A Centenary Tribute

The Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother*

Some Reminiscences

There is a lot of "I" in these reminiscences. But that is an unavoidable accident. For, they are penned not because of the person to whom certain things occurred: they are penned because of these things themselves. And if the person has any significance it is that he serves to set off all the more the incalculable play of Grace from the Karmic Law of Deserved Returns.

* * *

It all goes back to the very beginning of my spiritual search. Something had awakened, of which I had never dreamt in my ultra-modern philosophy. And as a result I who had always kept my head intellectually high and looked down with a cool superior smile at the heat and hurry of that strange thing called "God-intoxication" - I looked around hungrily in the mundane twentieth-century city of Bombay for those flitting figures out of the past, clad in ochre robes - the sadhus and sannyasis. Several of them I caught in various corners of the metropolis and questioned about the Unknown that had come like a wind out of nowhere into my life and blown away all my worldly wits. I thus learned a few methods of meditation but the central self in me remained unsatisfied.

Then - of all persons - a Theosophist broke the name of Sri Aurobindo to me. That I should bump into a Theosophist

* From: The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo by K.D. Sethna, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1968; second revised and enlarged edition 1992, pp. 136-41.

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who should speak of what he termed Sri Aurobindo's Cosmic Consciousness and not preach to me of the "White Lodge" and the "Great Masters" and the Isis-unveiling Madame Blavatsky - this was a touch of Sri Aurobindo's Grace already. What made it the more Graceful was that the Theosophist told me: "Nobody except Sri Aurobindo will satisfy the complex problem that you are, particularly the side of you which on the one hand is poetic and on the other philosophic."

A little later I came across a booklet in which there was a picture of Sri Aurobindo. I do not remember what the booklet was entitled or who its author was. Two memories have stayed with me: Sri Aurobindo was credited with the power of being in several places at once and he was described as a great linguist, having Greek and Latin at his tongue's tip and knowing French like a Frenchman - apart from being, of course, a master of English. I don't know which of the two siddhis - multi-presence and polyglottism - appealed to me more. Perhaps the latter struck me as the more unusual in a Yogi. But neither drew me into any Virgilian stretching of hands for love of the other shore. I must have been especially dense: many have become Aurobindonians at a slighter pull.

I continued my quest. But there was also the ordinary life and its material needs. One day I noticed that my shoes looked rather shabby. So I drove myself to visit the market for a new pair. I never thought the Gods could have anything to do with such a locality, though I had read of Bacon's idolafori, "idols of the market-place". I bought the shoes I had wanted and the shopman wrapped the box up in a newspaper sheet. When, at home, I unwrapped it, the part of the sheet that fell over right in front of me bore the headline in bold type: "The Ashram of Sri Aurobindo Ghose." It was like a sun-burst. A visitor had written a long article. I devoured it and when I got to the end and understood how the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga stood for a new life not rejecting but transforming the main activities of man (including perhaps even the market-place), I rose up with

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the conviction that I had found what I had been seeking. Soon after, I wrote to the Ashram asking for permission to come. I got the permission and some months later - in the December of 1927 -I reached Pondicherry. The shoes I had gone to buy were meant by Sri Aurobindo to be those of a Pilgrim!

Grace in the next ten and a half years during which I was an Ashramite - with the name "Amal Kiran" given by Sri Aurobindo and explained by him as "The Clear Ray" - is a story apart. I shall not deal with its abundance now. I pick up the thread from when I went back to Bombay for a long stay, keeping in contact inwardly, as well as by correspondence, with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother but outwardly unable to return and resume my life in the Ashram. Of course I used to make short trips. And one of them was for the darshan of November 24,1950.

It was reported that Sri Aurobindo was not keeping well. I knew that he had complete control of the physical being. So whatever illness might be his would be something which he had consented to for some inscrutable purpose - had consented to and yet would fight against in order to work out some paradoxical victory. But there was a little tremble in my nerves. Everything, however, seemed to go right when as usual we saw the calm magnificence that was he - grand and gracious at the same time, sitting beside the radiant Mother.

From the other end of the long room across which we were going up to both of them I saw the Mother glance ahead and then lean a little to one side and say something to Sri Aurobindo. His face broke into a smile and he kept looking and smiling. My wife who was just behind me said afterwards that he was smiling until I disappeared into the next room through which we had to pass out again. Such a thing he had never done with me before.

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On the night of December 3,1 caught the train for Madras on way to Bombay. The Mother was to meet us before we left, but owing to a slight turn for the worse in Sri Aurobindo's condition the meeting was said to be cancelled. Then suddenly news was brought that she would see me. I rushed to the Ashram courtyard and at the bottom of the central staircase she came and sat in a chair while I sat at her feet. Cool and "translucent" she was as ever and we talked of several things connected with my work.

A day or so before fixing my departure I had had a vague feeling that I should stay on. But I gave no importance to it. I reached Bombay in the afternoon of December 5 and before I could leave the station a telegram was brought to me from my house that Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from his body early the same morning.

In the midst of this news that shook me to my foundations and still shakes me somewhat after all these years of understanding why Sri Aurobindo took so drastic a step, I remembered how he had shed that wonderful sustained smile. The thought of it is always a quenchless light in the deepest darkness that may try to cover me.

But the whole afternoon and evening of December 5 in Bombay were a cry to get back to Pondicherry and see once more the countenance which had granted that sweet parting grace. I requested the sister of a friend of mine, whose efficiency I admired, to manage somehow a seat for me on the night-plane. She herself and another Aurobindonian who had returned with me from Pondicherry wanted also to come. So I said, "We must have three seats." The air-office declared that no seats were available. There was the additional problem of securing accommodation at Nagpur where our plane would touch down and people not only from Bombay but from Delhi and elsewhere would catch another plane to reach Madras. It might become possible to go up to Nagpur; but what then? My friend's sister would accept no defeat. She pleaded with the officials to keep inquiring in all directions. After anxious hours we heard that just three seats

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could be found right up to Madras owing to sudden cancellations in several places.

We arrived at Madras early next morning and took a taxi to Pondicherry. By eleven we were in Sri Aurobindo's own room, standing beside the glorious body with the face on which there was not merely the far look of peace that one often finds when the soul has gone out: here was the look of a victorious tranquillity, a power that with no effort, with no loss of peace, was radiating itself and breaking through all obstacles in the earth's consciousness. Never in all our years in the Ashram had there been such an overwhelming experience of what Sri Aurobindo himself had called in a line of poetry -

Force one with unimaginable rest.

With a thundering intensity, as it were, from above our heads the presence and power of Sri Aurobindo plunged down to the depths of the heart. Sri Aurobindo had never done anything so stupendously creative as his own passing from the body!

Later I learned from the Mother that the moment he had left his body what he had termed the Mind of Light, the physical mind receiving the supramental Light, had been realised in her. The strange golden light that many saw upon his body that lay without a touch of discolouration or decay for five days was a sign of the triumph that he had wrested for the earth by sacrificing his own physical frame.

Deep within, each of us felt the glory that looked outwardly a tragedy. But the little human heart in us, the outer emotional self, could not always share in the sense of this glory. And I who had depended so much on Sri Aurobindo in all my writing-work - when he had woken to inspiration the labouring poet, stirred to literary insight the fumbling critic, shaped out of absolute nothing the political commentator -I who had almost every day despatched to him some piece of writing for consideration felt a void at the thought

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that he would not be in that room of his, listening so patiently to my poetry or prose and sending me by letter or telegram his precious guidance. A fellow-sadhaka spoke to the Mother about my plight. On December 12 the inmates of the Ashram met her again and each received from her hands a photograph of Sri Aurobindo taken after his passing. It was dusk, as far as I recollect. She must have seen a certain helplessness on my face. Smiling as she alone can do, she looked me in the eyes and said, "Nothing has changed. Call for inspiration and help as you have always done. You will get everything from Sri Aurobindo as before."

This was simultaneously the Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the crowning touch to all that they had done in those three weeks from November 24 onwards for a poor aspirant whose dependence on them was abject.

*

I went back to Bombay with the prayer within me that soon, very soon, the Mother might help me and my wife to be near her. At last the second Pilgrimage became a possibility. As if from something above the head, some uplifted luminous watching Will, as it were, the decision seemed to come in February 1953. When it was conveyed to the Mother, she confirmed its authenticity. But to make the decision practicable in terms of rupees, annas and pies was not easy. During one of my short visits, I laid before her all the difficulties. At that time I was somewhat hard-up and I said, "Mother, I must have Rs. 500 to settle a few matters and pay for a thorough migration with my wife and our dog." The Mother replied, "You must have Rs. 500."

I went back and fixed the time of the second Pilgrimage a few months ahead. Weeks rolled by, but there appeared no prospect of those Rs. 500 materialising in a lump sum. In the December of the previous year an American journalist, Harvey Breit, had come to Bombay with a scheme of the Ford Foundation for a special India-supplement to the Atlantic

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Monthly. I met him and he commissioned an article on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram. I wrote my piece, two thousand words or so. It was approved. I asked hesitatingly whether there would be any payment. "Of course," was the answer, "we'll write to you from the States." But even after months there was no sign of payment. Now the September of the next year was approaching, the month in which I had fixed my return to Pondicherry. Within a fortnight of D-Day (Divine Day, of course) I got a letter from America. It said that a cheque was enclosed on the Ford Foundation's account in an Indian Bank. I unfolded the cheque. There, unbelievably, was an order for Rs. 500. Not a pie more, not a pie less.

But the story of the Grace does not end here. A week later I received another letter. It was apologetic, saying that owing to certain unavoidable circumstances the supplement had to be cut down considerably and that though my article was much appreciated it could not be used. This did not mean the withdrawal of the payment. The payment would be made and I was even told that the compilers claimed no right on my article: it could be sold by me anywhere else.

So my article went all the way from India to the United States and came back to me with a gift of the exact amount which I had mentioned to the Mother and which she had confirmed. And, to take me to the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, it had to be appropriately an article on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram!

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