He used to say so. One day Father said, "You two should read ‘Shakuntala’ with me. There’s no use learning Sanskrit from ‘Hitopadesha’. Read something enjoyable, you’ll like it." From the next day, we began studying together. Who knows what people of that era thought, seeing a sahib sitting on the floor with me, learning Sanskrit. I saw envy mixed with astonishment in the eyes of Father’s Bengali students; I saw suspicion and disapproval on the faces of the elderly women, and amusement in the eyes of my peers. But Father paid no heed. Both Mother and Father accepted his presence very naturally. Gradually, he was becoming one of the family.

When studying with Father, I would deliberately sit on the mat. Father would sit between us—on a sofa. I knew Mircea loved sitting on the mat; it was new to him, and he wanted to become one with us. He observed everything, examined it closely. He wanted to know all about us, and sought meaning in every little thing.

Mother would say, "Euclid is a very good boy, gentle, calm, polite. Why don’t you call me ‘Ma’, Mircea, why do you call me Mrs. Sen? Call me Ma."

After that, he would call her Ma. But he told me that in their country, no one calls such young women ‘Ma’, they get offended. My mother was only thirty-two or thirty-three then. But draped in a red-bordered sari, vermilion on her forehead, her feet adorned with red alta—our beautiful mother was the very image of motherhood; who would think of her age! I know, their country is so strange—if you call a woman ‘Ma’, she gets angry! So what need is there to count the years?

In the mornings, after everyone left the dining table, we would sit and chat. Then, standing by the library door, we would talk for another hour or two, and no one seemed to notice. Father’s library spanned three rooms, with seven or eight thousand books—there our conversations would flow. Father would go down the stairs, but say nothing; this happened so many times. Not even a word of reproach for wasting time chatting. If I had been talking with Milu or Gopal, I would surely have been scolded; but with Mircea Euclid, surely we were discussing philosophy, improving ourselves!

One day, as I was coming down from upstairs with a book in hand, Mircea stopped me in the middle of the corridor—"Did you write a philosophical poem yesterday?"

"Yes—Father was very excited about my poem yesterday. There’s a line in it—‘Moments will be lost in the womb of time.’ Father liked that line very much; within it lies a question about a profound truth—the question itself is the philosophy. I am fourteen now, that is, two years ago, I was sitting on the shores of the sea at Puri—at dusk, and suddenly it felt like morning—an odd sensation, which I wrote about in a poem—‘Take me, take me, carry me away, wherever this stream