I was always amazed at the beauty of the man. It was part of his beauty that he could answer by saying, “I cannot answer. One day you will understand.”

One day he said to my father, “Perhaps I should not be friendly to him, but respectful.”

It shocked me too. When we were alone, I said to him, “Shambhu Babu, what nonsense were you telling to my father? What do you mean by saying that you should respect me?”

He said, “I do respect you because I can see, but not very clearly, as if hidden behind a smokescreen, what you are going to be one day.”

Even I had to shrug my shoulders. I said, “You are just talking rubbish. What can I be? I am already it.”

He said, “There! That’s what amazes me in you. You are a child, the whole village laughs at our friendship, and they wonder what we talk about together, but they don’t know what they are all missing. I know,” – he emphasized it – “I know what I am missing. I can feel it a little, but I can’t see it clearly. Perhaps one day when you are really grown up, I may be able to see you.”

And, I have to confess, after Magga Baba he was the second man who recognized that something immeasurable had happened to me. Of course he was not a mystic, but a poet has the capacity, once in a while, to be a mystic, and he was a great poet. He was also great because he never bothered to publish his work. He never bothered to read at any gathering of poets. It looked strange that he would read his poetry to a nine year-old child, and he would ask me, “Is it of any worth? Or just worthless?”

Now his poetry is published, but he is no more. It was published in his memory. It does not contain his best work because the people who chose it, none of them were even poets, and it needs a mystic to choose from Shambhu Babu’s poetry. I know everything he wrote. There was not much, a few articles, and very few poems, and a few stories, but in a strange way they all connect with a single theme.

The theme is life, not as a philosophical concept but as it is lived moment to moment. Life with a small l will do, because he would never forgive me if you wrote Life with a capital L. He was against capital letters. He never wrote any word with capitals. Even the beginning of a sentence would always be written with small letters. He would even write his own name in small letters. I asked him, “What is wrong with capital letters? Why are you so against them, Shambhu Babu?”

He said, “I am not against them, but I am in love with the immediate, not the faraway. I am in love with small things: a cup of tea, a swim in the river, a sunbath…. I am in love with little things, and they cannot be written with capital letters.”