IN A FATE that was harsh, though not uncommon, a seven-year-old girl from central Kerala was left in the care of an indifferent father and an abusive grandmother after the death of her mother. Her father became bitter. He had hoped for a life as an ascetic and had never wanted a marriage or a family. Her grandmother never lost an opportunity to raise a hand against her. The girl was staring at a childhood bereft of familial affection.
Five years later, in 1988, the father made a decision that would transform the girl’s life. He took her and her siblings to Vallikavu, a fishing hamlet in the Kollam district, where he introduced them to a woman who would have been in her early thirties—an unmarried woman living in her parents’ home. “Amma will look after you now,” the father told her. The woman smiled brightly at the girl and called her mole, a common Malayalam expression of endearment for daughters. After facing neglect at her own home, this was music to the young girl’s ears. “She hugged me, and that was perhaps the first time someone hugged me like that,” she told me. “I was extremely happy.”
The girl looked forward to her frequent visits to Vallikavu. Soon, she moved into an orphanage in Kollam, a decrepit facility that the woman had taken over. She was eager to settle into what she believed would be a sanctuary of the love that she had been missing until then. She went on to spend over three decades under the watch of her chosen mother, Sudhamani Edamannel, who became known as Mata Amritanandamayi Devi—the leader of one of India’s most prominent spiritual organisations.
“I didn’t know how to live without clutching at the ends of her sari,” the long-time disciple said, when she met me a few years after she walked out of the world that Amritanandamayi built. During the years that she had been a part of it, Vallikavu evolved into a spiritual town named Amritapuri, with a huge ashram complex, adjacent to several apartment buildings for visitors and resident devotees, as well as educational institutions run in Amritanandamayi’s name.