Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/24

4 and the tendencies of the present time were aggressively antagonistic to these ideals, but also I was certain that the ancient teachers of India were right when they said with a positive assurance: “It is an absolute death to depart from this life without realising the Eternal Truth of life.”

Thus the exclusiveness of my literary life burst its barriers, coming into touch with the deeper aspirations of my country which lay hidden in her heart. I came to live in the Shantiniketan sanctuary founded by my father and there gradually gathered round me, under the shades of sal trees, boys from distant homes.

This was the time when Satish Chandra Roy, the author of the following little story, felt attracted to me and to my ideas and devoted himself to building up of the ashram and serving the boys with living food from the fulness of his life. He was barely nineteen, but he was born with a luminosity of soul. In him the spirit of renunciation was a natural product of an extraordinary capacity for enjoyment of life. All his student days he had been struggling with poverty—and yet he cheerfully gave up all chances of worldly prospects when they were near at hand and took his place in the ashram