Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

23

Neglected Childhood

It must have been sometime in 1933 that I saw my father reading a book several times. He then passed it on to me, saying, "Read it." It was a Bengali book written by Rabindranath Tagore, and entitled: Aurobindo Ghose. That was my first acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo, if my memory serves me right, for I was only running eight, and we were living in Santiniketan. I can't say that I understood all I read (I), but I did understand that Rabindranath was addressing Aurobindo Ghose as a Rishi. The childish impression persisted for long years in my life, and I took him as I found him: a Rishi. It never occurred to me that before becoming a full-fledged Rishi, he too was once a child like the rest of us I Frankly, I was quite ignorant about the passage of time. When my father wanted to get me admitted to Kalabhavan, the Registrar asked him, "What is her age?" "Seven," replied Father. After that whenever I was asked my age my invariable reply was, "Seven." Till one day when I was brought up short by a sneering girl of my own age: "You are always seven, aren't you!" Only then did I come to know that each passing year adds to our age. But

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in my inner heart I continued to live in some ageless time.

In his lonesome boyhood in England, did Ara's memories ever turn to some haunting scenes and incidents of childhood ? Did he see those scenes in his mind's eye, as did his Mejodada? "There was one Indian sight which left a vivid impression of interest on my mind," wrote Mano to his friend Laurence in May 1888 —"I mean those noble stone palaces, with gray balconies, stately pillared courts, and their breezy and murmurous environment of wood and water .... Not far from my father's house there was one of these Rajah's palaces, which I often observed with interest and wonder."

Did "forgotten faces of joy and terror" sometimes flit before Ara as they did before Mano? Ara's manners held a good deal of shy reserve and he did not easily give expression to his deep feelings. But being starved of his mother's love must have given him and Beno the same sense of loss as Mano felt, who was the more expansive of the three brothers.

It was on 18 February 1888, when he was a collegian at Oxford, that he wrote to his friend about his mother, ". . . What to others is the bright portion of their life, its heaven and refuge was for me bitterly and hopelessly blighted." He then confided a painful secret to Laurence. "You will not understand me, unless I tell you a circumstance of my life which is unhappily both painful for me to reveal, and for you to hear. I had no mother. She is insane," he said baldly. "You may judge the horror of this, how I strove to snatch a fearful love, but only succeeded in hating and loathing, and at last becoming cold. Crying for bread I was given a stone. My father

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was kind but stern, and I never saw much of him. Thus from childhood I was subject to fits of gloom and despondence which grew with my age. I don't wish to dwell on this, and you need not pity me. I have quite outgrown that dead past, and look upon it without the least regret: indeed I should have forgotten it, but that the incidents are of an unforgettable nature. ..." Poor boy I It was when he married that he was finally able to pour out on his wife all the pent-up emotion of his heart.

Although Mano refers often enough to his father's sternness, yet it is rarely with any complaint. Among the numerous letters he wrote to his friend, we come but once upon a complaining note. "I am growing as stern as my father," he wrote on 27 February 1888, "who is so strangely unsentimental that I am assured he would vivisect me if he thought that my highest good."

That was really an exception. None of the children felt any bitterness towards their father. Rather it was a feeling of great admiration and a quiet pride that Dr. Ghose aroused in his children. One could feel that when they spoke of him. And despite his stern nature, they felt his inherent kindness and a deep affection for them. Sri Aurobindo said as much to his father-in-law in a letter dated 6 June 1906.

"I am afraid," he wrote from Calcutta, "I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues. I have tried, very ineffectively, to do some part of my duty as a son, a brother and a husband, but there is something too strong in me which forces me to subordinate everything else to it. Of course

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that is no excuse for my culpability in not writing letters,—a fault I am afraid I shall always be quicker to admit than to reform. I can easily understand that to others it may seem to spring from a lack of the most ordinary affection. It was not so in the case of my father from whom I seem to inherit the defect. In all my fourteen years in England I hardly got a dozen letters from him, and yet I cannot doubt his affection for me, since it was the false report of my death which killed him. I fear you must take me as I am with all my imperfections on my head."

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