The filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt met the philosopher UG Krishnamurti sometime in the 1970s. Bhatt went on to become one of Krishnamurti’s most ardent followers, writing several books on him. The latest is The Ashes Are Warm – Memories of a Lifetime Spent with UG Krishnamurti (Rupa Publications).“He was standing at the top of the staircase, clad in white,” Bhatt writes about his first meeting with Krishnamurti, who was also known as UG. “And as if walking through a tunnel, I began to climb toward him. His luminous face slowly eclipsed everything around me. A volcanic silence blazed through my gut. The clamour of the city receded into the background.”The book doubles up as Bhatt’s own memoir. In the chapter excerpted below, Bhatt, the son of filmmaker Nanabhai Bhatt, writes about his mother Shirin. Bhatt created a character based on his mother in his award-winning film Zakhm (1998). Bhatt’s daughter, Pooja Bhatt, plays Noor, a Muslim woman who marries a Hindu director and hides her faith from her children. Noor’s reality is revealed through tragedy: she is killed during a communal riot.She was never just one thing. Not to herself. Not to us. Not even to ‘God’.In the Shivaji Park flat where I grew up, the walls carried no portraits of ancestors – but there were gods everywhere. Ganesha, garlanded with marigolds. Shiva, brooding in silence. A laughing Buddha, quietly smiling on the shelf.Her prayer mat and Quran were hidden above the cupboard in her bedroom, out of sight but never far. At dawn, behind a closed door, she offered her namaz. Later, she lit incense and placed flowers before the gods – keeping peace with the world outside, and perhaps with herself.My mother, fearing discrimination, cleverly concealed her identity behind a large bindi and mangalsutra, gave us all Hindu names, and sent me to an English-medium school run by Italian missionaries. She lived her life in disguise – not for glamour, but to protect the lives that had sprung from her.She was a Shia Muslim woman living with a Brahmin film-maker in post-Partition India. A mistress in the eyes of the world. A mother, in the only eyes that mattered – mine.To shield us, she bent to social lies so we wouldn’t have to carry the burden of truth. But her inner world was seamless. She visited Mount Mary’s Church and begged Mother Mary for a son after three daughters. When I was born, she said it was Mary’s gift – a child who would shield her from the world’s judgment, and maybe, one day, return the favour.Then UG came into my life – the man who became the breath of it. And she, too, was drawn to him. Not because he offered salvation, but because he didn’t. He saw through illusion – and he saw her.