A Luminous Life

Standing at the Ashram gate

We had brought a picnic lunch, and after seeing a few of the town's small sights, my great-uncle — who was with us that day — suddenly said, as the afternoon wore on, "I think Aurobindo Ghosh has his Ashram here." "Is that so?" my father asked, and made enquiries of the local supervisors accompanying him. "Yes, yes," they said, "the Ashram is there, on the Rue de la Marine." We were, it turned out, quite close by, so they took us to the gate.

No one could enter without prior permission, but the gates stood open, and two young men with long hair and meditative eyes sat on stools watching the entrance. We were made to wait outside — I was eleven, my brother nine, my sister Jayanti six — and we stood there with our mother, simply looking in.

As I stood in that open doorway, a strange sense of familiarity began to steal over me. It made no sense: French was unfamiliar to me, French India looked utterly foreign, and Tamil too was a language I had never heard. Yet something in me recognised this place. The two young men spoke in such soft, gentle voices, and the Ashram itself was so quiet — no cars, no rickshaws, nothing of the noise of the street outside.

My father and great-uncle went inside with the attendants, and I could just hear my father ask, "Can we see Mr. Ghosh?" "No," came the reply, "our Guru is in seclusion. He gives Darshan only four times a year. You must write beforehand for permission — you must write to the Mother." My father, ever willing to indulge an elder's wish, seemed about to press the request further, but my great-uncle stopped him: "No, no, Prabhakar" — that was my father's name, meaning the sun, the one who gives light — "let us come another time." The evening shadows were falling, the children had been out long enough, and so we turned back with only that much: our first glimpse. It was December 1941 — which, at the time of this telling, makes it seventy-one years since I first stood at the Ashram gate.

That evening the beach was already full of French soldiers; the Japanese were advancing from the east, bombs had fallen on Calcutta and even near Madras, and word came from the family on the West Coast: "Bring the children back, we want them safe here." So we returned, and school resumed there, and I had no chance to visit the Ashram again for some time. But my father did not let the matter rest. On a later visit, he met Dr. Rajangam and another of the older sadhaks, who took him into the library and had him buy several books — Bases of Yoga, Lights on Yoga, the small Prayers and Meditations (the prayers translated by Sri Aurobindo himself), and The Riddle of This World — each one autographed to my father's name, with blessings, by Sri Aurobindo, and the Prayers and Meditations inscribed by the Mother herself.

We children were brought back to Cuddalore again before the war had ended, because my maternal grandfather was dying and my grandmother wanted us with our parents. And it was around this time, in a temple corridor at Chidambaram, that something happened to me which I did not understand until much later: walking through the half-dark passages, unnoticed by anyone in our party, I suddenly felt a great suffering enter me — a difficulty breathing, an unaccountable distress. After perhaps half an hour it passed as suddenly as it had come. I later learned that this was exactly the half-hour in which my grandfather, far away, was dying; he breathed his last at eight that night, and it was at eight that the strange feeling in me had subsided.

I was thirteen, and in deep grief. So when my father told me, on my return, that he had applied for my own Darshan of Sri Aurobindo — for I was old enough now — I felt nothing stir in me at all. I only wanted to die myself.