Chapter Seven: The Artist’s predictions

“A vast spread of farmland
Covered with violets and red clover –
The skylark sings joyously.”

- Basho

The following weekend, Sri Chinmoy again distributed to his counters his output of small drawings for the past few days. They included a hardbound artist’s sketchbook with a picture of a magnificent bay horse on the cover. From time to time, we had heard the artist refer to this sketchbook in language that was utterly unintelligible to the uninitiated. “From the horse, it is my wish to have 50,000” was one such puzzling comment. Now the mystery was solved and, as we turned the leaves of the horse book and saw them crowded with birds, it seemed not inconceivable that he would attain this figure.

By the close of the day, after hours of counting, Sri Chinmoy’s grand total had climbed to 752,359 and we realised that we were now in the final stages of the project. Should he choose to, the artist could reach his goal within two or three weeks. But we had forgotten one thing: even after 2,752,359 bird drawings, Sri Chinmoy was still revelling in the pristine purity and freshness of his original vision. His supply of inspiration was nowhere near exhausted and, although it was carrying him rapidly to the goal, he had no wish to foreshorten the distance.

On Monday, June 27th, Sri Chinmoy completed a drawing that featured Japanese neon inks on a pale pink background. His bird forms seemed to rise against the first blush of dawn, tinted with the radiance of the morning sun. Although exquisite in its overall effect, this drawing posed a special problem for the counters. Due to the large number of neon yellow birds and the evanescent, almost trembling, effect this created against the pink background, the birds were counted through an acetate overlay.

As usual, before the counting began, Sri Chinmoy gave us his projected total – in this case 20,000. It baffled us how he could give such forecasts for drawings that appeared to the naked eye to be such a dense weave of shapes. We were reminded of stories of Sri Chinmoy’s father who had the special gift of being able to tell the exact number of seeds in a pumpkin or watermelon just by looking at the fruit. His children would then break it open and count the seeds, only to find that their father’s total was accurate to the very last one.

In the present instance, the counters arrived at a total of 19,015 birds for this sunrise drawing and, even then, because of the difficulty they experienced in counting some of the overlapping birds, they felt they might have seriously underestimated the final figure.