Retreat in Marve

The guys

Returned after quite an in-depth journey with six others including Pankaj and Vijay, at Marve. The theme of our workshop occurred to me quite spontaneously a few days before we met and probably had to do with a sort of dissatisfaction I was experiencing in myself. The question I thought of exploring with the others was, what do we mean by “quality” and how does it relate to us? Quality, as in quality of life, quality of our relationships and so on. How do we experience it and do we really want it?

It is amazing how, at a deeper level most of us feel the same. By and large all of us agreed that quality rested on honesty, on being authentic. A difficult thing because honesty is often embarrassing, especially in view of the fact that we are always trying to please each other. We are not honest because we are afraid to “destroy” a relationship. We seldom realise the fact that by not being honest, the relationship anyway goes for a six. Either it results in conflict or it goes dead over a period of time. The battery runs out.

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Marve is great during the rains. It poured off and on while we were there, and I thought about July 26th and whether we would be stranded in getting back home. Meena, the cleaning woman told me, that during the time of the Big Rains, the whole area around the house was like a lake. There was water up to the top of the front steps and the garden was drowned under several feet of water.

Raju, our tried and trusted caterer whose shack is down the road, and who provides wholesome veg thalis for Rs. 30, had locked up shop the day we arrived. So that evening, Vijay, Pankaj, Ganesh and I made do with tomato and cheese sandwiches, Khichdi made with pure ghee, which Ganesh had brought along, prepared by his mother. And there were plenty of fruits. Panky painstakingly peeled the apples and pears and we ate those and small yellow bananas and chikoos. The hungry guys – Venky, Sharat and Sanju went out for dinner to a nearby restaurant and returned shrugging their shoulders. “It was okay,” they said though Sharat found the food terribly spicy.

Luckily Raju was back the next day so we were able to order Upma for breakfast. But our dinner failed to arrive. We had ordered for 8 PM and when there were no signs of it by nine, Panky and Ganesh drove down to see what was up. They found the cook and the odd job boy sitting in the shack, totally drunk. They had forgotten about cooking our dinner but were prepared to do it even at this late stage. “Just that we have to go to the bazaar to buy the veggies,” they apparently told Panky and G. So they returned empty handed and we ate the remainder of the khichdi and bread and cheese and tomatoes. Quite a healthy weekend on the whole. My stomach which had gone for a six the previous day returned quickly to normal.