Our Light and Delight

11

In the Year of the Greatest Difficulty

On the evening of December 31, 1954, the Mother announced that the coming year — with perhaps two more months added — would be a very crucial one, the year of the greatest difficulty because a great outburst of the Divine was preparing and the hostile forces would give battle with the utmost ferocity to stop it. A sort of last-ditch fight was anticipated. The Mother said it would affect individuals and collectivities alike. She warned us to be on guard and to hold out at all costs.

I must, however confess that I passed nearly the whole of 1955 very enjoyably by choosing as my special cross the most difficult poet in the world to study and translate and comment on. All such troubles as my friends went through were sub-merged for me by this poet: the Frenchman Stéphane Mallarmé. Grappling with his obscurity was to strive with the covering under which the light which is beyond the mind puts itself when the mind approaches it with its own terms and standards. An Upanishad says: "The Gods love the obscure." In an analogous sense Mallarmé loved it. Once, after a lecture, he asked a student to hand him the notes the listener had taken. Mallarmé said: “I want to put a little obscurity into them.” Without that tinge of the elusive his thoughts would become merely mental. By a certain inspired twist he would distance them, so to speak, and make them suggest what cannot be expressed in the percepts and concepts to which our mind is accustomed. By the challenge which Mallarmé posed all the time to the mere mental, I felt I was getting in contact with a consciousness which made everything in the world a riddle instead of a plain fact and demanded an answer other than our normal life, even our normal imaginative life, could give.

I do not say that Mallarmé's way of conjuring up mysteries is the highest, the most spiritual. One can be mysterious

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without being mystifying, and it is then that one is authentically mystical: there strikes on us a glory of Truth which dazzles us into an ecstatic inner intuition of realities, each having a precise form with an infinite halo. With Mallarmé we are left not with realities but with symbols that by their baffing vividness, their dynamic vagueness, annul the ordinary system of experience and create what I may call a pregnant void, an emptiness full of the promise and potentiality of a new cosmos — but that cosmos itself is not there.

Perhaps in that year of definitive confrontation by the unspiritual darkness of the ages, the preoccupation with the Mallarméan darkness which was a hidden illumination helped to prevent the unspiritual gloom from overwhelming one: it gave one a trick, a skill, an art, as it were, to live with that gloom and give a new turn to its presence so that it might be made, in spite of itself, to serve a higher end. Of course, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri was never far from me and I tried to look at Mallarmé and interpret him in the manner Sri Aurobindo had hinted at in his correspondence with Nirodbaran while commenting on two sonnets of the French Arch-Symbolist. But the Mallarméan technique and inspiration were a good training and I approached the end of 1955 with a happy face and a brain healthily athletic with a ready wrestler's grip for supra-intellectual secrecies.

Then suddenly a grim shadow fell over my achievement. It was of an accident which happened in early November. The mischance did not involve my own person nor was Pondicherry its setting, but it affected me keenly because the one involved in it was my wife Sehra's sister Mina who was a close friend to me and whose coming to the Ashram had been linked with me intimately. Late in the evening on the Divali day of 1955 we received an extra-express telegram saying that Mina in Bombay had been flung from her running scooter and very grievously hurt in the head and lay unconscious in hospital. Although the hour was fairly advanced we ran up to the Mother. She was in an inside room but came out at once on learning that we were waiting for her. She took the news most gravely and said the situation looked indeed bad. She wanted to be kept in constant touch with developments from day to day.

Sehra worried a great deal the same night and the next

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morning. Towards noon she felt that she just had to go to Bombay and be by her sister's side as well as near her niece Roshan who was naturally in extreme distress. We were told afterwards that Mina — a markedly beautiful woman — had looked horrifying when she had been picked up from the pavement where she had fallen off her scooter. One side of the face had turned black and huge and the mouth had been set in a frightful grimace with bared teeth.

Arrangements were made for Sehra to leave by the night train. In the late afternoon, as was her privilege in those days. She went to see the Mother at the Playground to tell her of her forthcoming departure and receive her blessing. Some minutes after she had left our house it struck me that I should rush out and see what transpired between the Mother and her. When I entered the Playground I saw the Mother standing on the threshold of her resting-room and Sehra kneeling at her feet. I hurried to where the parting was taking place. I reached there before Sehra lifted her head for the blessing. Looking at the Mother's serious face I gathered in a flash that she did not really approve of Sehra's precipitate journey. As soon as Sehra raised her head I said: "Mother does not want you to go. Don't go." Sehra was amazed as the Mother had shown no sign of a negative attitude. The Mother herself turned to me and protested: "I have not said No. Why do you say I don't want her to go? Let her go if she feels like it." I replied: "I am sure that you don't wish her to go. How can she do so against your wish?" The Mother's face was still unresponsive to my intuition. But some ray of understanding entered Sehra's mind and she, although puzzled, managed to say: "If Mother truly disapproves, I shan't go." I addressed her: "Of course she disapproves. Ask her." It would appear that Sehra had not once asked the Mother: she had merely declared her resolve and received permission. When she said she would not leave Pondicherry unless the Mother openly gave her sanction, the Mother relaxed her own expression and showed that she did not like Sehra to leave. The trip was thus cancelled and the Mother explained in effect: "If Sehra on her own initiative took it upon herself to go and be a help to her sister, my responsibility would be secondary. If, on the contrary, she threw herself into my hands and left everything to me with

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full faith, I would become fully responsible and my direct capacity to save Mina would be in action. It was a choice between my staying in the background and my standing in the front as Mina's saviour."

These words provide an insight into the Divine's workings. They remind us of Sri Krishna's Mahavakys: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver you from all evil. Have no fear." The idea of personal help, even the idea of self-help, are dharmas, set rules of conduct, which, though commendable under ordinary circumstances, grow obstacles in a life aspiring to be in immediate relationship with the Divine. Not that one remains passive or indifferent: one gives whatever assistance is possible, but the sense of individual responsibility is put aside, the Divine is constantly invoked, one's own self and ability are offered to Him as instruments and a deep equanimity which is suffused with complete trust in the Divine's wisdom-illumined love serves as a base on which He is allowed to build His own vision of things to come.

Sehra proved a good medium. Here an interesting fact calls for mention. The Mother could act through her so well, first because there was a psycho-physical connection between sister and sister and secondly because Sehra's heart was wide open to the Mother. But the heart's openness brought about a strange phenomenon in the head. Mina had been severely hurt on her head but had become totally unconscious. Now, Sehra began to suffer from a strong headache as though some of the pain, which would have been Mina's if she had been conscious, had got transferred to Sehra and as though Sehra's brain had been acting proxy for her sister's and supplying the Mother with a focus-point for concentrated play of curative force.

Day after day the Mother's profound work went on. News was sent without fail so that some outer specific guidance might be available for the inner movement of the Power. Once there was no news. The Mother sternly demanded why it was lacking, and she emphasised the importance of a daily bulletin. Mina was unconscious even after a fortnight. The doctors were very much concerned, but the Mother said that the unconsciousness was a boon to the patient, for else the pain, at the beginning at least, would have been unbearable.

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Information came one day that the side of her body that had been paralysed was still immobile. The Mother put her concentration on it and the next day we heard of slight stirrings in the limbs.

On about the twenty-first day, when the unconsciousness still kept on, I spoke to the Mother: "Mina has always been very receptive to my influence. It has often happened that things like an ache anywhere and even a state of fever got cured when I tried to channel your presence and power to her. I have the feeling that if I went to Bombay and attempted in your name to draw Mina out of her unconsciousness something in her would respond." The Mother kept silent for a few seconds and then answered: "I know that you can help. But let us wait a little longer. If no change takes place I shall send you to Bombay. But don't leave the Ashram just yet." Two days after this talk we were informed that Mina had come out of her dead stupor of more than three weeks. There was no sign of paralysis left but she could not speak at all except two words: "Mother" — "Sehra." My sister Minnie who had been visiting her all along visited her now too and reported to us her conviction that Mina understood everything said to her and what was going on but could not exteriorise her understanding. An eminent neurosurgeon was called to examine her. He put her through some tests and arrived at the conclusion that she would never recover normal speech. Thinking she was not looking, he sombrely shook his head. She caught sight of him and burst into tears. By a curious quirk of fate, this neurosurgeon met with an accident three or four weeks later and lost his own speech completely. He had to be sent to London to undergo a long treatment. Mina, on the other hand, began to increase her vocabulary though at times the words got mixed and one word popped out instead of another. When she returned home she tried to read a paper. The whole mass of printed matter seemed one black blotch. But gradually, as time went on, the eyes came to discern things on a page, though not to her satisfaction. She was in a hurry to come to the Ashram where, she felt, her hope of full recovery lay. Within a month of her home-coming she was on board a train, accompanied by a nurse. She would reach Pondicherry on January 6, 1956.

I went to Madras to receive her. She was extremely glad

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to see me. I noted that she had regained her old looks. The monstrous disfiguration had entirely vanished. This was enough of a wonder. The three of us reached Pondicherry happily and Mina's meetings with the Mother started again. She told the Mother in her broken way that she could not say words with ease and frequency except "Mother" and "Sri Aurobindo". Hearing this, Champaklal who was somewhere near rushed into the Mother's presence and exclaimed: "Ideal condition. Mother, ideal condition! I also want to say nothing except these names." The Mother stared in a bit of amazement. So did all of us who were present. What was at the back of Champaklal's mind seemed to be that he was often led into useless talk and that only the names of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo with their deep spiritual associations made speech worthwhile. Several years later a difficulty developed in Champaklal's articulation. There was nothing organically wrong: some dietary deficiency appeared to be responsible. A period of silence was advised and treatment prescribed. The regime of keeping quiet suited Champaklal very much and he made it a rule not to speak even after the stipulated time was over and he had considerably improved. He has gone far beyond the "ideal condition" he had dreamt of, for now invariably he scribbles on a writing-pad in answer to people's questions and the two Great Names themselves do not get audibly uttered. They certainly keep ringing within him, since he is all the while in a state of radiant joy and the absence of speech obviously helps in his case to conserve as well as communicate it better.

Mina made an earnest plea to the Mother that she might be given again the capacity to read her works and Sri Aurobindo's. She said she did not care whether she could talk as freely as before, but would be endlessly grateful if she could intelligently absorb herself in their marvellous books. Her prayer was granted.

Her speech too returned to normal. At one stage Dr. Sanyal proposed that if improvement was not rapid enough he might be permitted to drill a small hole on one side of the skull and let out whatever obstructive blood had collected there. No need arose for the operation. Mina had complete faith in the Mother and knew how to be patient. Little

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"howlers" were taken by her as part of the day's work. With her overflowing sense of humour she would laugh at her own occasional verbal misfires. I am sure she will not mind my citing one of the instances which provoked her own hilarity. She had presented to the Mother a beautiful large aquamarine. The Mother had it fixed in a headband. Mina, seeing it worn upon the Mother's brow, was pleased beyond measure and recounted to me that her "aquarium" was being carried by the Mother on her head.

Actually, Mina in Bombay had set up an elaborate aquarium in her flat and she is an expert in fish-lore. Born under the astrological sign "Pisces" on February 28, she might be expected to be so — and we might expect her also to take spontaneously to life with the Mother, who, born on February 21, was herself a Piscine and by virtue of this early date the primary one. Like the first member of the Hindu procession of Ten Avatars — the Fish-Incarnation of Vishnu who led Manu, the Indian Adam-cum-Noah, to safety over the World-Flood — such a Piscine would most appropriately be our leader through the super-Mallarméan mysteries which Sri Aurobindo in a line of Savitri calls "the soul's great deeps". And what more natural than that with her love she should bear safely a wounded fish-child of hers across the profundities during that period when the blackest of black winds blew over the adventure of the Integral Yoga: 1955?

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