Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

7

Square du Roule

Then the Alfassa family shifted to 3 Square du Roule.

Mirra was eight. She lived there up to the age of nineteen.

Those twelve years were a period of intensive growth.

Life presented its myriad facets. Life mysterious.

Mirra had to learn its secrets. Mirra had to understand.

"But I remember, you see, I remember so well my own attitude when I was learning. ... I liked only what I understood."

'Learning' was absorbing. Her whole life through Mother never stopped learning! "And the ease:

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whatever I wanted to do I could do." She did and went on. She would plunge wholeheartedly into the subject in hand —no half-measures for little or big Mirra —master it and pass on to the next. "But after a time I had experienced it, and the thing didn't seem important enough to me to devote a whole life to it. So, I would pass on to another thing: painting, music, science, literature . . . all, all; and practical things."

Practical things —dancing, running, jumping, playing games ... an entire range of them. Not only was Mirra a fast runner who easily outstripped her playmates, but she was wonderful with a skipping rope, too.

One day I was skipping away all by myself when Mother came and stood watching me. Becoming aware of her I stopped. She then asked me, "How many times can you swing the rope in a complete circle in one jump?"

"Normally twice, Mother, at times thrice."

She smiled, "Thrice? I did that normally. Generally I did four times. And with a little effort I could swing the rope five times in one jump."

But her 'passion' was tennis. "I remember learning

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She was wonderful with a skipping rope.

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to play tennis when I was eight. It was a passion. But I never wanted to play with my little playfellows, for I learned nothing (generally I beat them). I always went to the best players. They sometimes looked surprised, but ended up playing with me. I never won, but I learned a lot."

Learning was what mattered; and retaining what was learnt. She played tennis even in 1958, when she was eighty. Of course, her feet by then had lost some of their fleetness, but her eyes were as keen as ever and her hand had lost none of its accuracy. What a control she had! She could place the ball exactly where she wanted. Having played with her, and being at the receiving end, I can tell you how much we had to run! Mother was full of praise for Ramanathan Krishnan, the Indian tennis champion, when she played with him in 1952. Krishnan himself still remembers it very vividly. As he wrote on August 20, 1984, in reply to a query: "Yes, I did have the privilege of playing tennis with the Mother in the Pondicherry Ashram tennis court. It was during the last week of April, 1952 (I do not remember the date

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but am sure of the week, month and year). It happened just prior to my departure for the Wimbledon Junior championship for the first time. I went to take Her blessings." He was accompanied by his father. "We had a few games of singles followed by some doubles. Mother was regular with her tennis on the green cement courts facing the sea. I received a 'Dunlop' (Maxply) racquet from Her. I was 15 years old at that time and the whole thing was an education as well as inspiration to me." He might have been only fifteen, but he was already an artist wielding not a paintbrush but a tennis racquet. With his deft touch he could give Mother exactly the type of game she liked to play. No tennis lover needs to be told that Ramanathan Krishnan became the Wimbledon Junior champion. Later, he twice reached the semifinals of the Wimbledon grasscourt tennis championship. Today he plays in the Grand Masters' circuit with his old friends Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and others. And as a person he remains as unassuming and friendly as we could hope to meet.

A few years later the Dane Törben Ulrich also

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gave a fine display of tennis on the same green cement court. He was the reigning champion of Denmark. Both he and Krishnan represented their respective countries at the Davis Cup matches. Both were seeded players at Wimbledon. But coming in February 1959 as he did, Ulrich did not have Krishnan's luck: Mother only watched him play. Because just a month or two earlier she had stopped playing tennis.

*

* *

On holidays, little Mirra would go visiting her cousins and they would all play together. More often than not, their game consisted in theatrical activities, mainly doing tableaux.

One morning in 1969, Mother suddenly saw a scene in her memory's eye. "Suddenly was awakened the memory of something that happened in my childhood, when I was about eight or ten years old, which I had completely forgotten. On Sundays (I suppose so, or anyway on holidays), I used to go and play with my first cousins, the children of my father's brother. I would go

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and play with them. I can still see the house. We generally spent our time playing scenes or enacting a story in tableaux. . . . There's a story of Bluebeard, isn't there? Well, one day we did a tableau vivant, in several tableaux, of the story of Bluebeard, who cut off the heads of his wives. That's how the story goes, no?" Mother asked Satprem amidst our laughter. "Now, we played in a big room, a sort of enclosed verandah —a big and long room, in Paris. We had stood—our playmates were little boys and girls —we had stood some girls against the wall. We had pressed them against the wall and strung their hair above their heads," said Mother with a grin. "We had also wrapped the rest of their bodies in a sheet, like this. The sheet reached the floor so that the body could not be seen, only the head was visible." Mother then added reflectively, "I saw this scene, in my memory's eye I saw the room and how it was arranged. Well, at the same time it came to me that. . . . You see, we found it quite natural, just a story we had read, no horror, it didn't seem hideous to us, we were having great fun. . . . For one full hour I saw a whole stage of humanity —the stage of the late

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1800s, the second half of 1800. Strange, isn't it?" said Mother musingly. "It happened some eighty years ago probably (82 or 83 or 84 years ago), yet it came intense, vivid, living; so extraordinary that even now if I look I can S-E-E. I see the setting so very clearly, the apartment, the people, the scene, everything. But it did not rise from within, it was shown to me. Well, whilst seeing it, all at once I said within myself, 'Hello, but I have lived this!' It was stored somewhere, stored as one would collect memories for educational purposes. It is far more precise, complete and concrete than any book or anything said with so many words."

Mirra had a huge store of collected memories.

And by any standard, all of Mirra's doings bore the stamp of strangeness — although she herself took everything in her stride —be it playing with her brother, on outings with her friends, or studying . . . history, for instance.

"When I was small —between ten and twelve, I think—I had some rather interesting experiences which I didn't understand at all. I had some history books — textbooks they give you to learn history. Well, I would

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read, and all of a sudden the book became transparent, as it were, the written words became transparent, and I would see other words instead, or pictures. I hadn't the faintest notion of what was happening to me! And it seemed so natural to me that I thought it was the same for everybody. But my brother and I were great chums (he was only a year and a half older than I), so I would tell him, 'They talk nonsense in history, you know. It is LIKE THIS !' it isn't like that —it is LIKE THIS !' And several times the corrections I got, on certain details, about one person or another, turned out to be quite exact."

Mirra was simply reliving some memories of her past lives awakened by history books.

"Reading some passages, I would even say, 'How silly! It was never that: this is what was said. It never happened that way: this is how it happened.' And it was because of the book —the book was open in front of me; I was merely poring over it like any other child and . . . something would suddenly happen. Of course, it was all in me, only I thought it was in the book!"

Strange Mirra.

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