“When I was sixteen, I was married off. I never met my husband before the ceremony, and I didn’t really know what it was all about. My husband’s family owned a small shop selling paan and cigarettes and groceries. My father had begun to drink by then, and he never had any money, so my maternal uncle gave Rs 3,000 for the marriage. I cried a lot when I had to move to my in-laws’ house. I was leaving my father and going to a strange place. It was over a year before I would sleep with my husband, and this made him angry. My mother-in-law also did not like me, and kept saying: ‘What are you crying for?’
“It was shortly after I moved into my husband’s room that I was possessed by the goddess, and had a fit for the first time. A few months later, when I first became pregnant, and went back to my mother to have the child, I went into a full trance. A friend of my mother observed me in this state and said: ‘This is not an illness, this is possession.’ Over the next few years it became more and more frequent: I would start shaking or faint, and fall unconscious. The doctors could do nothing. My children became quite used to it: they thought all mothers were like this. But my husband and my mother-in-law were embarrassed and angry. He would beat me and say: ‘What is this trance? Why is this happening? The customers do not like it and you will drive them away. We cannot afford this.’
“None of this stopped me. Instead, I became increasingly preoccupied with the goddess and spent more and more of my time in the temple, listening to kirtans. This led to more conflict still. My mother-in-law kept asking: ‘Why do you go to the temple the whole time? You have children.’ But I continued to sneak out whenever I could. I loved to hear the chanting of the names of the goddess, and it always calmed me down and made me happy when I could put garlands around her image.
“One day I was possessed when I was in the temple, and when I came to, I found the pundit of the temple had garlanded me. Not only that, he had washed my feet and put a sandalwood-paste tilak on my forehead. I asked why he had done this, but he just replied: ‘Ma—don’t refuse.’ From that point on, people at the temple used to worship me, as they thought I was possessed by the goddess, and they gave me offerings and tried to interpret what I was saying during my fits. This frightened me at first, but slowly I grew more confident. My three daughters were no longer babies and I felt better able to imagine taking my own path. But there was increasing conflict at home, especially when devotees followed me and would knock at the door to ask for blessings. I don’t know why, but it seemed that the more angry and violent my husband became, the more often I went into a state of trance. Maybe this also was the doing of the goddess.
“Before long, quite large numbers of devotees would come to see me in this state—five or ten people a day would come to the house, or the shop if I was working there, and of course they disrupted everything. My husband got more and more furious, saying I had turned our store into a temple. Then one afternoon, after he beat me very badly, I heard a call from Ma Tara. It was a sound which came in the breeze, Tara Ma saying, very clearly: ‘Come to me. All that you may lose, you will recover. I will take care of your daughters. Your place is now with me.’
“It was not my will. Mother called me, and I had to go. I walked out of the house then and there, taking nothing with me other than the clothes I was wearing. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my children. It was already over with my husband; we no longer had a relationship. I spent the first night in the temple of the goddess Kali. That was the lowest moment. I didn’t sleep at all and felt depressed, as if my whole life had broken apart, and I had failed in everything. In fact the first few weeks were very hard. But I kept telling myself that when the Mother calls, there is nothing you can do. I stayed in the temple for two years, living off offerings, and sleeping in the courtyard.
“Only after much wandering did I finally find my way here to Tarapith. I have now been here twenty years. It was here that Ma Tara fulfilled her promises to me. I have been on many pilgrimages since then, but from the day I arrived here, and after Tapan Sadhu became my protector, Tarapith became my home. I missed my children, of course—the youngest was only four, and none of them were old enough to understand. Often I would weep. But my devotees came to fill the hole in my heart left by the absence of my girls. Now the whole world is full of my children: when I miss my daughters I see my other children, and my heart turns to them. So many people now call me Ma.
“From the day I left my husband, my trances became less frequent, but I feel her presence more than ever now. I will be sitting here in my hut with Tapan and suddenly I feel that she is here—I feel this with tremendous force—even though I cannot see her with my eyes. This is a very ancient site, and many great saints have attained perfection here though tapasya [ascetism] and meditation. Those who invoke the energy of the Mother here can access her power, and her imagination. She is present in all the rituals that are performed here.