We continue with the recollections of Pir-o-Murshid Musharaff Khan about his mother, Khadija Biy, begun here. His memories give us some hints of the home environment which helped to shape him and his eldest brother Hazrat Inayat Khan.

My mother’s life was indeed given up to her children, and in educating her children she was specially interested in the psychological teaching of the Hindu religion, which with us is too often debased into forms that have become meaningless superstitions. But under these external forms lie deep truths and knowledge of human nature.

Impression is everything. This is the underlying motive of so many Hindu observances. It was our mother’s endeavour in educating her children, and in building their characters, to avoid ugly and unhealthy suggestions of any kind, and to encourage happy impressions.

Children are especially susceptible to impressions. They are like sensitive photographic plates. They quickly pick up a gesture, a movement, an inflection of voice and the impressions that are unconsciously received sometimes make an even deeper mark in the childish mind. For instance the Hindu thinks it is most important to consider what is the character of the people attending an infant, an idea that might not, I think, occur to many careful European mothers who are otherwise particular about the conditions of their nurseries. All such details interested our mother, who wished only happiness for her children. She also knew much of the Hindu teaching about the qualities of character and habits of mind and manner, which bring happiness and prosperity in life. For the Hindu religion, when understood, shows itself deeply psychological, and even scientific in its analysis of human types and its comprehension of human character and life.

She had one custom, which may be called a superstition, for she would hang a black cord around her children’s necks to protect them from evil. This custom is very like that seen in the West of hanging medallions or holy pictures round the necks of children.

I was a small child when my mother died. [about the age of seven – ed.] I gathered only a few impressions about her. Once — it must have been not long after her death — it was just at twilight when I was in the kitchen, the maidservant must have gone for a moment, and I have a faint remembrance that I saw my mother in the twilight —her face — and she called me by my name. I could not express myself and when the maidservant came back I was crying. She brought me to my grandmother who took me and consoled me. I remember she corrected the maidservant, saying “You ought not to have left him alone.” I could not express myself, but I felt my grandmother had understood what had happened.