INTRODUCTION
Surendra Nath Jauhar or 'Chachaji' as the children and teachers of the Mother's International School loved to call him, or 'Faquir' as he preferred to call himself towards the end of his life-was his own best biographer.
He had a way of recalling events, telling stories and creating a lively and compelling atmosphere. This was often done with a mass of facts, dates, names and the resulting tale would have the splash and ring of the higher Truth.
And he had a way of using language-English, Hindi, Urdu, Pathani Punjabi-that was altogether his own. His observant eye missed nothing, he had a genius for spotting the unusual, the exceptional, the ludicrous and the droll, and he found the right words-even if it meant taking liberties with the received language-to invoke the odd fact that had caught his eye. "Give me a yard of steaming coffee!" he told a server in a wayside hotel in Tamil Nadu on seeing him pour and receive hot coffee from a cup in one hand held high to another cup held low by the other hand-a nimble feat to make the beverage less warm and grow beaded bubbles shining at the brim. It took the server a minute to understand, and then came the broad smile and the response to the request.
Chachaji had indeed a sense of humour quite out of the ordinary, a singular capacity to laugh at himself and at others, but the humour invariably enhanced, rather than diminished the intended target.
Among the lines of business that he built up, not the least important were building materials like firebricks, cement, lime and limestone, paints and varnishes. He was quite a master builder, and he built in concrete as also the elusive abstract of the human and the spiritual.
In the later years of his heroic life as a Karma Yogi, often when he walked on the grounds of the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, or suddenly stood up in the morning Assembly of the Mother's International School, to speak to the rapt congregation of pupils, teachers and visitors, 'Chachaji' struck beholders on a first glance as another 'Chacha Nehru'. On a closer confrontation, however, one realised that, where Nehru's was a sensitive, intellectual and charismatic countenance, Chachaji's flaming eyes and face suffused with a native spiritual glow were rather more characteristic of the power and personality of a realised Yogi, a Faquir.
II
He was named Sikandar Lal, but after Matriculation changed his name into Surendra Nath Jauhar. As he changed his name, he was to effect a decisive change in the direction of his life as well. The origin and growth of the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram are part of the later phase of Jauhar's life, for these merges into a single story. And this also includes the tale of my own association with Chachaji and the Delhi Ashram. No life, no tale, is wholly isolable, for History is a teasing and fascinating web, and the web is of a mingled yarn, and the diverse colours can fuse into a Rainbow Arc of unity in tantalising variety and multiplicity.
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