Story of a sadhak called Murarilal Parashar

A Beautiful Death

Shri M. L. Parashar, who had lived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi Branch for nearly half a century, came to Pondicherry on 9th April 1989. It was to be a very special journey. He had earlier written to his adopted son and friend, Professor Olivier Pironneau, to come from Paris to accompany him on this trip. Anu who looked after him with the devotion of a daughter came too. I met them on the 10th and it was decided that they would go to Sri Aurobindo's room the next day, namely, on the 11th and in the afternoon they would come to visit me and then I would take them to Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) whom Parasharji had particularly wanted to see.

The Mother has said that eleven is the number of perfection. And surely the 11th of a Darshan month is doubly hallowed. On this 11th at about 11 a.m. we met in the Ashram. I got the group a permission card to visit and meditate in Sri Aurobindo's room. Then I gave the three of them four flowers each to take to Sri Aurobindo's room—Agni (Fire), Prosperity, Surrender and a Hibiscus named by the Mother "The Beauty of the New Creation". Out of these four flowers Parasharji was attracted specially towards the flower Agni and he twice ascertained its significance. About this salmon-pink flower with deep red veins and a deep red centre the Mother has said, "Agni—the Flame of purification which must precede all contact with the invisible worlds."

The later events reveal the reason for his instinctive fascination for this particular flower. On this eleventh he had a tryst with death and a tryst with life. This seemingly paradoxical statement is not truly so, for a tryst with death opens doors to a birth in a new body which would be capable of housing the developed consciousness which the old and the worn-out body could not contain or support. That is why a tryst with death is also the promise of a new-birth.

Masterji, as he was known to many whom he inspired and who loved and revered him, came to Pondicherry in his eighty-third year as if to leave his body at this place—a destined death, it seems. Let me look back a little. My contact with Parasharji started when my poem "Divine Madness" appeared in the May 1986 issue of Sri Aurobindo's Action. Since Parasharji had experienced this exalted state which the poem pictured and which the Shastras call Unmatta vat—"like mad"—he felt an affinity with me and, later, on one of his visits to Pondicherry he met me. With time the contact deepened. Once on an inner impulse I enclosed a blessings packet in my answer to a letter from him. He received it while he was having a heart-attack. The blessings packet gave him the needed strength, and though great damage was done he cheerfully went on to play the game of life for two more years, though the doctors would wonder what kept him alive. It was the Mother's Grace and his own firm will and the loving care of his 'children' that kept him going. At that first meeting when he said he came to Pondicherry to see me he narrated his life-story which afterwards appeared under the serial "How They came to the Ashram" in Mother India's September, November and December 1988 issues.

To come back to the present - on the 11th April at about 4.30 p.m. - we met in the Ashram courtyard and from there proceeded towards my house. On the way we went to Golconde on an unscheduled visit for him to see the beautiful wall-painting done by Krishnalal. After passing some delightful time in the beautiful ambience of Golconde where Commodore Satpal showed Olivier and Anu this architectural marvel, we came to my house where Parasharji partook of some fruit and snacks and drank some lemonade. Later he recounted some stories of the Mother's Grace and promised to write them for the second volume of my book Vignettes of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He told me how he had liked very much the portions of the first volume of Vignettes he had read the previous day. He was trying to collect money to publish my Hindi poems.

At 5.30 unaware of the Invisible Summoner waiting in the wings, we went to see Amal Kiran where Parasharji reminded Amal how several decades earlier when he had come on his first visit to Pondicherry, they had travelled together from Villupuram. Amal, he said, was the first Ashramite he had met. It so happened that he was the last Ashramite Parasharji made it a point to visit. Parasharji had a remarkably clear memory and quoted a striking sentence which had ended one of Amal's articles written in a 1950 issue of the then fortnightly semi-political Mother India, published from Bombay.

A little after, at 6 p.m. the group left Amal's place. He thanked me warmly. I took my leave of him little realising that it was farewell. Parasharji said he wanted to go to the Samadhi. So he, Olivier and Anu went to the Ashram. There he asked Olivier to give him some water. After drinking the sacred water of the Ashram and paying his respects at the Samadhi, Parasharji and Anu proceeded towards the International Guest House while Olivier and Shipra (who had been waiting for them in the Ashram) went to arrange for a taxi for a visit to Auroville the next day. Outside the Ashram Anu wanted to take a rickshaw but unluckily there was none in sight. So they walked slowly towards the International Guest House. A few metres' distance from the Guest House Parasharji suddenly trembled. Anu made him sit on a stool in front of a tea-shop. There two or three times he repeated, "Ma, Ma", and his soul left his body.

Two years ago Anu had seen her father pass away just like this when she had returned from a visit to the Ashram. She understood that all was over. She put him in a rickshaw with the help of some onlookers and tenderly resting his head on her shoulder drove to the Trésor Nursing Home, where not finding any pulse the persons there directed Anu to take him to Dr. Raichura. But when Death takes over what can doctors do? It was evidently his soul's secret choice to die in the sacred land of Pondicherry in the Shukla Paksha—the fortnight of waxing moon. Meanwhile the people of the Trésor Nursing Home called Chamanlalji who along with Shipra had been very close to Masterji. Promesse and Lata—his old students—came too. Since he belonged to the Delhi Ashram it was in the fitness of things that he was carried to a room of the Delhi House (the erstwhile Ira Boarding), which Shipra made beautiful with her artistic touch.

And there he lay serenely, till 5 p.m. of the 12th. His friends Rachna, Dr. Matish and a cousin flew from Delhi to pay their last respects. The Mother's music was played. Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's garlanded photos were looking benignly at him. He lay on an Ashram sheet and was covered with an Ashram sheet (he had come by air and had brought no bedding), and went to the pyre wearing an Ashram dhoti. There was no sorrow in the atmosphere. His young friends to whom he was very precious bore the sudden blow yogically.

He had always had a child-like aspiration to bring bus-loads of young people to the Mother's Lotus Feet. His aspiration was fulfilled. With some of these young bright souls around him he went on his last journey, on the sacred soil of Pondicherry, carried by young hero-warriors of the Mother and his body was consigned to Agni—to the spirit of the flower he had chosen to take to Sri Aurobindo's room.