Contact with The Mother

THE SAVIOUR GRACE

A Friend pressed me to speak to the Mother before I left the Ashram after the February Darshan of the year 1945. I argued that not only did I feel no need or urge to speak but had nothing to say either. Yet he prevailed upon me.

“Mother, the day after tomorrow I am going,” said I when I went to her for blessings. She nodded her head in a gesture of consent.

“And I want your Grace,” I continued. The Mother nodded her head affirmatively.

A few months after, one summer night at about 10.30 p.m., as I lay in my bed reading the Bases of Yoga, in the light of a lamp placed on a tripod beside my cot, an owl ventured to peep and screech through the head-side window of my forest-situated office. I smiled at the idea as to what wisdom the night bird had come to bestow upon me. That the owl is a symbol of wisdom, I had come to know during my last trip to Pondicherry, from a letter of Sri Aurobindo to a captain in Hyderabad. In our own parts it is popularly considered the symbol of the opposite quality.

The usual stillness of the night in a solitary place, harmonising itself with the chirping of the crickets—pierced only by a fake gun-shot from the nearby Hanuman Rice Mills, to scare away the wild boars that used to devastate its paddies—reasserted itself. And then suddenly a heavy thud on the big wooden chest lying at a few yards’ distance from my feet broke that calm. A cat had jumped in from outside the window behind the chest, I thought. But could the soft pads of a cat’s paws produce such a heavy sound? I wondered for a while and then buried myself in my book, undisturbed, not caring a whit to see what was the matter, thinking myself on the road to samatā, spiritual equality, a state of unperturbedness even if the heavens fall ! A faint sound of some movement on the bags beside the chest succeeded the thud.

Then all was quiet. Suddenly a grasshopper struck and sat on my book. I drove it away. A few minutes later it made its stubborn presence felt on my hand. I shook it off. A third time it sprang on my chest. I caught it and threw it away into the surrounding forest. A few minutes after, while I was almost sure of its disappearance, the mattress near my pillow started rising a little, and I thought that the “little rascal” had reappeared and got under it, though what was happening seemed a little too much for its strength.

I prepared myself to press the mattress down with a blow and so crush the disturber of my precious peace. But something made me stay my hand and sit up on the cot to look before hitting. What did I find?

A big black snake, its fore-part raised from the ground, its head just near the mattress of my bed, in between the cot and the tripod in the comparative darkness below the lamp! Was it not the Grace that without any preconceived idea in my brain deterred me from the blow that would have been lethal—to myself?