Raj Maheshwari

By Shahid Najeeb

“Death, be not proud ...”

John Donne

I knew Raj only as his clinical supervisor. He started supervision with me, waiting to get a training case. In this time we got to know a little about how the other worked, but also a bit about the other person. I think the latter had transformative significance for both of us. He was still seeing me for regular supervision when he received the awful diagnosis of terminal cancer in mid 2020. However, we continued to meet and talk weekly as before, initially personally and later on, on FaceTime, whenever he was not going for treatment or was not too sick to talk, discussing anything he wished to talk about.

I was struck by the enormous courage with which he faced his illness. When he first got the diagnoses he said, “Why are all the doctors so gloomy! Let’s see what happens.” He had a very generous nature and went along with all the religious and medical procedures his family and doctors suggested, though he was quietly sceptical. He had never seriously engaged with the spiritual dimension of Hinduism, which fortunately I know something about and which, I think, I helped reconnect him with. In the last few months there was an amazing flowering in him, despite the terrible debilitating effects of the radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

With little encouragement, he started jotting down his thoughts about cancer that rapidly evolved into an extensive paper “Cancer: A Search for Meaning”, which he showed me. We spent the next full session discussing just the first, highly significant, line of the paper. He was very open to new ideas, but further discussions about his paper were curtailed because of the pressures of his illness. That paper is included in this Issue of “Psychoanalysis Downunder”, just as he gave it to me. He would probably have liked to develop it further, so it is incomplete in that sense, but “complete” in its incompleteness. Anyone reading this paper will be struck by the thoughtfulness with which he explores so many different lines of thought, all in a person that has just received a fatal diagnosis. It is an excellent exploration in it own right, but quite remarkable given the circumstances it was written under.

Along with another candidate he laid the editorial framework for starting a candidates journal for the Asia-Pacific region and discussed with me how it could connect with “Psychoanalysis Downunder”. The first issue of this journal is expected to come out in early 2021.

He wrote and directed for his family the epic Hindu play “Ram Leela” to celebrate the festival of Dashera, that we were passing through. Along with some friends he started a Sat Sangh group meeting, usually conducted by a spiritual guru, but which was

preparatory to involving a guru at a later date. They discussed spiritual and emotional matters, not usually talked about.

For the first time in his life he started exploring the fifteenth century mystic Indian poet and folk-song writer, Kabir. Kabir wrote in a deceptively simple way, for though he used the folk language of his day (hard to understand now) and used simple metaphors, his thinking is profound and challenging. See for instance https://youtu.be/T1tiIuMXLRw in which Kabir asks you to accompany him to his land of no attributes, including no attributes of time, space or concepts. So it is not a place, but an experience, reminiscent of Bion saying that “O” cannot be known about, but only experienced, by becoming one with it. Despite all this being relatively new for him, Raj started to appreciate the profound depth and beauty of Kabir’s communications - reverberations across time and space. Perhaps a true thought searching for, and possibly finding, a thinker (Bion). He also started meditating for the first time, sometimes for 2-3 hours in the early morning, finding great peace and comfort in it. “It feels like riding the gentle waves of the great ocean”, he said. He went on a 10 day meditation retreat in December, but had to come away after 5 days because he was struggling to breathe, his lungs compromised by the cancer and fibrosis. And he went through all of this, usually in good humour. When we last met on Christmas Eve, he was struggling to breathe and was soon too exhausted to continue. I told him that though I would be on leave, we could talk anytime, otherwise we would meet when I returned. He said something indistinctly but his expression said, somewhat wistfully, “If I am around.” He died on 30 December 2020 and is survived by two delightful young sons and a very loving wife.

He was such a remarkable and brave person, the likes of whom we rarely come across. We in the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, and as human beings, are poorer without him.