Foreword to My LIfe and Quest by Arthur Osborne #1

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Foreword to My LIfe and Quest

Arthur Osborne

 

MANY YEARS after my father’s death in 1970 I opened an

old suitcase and found several of his unpublished manuscripts.

It is strange that they remained buried and unknown for so

long, but perhaps now is the time for this story to be told.

Reading through them it was intriguing to see how true his

voice was, and how it endured over the years. One of these

documents was his autobiography that he had entitled “The

Mountain Path, My Quest”.

 

Later when he founded the quarterly magazine for

Ramanasramam he used the title “Mountain Path” for that, so

we decided to leave it out of this work in order to avoid confusion.

It is an apt title for the chronicle of his life which was

dedicated firstly, to finding the path, and once he was sure that

he had found the right one he was utterly committed to it. His

poetry as much as his prose show what a struggle it was for him

at times, how he fought with darkness and despair, but, as he

points out, a man who is climbing Mount Everest does not

stop to play the violin. Through all his vicissitudes his faith in

Bhagavan was unwavering, and Bhagavan recognised in him

his humility and dedication. Sometimes when he was sitting in

the hall with his eyes closed in meditation Bhagavan would look

at him with such love that it could move one to tears. Even as a

child I recognised this as something very special.

 

He was a very special person and father, but as he was the

only one I had ever known I perhaps did not quite realise his

uniqueness until much later. Of course some things were outstanding

even to me. He writes about being quite gregarious as a young

man; be that as it may, by the time he was an older man, and my

father, he had become quite the opposite. He would talk, but he

never chattered. I could ask him about anything that I wanted to

know and get a concise answer, but he never talked randomly or

just to fill a silence. He was a man of silence and he wore it like a

cloak.

 

A couple of stories I remember sharply illustrate this quality

in him.

Two men once came all the way from Delhi to Tiruvannamalai

especially to meet him, and my mother seated them all on the veranda

while she carried on with her work. After about an hour, hearing no

sound from outside she assumed the men had left and came out. She

was startled to see the three of them still sitting together in silence

and she hastened to make conversation. They wanted to ask him

many questions but were nervous or shy of initiating a discussion.

When they eventually did leave my mother asked him why he hadn’t

spoken to them, why in fact he had left them sitting in silence for so

long. He had no idea why she was upset. He said that he thought

they wanted to be quiet but that if they had anything to talk to him

about they only had to say so!

 

Some time after I had left home and was living with my

husband in Pakistan, I came back on a visit. I had bought some

old coins in the bazaar in Peshawar and I showed them to him,

explaining that I had been told they were from the reign of

some ancient king. He looked at them and said that one of the

coins was certainly of a much later date than I supposed.

“How do you know?” I asked him. “I didn’t think you

were interested in old coins.”

“I’m not,” he told me, “but the date is written on the

coin.”

“It is written in Arabic!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t know you

could read Arabic. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Well, you never asked me,” was his reply. He had in fact

learned the language many years before but had not used it for

a long time. In all those years it had never occurred to him to

mention that he spoke yet another language apart from Polish

and French, and for all I know several more that I hadn’t asked

him about! As I said, he was not a man of many words, but

those that he did speak were worth listening to.

My mother was also deeply devoted to Bhagavan although

hers was more an intuitive devotion: her instinct was sure. When

my father was interned in Bangkok at the beginning of the

Second World War she had not one single word from him for

two years, and then a telegram came from the War Ministry to

say that he had been killed. At the time we were staying with

our friends the Sharmas in Madras. Mrs. Sharma was terribly

upset on my mother’s behalf and tried to comfort her.

My mother was relatively calm. She kept saying, “Don’t

worry, it is a mistake. If Arthur were dead I would know it. I

know he is not dead. It is a mistake.”

Of course they all thought that she was unbalanced with

grief, and Mrs. Sharma was so upset by this seemingly irrational

behaviour that my mother ended up trying to comfort her,

while she herself remained unwavering in her belief that her

husband was alive, and sure enough a few days later there was

another telegram saying in effect that they had got the wrong

Osborne. Her intuition guided her, and her faith in Bhagavan

who, when my little brother Adam asked him to keep his daddy

safe, had assented. This, and her own instinct gave her the

knowledge and the fortitude to sense the truth and to recognise

the mistake for what it was. Later we got all his letters

simultaneously, and apparently he also only heard from us after

two years.

............

 

 

by KATYA DOUGLAS

to be continued