A Luminous Life

To Singapore and Sri Lanka

For a very long time, neither Madhav nor I imagined we would ever leave the Ashram. Invitations had come to him even in the Mother's lifetime, from universities and centres abroad, but he always declined, wishing never to be far from her. It was only after her passing that circumstance drew him out — beginning, almost by accident, with an invitation to Singapore.

The Singapore centre had been founded with the involvement of Devan Nair, a leading political figure there who, while imprisoned by the British for his part in Singapore's independence movement, had read The Life Divine in his cell and — a communist turned disciple of Sri Aurobindo — never looked back. He and others wrote to Madhav, acknowledging that he never travelled, but pleading that after the Mother's passing, disciples scattered across the world badly needed the presence of an older sadhak to give them courage; would he come, they asked, at least to Singapore, for a week? He agreed. We had, quite literally, no suitcases, having never expected to travel anywhere.

When we were leaving the Ashram for that first journey, one of our fellow Ashramites, the artist Krishnalal, made us a special painting as a parting gift — showing Madhav in his dhoti and myself in a sari, each of us holding what looked like the Mother's flag, standing beside an aeroplane we were about to board. It touched me deeply, because rather than viewing our going out into the world as something to be critical of, he had chosen to bless it in his own way — his manner of wishing us bon voyage.

In Singapore, Madhav was received with astonishing warmth — even at the university, dominated as it was by communist sympathies, where he was heard in pin-drop silence and fielded every hostile question so gracefully that no one could find fault with him. What was meant to be a week stretched, at Devan Nair's insistence, into a fortnight, with halls overflowing and journalists filling the papers with the visit. It was there, too, that Devan Nair's and a Chinese friend's wives took me shopping and, over my protests that I needed no such thing, bought me eight beautiful synthetic saris — "You will need them," they told me, "when you go to America." We had no such plan. "But we feel you will be going," they said. They were quite right.

From Singapore, invitations followed to Sri Lanka, where Mr. Murugesu, a distinguished and devoted admirer of Madhav's books, arranged a reception of similar warmth — lectures, a full-moon Puja of the Buddha shown especially in our honour, and, at Ananda College, a Buddhist institution, an invitation none of us had expected. I was asked to sing everywhere we went. At the great Buddhist monastery in Kandy, near the Temple of the Tooth, I was suddenly asked, without warning, to sing an invocation before several hundred ochre-robed monks — grim-faced men who, I was told, saluted no one, though laymen were expected to salute them. I had nothing prepared, only the Dhammapada I had been reading over and over during the long drive there; I closed my eyes and began the Pali invocation, Om Namo Bhagavate Sambuddhassa, followed by verses in the metre of the Gita describing the Buddha's teaching, set to a tune that came to me spontaneously in the manner of our own Sanskrit chants. When I opened my eyes, every one of those glum faces was smiling — grinning, even — and as we walked afterwards through the monastery's inner courtyard, monks who supposedly saluted no one stood everywhere with folded hands. "It was your day," Mr. Murugesu told me. "You saved the day."