An extraordinary girl

Last Days of My Uncle Dilip Kumar Roy

I have spoken of my husband's generous act and how he kept his word. My uncles's greatness, however, was of a spiritual character. It will be recalled that at his last performance, which I described in a previous episode, his voice had given way and he had abandoned himself to an emotional outburst of bhakti, keeping the audience spellbound. I also mentioned how his body had deteriorated almost to the point of infirmity. That occasion was the last time that I saw him. I never visited his Ashram in Pune, nor on his part did he know anything of the ordeals of my own life. His focus of concentration was his own sadhana and his Ashram which had gained wide popularity and attracted a large number of bhaktas from various parts of India.

But what interested me was that his attitude towards the Mother was changing. He was writing letters to Nolini-da enquiring about the Mother's health, offering his pranam to her and praying for her blessings. He even wrote to her that he was getting old and his end was near, to which she replied that he need have no regrets for he would still live sufficiently long.

The Mother had kept his old "Tresor House" vacant for many years after he had left Pondicherry. Then some people mooted the idea of setting up a clinic there. When the Mother heard of it, she finally gave her consent to let them approach Uncle for permission to use the property for this purpose, and he readily agreed.

Similarly, he was pleased to hear that I had taken up residence in the Ashram.

The most pathetic yet exalted moment of his life came when Sri Aurobindo's Relics arrived in Bombay. Uncle travelled there from Pune to have their darshan. But when he came near them, he burst into tears and had an overwhelming experience, so much so that he lost consciousness and remained in that state for two or three days. It seemed he had the Darshan of his beloved Guru and both embraced each other. This story was corroborated by a number of his bhaktas.

An equally apocalyptic wonder was once experienced by Nirod-da who relates: "I was sitting before my desk next to Sri Aurobindo's Room in the early morning, and was preparing the manuscript for my prospective book Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. There were a number of letters exchanged between me and Sri Aurobindo concerning Dilip-da and I was quite perplexed as to what or how much of them to include. While I was lost in thought, all of a sudden a dhoti-clad figure appeared from Sri Aurobindo's Room. He had a slender and luminous subtle body, with face and eyes aglow: he looked like an angel. He stood by the door beside my desk, looked at me, and then disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. I was transfixed. My first thought was that it was Sri Aurobindo, but I corrected myself at once, when I realised that it was Dilip-da. At the same time, I found the answer to the problem that had been vexing me. Obviously he had come to silently give me the solution."

Recently, when I was thinking about Uncle, his chequered life, and his great love for Sri Aurobindo, Nirod-da's remarkable experience was confirmed by Sri Aurobindo himself. While revealing some inner secrets about Uncle to me, he told me that the Divine had sent Uncle to Nirod-da to convince him of the truth that the outer life was not always the criterion of a man's inner development.