Ajay Narayan, with a natural bent ness to God, bent down to pick a penny at the Tim Horton parking lot. And he said, “Henry I always take this money”! First, I didn’t understand. Later when I connected what I saw with what I heard, that made sense to me.
Ajay is a wealthy man. But his wealth is his friends, rather his acquaintances. He greets every man he meets on the road. There are moments when his greeting prolongs to a friendly chat that connects two souls. That’s how, today, he is my friend. But he repeatedly, with great emphasis, affirms that I am his brother.
With me he frequently blurts in Hindi, though I have said so many times that I know no Hindi. Still Ajay, somewhat a short man in physical height, needs to say that in Hindi. Then he would be his own translator! Once Ajay ended challenging the official translator when the latter was wrongly communicating Ajay’s speech to his doctor writing a report for the Workers’ Compensation Board. Such is Ajay’s presence of mind that he extends very naturally to his awareness of God, the source of his very character and personality.
Ajay, his first name derived from the Sanskrit language, means “unconquered”. It is the equivalent of the Western name “Victor”. Ajay, though lacking physical tallness, and unemployed since his work related injury, he is very tall in cheerfulness. And he carries in his heart a victorious spirit, battling courageously even a wealthy contractor and a learned lawyer who have landed him in unnecessary difficulties despite taking great sums of money as fees for the services. These exploiters, he claims, exploit his lack of education and sophisticated English language skills.
His last name “Narayan” – pronounced, nārāyan, also called as “Narayana” – is a reference to the creator God. And in Hindu religion, which is Ajay’s faith, it usually refers to Brahma or Vishnu who dwells in the waters! “Nara”, according to other sources, also means “waters”, an essential resource for life! “Nara” also means “human”, while “ayana” may mean, “the direction, or path”. “Narayan” in Sanskrit also refers to the “primordial human”, the Purusa, the equivalent of the Semitic, Adam!
And it is interesting to note Ajay Narayan manifesting all these lofty meanings of human life in his simple life style of caring for his family, including his elderly widowed mother, and neighbours, particularly those who are hurt by human callousness and in need of extra human compassion, while he, gleefully, enjoys his grandchildren.
He has, in his house, Hindu images and statues, Hindu representations of God, everywhere one turn. They are his precious possessions. As for Ajay these are not mere religious monuments. They are, in some sense, God, or at least incarnation of God in which he gets absorbed. They are really divine. One cannot fail to notice Ajay, as he walks about and turns around in his home, bowing and offering flying kisses to these sculptures, expressing his devotion to God.
It is, perhaps, Ajay’s regular ritualistic immersions into God awareness that has transformed this honest, harmless, humble man to cheer up every human he encounters outside the home, feeding them also when they are hungry and in need of food.
Ajay, my friend, for many of his friends and me, is an undeclared humanist and an un-canonized living saint. He earlier sacrificed his own education and all that security and comfort that came with it in order to feed and clothe his earlier home soon after the death of his father in Fiji.
But neither his devotion nor his many sacrifices make him humourless. The other day when he was driving me through the “drive through” of the Tim Horton, I saw him hurriedly rolling down the car windows. And then he loudly said to the (white) man – colour is important here to see Ajay easily crossing colour, class, caste, and creedal boundaries – picking pennies dropped at the Tim Horton window, “today your pay day, man!” First I thought that must be his friend. But I learnt Ajay has never even seen him before!
