Life
IN LIGHT AND SHADE
The Mother continued to live at Jayrambati for some time after recovering from malaria and spleen trouble. Perhaps, she returned to Dakshineswar in the winter of 1877 following the first Jagad-dhatri worship. We noted earlier that Providence had led Shambhu Babu to step into the shoes of Mathur Babu as the supplier of the Master’s needs, and that he had been serving the Master and the Mother with whole-hearted devotion. His wife, too, adored the Master as God himself; and whenever the Holy Mother happened to be at Dakshineswar, the lady took her to her house every Tuesday to make offerings at her holy feet as she would have made at a deity’s. It did not take long for a warm and generous-hearted man like Shambhu Babu to realize that for the Holy Mother who was used to the ease and freedom of the village, living in a small place like the Nahabat, which was nothing better than a cage, would be very uncomfortable. So he purchased for Rs. 250/- a small plot of rent-free land near the temple premises, on which he planned to build a thatched house for her. Coming to learn of this, Captain Vishwanath Upadhyaya, who was a staunch devotee of the Master and was in charge of the timber yard of the Nepal Government at Belur, across the river, offered to supply free of cost, the sal wood necessary for the purpose. And so three sal logs were sent with the flow-tide to Dakshineswar. But at night another high tide carried away one of the logs. Hridaya read a bad omen in this and castigated his aunt saying, ‘You are ill-starred.’ He made also some other uncharitable remarks. But Captain Upadhyaya, unmindful of the loss, sent another log. The house was thus completed, and the Mother took her residence there1 with a maid-servant, engaged to keep her company and help her in her domestic duties. And soon after, Hridaya’s wife also joined her there.
The Mother cooked the Master’s food there according to his taste and needs and carried it to his room, where she sat till he had finished. For looking after the comforts of the Mother or for her satisfaction, the Master, too, often visited the cottage during the daytime and spent some time with her. One day it rained so heavily just after his arrival there, that unable to return, he had to finish his meal there and then lie down for the night. From the bed he said to the Mother laughing, ‘This is as though I have come home like any priest of the Kali temple going home at night.’
The Mother could not live in this thatched shed for long. She had to return to the Nahabat for attending on the Master who, as we said, had a bad attack of dysentery. As the Master became too weak to walk far away from the room, the Mother used to come from the new house to help him Just then, fortuitously enough, an aged woman came to the Kali temple from Banaras. Little, or nothing was known about her past, and we know even less of her life after the Dakshineswar days. She came like a flash of lightning for fulfilling a divine duty, and disappeared completely when it was over. The Holy Mother searched in vain for her when she went to Banaras. This aged woman volunteered to serve the Master, but realizing that for various reasons she was not equal to the task, she told the Mother, ‘It’s odd, my dear, that you should be staying here when he is so ill there!’ The Mother replied, ‘How can I help it? How can my nephew’s wife be left alone? My nephew Hridaya is there with the Master. ’ The woman said, ‘ Let them carry on as best as they can. Does it befit you now to be away from him?’ The Mother admitted the force of this and shifted to the Nahabat to engage herself in the Master’s service more completely.
Up till now the Mother had remained veiled before the Master. The Banaras woman one night took her to the Master and in his presence removed her veil. The Master, who was in an ecstatic mood, went on discoursing about divine things which kept them spell-bound. It was dawn when he stopped and they took leave of him
It is not known when the Mother went again to Jayrambati. But about her return to Dakshineswar for the fourth time, she herself said, ‘Well, the next time my mother, Lakshmi, myself and some others went to Dakshineswar. I made a votive offering of my hair and nails at Tarakeswar for recovery from my last ailment. As (my brother) Prasanna was with us, we first went to his rented house in Calcutta. It was perhaps in the month of March (1881). Next day, We all went to Dakshineswar. No sooner were we there than Hridaya for some reason best known to him, said, “ Why have they come? What have they got to do here? ” He showed his disrespect to them in this way. My mother made no reply to all this. Hridaya was a man of Shihar and my mother too was a girl of that village. Hridaya utterly ignored my mother when she said, “ Come, let us go back home; with whom shall I leave my daughter here?” For fear of Hridaya, the Master kept mum all through. We all left that very day. Ramlal called a boat for crossing the river.’
With the deepest disappointment the Mother left,—she could not stay at Dakshineswar even for a day! Apart from this solitary grievance, the unassuming selfless wife had no complaint against the Master at all, or any ill-feeling towards her nephew. But all her sorrows and all her complaints were laid at the feet of the Almighty whose will rules everywhere. And so at the time of departure, she told Mother Kali Who dwelt within her mind, ‘Mother, I shall revisit this place only if You will have me here again.’ If the Almighty rejected a supplicant who had absolutely surrendered herself, whom else could she implore for rights ing the wrong? The futile fourth visit thus ended abruptly.
Hridaya, in the pride of his heart, transgressed the limits of courtesy. May be, he had some satisfaction at this apparent triumph. But the unseen hand of destiny was shaping his future in another way. This was not the first instance of his rudeness to the Holy Mother. On another occasion Sri Ramakrishna who noticed such misbehaviour reprimanded him saying, ‘My dear Hride, you may be talking to this (pointing to his own body) slightingly, but don’t you do so to her. If the one that is in this (body) raises its hood, you may still be saved; but if the one that is in her raises its hood even Brahma, Vishnu, and Maheswara cannot save you.’ Egotistic as Hridaya had become, the warning made no impression on his hard heart; and so, through the force of circumstances he had to leave the temple precincts for good to clear the way for the Mother’s return. Through his foolhardiness he worshipped on the anniversary day of the opening of the temple (June, 1881), the little daughter of Trailokyanath, a son of Mathur Babu, as the divine Gauri;1 whereupon Trailokya fearing that some evil would befall the girl, dismissed Hridaya from his service.
Then the Master’s nephew Ramlal succeeded Hridaya as the priest of Kali. On getting this promotion he was elated with the thought, ‘How grand! I have become the priest of Mother Kali,’ and became unmindful of his duty towards Sri Ramakrishna. The Master used to be very frequently in samadhi, so that unless somebody reminded him of the prosada sent from the temple and coaxed him to eat it, it would lie in his room uncared for and become stale or dried up. There was none besides Ramlal who could really serve the Master with devotion. So, the Master suffered, and he sent word to the Mother through people who happened to go to those parts, to rejoin him at Dakshineswar. Thus through Lakshman Pyne he sent the message: ‘I am suffering here; Ramlal has joined the other priests after becoming the priest of Mother Kali, and he does not now look after me properly.
You must come, be it by a doli1 or a palanquin; and I shall meet the expenses, be they ten rupees or twenty.’ This earnest call made the Mother at last come to Dakshineswar (probably in February-March, 1882). This was her fifth visit after staying away for about a year.
The next time she went to Jayrambati, she spent there some seven or eight months, coming back to Dakshineswar in January-February, 1884. It was at this time that the Master tumbled down when in a state of ecstasy, and as a result had a bone in the left hand dislocated. As soon as the Mother entered the Master’s room and saluted him, placing the bundle of clothes on the floor, he inquired, ‘When did you start?’
Ascertaining from her reply that she had started in the afternoon of a Thursday, which is regarded as extremely inauspicious, he said, ‘There it is! I got my hand injured because you started on Thursday afternoon. Go back; go and make a fresh start.’ The Mother wanted to leave that very day; but the Master said, ‘ Stay today; you can go tomorrow. ’ The very next day the Mother left for her village home to recommence the journey on a more auspicious day.
It is not known when the Mother went home from Dakshineswar again, nor when she returned. But it is a fact that she was at Kamarpukur at Ramlal’s marriage in 1884 and returned to Dakshineswar in the beginning of the next year. From this time on, most probably she did not visit Jayrambati again during the Master’s lifetime.
We have tried to be as accurate as possible about the number and times of the Mother’s journeys between Jayrambati and Dakshineswar; but in getting a more accurate idea, we have to take another factor into consideration. During the period beginning with the date of completion of the Master’s austerity up to the year 1880, he used to go to Kamarpukur every year during the rains and spend there three or four months. His physicians advised him to go to the country at that time of the year to recoup his health which had been impaired by austerity. It is known that when steamers began to ply from Calcutta to Ghatal on the river Rupnarayana, the Master once went home with the Mother and Hridaya along that route. They got down from the steamer probably at Bandar and then proceeded by boat to Bali-Dewanganj which lies about eight miles south of Kamarpukur. That was a Vaishnava village. A merchant of the Modaka caste of that village cherished the idea of accommodating some saintly man in his new house for three nights. After the arrival of the Master and the Mother, the weather became so inclement that they had to spend three nights at the house. On the fourth day they went to Hriday’s village, Shihar. It was during this visit that the Master inspired the people around by joining the kirtana parties at Shihar and Shyambazar, who sang continuously for days.
The Master visited Jayrambati quite a number of times. Whenever he happened to be at Kamarpukur, he used to be taken to Shihar, and he would visit Jayrambati on the way stopping there sometimes for more than a week. During one of these nights at Jayrambati, when all were asleep, the Master suddenly got up and said that he was hungry. The women of the house were in a quandary, for as a consequence of a feast that day, no food was left over except a little rice soaked in a pot of water. The Mother passed on the information to the Master with not a little hesitation, for that was not the kind of food to be offered to a guest at that hour of the night. But the Master said, ‘Fetch it.’ ‘But there’s no curry,’ put in the Mother. ‘Why not make a little search?’ suggested the Master. ‘Do see, if even a little of the curry you prepared is left in the pan. ’ The Mother found a little bit of curry and placed this before the Master which made him very happy and he satisfied his hunger with the food thus got together.
The Mother usually covered the distance from Jayrambati or Kamarpukur to Dakshineswar on foot. Once when some village women started for Calcutta for a dip in the Ganges on some sacred day, the Mother, too, accompanied them with her nephew Sivaram and her niece Lakshmi Devi. Her idea was to stay on at Dakshineswar after the holy bath. It was settled that their first halt should be at Arambagh which was eight miles from Kamarpukur; for in front lay the uninhabited, notorious stretches of fields called Telo-bhelo which were infested with robbers. People would not cross them alone even in daylight. As a reminder of those fearful days there is still the terrible image of the goddess Kali in the heart of Telo-bhelo which the robbers used to invoke before engaging in their nefarious activities. The image is still called the robbers’ Kali. On the day we are speaking of, the party from Kamarpukur decided after reaching
Arambagh that there was plenty of time left for a moderate walker to reach Tarakeswar before it became too dark and that it was not wise to waste a day for rest which was not really wanted. The Mother was well-known even from her early age for her unobtrusiveness; if need arose she would endure discomfort to make it easier for others. In the present instance too, she restarted with them, though she knew well enough that her tired legs could not bear such prolonged strain. Soon she began to lag behind others. Her companions halted three or four times to allow her to catch up with them. But when at last they were convinced that she could not keep pace with them and that such slow movement would expose all to inevitable danger or even death, and when on top of all this the Mother asked them not to worry about her but to go forward, they quickened their steps and were soon lost to sight, while the Mother trudged on all alone.
When the sun set and the darkness of night began fast enveloping everything around, the Mother was still plodding on across the solitary fields of Telo-bhelo, full of anxiety, but finding no way out. Just then she noticed a tall figure emerging out of the darkness and approaching her. When the figure had drawn sufficiently near, the Mother saw that it was a man of deep dark colour and thick long hair who had a stout staff on his shoulder and silver bangles round his wrists. She knew that he was a robber, and terror-stricken, she halted at once. The man had no difficulty in understanding her mind, and with a view to terrifying her all the more he said in a harsh voice, ‘Hullo! Who is that standing there at this time? Where would you go?’ ‘Eastward,’ said the Mother. ‘This is not the way there; you have to go that way,’ said the man. The Mother still made no movement, and the man came very close. But as he looked at the Mother’s face, there came a sudden change in his demeanour, and the cruel man-hunter said softly, ‘Don’t be afraid; I have a woman with me who has fallen back.’ At this the Mother’s eyes were taken off the immediate danger and extended further off where, sure enough, a woman was moving up. Then she got encouraged and said, ‘Father, my companions have left me behind, besides, methinks, I have lost my way. Will you kindly take me to them? Your son-in-law lives in the Kali temple of Rani Rasmani at Dakshineswar. I am on my way to him If you take me to that place he will treat you very cordially.’ The woman came up before the Mother had finished and the latter took hold of her hand with full confidence and affection and said, ‘Mother, I am your daughter Sarada; I was in a terrible plight having been left behind by my companions. Fortunately you and father appeared; otherwise I can’t say what I would have done.’ This simple behaviour, extreme confidence, and sweet disposition conquered the hearts of the robber couple who belonged to the lowly Bagdi caste. As a result they forgot the gulf of social difference that separated them from a brahmin woman and consoling her as though she was truly a daughter of theirs, did not allow her to proceed further because she was tired. They took her to a little shop nearby, where the woman improvised a bed for her with her clothes and other things and the man brought some fried-rice for her to eat. Then she was laid to rest with extreme affection, the man keeping guard at the door with his staff.
At dawn, when they were on their way to Tarakeswar, the Bagdi mother picked up green peas from the field for the Holy Mother. The latter accepted the affectionate gift like a little girl and put them in her mouth. They reached Tarakeswar about an hour and a half after sunrise. Here the Bagdi woman said to her husband, ‘My daughter had nothing to eat at night; finish the worship of the Lord Tarakeswar (Shiva) soon, and bring some good things from the market; she has to be fed properly today.’ When the man was out, the companions of the Holy Mother who had been out in search of her came to that place and were delighted to find her safe. Then the Mother introduced them to her Bagdi mother who had given her shelter on the previous night and said, ‘If they had not appeared and saved me, I don’t know what I would have done last
night.’1 It is no longer possible to ascertain how this event was viewed by the pilgrims from Kamarpukur who were uncultured and steeped in caste prejudices. Nor can we gauge how far they realized the full import of that extraordinary drama of affection that was enacted on the solitary field at nightfall, and the intimate relationship that was established between the robber couple who belonged to a very low caste and the brahmin girl who was picked up at that odd hour from a very odd place. Nor do we get any inkling of any light having flashed across the minds of those ignorant villagers with regard to the victory of that sacred, though as yet unfolded motherhood over the cruelty of the robber, or the supremacy of light over darkness when the two came into conflict. As unbiased witnesses, we only find the Holy Mother, the robber couple, and the Kamarpukur pilgrims cooperating like a family in a common endeavour for their noon-day meal, and after finishing it in a very cordial atmosphere, starting for Baidyabati on the way to Calcutta.
The Mother and the Bagdi couple had drawn so close to one another during that single night, that all the three began to shed profuse tears at the thought of separation. As the pilgrims moved onward, the Bagdi couple accompanied them for some distance, and the woman picked up some peas with eager hands from the fields and tying them to the hem of the Mother’s garment said in a choked voice, ‘Dear daughter Sarada, when you chew your fried-rice at night, add these to it.’ At last the Holy Mother got a promise from the couple that they would visit Dakshineswar and then managed to take leave of them. The couple kept their promise visiting Dakshineswar more than once with various gifts for the Mother. Sri Ramakrishna, coming to know the whole incident, behaved with them like a true son-in-law. The Mother, however, when relating the incident to the devotees ended it with this significant remark: ‘Though my robber parents were so simple and well-behaved, still it strikes me that they did commit robbery off and on in their earlier days.’ In other words, she never looked upon that thrilling incident on that lonesome plain of Telo-bhelo as an ordinary event.
It is beyond our capacity to imagine an adequate reason for the sudden change of mind of the robbers. It might have been that the uncommon guilelessness of the Mother and her immaculate holiness exerted an irresistible influence on their minds or it might have been that some supernormal factor was at work. That the second surmise is not baseless is apparent from what the Holy Mother told a devotee in the course of a conversation. It had reached the ears of the devotees that when the Mother once asked her Bagdi parents, ‘Why, my dears, are you so attached to me?’ they replied, ‘You are not, in fact, an ordinary mortal, for we saw you as Kali.’ ‘How you speak my dears! How could you have seen me so?’ remonstrated the Mother. Unabashed they said in an aggrieved voice, ‘No, Mother, there was no mistake about what we saw. You want to hide this from us since we are sinners.’ To this the Mother said indifferently, ‘Who knows? I am not in the least aware of it.’1
1. For the sequence of events here we rely mainly on the Holy Mother’s own account. She says, ‘Then (at the time of Chandramani Devi’s death) I was ill—I had gone to my village home after suffering for a year at Dakshineswar. After I had visited (Dakshineswar) twice or thrice…Shambbu Babu had the house constructed…In that house I stayed for some days… At last an aged woman from Banaras persuaded me and had brought me to the Nahabat from the house…Next time (fourth time) myself, my mother, Lakshmi, and some others came to Dakshineswar.’ Shambu Babu gifted the house on 11-4-1876 and he passed away in 1877.
1. It is usual to adore little brahmin girls as symbols of the divine Mother. Trailokya a non-brahmin feared that the worship of his daughter by a brahmin would spell ruin.
1. A litter, being a cheaper and smaller prototype of the palanquin.
1. From a foot-note on p. 12 of the 2nd edition of the fifth part of the Kathamrita it seems that at this time the Master stayed in those parts-from 3rd March to 13th October, 1880.
1. There is a little controversy in the printed literature whether the Mother had any companion with her. The Lilaprasanga, Divyabhava (pp. 260-64) says categorically that there was none. The controversy seems to have arisen because of the Mother’s reluctance to be adequately communicative about the circumstances of the incident. Once when she was questioned about this before Swami Ishanananda, the Mother avoided a direct answer and then told the Swami in confidence, ‘See, what a fuss they make about hearing this robber story again and again. I don’t want to talk. Lakshmi, Shibu, and others, though they were with me, left me. Now if that question arises they would feel sore and look small. Howsover that might have been, they are my nephew and my niece. If I go on repeatedly narrating the incident they become dishonoured. So I avoid the point. Others don’t understand it. It’s no good asking me again and again.’ In fact, the Mother did not admit the presence of anybody ebe.
1. Shri Ashutosh Mitra in the Bengali book, Shri Ma (pp. 31-32) depicts the concluding portion of the event thus: The Mother says, “ The Man was a Bagdi by caste. With a harsh voice like that of a robber he demanded, “Who art thou! “ and he kept on looking at me with his mouth wide agape. ‘A devotee inquired, ‘What did the robber see as he looked at you thus?’
The Mother said, ‘He talked afterwards of having seen me as Kali.’ The devotee said, ‘Then you revealed yourself to him as Kali. Speak out, Mother, don’t hide it, Please.’ The Mother said, ‘Why should I reveal it? He said that he saw me as Kali.’ The devotee said, ‘That’s all the same—you revealed yourself. The Mother said with a smile, ‘You may take it that way if you like it so.’
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