A Luminous Life

The passing of Kapali Sastry

Kapali Sastri's own end came quietly, and in a way that felt, to those of us who loved him, entirely fitting. Some while before he died, he had fallen ill — an eczema had attacked his feet, the weakest and lowest part of the body, as we say, and Dr. Nripendra treated him for it as best he could. But Kapali Sastri himself knew that something graver had happened to him. Walking back from the Ashram one day after his Pranam, just past the dispensary, he felt what could only be described as a spear entering his chest — nothing physical, and yet unmistakable. He knew, from that moment, that he had been struck, and from that day he was truly ill, unable to go to the Ashram again, spending most of his time in meditation, sometimes with his eyes open and yet clearly elsewhere. Madhav looked after him devotedly, with his mother and sister coming often to sit with him, careful never to disturb his inward state.

Both the Mother's principle and Kapali Sastri's own were the same on this point: no negative thought — nothing of illness, nothing of death — should be allowed to enter the atmosphere around a person in that state. It was not a matter of fear, but of a different, occult way of meeting the end. Sensing that his time was near, Madhav asked the Mother whether he might bring Kapali Sastri to his gate one afternoon when her car passed on its way to the tennis ground, and she agreed. They stood waiting, and when her car came by, the window was lowered and the door opened slightly; Kapali Sastri bowed to her from where he stood, and she rested her hands on his head for a long moment, blessing him. They looked at each other once — she love and compassion itself, he surrender itself — and then her car went on. In this quiet way he let her know that he understood the end was coming.

He turned more inward after that, and on the fifteenth of August — Sri Aurobindo's birthday, three years after Sri Aurobindo himself had left his body — he remained deeply meditative all day, through the long Darshan lines, and again that night. Madhav's own bed lay only a few feet from his, separated by a single step, so that he might know if anything happened. After settling him for the night, Madhav found him still in what appeared to be peaceful meditation when he first looked in; some hours later, checking again, he found that Kapali Sastri had gone — with no trouble, no sound, nothing at all. He had passed, quite simply, from the state of Samadhi into whatever lies beyond it. Because no one could say exactly when in the night it happened, it is recorded as the sixteenth of August, but I believe he truly left on the night of the fifteenth itself — Sri Aurobindo's own birthday. It was, I think, exactly as he would have wished it: adoring Sri Aurobindo, as he had all his life, in his Sanskrit hymns, to the very last.