In memoriam - Nergez

Nergez joined Auroville in 1977 and became a very active participant in this growing international community. Amongst her many other activities and interests, from November 1994 onwards she became involved in the weekly group meeting to read and study Sri Aurobindo’s mantric epic Savitri. We remember her energetically engaged in planting young trees and shrubs on the land allotted for the Savitri Bhavan project and a few years later taking the lead as the senior member of a group invited to Navsari in Gujarat for the first major fundraising effort for the planned complex. Once the first building was inaugurated by Sri Aurobindo’s close disciple Dr. Nirodbaran, Nergez was an enthusiastic participant in all the expanding activities which developed as the project grew, until growing weakness began to confine her to her home from 2016 onwards. But she continued her custom of reading Savitri daily, for she found it to be a source of light and inner strength.

In October 2016, Nergez asked Shraddhavan to select some lines from Savitri to be read at her funeral. After the ceremony many people asked for them to be to shared.

Although Death walks beside us on Life’s road,

A dim bystander at the body’s start

And a last judgment on man’s futile works,

Other is the riddle of its ambiguous face:

Death is a stair, a door, a stumbling stride

The soul must take to cross from birth to birth,

A grey defeat pregnant with victory,

A whip to lash us towards our deathless state. …

Night is not our beginning nor our end;

She is the dark Mother in whose womb we have hid

Safe from too swift a waking to world-pain.

We came to her from a supernal Light,

By Light we live and to the Light we go.

All that is made and once again unmade,

The calm persistent vision of the One

Inevitably re-makes, it lives anew:

Forces and lives and beings and ideas

Are taken into the stillness for a while;

There they remould their purpose and their drift,

Recast their nature and re-form their shape.

Ever they change and changing ever grow,

And passing through a fruitful stage of death

And after long reconstituting sleep

Resume their place in the process of the Gods

Until their work in cosmic Time is done.

A deathbound littleness is not all we are:

Immortal our forgotten vastnesses

Await discovery in our summit selves;

Unmeasured breadths and depths of being are ours. …

A larger self … lives within us by ourselves unseen. …

A treasure of honey in the combs of God,

A Splendour burning in a tenebrous cloak,

It is our glory of the flame of God,

Our golden fountain of the world’s delight,

An immortality cowled in the cape of death,

The shape of our unborn divinity.

It guards for us our fate in depths within

Where sleeps the eternal seed of transient things.