Mother told her it might spoil her taste for milk – but did not forbid anything. Now Shanta says she can’t take it even in milk, so renounces its use.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1936
Letter ID: 1719
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
September 8, 1936
If any oranges can be spared for G, don’t you think it will do him good?
[Mother:] You can go to Champaklal, he will give two oranges daily.
Why two interrogations, Sir, against my using butter?
Butter and cod-liver oil – which is two.
Since the Force does not help, I have to seek fatness from butter and oil. Of course, Dr. Becharlal also added cheerfulness to the prescription.
Mother pours scorn on your idea that you are a jutting skeleton. She says that you are less shockingly plump than when you came, but that is all. But if you take butter and oil together, to say nothing of cheerfulness, what will you become? Remember Falstaff1.
We understand that Mother asked Shanta not to take cod-liver oil with milk or water as it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Mother told her it might spoil her taste for milk – but did not forbid anything. Now Shanta says she can’t take it even in milk, so renounces its use.
So we advised her to take it as it is though it is slightly bitter. But still she wants us to ask Mother how to take it!
So what? Any substitute which she will not object to? She says she has pain in eyes and temples. Replaced fever?
1 A fat, witty, good-humoured old knight in Shakespeare’s play, Henry IV.