A Luminous Life

The Bhagavad Gita and early memories

Every morning, before breakfast, my maternal great-grandfather would have me write out a couplet of the Bhagavad Gita — two lines a day. I did not understand a word of it, but I had picked up the Devanagari script; I was only six years old.

It was from South Canara that we children were eventually brought, by administrative chance, to the East Coast. My father was suddenly transferred to Cuddalore, just seventeen miles from Pondicherry — a transfer that caused great lamenting in the joint family, who had always had us close by, and who now felt we were disappearing to the back of the beyond, among people who spoke Tamil, a language none of us knew. This was in 1941.

One day my father said, "I will take you to French India, to Pondicherry, for a day's outing." The roads were beautiful then — green on both sides, ponds full of ducks — and I have never forgotten that first sight of the town's green outskirts, its three rivers, its little backwaters. Cuddalore itself, when we first arrived, exposed us to Tamil for the first time, and to a heat unlike anything we had known on the cooler West Coast.