A Luminous Life

The journey to America

After Sri Lanka, and a visit to the Baroda centre — housed in the very mansion where Sri Aurobindo had once lodged as a young man in the Maharaja's service — invitations began arriving steadily from the West. Getting our passports was, oddly, no trouble at all: the Governor of Pondicherry at the time, who had already had Madhav address gatherings at Government House, simply instructed an official to arrange everything without delay. I travelled as Madhav's secretary, since a man needed some official reason to be accompanied by a woman.

Before we left, there was a moment I still turn over in my mind. Waiting once in the first-floor room of the main Ashram building for the Mother to call me up, I suddenly had the sensation that the four walls around me — the walls of the Ashram itself — had simply fallen away, and I sat exposed, like a child, to the whole open world beyond. There was no fear in it, no sense of anything destroyed — only a strange, unmistakable feeling of being about to be exposed to the world entire. I remembered this vividly as we prepared to leave for America, and it proved true enough: for the next ten years I was travelling almost continuously, through America and Europe both.

We flew out in 1977, a party that soon included three young American helpers — Tatsat, Stan, and Barbie — who had taken it upon themselves to arrange our itinerary; Stan even gutted a van of its seats and fitted four comfortable armchairs so we could travel long distances in some comfort. I used to joke that we were a travelling circus, performing wherever we stopped.

Our first stop was the American East Coast, where fog forced our plane to circle over Philadelphia before we could finally land in New York. There, Eleanor Montgomery — a longtime friend of Madhav's from her days staying at Golconde — met us eagerly, already certain that Madhav would settle permanently in New York; she was deeply disappointed when he told her he had come only on a three-month visa and must return to the Ashram. I remember something she told Madhav once, on her own last day at the Ashram before returning to America: feeling sad to be leaving what she called Mother's Ashram for far-off New York, she heard the Mother say to her, quite simply, "You know something? The whole world is my Ashram." I heard this with my own ears, and it stayed with me — the Divine does not come to earth for one community alone, but for the whole of humanity, and Eleanor, in her way, would go on doing the Mother's work in New York just as surely as any of us did it here.

Wherever we travelled — universities, spiritual centres, private homes — Mother had long ago given Madhav his method for speaking to secular or unconvinced audiences: first speak only of the principles and ideas themselves, and only if people are moved enough to ask who taught you these things, then speak of us. At a symposium in Chicago, sharing a platform with followers of other paths including Rudolf Steiner's, Madhav's presentation of Sri Aurobindo's thought was met with such pin-drop silence, and such a rush of people afterwards wanting to know who his teacher had been, that they arranged two further evenings — one on Sri Aurobindo, one on the Mother.

Music went everywhere with us. I would fit fifteen minutes of song into a university programme, or a full hour-long recital elsewhere, tracing what I called the evolution of Indian devotional music — a Rik from the Rig Veda chanted on its ancient three notes, a verse from the Upanishads, a couplet from the Gita, a piece from the Puranas, the Guru Stotra from the Tantra, and then, moving into the medieval age of Bhakti, a song of Guru Nanak, a Bengali Shyama Sangeet to Kali, a Baul song, a hymn of the Tamil woman-saint Andal, a Marathi abhang, even a Gujarati devotional song — showing, in one small recital, both the unity and the astonishing diversity of the country's devotional traditions. I had learned many of these — along with the beautiful, image-rich Krishna songs of the Muslim poet Kazi Nazrul Islam — from a gifted Ashramite named Gitika, whose own father had once wandered Bengal's villages singing songs of revolution.

At one memorable retreat centre outside Detroit, belonging to a very old and dynamic follower of Paramahansa Yogananda's mission, I was nudged without warning during a morning assembly — "Your turn is next" — and made to sing before I had even had a glass of water; I sang Pujalal's Sanskrit hymn Namo Namaste in Raag Kedar, and the response was such that his secretary was overheard insisting, in a high, carrying voice, "I said no, she couldn't be just a secretary — it was so spiritual!" I had, of course, never claimed to be anything but a devotee singing before her Guru — "Even that is enough," came the reply, and I was asked to give a full concert that same evening.

In California, my old friend Jyotipriya — Judith Tyberg, whom I had known since her very first visit to the Ashram in 1947 — welcomed us with open love, even posting a public notice at the East-West Centre announcing "music by our beloved Vasanti." At Krotona, on the hill in Ojai once home to the Theosophical Society, we met people who had spent whole lifetimes in genuine spiritual practice; I remember, in particular, an old man walking quietly along a hillside path, his face lit from within, utterly ripe with a lifetime's sadhana, who exchanged not a single word with Madhav — only a bow, and a silent gesture of blessing — before continuing on his way. We attended, too, a talk by Krishnamurti nearby, though we left before it ended; and at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, an institution famously exclusive and devoted to a philosophy of emptiness quite different from our own, Madhav was received with unusual respect, introduced as a great authority on Indian Tantra, and kept back long afterwards for a private, searching, entirely amicable exchange of views.

Even flying over the American land itself, between one city and another, I felt distinct currents of what I can only call sacred vibration rising up from the earth — as though something ancient and holy were embedded there, quite apart from whatever modern America presented to the world outwardly. My mother's own village Guru used to compare it to a clothesline: pull one end and every garment hanging along its length begins, ever so slightly, to sway. I found, again and again in America, people and places that swayed in just that way.