Living in The Presence

At the time I am writing about, I had no money of my own. The Mother used to provide us with everything that we needed for our daily use from 'Prosperity'. Whenever I needed to write a letter to Calcutta, I would ask Nolini-da for the postcard or stamp and envelope. We had breakfast and lunch at the Ashram Dining-room. Dinner was brought from there and eaten at home. Corner House, the students' canteen, had not yet started then. In those days, tiffin was provided from a small room in the Playground which disappeared when the Playground was renovated. When I started organising programmes for visiting artists, my contacts with them began also to grow and deepen. I would try to increase my collection of bandishes of Raga music, Bengali songs of all styles (Rabindra-sangeet, Nazrul- giti, Atulprasad, Bengali compositions based on ragas, etc.) from these artistes who came to the Ashram. During their short sojourn, I would try to learn as much as I could with them. My primary preoccupation through all these efforts was to be as worthy an instrument of the Mother's work as was possible for me. Remaining in the Ashram atmosphere and keeping myself as open to the Mother as possible, I would try and enrich myself with all my heart and soul. In those days, the artists who came here came primarily for the Ashram, to spend some time in its spiritual atmosphere and to imbibe a little bit of the Presence that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had charged the Pondicherry air with. Presenting their music was not their principal objective. Thus, many of these artists would come regularly to spend some time here. During their stay here, a beautiful relationship developed between myself and them in several fields. I received a lot of music and knowledge of music

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