Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

14 February 1940

Purani: Some Chakravarthy, a final year medical student, has written to you through Nolini that his father Bhuban Mohan Chakravarthy had been your Bengali teacher.

Sri Aurobindo (extremely surprised): How? When? Where?

Purani: That is the mystery.

Sri Aurobindo: My only Bengali teacher was Dinen Roy – unless he had another name.

Purani: “Chakravarthy” and “Roy” are a little far off from each other.

Satyendra: Besides, how can he be the son of that teacher? Sri Aurobindo has been here for a long time.

Sri Aurobindo: That won’t be a test, for he could have been a teacher long before the son was born.

Purani: He writes that he can produce a most authentic proof – a letter you have written to his father.

Sri Aurobindo: I?

Purani: Yes, and he can send the letter if you want. He has asked for a loan from you to carry out his studies. He will repay you afterwards.

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, that is the reason! (After some time, to Purani) Have those articles been sent off to the Indian Express for the special number of February 21?

Purani: I don’t know. I shall ask Nolini. Is there anything wrong?

Sri Aurobindo: Radhanand, in his article on the Mother, has claimed that she is an Incarnation. That is something we have not yet said publicly.

Purani: Radhanand said that whatever he had written had been gathered from talks, etc.

Sri Aurobindo: The body of the article is all right. But at the beginning he makes this claim.

Purani: We can then send a modification.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. State simply that it is the birthday of the Mother.

Two days later we saw that the article was published as it was, along with a poem by Radhanand.

In the morning the Mother told a very interesting story to Sri Aurobindo.

The Mother: J has written that she and her son want to go on an outing for a few days, stay in a bungalow and return just two or three days before Darshan. She wants to know what I would say. I have seen that she doesn’t want to know. Already they went once and found that the bungalow was occupied by another European. Finding no room, they came back and said that they would start again after a few days. I clearly saw that if she went again some accident would happen to her and she would miss the Darshan as she had done before.

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, did she miss it once once before?

The Mother: Yes, it was when she went to see her son. They don’t take a hint. Then she wrote to me that they couldn’t go as they couldn’t get hold of a chauffeur. I was tempted to write to her that the Divine Grace (here the Mother spoke in French; the sense seemed to be that the Divine Grace had saved her.)