Esha's recollections of some episodes of her life, as narrated to Nirodbaran in Bengali, who translated it in English. This is presented here in form of a book.
Sri Aurobindo : Contact
Nirodbaran on Esha's story : Esha, the late Dilip Kumar Roy's niece, was a little girl visiting the Ashram when I came to know her through my niece Jyotirmoyee with whom she had become very friendly. She wanted to settle in the Ashram, but her mother did not want it as she was still a minor. When after many years she came to the Ashram again and stayed with Sahana Devi, I became more closely acquainted with her. By that time she had already married and obtained her divorce and had decided to settle here. I came to her help and made all possible arrangements for the purpose. Since then I have come to know her well and listened to her narration of the incidents of her life. As I found them interesting I began to note them down and was thinking of publishing them in Mother India when somehow she got wind of it and strongly objected to it. As I felt I had Sri Aurobindo's sanction for it, I did not listen to her. In spite of my disregarding her objection, luckily she did not stop recounting her saga. Of course she narrated it in Bengali and later I put it down in English as faithfully as I could. When the story began to appear in Mother India, she insisted more than once that I should stop it. My answer was that I believed it could be helpful to many readers and that Sri Aurobindo seemed to support me.
THEME/S
On the 5th December, 1950, an hour or so after midnight, I had a most frightful dream. I dreamt that the entire world was shaken by a violent earthquake. My bed trembled, swayed, rose and fell. Darkness enveloped the earth and everything in it — men, beasts, cities, nations. All were laid waste by a massive destruction. In the midst of the holocaust, I found myself totally alone. Desolately and with a great effort I somehow climbed a tower and heard a voice whispering in my ear, "On this earth you now have no one left to call your own. Beyond, you have." The shock of this ominous utterance shattered me. My whole body trembled. I woke up dazed from the terrible dream, my head reeling. "What does it mean?" I wondered miserably.
The next morning, I recounted my dream to one of my distant relatives. He was as puzzled by it as I was. Then, later, we heard the radio announcement that Sri Aurobindo had left his body. On hearing the news, I felt completely broken. My mind became a blank unable to accept the brutal truth, and then it dawned on me that the huge convulsion that had overtaken the world in my dream had been due to his departure. "What a tremendous person he must be!" I marvelled. My relative too was stunned by the news, even more so when he later received a letter from my uncle, Dilip Kumar Roy, who was in Benaras at the time, describing a similar dream he had had the same night.
Five days later, while I was putting my child to sleep, I saw a figure standing at my door. At first I could not make out who it was. But when I looked closely, it became clear that it was Sri Aurobindo himself. He appeared exactly as he had been during that last Darshan I had attended. Then he said in a low voice, "I have come to bless you." But when I stepped forward to do pranam at his feet, I suddenly found there was no one there. It was then that I felt my aloneness most acutely. I had no one left in this wide, strange world to call my own except my child. I was already estranged from my husband, while my mother lived in her own world and, rather than being a support to me, was herself in need of my help due to her constant ill-health. So it was that I found myself surrounded by misfortunes that came not one by one, but all together as they always seem to do.
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