Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

5

Boulevard Haussmann

Life went on with its ups and downs at 62 Boulevard Haussmann; that is where the Alfassas lived till Mother was eight.

One day Mother showed us on a map where she had lived as a child. The house was located in the 8^th arrondissement of Paris. It no longer exists —it has either been demolished or amalgamated with the Annexe du Printemps. "I lived there up to the age of eight." Then the family moved a little westward to N°3 Square du Roule, where Mother lived with her parents till the age of nineteen, when she married.

"When the first fire of the Magasin du Printemps broke out," Mother narrated to us, "I was still living in the next-door building. They had burned the building purposely —to rebuild and expand —but as this could

Page 60

not be proved, the insurance company had to pay."

Mother and fire. "From our house at Square du Roule, I remember seeing the Opéra Comique in flames." She added, "And I was still there when the Comédie Française burned down. There was an actress, Petit Henriot, who was burned to death in it. She wasn't in the building when the fire broke out but went in to fetch her dog which was inside."

*

* *

She would listen wide-eyed to the adventure stories her father told his two offsprings, always in the first person singular! But although she may have guessed them to be invented, still she would get into the spirit of the stories.

Mirra always got into the spirit of everything.

She would go for a stroll with her father to the Tuileries, the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin des Plantes, her little hand tucked in the big Turk's huge fist. She would look quietly, silently, at the animals, the trees, the flowers. Her gaze had but to linger

Page 61

awhile on any of these, and she would feel in her very depths a communication, an exchange, like a wordless language.

"You know the moths that go bumping against lights? Well, each one's consciousness is like that," Mother told us, "it goes bumping here, bumping there, because things are foreign to it."

Of course nothing was foreign to Mirra.

"But, if instead of bumping against things, you go right inside," Mother pointed out to the growing children of the Ashram, "then they start to become part of yourself. You become wide, you have air to breathe, you have room to move about, you don't bump against things; you enter them, penetrate them, you understand."

"Understand". . . . Well, we have yet to meet someone who understands so thoroughly. How many times have I stood before Mother, mutely, and she knew at once if I had any pain in my heart —which she would soothe away by her look; or if any problem was troubling my mind —the solution would be given along with peace. Yes, Mother "understands." Why,

Page 62

even a lion agrees with me.

"I shall tell you an amusing story," Mother smilingly told us once (a master raconteur, our Mother). "In Paris, there is a park called the Jardin des Plantes, where there are animals as well as plants. A magnificent lion had just been received there. Naturally, he was caged. And he was furious. In his cage was a door, behind which he could hide. And sure enough, whenever visitors came to see him, he would go hide himself. I had observed this; so one day, I stood near the cage and began speaking to him —animals are very sensitive to articulate language, they really listen. I started speaking gently to my lion. I said to him, 'Oh, how beautiful you are! What a pity you hide thus, we would so much love to see you. . . .' Well, he was listening. Then, little by little, he cocked an eye at me, then craned his neck the better to see me; next he stretched his limbs and finally pressed his nose on the bar with an air as though to say, 'At long last, here is someone who understands me!'

*

* *

Page 63

She would play games with her brother. "One of the favourite games my brother —who was only eighteen months older than I —and I played, was to take the Animal Dictionary and become a particular animal for ten minutes. Have you ever tried?" Mother asked us, half a dozen brothers and sisters in our teens. "Well, you know, it's not that easy to become a great anteater. What a long snout it has!" Her laughter pealed out and ours mingled with hers.

'Becoming' was one of the keywords in Mother's life.

But life with Mathilde was less amusing, in fact harsh, for a sensitive child like Mirra. "I remember once. . . . She used to scold me very often —but that was very good, it was a very good lesson! —she would scold me very, very often . . . for things I had not done!" Mother smiled ruefully. "Once she berated me for something I did do but which she hadn't understood—I had done it with my best consciousness. She reproached me as if it were a crime, or at any rate an unseemly act —I had given something to someone without asking her permission!

Page 64

She would look uncomprehendingly at this harsh world.

"At first I stiffened and told her, T have not done it.'

"She started to say that I was lying.

"Then suddenly, without a word, I looked at her, and I felt ... I felt all the human misery and all this human falsehood, and silently the tears fell.

"She said to me, 'What! Now you have begun to weep!'

"All at once I was a bit fed up and told her, 'Oh, my tears are not for me, they are for the world's misery.'

" 'You are going crazy!' She truly thought I was going crazy!"

Mother's mouth widened a little in amusement. "It was perfectly amusing."

But it was rare for Mirra to cry. She would generally sit in her little armchair, all alone, and look uncomprehendingly at this harsh world, bizarre, obscure, which smelled of mothballs from the high-hanging curtains, and shook and rattled with the early trams pulled by four horses. She would draw down that something strange and luminous, and oh, what a pleasant sensation!

Page 66

"Otherwise, I was all the time in a state of dazed stupefaction. And the blows I received! Constantly. Each thing came to me like a stabbing or a pummelling or a clubbing, and I said to myself, 'What? How is this possible?' You understand," Mother explained to Satprem, "all the baseness, the lies, the hypocrisy . . . I saw it in my parents, in events, in friends, in everything—a stupefaction. It wasn't expressed intellectually, it expressed itself in this stupefaction."

Until the age of twenty or twenty-one, when Mirra began to meet Knowledge and someone who would explain to her the meaning of her sensations, she spent her life with this stupefaction: "'How —is this life! What —are these men! How. . . !' And I was as though beaten black and blue."

But someone literally turned little Mirra blue. It was her English governess. Seemingly, Mirra was just like any ordinary child "except that I was difficult." Among a number of things Mother casually mentioned, "I was even difficult from the point of view of making my toilet. Because being in the hands of an Englishwoman, I was given cold baths; my brother took that

Page 67

quite well, but I used to howl! Later on it was proven — because the doctor said so —that it was not good for me; but that was much later."

And really speaking, Mirra was always cold. "Up to the age of thirty, all my childhood and youth, always I was cold, always cold. Yet, I used to skate, I did exercises, I led a very active life —but cold, terribly cold! A feeling that I lacked the sun. But when I came here [in India], 'Ah, at last! Now I am comfortable.' The first time I came here [in 1914] —I had brought along such an accumulation of cold in my body —I used to go about in a woolen ensemble . . . in full summer! A skirt, blouse and cloak. People would stare at me ... I didn't even notice —it was my natural dress."

Page 68