In my teens, I begin reading one of your Darshan diaries: intimate conversations with sincere, seeking hippy types in the seventies. You coax and love and provoke, and they respond anywhere within the spectrum from woodenness to liquid gold. Life stories emerge fragmentarily and tenderly.

Then, listening to the beat-up old audio tapes that Nick lent, I heard some of the reality of your speaking. As if caressing, and yet so spacious, centred, listening, waiting, unhurried. A group of admittedly besotted seekers made their listening a meditation in itself, a heart practice, allowing the words to arrive and be felt, suspending judgement and assuming love, goodness. Likewise, your words were in no rush.

In the long pauses, the sounds of the city – rickshaws passing with buzzing engines and bip-bip horns, that beautiful bird with the ascending series of boo-oop, boo-oop, boo-oop, boo-oop to its call. And the wind or rain arriving. As I listened myself, at home in my seventeen year old, barely-formed body and soul, I was entranced.