What is Sadhana?

 “Sadhana” — the word had always seemed to belong elsewhere. To ochre robes drying in mountain sunlight. To caves, silences, withdrawn faces. To men who seemed to have stepped outside ordinary wanting. Certainly not to indecision. Not to trunks being packed, departures delayed by thought.

The afternoon before leaving Almora Ashram for Chandigarh returns to me now less as memory than as atmosphere. I had arrived there months earlier in the middle of what, at that age, I could only have called wandering — moving from place to place without any clear idea of what I was looking for.  

In those months I had drifted through towns without staying long anywhere. A few days here, a week there. Cheap lodges near bus stands, long journeys without conversation, tea at railway stalls that all began to taste the same after a while. I was not searching for anything I could have named clearly then. I only knew I could not yet return to the life I had left behind.

Somewhere during those wanderings, I arrived at an ashram in the hills of Almora and stayed far longer than I had intended. The ashram had begun quietly to feel like home.

A pale light over the hills. The faint smell of incense that had already burned itself out. My trunk corded shut near the wall. I had already packed most of my things. A shawl folded once, then folded again without reason. Somewhere below, in the courtyard perhaps, the dull metal sound of a bucket being set down.

The previous night, I had telephoned home. My grandmother, whom I loved deeply, sounded weaker than I had ever heard her, though even then I could not entirely tell how much of it was illness and how much was simply the desire to have me home again.

She had never asked me directly to return before. That was perhaps why the call unsettled me so deeply. Even as a child, I had known that beneath her ordinary questions — whether I was eating properly, whether I was sleeping enough — there was always another concern she rarely spoke aloud.

I went to Swami Nirgunananda for permission before leaving, though I lingered outside his room for a few moments before entering.

Even while speaking, the mind would not remain still. Stay a few more days. Leave now. Remain here where the hours moved softly and without edges. Return to the old life waiting beyond the mountains. One thought entering quietly while another withdrew. Like someone uncertain at a doorway after dusk.

He looked at me for some time before asking, almost casually, “Do you know what sadhana is?”

I began answering with more confidence than understanding. Meditation, perhaps. Discipline. Sitting still somewhere, cross-legged, gathering the scattered mind inward.

Before the thought had settled between us, he smiled.

“No, Aashish,” he said gently. “You are in sadhana right now.”

Outside, someone was sweeping the stone pathway. The dry leaves made a faint circling sound before collecting again near the corner wall.

“Look carefully at the mind,” he said after a while. “It moves first one way, then another. Stay. Leave. Stay. Leave.”

Then silence.

Not the silence of conclusion, but the kind that continues after words.

I lowered my eyes. After some time he said quietly, “Remain there. Watch it.”

I thought I understood what he meant then, though I would return to those words many times before I truly did.

There were years afterward when I hardly thought about that afternoon at all. Life became busy in the ordinary ways lives do. Work, responsibilities, the slow accumulation of practical concerns. 

Yet the words would return unexpectedly, often in moments that outwardly seemed insignificant — at railway platforms after midnight, at office windows long after the building had gone quiet, in the silences that sometimes followed difficult conversations with those I loved, in the small inward pauses before decisions we pretend are practical but know are not.

Over the years, I began to recognize how persistently the mind longs for certainty, and almost every time I sensed that restlessness returning, I would remember the leaves outside his room, gathering again in the same corner each time they had been swept away.