Avatar of Vishnu, (Gautama Buddha & Krishna were earlier incarnations) was that of a man with a sword upon a white horse.