Songs for my brother Chitta²⁰

Now is my wish to offer you seventy-four extemporaneous songs. One after another I shall sing seventy-four new songs, and then I shall sing twenty-six songs without using the music. I do not think that twenty-six songs I have ever sung without using the music, and these are all absolutely new songs.

These songs I am offering to my brother Chitta, because it was he who taught me how to write poems. When I was eleven years old, not even twelve, he started teaching me how to write poems.

Chitta told me once that our father had written between sixteen and twenty poems. He told me about our whole family. Ahana wrote, I think, about fifteen or sixteen poems. Mantu wrote between twenty and twenty-five. After Mantu comes Lily. She wrote about forty poems, in one notebook. Hriday wrote a little over a hundred poems. I am sure that Chitta wrote more than one hundred fifty. Their youngest brother’s songs number in the thousands. It is all their blessings, all their affection.

My eldest sister, Arpita, never, never wrote a poem. She knew only how to cry for me to become a man of wisdom.

She wrote me many, many, many letters, only begging me to come back to the Ashram to give her joy. Even after I had hundreds of disciples, she wanted me to go back, so that she could live her life peacefully. My desire was to set to music some of her beautiful prose lines, but so far I have not been able to succeed.