Of Mira’s flowers, treasure chests and question marks

And there we were talking to the stars, Mira’s flowers or saplings as we were, like infant sunflowers winking at the sun. Mirambikans. What the night whispered in the moonlit Aurobindo Ashram I still don’t know nearly twenty years since. What is knowing? Is it an ability to dissect, process and present information convincingly or is it just an answer ‘blowing in the wind’? Maybe its just a question mark.

After dinner at the ashram, we would be fanned by the eucalyptus trees (and thank heavens we didn’t actually go ahead and climb them like we often planned to!) as we walked past the Sri Aurobindo statue or were we walking with him as we soaked in the wisdom of the moon, of river valley civilizations that vanished mysteriously 3000 years ago, of how black and blue merges to make purple and how all colours can be found in the colour white.

The words ‘Night stay’ had a strange effect on us 10 year old Mirambikans, our unusually active imaginations would go overboard in anticipation. Some of us would start finding Harappan rocks of whitish green or yellow etched with a script, waiting to be deciphered. Others would dedicate themselves to the occult art of making magic potions from hyacinth leaves and mom’s stolen shampoos. Others still would discover the keys to a lost treasure that lay in the small Tughlak ruins (castle!) with a tunnel that led to it.

Come the day, and at evening we would sit in the meditation room in padmasanas and shavasanas and sleep asanas and absorb the silence and the mother’s music of mixed hypnotic modes from a Hammond organ. I can’t remember any hisses, whispers, disturbances in that space. We experienced something so sacred that felt so natural. I remember feeling the sweet melancholy of changing time as I would often peek into the past of my parents from when they were children at these times, and play with them as I would with my friends.

Sometimes we would watch documentaries on the big bang or the mammoth and dinosaurs with jaws that dropped to our palms as we lay on our stomachs, bewitched.

Sometimes, we would sip lemonade and gorge on the Ashram made chocolate cake after hours and hours of a sport we invented- gutter and pole. The game was designed specifically for the front lawns in front of the hexagonal Mirambika building, with the two said boundaries (gutter and pole) on either side. The object of the game was to pitch the ball beyond the boundary at a given height. This game was a lot more physically demanding than you can imagine, though I have to say that the ‘pole’ side always had an unfair advantage!

The highlight of the night was undoubtedly the star gazing session when the ‘diyas’ or didis and bhaiyas (teachers) would take us on a trip across the cosmos, through the milky way, past the big bear and 12 planets and the star called sun, the cast of gases, the new faces in the gallery of stars and our trip would spin past the river valley civilizations, the lost treasures, the mammoths, the one continent and end at the beginning of everything.

At that moment, some of us would hear a big bang and others would see a question mark.

(Mirambika is a free progress school based on the educational ideals of Sri Aurobindo. Its located in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Delhi.)