Reminiscences

VIII

Pondicherry Cyclone

I have once spoken to you of an earthquake and a small fire. Today I shall say something about two or three other inclement natural phenomena of which I have had direct personal experience.

The first was when I was a child, it has left a clear imprint on my mind. Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with storms and hurricanes. But have you ever seen a whirlwind, what they call a tornado? This word has been rendered by a Pundit into tūrna-da, a thing that is swift in its flight. I have had a chance to see the thing with my own eyes. Just listen, you will see how terrible a thing it is and how well in keeping with its formidable name.

We were at school then, the District School at Rungpur and were attending class. The day was about over. The sky had been overcast and it looked as if it was going to rain. All of a sudden we heard people shouting, "Fire, fire!" Was there a fire, a real fire? We rushed out in a body into the open field in front. As we looked up we saw what they had at first taken to be smoke or rather a whirling mass that looked like smoke but was actually a cloud. There was a mass of clouds that kept whirling almost over our heads, and from a distance there came a low rumbling and whistling sound. What could that be? What did it mean? They let us off from school and all of us ran in the direction of the sound. It did not rain much, very little indeed, if at all. We ran on, but the sound was nowhere near. Then we heard people saying, "Something terrible has happened, over there, in that direction." We kept running, for a distance of two or three miles from the school and beyond the limits of the town. Suddenly we were brought up short. Right in front there was a wooded tract where the trees had been all smashed up. We moved on straight into the heart of the ruin. It was a strange spectacle, as if an open zigzag path some fifty cubits wide had been cut across the wood

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with dozens of bull-dozers driving through and leveling everything down. Bushes and shrubs and trees and houses —it was lucky there were not many houses—had all been swept clean away—for a distance of four or five miles, we were informed. The place had been sparsely populated, so the casualties were not heavy—some half a dozen men, a few head of cattle and some houses. The demon of destruction seemed to have spent all his wrath on Nature. It was perhaps really the work of some evil spirit.

They said the whirlwind had arisen from a pool of water four or five miles away and it did look like a demon when it came rushing forward with a whirling motion after having churned the waters of the pool. However that may be, we heard this about a pedestrian who had been walking along the road just when the tornado crossed his path. He was caught by the wind, given a few twirls up in the air and thrown down on the ground by the side of the road. As he shook himself up on his feet, he went on muttering, "What fun, I got a free lift to the sky!"—kaisā majā, āsmān dekh liyā mufat se. The man was a labourer type from Behar.

As I moved for some distance along the clearing left by the wind, I could see how swift and powerful had been its impact. The trees that had not been uprooted were twisted in a fantastic manner you could hardly imagine. All that was needed now to make a paved road or highway out of the clearing was to remove the bush and throw in some gravel and mud.

What I saw, or rather experienced, on the next occasion was not a tornado, but a prank of the wind-god all the same. It was a wild enough prank and rather dangerous for those of us who were among its victims.

It was here in Pondicherry. At that time we were in the old Guest House; it is old indeed, for after that storm the very look of the house was changed. In those days, Pondicherry used to have regularly every year, in October or November, cyclones of a rather severe type. We do not get anything like them now. The Mother's presence seems to have pacified a great deal the wild forces of Nature.

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In those days it would not do to bar our doors and windows with ordinary bolts and latches, they needed to be held by regular bamboo poles.

It, all happened after nightfall. The sky had been overcast the whole day, it was dark all around and heavy showers fell at intervals—real nasty weather, you would say. We were upstairs. In those days we all lived in the rooms upstairs, the ground-floor was used only for meals. We had just had our dinner and had moved upstairs. In the meanwhile the wind had been gathering strength all the time and the downpour grew heavy. Suddenly, there was a terrific noise, of things creaking and crashing down, which meant that the doors and windows were giving way before the ferocious gale. With it came a whistling sound and splashes of rain. The doors and windows of the two rooms occupied by Sri Aurobindo were blown away, leaving them bare to the wind and the rain like an open field. He moved to the room next door, but there too it was much the same. The upstairs was getting impossible, so we started moving down. We had barely reached the ground-floor when the shutters and windows along the walls of the staircase fell with a crash on the stairs. We escaped by a hair's breadth. Things did not seem to be very much better in the rooms downstairs. There too the doors and windows had given way and allowed free entry to the wind and rain. All of us gathered in the central hall, and somehow huddled together in a corner.

In the early hours of the morning the storm abated and by daybreak all was clear. Indeed to us it seemed much too clear. That is to say, the rows of Porche trees—we call them health trees—that lined the streets and were considered among the attractions of the city now lay prostrate in their heaps on the surface of the roads, making them impassable. Gangs of workmen arrived from the Municipality with their axes and tools but it took them some time to cut through a passage. Even now you could see, especially on the way to the Lake, huge trees lying about uprooted on the ground with their limbs broken and twisted out of shape

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And now we had to think of our daily needs, about breakfast and lunch. But where to find the milk and foodstuffs, rice and pulses? Where were the shops? Everything was a shambles. I do not know if during a war the opposing forces battling through a town or village would leave it in a condition somewhat similar to this. The number of wounded and dead was fairly large, somewhere in the region of a thousand.

I cannot now recall the exact year of this upheaval. Most probably it was 1912 or 1913, that is, shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. We may suppose perhaps that this minor upheaval came here as the harbinger of that world-shaking calamity.

But it was no less strange that not long after the end of the Great War, there came another storm, not of the same intensity but on a somewhat similar scale. This time it brought a different sort of message and turned out to be a blessing for us in the end.

The Mother had already arrived for the second time, this time for good. She was at the Bayoud House where the Dowsetts now live. We were at the Guest House and I remember well how Sri Aurobindo used to call on her every Sunday and dine with her. We too would go along and have a share of the dinner. I need not add that the menu was arranged by the Mother herself and she supervised the cooking in person; she also prepared some of the dishes with her own hands. That is the reason why I say we were really lucky to have a share in those meals. At that time we could only appreciate the physical taste of the food we were served; today I realise what lay behind it.

After dinner, we used to go up on the terrace overlooking the sea front. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stood aside for a talk and we stood by ourselves. Sometimes we would request Sri Aurobindo for some automatic writing after dinner. The writings that came through his hand in those days were frightfully interesting. I remember somebody came and began to give an analysis of the character of each one of us; he had many things to say about Motilal Roy as

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well. One day someone suggested that something might be given about the Mother. But she immediately protested, "No, nothing about me, please." At once the hand stopped automatically.

Well, during the Mother's stay in this house, there came a heavy storm and rain one day. The house was old and looked as if it was going to melt away. Sri Aurobindo said, "The Mother cannot be allowed to stay there any longer. She must move into our place." That is how the Mother came in our midst and stayed on for good, as our Mother. But she did not yet assume the name. You can see now how that last spell of stormy weather came as a benediction. Nature did in fact become a collaborator of the Divine Purpose.

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