The second half of a story of being in Auroville during the late sixties and early seventies, and the winding road it took.
Originally published 2008
Part 2
He . . . told me the whole thing, taken out from one of the Society’s booklets. I said “Okay, sure, why not? What do I have to do?” He said, “You meet me in front of the Sri Aurobindo Society office, and we get in a Land-Rover and we go out, we work all morning and we get back in the Land-Rover either at noon time or in the evening and we come back to Pondicherry.” It sounded good so I agreed. So the next day, we did go. It was just a question of who knew less about building houses, Gene or I. I thought I was going to be the helper, but we were both helpers, and what we needed was a builder.
Anyway, I started to go out there on a daily basis, and one time I got hung up a little bit, and by the time I got back to the Centre the Land-Rover already had gone back to Pondicherry. There was a fellow at the time called Auroarindam who was a Canadian fellow. He said to me,
“You can come down to the pump house, and sleep on the floor of my kitchen.” So I went down to his place, and there was a cowdung floor in the kitchen. I spent the night there and actually I had a great sleep, very nice. I enjoyed sitting out there at night watching the stars, in the quiet, no electricity; it was a very beautiful evening. So I went back to work with Gene and stayed out there sleeping on Auroarindam’s floor for about three-four days. Then I asked him, “Can I do this on a regular basis?” He said yes. And one day he came to me and said, “I have to go to New York tomorrow, I am the UN ambassador to Auroville,” and he brought out his passport that was a United Nations passport, and he said he had to go. At the time all I was doing was moving around, you see, so other people moving around didn’t seem unusual to me, and next morning at 5 o’clock he got in a taxi and he went off. At 8 o’clock two workers showed up and asked me what they should do. So I asked them to do… whatever they were doing yesterday (laugh). I had no idea what they were doing! Then some guy pulled up on a bullock cart with a drum.
“What does he want?”
“Oh, he wants water; there is a drought going on and you are the only well in the area and you have to supply the villages with water.”
That was behind the Nursery. This is the well they dug up to supply water to the 28th February ’68 ceremony, the first well, and it is still functioning.
So all of a sudden I found myself there. My friend Auroarindam had built this house with casuarina poles, and then he made flower beds around the casuarina poles with compost and everything. So it attracted a tremendous amount of white ants. Gene knew nothing, Auroarindam knew nothing, and I knew less. So it was only a matter of . . . I was there probably a week or ten days before the whole house went . . . (gesture of collapse) So along comes a fellow named Constance, and we went out and found a mammoth big casuarina pole six villages away, and I thought it was fantastic that we could buy this for thirty rupees, and then have ten guys lift it up and carry it six miles for another thirty rupees. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world; it did not matter whether I used it or not. But I did, we made a house.
I made this big house and I was there for a couple of weeks, and . . . it was May by that time, it was getting hot, there was absolutely nothing there. The people who I was travelling with did meet up and they did go to Sri Lanka, and coming back north, they stopped by me, and said: “Come on, we are going to Nepal!” I looked around and there I was, hot in the middle of nowhere, trying to grow things that weren’t growing. I said, “Great idea! Let’s get out of here”. So I went to Nepal; I think I lasted about two months there, and then I was confused. I thought the Darshan was not August 15, but August 24. So I got back here by the 20th of August and I was hungry for the Darshan, and I had missed it. So I went to see Maggi and I expressed my hunger and she said, “Sure, sure”. So she got me into another darshan. Then I went into a phase where I was trying to think of emotional and critical reasons why I had to see the Mother. I was having one crisis after another. And finally they said, “Enough”. I got a statement from the Mother that said: “Once the fire is ignited within the breast, it is your work to make that fire grow into a big raging fire, and too much contact with me does not serve this purpose.” It was just a polite way to say . . .
I had money. I got caught up in this thing that something bigger than my own little personal life and drama was happening. I really believed that Auroville was going to be built in twenty years, and I really believed that we were all going to reach a level of consciousness that would be striking to mankind, and I thought that it was going to be a fantastic thing to be part of this. Money would not be needed any longer because . . . So okay, a new tractor! a new borewell! Let us spend money! People enquired, “How long are you going to stay in this place?” I said, “Let us see, let us see what happens.” I never made a commitment to stay here actually. I never said, “I am going to stay here for the rest of my life.” It was always a let-us-wait-and-see type of situation.
I did have a crisis when Mother left her body. I took that as a personal betrayal, I got very angry, I was grouchy and was fighting with everybody, a real pain in the ass: the Ashram was nonsense, Auroville was nonsense . . . Especially as I had to deal with Navajata, a cold slap of reality came in. I almost left at that point. What actually saved me was… I was working for Shyam Sunder at the time, running errands for him and being his information collector and stuff like that. One day I wandered over to the Matrimandir, and I picked up on a vibration that actually got me out of all this negativity that I was manufacturing (I was manufacturing negativity at an unbelievable rate). All of a sudden I was not in that space any longer. So I decided I wanted to hang on at the Matrimandir.
It was just around that time that there was a conference of the Sri Aurobindo Society in Pondicherry that I attended. Navajata was presenting a situation where he was saying how well he and Shyam Sunder were getting along. He was doing this to six or seven hundred people there, and he was going on and on and on. Then he made some statements about Auroville and I stood up and said, “You know, if you and Shyam Sundar were getting on, you would know that what you just said is not true.” This marked me. I didn’t realize at the time, but Navajata put a check after my name.
So then in 1975 when the revolution 1 began, S and I got quit notices. Just the fact that they wanted to throw me out, made me want to stay all that much more. I probably would have wandered off myself if they didn’t do that to me. The divine play of things. So we were thrown out.
A political game was taking place. I had said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, but I felt that we had made a deal with Navajata in a hotel room in Delhi, and the deal was that we would not any longer object to leaving, and in three months we could come back. That is the deal that I understood that we had made, with Kishorilal and another person present in the room. So when S and I were deported, we went right to San Francisco and we applied for visas instantly. We thought we would get there before any notice that we were persona non grata. We did get visas, we spent the three months there and then we came back in, and this is where we made a mistake. S got the name of a travel agent from Tim Wrey who was living in London at the time, and we went to this fellow; we wanted of course a discount flight. He kept on delaying us, and we didn’t understand. What happened is the fellow we went to was a member of the Sri Aurobindo Society. So he informed Navajata that we were returning, via this flight, and so on.
So we entered Bombay, and we felt just so happy to be back, and all of a sudden this troop of soldiers comes in front of us.
“Are you so and so?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Well, you are under arrest.”
They were trying to get us out by the next flight, but JRD Tata 2 blocked the whole thing and came to our rescue. He was my patron for x number of years getting my visa which always impressed the guy at the RRO office [office for the registration of foreigners].
I came back into Auroville and got into what I call the Joan of Arc syndrome, where you are fighting for the truth, and then . . . somewhere around 1978 I ran out of money. I just had no money at all. I came in after an all-night concreting into a little hut I was living in and kicked over a kerosene lamp, and the glass broke all over my bed, and the kerosene . . . I said okay, that’s it! I am not eating this food, I am not in the sun all day, I have to get electricity, that’s it. I had to borrow money for a plane ticket to get me back into America.
I thought it would take me a maximum of one year to get refinanced. But I discovered when I was in America that the Mother gave me something that I could least afford to have. And that was a conscience. Up to that point I never had a conscience. If it was good for me, it was good; if it was bad for me, it was bad. Very simple. Life was easy. All of a sudden I found myself saying, “Oh I can’t do that, that’s not right, I don’t want to get involved with that,” and stuff like that, so it made the refinancing thing much more difficult. Also I was out of America for about thirteen years, and the whole price structure changed, what cost 50 before was now 500. The one who saved me actually was Lila. Lila and I were living together at the time. Lila insisted that everything I did was legal. So this restricted me. And the conscience. The two things really were terrible, definitely a burden. So it took eight years before I had sufficient funds.
We were moving all over America. I couldn’t fit in anywhere. I was an outsider all the time, and one day Lila came to me and said, “I want to go somewhere, I have been following you all over the country for the last eight years (we lived in ten, twelve different places), I want you to come with me now.” (I used to walk in the door and tell her: pack up, we are going to Virginia, we are going to California, we are going to New Mexico). But this time she said, “My turn.”
“Okay,” I said, “where do you want to go?”
“I want to go to Auroville.”
“No, no, any place but Auroville!”
We had fights over this, then she said, “Listen, one year. We will go to Auroville just for one year.” I said okay.
But we had to sell the house, we couldn’t carry the mortgage on this house for one year. The market was down, as it is today. My brother-in-law came to me and said, “Hey, what are you doing? You are moving to India?” Ten days later a guy knocks on the door: “I want to buy your house.” I put everything out there to block him. I insisted on this and on that, but he just sat there nodding his head. I did everything to discourage him, but he hung on, really hung on, and so finally I sold him the house. Lila and I got on an airplane and we had this stop over in Hawaii, and I said, (tempter’s voice) “Lila, look at this place! Come on!”
“Auroville. You promised.”
“Okay, okay.”
So we got into Auroville at about 3 o’clock in the morning, after a terrible ride down in an Ambassador car, exhausted. I got out of the taxi and I instantly knew that I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t going anywhere, I was here. And from that time to this time, the one emotion that keeps coming forth is gratitude, that I have been allowed to be here. I really feel that . . . yes, grateful.
Even now?
Mostly now. Yes, absolutely, everyday. It radiates of that, of gratitude, to have this experience. You have to understand. Basically, you see, I am a New York street kid, with minimal education, absolutely zero family; family was a dysfunctional family, and everybody in my neighbourhood was either a policeman, a fireman or a gangster. That was it, so somehow I was able to get out of that and have a different experience, that I really feel grateful for.
That is how I came to meet Mother.
Auroville survived in spite of us. Aurovilians have done their maximum to undermine Auroville and yet it persists — and yet right now I can see the danger of it becoming institutionalised, but either She is who she said She was or She isn’t. I have got so much time invested in it now, I can’t think any other way. I have to believe that She is who she said She is. I don’t see an option. Often my mind plays with the game: “Well, if you don’t believe this, then what do you believe?” There isn’t an option. I don’t have an option. I am so totally involved in the process :in her teachings and her dream, I don’t have an option.
If Auroville has survived the Aurovilians, I also believe it will survive the Indian government.
From a conversation with Francis
- Against the Sri Aurobindo Society. Francis and S received a Quit India notice, and the Society pretended that it was due to their being suspected of being CIA agents. (Original editor’s note)
- JRD Tata, the legendary Indian industrialist who in numerous occasions helped and supported Auroville.
Excerpt from Turning Points: An inner story of the beginnings of Auroville (Auroville Press, 2008, pp. 37-41)
Turning Points is one of the best-selling books by Auroville Press, and available locally through these outlets. The book features twenty-one true stories recounting how in the sixties some men and women’s lives changed radically the moment they entered in contact with the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and they discovered a place called Auroville.