Page:A Collection of Esoteric Writings.djvu/11

This page has been validated.

A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THE LATE

T. SUBBA ROW, B. A., B. L., F. T. S.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The announcement, I am now compelled to make of the death of this brilliant young Indian mystical philosopher, will shock the Theosophical reading public. Wherever our work has extended, there has his reputation spread. He was an intellectual phenomenon, and his mental history goes as far as anything conceivable to support the theory of palingenesis. The facts bearing upon the case, as I derived them from his venerable mother on the day of the cremation, will presently be given. When he last visited the Headquarters, the first week in April last, the mysterious cutaneous disease to which he ultimately succumbed, had begun to show itself in an outbreak of boils. Neither he nor either of us dreamt that it was at all serious. But shortly after he had to keep to his room, then to his lounge, and he never went out again save once, when he was taken to a different house for change of air. In the beginning of June he sent me a touching request to come and see him, which of course, I did. He was a piteous sight: his body a mass of sores from crown to sole, and he not able to bear even a sheet over him, nor to lie in any comfortable position, not get sound sleep. He was depressed and despairing, and begged me to try if I could not help him a little by mesmerism. I did try with all my will, and it seemed with some success, for he began to mend from that evening, and at my third visit he and I thought he was convalescent, and so informed his unhappy family. But suddenly there came a relapse, his disease finished its course rapidly, and, on Tuesday, the 24th June, at 10 p. m., he expired, without a word or a sign to those about him.

The last wordly business he attended to was to declare on the morning of 24th idem in the presence of his relatives and friends, among them, Dewan Bahadur P. Shrinivasa Rao,