A Luminous Life

Closing words

Looking back across all these years — the ancestral scholars and freedom fighters into whose family I was born; the small girl gathering flowers each morning for a companion no one else could see; the day my father, quite by accident of postings, brought his children within reach of a gate at Pondicherry we knew nothing about; the years of quiet work in the library and in Madhav's little office beneath the stairs; the singing that carried Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's presence into concert halls, university platforms, and Buddhist monasteries an ocean away — I can only say that none of it was planned by me. Each step seemed, at the time, to arrive by itself, as though something had already chosen the road before I ever set out on it. I do not know, even now, in my late eighties, how I have been able to speak of all these things without being overcome by them. But it is only because you insisted that I have. And there is always so much more — a lifetime among some of the most extraordinary people I have known — that I could go on, if you let me, endlessly weaving these stories back and forth.

Namaskar.