I heard all this, not that I understood it, when I was a boy four or five years of age, my grandfather a convinced Vedantin (from a family that can boast of having been Vedantins at least since the thirteenth century, and again Brahmin advisers to kings, first in Rajputana, another thousand years earlier, and yet again Brahmins to other kings, may be the Greco-Indian ones in Gandhara, earlier yet—at least such our mythical genealogy tells us)—and my grandfather taught me Amara, that wonderful thesaurus which, like a grave and good Brahmin boy, I had to learn by heart, and thus never have to ask who the two-mothered one is, of course he is Ganesha, or Kartikeya, his brother, who, as you well know, is commander-in-chief of all the armies, wheresoever they may be. Life would not be worthwhile if you did not know which god was what, and if you will not have understood that Shiva is so awesome, you could see him only between the two ears of his vehicle, the bull, such as I did every evening at our family temple while the women chanted hymns to Parvathi, his bride, so richly adorned in gold, silk, sapphire, ruby, gifts that came from generation after generation of the family. Some kings of Mysore had given us privileges (for carrying the Royal Post, as also collecting the fee when a concubine girl first ‘tied on her bells’) and thus the lands we had, while the maharaja of Mysore, when he came to Hassana, had perforce to stop first in front of the Post Office House, which now explains why my mother, not finding enough room in our ancestral home for her lying-in, had to be transported to the dharmasala, room number one, and hence when my father was offering the ‘half-cut lemon on the knife’ to His Highness (and this was Krishna Raja Wodeyer, the Vedantin king), my mother was so vitally shaken she threw me into the world, hence instead of being named Ramakrishna, like my grandfather, I was simply called Raja.