Her name is Pushpa, and she is indeed a flower. But she is a serious person, so our pushpa-lila will consist of throwing ideas and feelings at each other, though I would like to sprinkle her with roses and jasmines. As Robi Babu says:
. . for me alone your love has been waiting
Through worlds and ages awake and wandering,
Is this true?
That my voice, eyes, lips have brought you relief,
In a trice, from the cycle of life after life,
Is this true?
That you read on my soft forehead infinite Truth,
My ever-loving friend,
Is this true?
Just looking at her, listening to her is enough for me, though. I think I have gone beyond mere physical attraction. It is the Female Principle that I adore in her.
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A mouse is playing at my feet, and last night I was kept awake by it — and, of course, by my thoughts. But this is all the lila, the play of the Universe, and I have plunged into it with great happiness. I am afraid the first postcard disappeared quickly, so I’m continuing on another one of the two dozen self-addressed postcards that Ma insisted on my taking with me.
Also, you must forgive my handwriting, which is bad. Pushpa has wonderful handwriting. I saw her write my name in the entry book in English, and she put a mystical full moon of a dot above my ‘i’.
How are Ma and Baba and Meenakshi and Kuku and Tapan and Cuddles and yourself? I do not miss any of you as yet, and when I think of you, I try to think of you with a disinterested love. I do not even miss my thatched hut where I meditate — or ‘maditate’, as Pushpa, with her delightful accent and warm smile, puts it. She says we should be free — free as birds — and I have decided to travel after the Mela wherever my spirit takes me in order that I can truly discover the Entirety of
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my own soul and the Being of India. Just wandering around at the Pul Mela has helped me to realize that the Spiritual Source of India is not the Zero or Unity or Duality or even the Trinity, but Infinity itself. If I felt that she might agree, I would ask her to travel with me, but she is a devotee of Sanaki Baba, and has decided to devote her whole life to him.
But I realize I haven’t told you who he is. He is the holy man, the baba in whose compound I am staying down here on the sands of the Ganga. Mr Maitra brought me to see him, and Sanaki Baba decided I should stay here. He is a man of great wisdom and sweetness and humour. Mr Maitra told him how unhappy and peace-less he felt, and Sanaki Baba provided him with some relief and told him that he would later explain to him how to meditate. When he left, Babaji turned to me and said: ‘Divyakar’—he likes to call me Divyakar sometimes for some reason—‘I crash into a table in the darkness, yet it is not the table that has hurt me but the lack of light. So, with old age, all these small things hurt, because the light of meditation is absent.’ ‘But meditation, Baba,’ I said, ‘is not easy. You make it sound as if it were easy.’ ‘Is sleep easy?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But not for an insomniac,’ he said. ‘And meditation is easy, but you must gain that ease again.’
So I have decided to find that ease, and I have also decided that the bank of the Ganga is the place where I will find it.
Yesterday I met an old man in a boat who said that he had gone all
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the way along the Ganga from Gaumukh to Sagar, and it set up a yearning in my heart to do the same. Maybe I will even grow my hair long, renounce everything and take sannyaas. Sanaki Baba was quite interested in the fact that Baba (how confusing all these ‘Babas’ are) is a High Court Judge, but he said on another occasion during a sermon that even those who live in great mansions turn to dust in the end, in which even donkeys roll. It brought things home to me in every sense. Tapan will take care of Cuddles in my absence, and if not him, someone else will. I remember one of our school songs at Jheel Schooclass="underline" Robi Babu’s ‘Akla Cholo Ré’, which sounded absurd to me even then when it was shouted out by 400 voices. But now that I have decided to ‘travel alone’ myself, it has become a beacon to me, and I hum it all the time (though sometimes Pushpa tells me to stop).
Everything is so much at peace here, there is none of the acrimony that religion sometimes causes, well, such as we saw that evening of the lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. I have been thinking lately of showing Pushpa my scribblings on various spiritual subjects. If you should meet Hemangini, please tell her to type out my jottings on the Void in triplicate; carbon copies stain one’s fingers when one is reading them, and my handwriting is too much to ask Pushpa to read.
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One learns so much here every day, the horizons here are Infinite, and every day they expand. Over the whole of the Mela sands I can imagine the ‘Pul’ of pipal leaves, like a green rainbow spanning the Ganga from the ramp to the northern sands, carrying souls to the other side, and regenerating our polluted earth with its greenery. And when I bathe in the Ganga, which I do several times a day (don’t tell Ila Kaki, she’ll have a fit), then I feel a blessing flowing through my bones. Everyone chants, ‘Gange cha, Yamune cha aiva’, the mantra that Mrs Ganguly taught us to Ma’s annoyance, and I too chant it with the best of them!
I remember, Dada, you once told me that the Ganga was a model for your novel, with its tributaries and distributaries and so on, but it now strikes me that the analogy is even more apt than you thought it at the time. For even if you now have to take on the additional burden of handling the family finances — since I won’t be able to help you at all — and even if it takes you a few more years to complete your novel, you can still think of the new flow of your life as a Brahmaputra, travelling apparently in a different direction, but which will, by strange courses yet unseen to us, surely merge with the broad Ganga of your imagination. At least I hope so, Dada. Of course I know how much your writing means to you, but what is a novel after all compared to the Quest for the Source?
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Now I have filled up a whole stack of postcards, and I can’t decide how to send them. Because if I post them separately at the post office here — they even have a Pul Mela post office! The administrative arrangements are quite amazing — they will arrive in random order, and I am afraid that will cause confusion. As it is, they look confusing with their mixture of Bengali and English, and my handwriting is worse than usual because I have nothing to rest the postcards on except my Sri Aurobindo. And I am afraid of causing you disquiet by the direction I have decided to take, or, rather, have decided I cannot take. Please try to understand, Dada. Perhaps you can take over for a year or two at home, and then maybe I will come back and relieve you. But of course this may not be my final answer because I am learning new things every day. As Sanaki Baba says, ‘Divyakar, this is a watershed in your life.’ And you have no idea how charming Pushpa is when she says: ‘The Vibrations of the true feelings will always reach the Point of Focus.’ So perhaps, having written all this, I don’t need to send it after all. Anyway, I’ll decide about all this later in the day — or maybe it will be decided for me.
Peace and Love to all, and blessings from the Baba. Please reassure Ma that I am well.
Keep smiling!
Dipankar
11.13
Darkness had come over the sands. The city of tents shone with thousands of lights and cooking fires. Dipankar tried to persuade Pushpa to show him a little of the Mela.