Abstract
One late morning in the winter of 2006, my research assistant Hena and I were chatting with Sri Ashok Bose, a warm, articulate man in his early eighties, who had been living in the Ramakrishna Mission Home for Aged People since its inauguration twenty-two years earlier in Kolkata, India.¹ We sat in his modestly furnished private room framed by two capacious windows open to tree-filtered sunlight and a pleasant winter breeze. In the room were a single bed brightly covered by a cotton hand-loomed spread, a desk, two simple wooden chairs, and a tall metal wardrobe. Sri Ashok spoke with