A Luminous Life

Twelve years of discipline, and a life of work

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother decided that Madhav should work as Nolini-da's assistant, in a tiny room beneath a staircase — barely large enough for a table and chair. Correspondence in those days was vast: three great baskets of letters would sit by Nolini-da's desk, one of which was given over to Madhav to answer under Nolini's brief instruction, while the Bengali letters Nolini handled himself after consulting Sri Aurobindo. Every letter was taken seriously by our Gurus — though neither of them wished to be addressed as such. This, incidentally, is the only Ashram in India where Guru Purnima is not celebrated; Sri Aurobindo was always called simply "Sri Aurobindo," and once the Ashram was formed, the Mother was addressed only as "the Mother" — never by her earlier name, Mira.

Kapali Sastri, for his part, put Madhav through a rigorous twelve-year private discipline of study, meditation, exercise, and a daily walk along the beach — though he taught him only the practice of Integral Yoga itself, withholding the wider Tantric, philosophical, and aesthetic learning he had received from his own many teachers. Nolini-da, meanwhile, taught Madhav French. And as the years passed, Madhav's responsibilities multiplied: he helped prepare The Life Divine for the press, joined the small Housing Committee alongside the senior Amrita-da and Kunuma, and eventually organised, almost single-handedly, the great International Centre of Education conference of 1951. It was, I think, this steady widening of his work — meeting all kinds of people, learning to administer, learning to speak — that quietly prepared him, though none of us knew it then, for the very different kind of life he would later lead in the world outside.

Through all these years I remained mostly in the library, working under Premanand and then Medhanand, though our paths crossed constantly, since the library supplied reference books for the secretarial work Madhav and the others were doing. It was only much later, when Madhav's own workload had grown too heavy — Nolini-da said plainly that he needed an assistant — that I offered myself for the post. Madhav, at first, did not think me suited to it; he was serious, withdrawn, absorbed entirely in philosophy, while I mixed easily with everyone in the playground and had already become something of a singer. But I persisted, pointing out that I knew several languages and had already been of use to him, and Nolini-da, who liked the idea very much, helped settle it. In my place at the library, I recommended a newly arrived young man named Kireet Joshi to Medhanand — who became so close to him that, as Medhanand later joked, he had had two of the nicest people in the Ashram working for him, only to lose them both to more important work.