My Mother's Death and the Mystic Amulet
My mother's greatest desire was the marriage of my elder brother. "Ah, when I behold the face of Ananta's wife, I shall find heaven on this earth!" I frequently heard Mother express in these words her strong Indian sentiment for family continuity. I was about eleven years old at the time of Ananta's betrothal. Mother was in Calcutta, joyously supervising the wedding preparations. Father and I alone remained at our home in Bareilly in northern India, whence Father had been transferred after two years at Lahore.
I had previously witnessed the splendor of nuptial rites for my two elder sisters, Roma and Uma; but for Ananta, as the eldest son, plans were truly elaborate. Mother was welcoming numerous relatives, daily arriving in Calcutta from distant homes. She lodged them comfortably in a large, newly acquired house at 50 Amherst Street. Everything was in readiness — the banquet delicacies, the gay throne on which Brother was to be carried to the home of the bride-to-be, the rows of colorful lights, the mammoth cardboard elephants and camels, the English, Scottish, and Indian orchestras, the professional entertainers, the priests for the ancient rituals.
Father and I, in gala spirits, were planning to join the family in time for the ceremony. Shortly before the great day, however, I had an ominous vision. It was in Bareilly on a midnight. As I slept beside Father on the piazza of our bungalow, I was awakened by a peculiar flutter of the mosquito netting over the bed. The flimsy curtains parted and I saw the beloved form of my mother. "Awaken your father!" Her voice was only a whisper. "Take the first available train, at four o'clock this morning. Rush to Calcutta if you would see me!" The wraithlike figure vanished.
"Father, Father! Mother is dying!" The terror in my tone aroused him instantly. I sobbed out the fatal tidings. "Never mind that hallucination of yours." Father gave his characteristic negation to a new situation. "Your mother is in excellent health. If we get any bad news, we shall leave tomorrow." "You shall never forgive yourself for not starting now!" Anguish caused me to add bitterly, "Nor shall I ever forgive you!" The melancholy morning came with explicit words: "Mother dangerously ill; marriage postponed; come at once."
Father and I left distractedly. One of my uncles met us en route at a transfer point. A train thundered toward us, looming with telescopic increase. From my inner tumult, an abrupt determination arose to hurl myself on the railway tracks. Already bereft, I felt, of my mother, I could not endure a world suddenly bare to the bone. I loved Mother as my dearest friend on earth. Her solacing black eyes had been my refuge in the trifling tragedies of childhood.
"Does she yet live?" I stopped for one last question to my uncle. He was not slow to interpret the desperation in my face. "Of course she is alive!" But I scarcely believed him. When we reached our Calcutta home, it was only to confront the stunning mystery of death. I collapsed into an almost lifeless state. Years passed before any reconciliation entered my heart. Storming the very gates of heaven, my cries at last summoned the Divine Mother. Her words brought final healing to my suppurating wounds:
"It is I who have watched over thee, life after life, in the tenderness of many mothers. See in My gaze the two black eyes, the lost beautiful eyes, thou seekest!" Father and I returned to Bareilly soon after the crematory rites for the well-beloved. Early every morning I made a pathetic memorial-pilgrimage to a large sheoli tree which shaded the smooth, green-gold lawn before our bungalow. In poetical moments, I thought that the white sheoli flowers were strewing themselves with a willing devotion over the grassy altar. Mingling tears with the dew, I often observed a strange other-worldly light emerging from the dawn. Intense pangs of longing for God assailed me. I felt powerfully drawn to the Himalayas.
One of my cousins, fresh from a period of travel in the holy hills, visited us in Bareilly. I listened eagerly to his tales about the high mountain abode of yogis and swamis.¹ "Let us run away to the Himalayas." My suggestion one day to Dwarka Prasad, the young son of our landlord in Bareilly, fell on unsympathetic ears. He revealed my plan to my elder brother, who had just arrived to see Father. Instead of laughing lightly over this impractical scheme of a small boy, Ananta made it a definite point to ridicule me.
"Where is your orange robe? You can't be a swami without that!" But I was inexplicably thrilled by his words. They brought me a clear picture: that of myself as a monk, roaming about India. Perhaps they awakened memories of a past life; in any case, I realized with what natural ease I would wear the garb of the anciently founded monastic order. Chatting one morning with Dwarka, I felt a love for God descending with avalanchelike force. My companion was only partly attentive to the ensuing eloquence, but I was wholeheartedly listening to myself.
I fled that afternoon toward Naini Tal in the Himalayan foothills. Ananta gave determined chase; I was forced to return sadly to Bareilly. The only pilgrimage permitted me was the customary one at dawn to the sheoli tree. My heart wept for my two lost mothers: one human, one Divine. The rent left in the family fabric by Mother's death was irreparable. Father never remarried during his nearly forty remaining years. Assuming the difficult role of father-mother to his little flock, he grew noticeably more tender, more approachable. With calmness and insight, he solved the various family problems. After office hours he retired like a hermit to the cell of his room, practicing Kriya Yoga in a sweet serenity. Long after Mother's death, I attempted to engage an English nurse to attend to details that would make my parent's life more comfortable. But Father shook his head. "Service to me ended with your mother." His eyes were remote with a lifelong devotion. "I will not accept ministrations from any other woman."
Fourteen months after Mother's passing, I learned that she had left me a momentous message. Ananta had been present at her deathbed and had recorded her words. Though she had asked that the disclosure be made to me in one year, my brother had delayed. He was soon to leave Bareilly for Calcutta, to marry the girl that Mother had chosen for him.² One evening he summoned me to his side. "Mukunda, I have been reluctant to give you strange tidings." Ananta's tone held a note of resignation. "My fear was to inflame your desire to leave home. But in any case you are bristling with divine ardor. When I captured you recently on your way to the Himalayas, I came to a definite resolve. I must not further postpone the fulfillment of my solemn promise." My brother handed me a small box, and delivered Mother's message.
"Let these words be my final blessing, my beloved son Mukunda!" Mother had said. "The hour is here when I must relate a number of phenomenal events following your birth. I first knew your destined path when you were but a babe in my arms. I carried you then to the home of my guru in Banaras. Almost hidden behind a throng of disciples, I could barely see Lahiri Mahasaya as he sat in deep meditation.
"While I patted you, I was praying that the great guru take notice and bestow a blessing. As my silent devotional demand grew in intensity, he opened his eyes and beckoned me to approach. The others made a way for me; I bowed at the sacred feet. Lahiri Mahasaya seated you on his lap, placing his hand on your forehead by way of spiritually baptizing you. "'Little mother, thy son will be a yogi. As a spiritual engine, he will carry many souls to God's kingdom.'
"My heart leaped with joy to find my secret prayer granted by the omniscient guru. Shortly before your birth, he had told me you would follow his path. "Later, my son, your vision of the Great Light was known to me and your sister Roma, as from the next room we observed you motionless on the bed. Your little face was illuminated; your voice rang with iron resolve as you spoke of going to the Himalayas in quest of the Divine.
"In these ways, dear son, I came to know that your road lies far from worldly ambitions. The most singular event in my life brought further confirmation — an event which now impels my deathbed message. "It was an interview with a sage in the Punjab. While our family was living in Lahore, one morning the servant came into my room. 'Mistress, a strange sadhu² is here. He insists that he "see the mother of Mukunda.""
"These simple words struck a profound chord within me; I went at once to greet the visitor. Bowing at his feet, I sensed that before me was a true man of God. "'Mother,' he said, 'the great masters wish you to know that your stay on earth shall not be long. Your next illness shall prove to be your last.'⁴ There was a silence, during which I felt no alarm but only a vibration of great peace. Finally he addressed me again:
"'You are to be the custodian of a certain silver amulet. I will not give it to you today; to demonstrate the truth in my words, the talisman shall materialize in your hands tomorrow as you meditate. On your deathbed, you must instruct your eldest son Ananta to keep the amulet for one year and then to hand it over to your second son. Mukunda will understand the meaning of the talisman from the great ones. He should receive it about the time he is ready to renounce all worldly hopes and to start his vital search for God. When he has retained the amulet for some years, and when it has served its purpose, it shall vanish. Even if kept in the most secret spot, it shall return whence it came.'
"I proffered alms⁵ to the saint, and bowed before him in great reverence. Not taking the offering, he departed with a blessing. The next evening, as I sat with folded hands in meditation, a silver amulet materialized between my palms, even as the sadhu had promised. It made itself known by a cold, smooth touch. I have jealously guarded it for more than two years, and now leave it in Ananta's keeping. Do not grieve for me, as I shall have been ushered by my great guru into the arms of the Infinite. Farewell, my child; the Cosmic Mother will protect you."
A blaze of illumination came over me with possession of the amulet; many dormant memories awakened. The talisman, round and anciently quaint, was covered with Sanskrit characters. I understood that it came from teachers of past lives, who were invisibly guiding my steps. A further significance there was, indeed; but one may not fully unveil the heart of an amulet.⁶ How the talisman finally vanished amidst deeply unhappy circumstances of my life, and how its loss was a herald of my gain of a guru, may not be told in this chapter.
But the small boy, thwarted in his attempts to reach the Himalayas, daily traveled far on the wings of his amulet.
A mantra or sacred chant words were inscribed on the talisman. The potencies of sound and of vach, the human voice, have nowhere else been so profoundly investigated as in India. The Aum vibration that reverberates throughout the universe (the "Word" or "voice of many waters" of the Bible) has three manifestations or gunas, those of creation, preservation, and destruction (Taittiriya Upanishad 1:8). Each time a man utters a word he puts into operation one of the three qualities of Aum. This is the lawful reason behind the injunction of all scriptures that man should speak the truth.
The Sanskrit mantra on the amulet possessed, when correctly pronounced, a spiritually beneficial vibratory potency. The Sanskrit alphabet, ideally constructed, consists of fifty letters, each one carrying a fixed invariable pronunciation. George Bernard Shaw wrote a wise, and of course witty, essay on the phonetic inadequacy of the Latin-based English alphabet, in which twenty-six letters struggle unsuccessfully to bear the burden of sound. With his customary ruthlessness ("If the introduction of an English alphabet for the English language costs a civil war...I shall not grudge it"), Mr. Shaw urges the adoption of a new alphabet with forty-two characters (see his preface to Wilson's The Miraculous Birth of Language, Philosophical Library, N.Y.). Such an alphabet would approximate the phonetic perfection of the Sanskrit, whose use of fifty letters prevents mispronunciations.
The discovery of seals in the Indus Valley is leading a number of scholars to abandon the current theory that India "borrowed" her Sanskrit alphabet from Semitic sources. A few great Hindu cities have been recently unearthed at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, affording proof of an eminent culture that "must have had a long antecedent history on the soil of India, taking us back to an age that can only be dimly surmised" (Sir John Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, 1931).
If the Hindu theory of the extremely great antiquity of civilized man on this planet be correct, it becomes possible to explain why the world's most ancient tongue, Sanskrit, is also the most perfect. "The Sanskrit language," said Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society, "whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either." "Since the revival of classical learning," the Encyclopaedia Americana states, "there has been no other event in the history of culture as important as the discovery of Sanskrit [by Western scholars] in the latter part of the 18th century. Linguistic science, comparative grammar, comparative mythology, the science of religion...either owe their very existence to the discovery of Sanskrit or were profoundly influenced by its study."