My Savitri work with the Mother

May 1962

Our work advanced regularly until the Mother was taken seriously ill in May 1962. Naturally we had to stop our Savitri work at the sixth painting. The last picture she explained to me was the toiling of the Earth:

Along a path of aeons serpentine
In the coiled blackness of her nescient course
The Earth Goddess toils across the sands of Time. ||11.8||

This expressed the Mother's own struggle, I felt.

The Mother said to Vasudha—her personal attendant:

Huta cannot possibly do the Savitri paintings without my direct help; meanwhile she should do something else.

And what should I do? Her illness was the greatest shock to me. During these months I sorted out thousands of the Mother's letters to me, arranged them and typed them in order to have them published. Later, I expressed my feeling to her that we might name the book White Roses. The Mother said:

Yes, indeed, it is a very pretty name.

And it was kept. As a matter of fact, she always used to send white roses along with each letter she wrote to me.

The first edition of White Roses was published on 24th March 1963, and the Enlarged Edition of it, on 15th August 1964.

The Mother asked me to paint white roses she sent to me for the Enlarged Edition. I was simply thrilled by her Introduction:

O ye souls yearning for calm and quietness, let these "White Roses" drop upon your heart their petals of peaceful fragrance.

The Mother said:

You see, I feel as if Sri Aurobindo was writing the Introduction—it is His Introduction.

The Mother did not teach me only painting but also the hidden truths of spiritual life. The book White Roses, for which I got the National Award in 1981 and the Tata Press, where the book had been printed, won the first prize, is only for the general reader, because it touches on subjects of universal interest.

Apart from these letters the Mother wrote many more personal ones as well as some in connection with the Savitri paintings which unfolded unknown things. Eventually all of them will appear in The Story of a Soul and other new books.

At the same time the first volume of Meditations on Savitri was getting ready.