Act X, Scene 6
(Pondicherry. Aurobindo’s house. The Mother looking up the Arya accounts, etc. Amrita comes in with a heap of the morning mail. Placing it on Aurobindo’s table, he lingers.)AUROBINDO (looking at Amrita): Yes, Amrita?
(Amrita had the standing instructions of Aurobindo that he should remind him of the matter for the Arya a week before the day fixed for going to press.)
AMRITA: I am reminding you about matter for the Arya, please. Just seven days left.
AUROBINDO: Oh yes. Thank you. I shall set about it forthwith.
AMRITA: But once you sit at your desk you will forget everything else and go on till you finish. Why not dispose of the post first?
AUROBINDO: Very well. You are always business-like. That’s all to the good.
(Running his eyes through the letters, one by one, he writes marginal notes, and stops short at one.)
AUROBINDO: Here’s a reader of the Arya asking me how I, a literary man and a politician, could become all of a sudden an out-and-out philosopher! It has struck him rightly. I must write to him that I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry. How did I manage to do it and why? Because X proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review — and my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything…
AMRITA: But it has never struck me as strange. Your articles, even your speeches, were at no time unmixed politics or pure literature. They have always been a happy blend of all the three, each at its best — I mean, politics, literature and philosophy, although the fire of love of country and her freedom predominated.
AUROBINDO: But hasn’t the Arya a different complexion altogether?
AMRITA: Undoubtedly.
AUROBINDO: Then you concede that he is justified in asking me…
AMRITA: I do. Oh, that the man in question could see you filling page after page without halting anywhere, as if your very fingers were inspired!
AUROBINDO: But that is exactly the truth! Strange to say, a Power comes directly into the fingers, as if it did not have to pass through anything else! Just now I said that a Yogi should be able to turn his hand to anything. Well, the word “hand” can be applied in a very literal sense where the Arya articles are concerned.
Now take these letters and make up replies from my marginal notes. Let me now start work.
