IN UNDYING UNION

It was fast becoming clear from the steady deterioration in the health of the Master that after entrusting the task of spiritual regeneration to the worthy hands of the Holy Mother and the chosen disciples, he was fast approaching the day of final departure. But the Mother could not accept this as inevitable. She had experienced the grace of Simhavahini in her own life, had seen the economic condition of her father’s family improve through the favour of Jagad-dhatri, and had received signs of the Lord’s mercy in many ways and many a time in the days of stress and strain. Would not that compassionate God cast His benign look at them in this critical hour? Would not the Divine heart melt at the tears of a faithful wife? After long deliberation, the Mother decided to go to Tarakeshwar and lie there fasting day and night at the temple of Siva who is known as the fulfiller of all wishes; for once, at least, she must try and see if the inexorable Divine law had not an exception, if Providence could not be moved by the piteous wail of a creature in distress.

Five years earlier the Master had indicated the omens that would precede his passing away — he would accept food indiscriminately from any one, would spend the night in Calcutta, and would eat food a part of which had been given to somebody earlier — which had all come true even before he left Dakshineswar. On his return to Dakshineswar after spending the night at Balaram Babu’s house during the car festival (ratha-yatra) of 1885, he told her of another sign, ‘When you find many people accepting, honouring and adoring this (pointing to himself) as the Deity, you will know that the time of disappearance is near at hand.’ That portent too, the Mother might have taken as having been already fulfilled; for were there not quite a number of devout souls who looked upon the Master as God incarnate? And while at Cossipore she got a concrete illustration too. A few devotees went with some sweets one day to meet the Master at Dakshineswar. But to their dismay they learnt that he had gone to Calcutta for treatment; so they offered the sweets to the Master’s picture and then took the prasada. When the news reached the Master, he said, ‘Why did they make the offering to the picture instead of to the Mother?’ The Holy Mother and others became upset at the news of this offering to a picture of the Master even while the Master was in flesh and blood; for such adoration of a living person augured ill for him. But the Master removed their consternation by emphatically asserting, ‘Don’t you be worried, my dear! I shall be worshipped in every house hereafter; I say this upon oath, so help me God.’ Therefore it became very clear that not only was destiny against her, but that the Master also was determined to bid adieu. From that point of view, in fact, there was nothing to cheer her. And yet hope lingers though belief passes away; and nobody can keep silent without calling on God who is our only source of solace amid blank despair.

The Mother went to Tarakeshwar; the Master did not object. It is not known who were her companions. Perhaps

Lakshmi Devi and a maid-servant went with her. She lay down there for two days without food and water — but there was no sign of Siva’s blessing. On the second night, the Mother continued there as before, craving the Lord’s mercy, when she heard a crackling sound much resembling the sound of some earthen jars piled up together being broken with a stick. That woke her up, and the thought took possession of her mind: ‘Who is a husband in this world and of whom? Who is related to whom here? For whom am I sacrificing my life here?’ It was as though a distant rumbling of the horn of Rudra, the great Destroyer, was ushering in the dissolution of the world, rending asunder all earthly ties, and creating in every heart an incomprehensible vacuum The Mother got up from her bed and somehow felt her way to the basin behind the temple where the holy water offered to Siva had accumulated, and taking up a little of it in her hand she quenched her thirst. Then she felt relieved. Thus foiled in her attempt to save the Master, she left next day for Cossipore. The finite human mind sometimes shoots upward through some divine inspiration to lose itself in the infinitude of the cosmic mind getting thereby a new and all-encompassing outlook, as a result of which the old worldly ties look ephemeral and meaningless and are, therefore, automatically discarded. This immersion of the microcosm into the macrocosm is what we call renunciation. Through the influence of that overpowering self-abnegation the Mother was deflected from her resolve and returned disappointed to Cossipore. The Master knew all this, and in good humour he said, ‘How now, my dear? Did you get anything? — nothing at all! ’

The time of the Master’s passing away was fast approaching—to prevent it was beyond human capacity. Mother had premonition of this in various other ways. She said, ‘The Master too saw in a dream an elephant going out to get a medicine. Just as the elephant began digging the earth for the medicine, Gopal came and woke him up. He asked me, “Do you have any dream?” I saw Mother Kali with her neck turned aside, and asked Her, “Mother, why are you in this posture?” Mother Kali replied, “Because of his that thing there (pointing to the Master’s sore in the throat) I too have it.”’ The Mother at once realized that if Mother Kali could not or would not cure the Master in spite of her suffering equally with him, then what could mere human beings do? Moreover, the Master also gave an explanation of his disease which was calculated to raise the Mother’s mind above worldly considerations to a level of universal compassion. He said, ‘I am being subjected to all the sufferings that there can be; none of you need have it again. I have suffered for all in the world.’ It became quite evident to the Mother that that was the real explanation of the Master’s martyrdom; otherwise why should such a sinless body have undergone such torture?

The month of August (1886) was well advanced. Through words and deeds the Master went on dropping hints that the day of final departure was at hand. But human hearts recoil from contemplating the poignant. Hence the devotees refused to believe their eyes and ears; and the Lord too lifted the veil of that mortifying future momentarily and then covered up the devotees’ minds in a shroud of mystery. One day the Master sent for the Mother through Shashi (Swami Ramakrishnananda), remarking that she was very intelligent and would, therefore, understand his condition. On her arrival, he said, ‘Look here, my dear, I don’t know why thoughts of Brahman are ever stirring my mind. ’ What answer could the Mother make? The sight of that frail, emaciated body was too heartrending for her; hence she uttered a few consoling words and then turned her face round to wipe off her tears. How helpless she felt! It was impossible to hold back the Master’s mind in its headlong rush to the quietude of Brahman.

On the day of passing away, the Master sat on his bed leaning against the pillows. It was a sick-bed, and the light of hope had been extinguished; and so all round there was a dark pall of sadness. All thought that the power of speech had left him; but when the Mother and Lakshmi Devi came, he said, ‘So here you are? Look here, it seems I am going somewhere—all through water to a far-off place.’ The Mother began weeping. But the Master continued, ‘ You need have no anxiety; you will be just as you have been so long; and they (meaning Narendra and others) will look after you and do for you as much as they have done for me. Do have an eye on dear Lakshmi.’

The sub-conscious of the Mother had been fluttering with trepidation at the black shadows of the imminent calamity passing over it. Everything around her seemed to be out of hinges and full of evil portent. She had been cooking some khichudi for her sons engaged in the Master’s service; the bottom portion of it got burnt. She served the upper portion to the boys and ate the lower portion herself. She had spread a piece of cloth on the roof for drying; it was not to be found. There was an earthen goblet; it fell and broke into pieces in the process of being lifted up.

Then came the midnight of the 15th August; and midnight passed into the small hours of the 16th. It was two minutes past one o’clock. That garden house dotted with shrubs and trees, on the outskirts of the city, was steeped in absolute silence; only the devotees sitting by the bed of Sri Ramakrishna kept a helpless vigil as they found him immersed in samadhi, which lengthened into hours till there was no possibility of a reawakening. The physician came to announce that all hope had been shattered. Next day the holy body was consigned to a sacred fire at the cremation ground on the Ganges at Cossipore; and when all was over, the ashes were gathered in a copper vessel which was carried to the garden house and placed on the Master’s bed.

In the evening the Mother sat to remove her ornaments one by one; and when at last she was about to take off her gold bracelets, the Master suddenly appeared in his body just as it was before he had the disease, and taking hold of her hands said, ‘Have I died that you are removing the signs of a married woman from your wrists?’ She then desisted from doing so. Balaram Babu had brought a white piece of cloth without any coloured border, to be worn by her as a sign of widowhood. When he gave this to Golap-Ma to be passed on to the Mother, Golap-Ma said with a start, ‘By Jove! Who is going to hand over to her the white cloth without coloured borders?’ Later, when she went to the Mother, she found she had torn a portion of the broad border of her own cloth to make it very thin. From that day she wore clothes with thin red borders and not the absolutely white ones. For, there is really no end to the everlasting play of the Master; and there is really no separation of the Mother from him..

On the third day, food was offered before the reliquary. Now, the older devotees decided that after the Master had shuffled off his mortal coil, there was no meaning in retaining the garden house. But the young devotees like Narendra wanted to continue the lease for sometime more, so as to allow sufficient time to the Mother to get over the shock and to have a place for keeping the Master’s ashes. But as they had no monetary backing they could not stand up against the older people. Therefore the final decision was that the house would be given up on the expiry of the lease, the urn containing the ashes would be removed before then to the Kankurgachhi garden of Ram Babu, which the Master had once made holy by a visit, and the Holy Mother would go elsewhere. But some of the young devotees did not readily agree to part with the ashes. For both the lay and the monastic devotees had settled at first by common consent that the copper urn would be interred in a plot of land to be purchased on the sacred Ganges. Considering, however, the great expenditure involved and for other reasons, the householders changed their view afterwards. As this new decision did not appeal to the young devotees, they removed more than half of the ashes and the pieces of bone to a separate vessel which was then sent to the house of Balaram Babu (vide Udbodhan, V>l. XVII. p. 440). Then they heartily cooperated in interring the first copper jar at Kankurgachhi on the 23rd August, which was the holy birthday of Sri Krishna.

The Holy Mother, who heard much of this controversy, took no sides in it because of her extreme mood of indifference consequent on the stunning blow; and she said to Golap-Ma with a sigh, ‘Look at these bickerings, Golap; that precious person, worth his weight in gold, is gone, and they are quarreling about his ashes!’ How far removed from partisan consideration, indeed, was the clear vision of the Holy Mother even in that moment of agonizing grief! Soon she became ready to leave Cossipore. At the invitation of the great devotee Balaram Babu, she went to his house on the afternoon of the 21st August. It can be well understood that at the passing away of the Master and the thought of her helpless condition, she was very much overwhelmed. Though subsequently she had a direct vision of the Master’s permanent divine body and heard the call ‘Mother’ from the lips of her children, and though this assuaged her agony a little, yet the terrible physical separation was not easy to forget. At every turn, and with every thought the

Mother was being reminded that the Master was not there just as he used to be. The devotees too knew of this state of her mind. And they, therefore, planned to send her on a pilgrimage to places which had been sanctified by the Lord in his previous incarnations and on which He had impressed His indelible marks, so that by coming face to face with these indubitable signs of the Lord’s undying presence she might forget the pangs of separation and by being far away from the places so fresh with the Master’s memory, she might somewhat recover from that agonizing grief. Accordingly, she started for Vrindaban on the 30th August, 1886, accompanied by Golap-Ma, Lakshmi Devi, Master Mahashaya’s wife, Swami Yogananda, Swami Abhedananda, and Swami

Adbhutananda.

On the way they got down at Deoghar to worship Vaidyanatha (Siva) and then they proceeded to Banaras, where they stayed for some eight or ten days worshipping Viswanatha (Siva), goddess Annapurna, and other well-known deities. The Mother climbed the tower of Venimadhava, from which could be seen the city of Banaras. One day, during the evening services at the Viswanatha temple, her spiritual fervour was so highly en-kindled that unconscious of what she was doing she walked to her dwelling place with unusually heavy steps. Questioned about this, she explained, ‘The Master had led me by hand from the temple.’ Along with others she visited Swami Bhaskarananda one day. The Swami was naked and He said to them, ‘Mothers, don’t you feel shy, for you are all forms of the Mother of the Universe. How can any shame arise?’ About her impression of the Swami the Mother said, ‘What a poised, great soul! In heat and cold alike he sits uncovered!’

From Banaras they all reached Ayodhya, the birthplace of Sri Ramachandra, where they visited some places associated with his divine disport. On the way to Vrindaban from Ayodhya, the Mother got another vision of the Master, under peculiar circumstances. On her arm was the gold amulet which the Master wore in the name of his chosen deity. She was reclining with that arm uppermost near the window of the railway compartment in which she was travelling. The Master peeped in through the window to say, ‘Mind you that the amulet is with you; see that it is not lost.’ She at once took it off and put it into the tin box in which was kept the picture of the Master that she worshipped daily. She never wore it again, but worshipped it along with the picture. On arriving at Vrindavan they put up at the Kala Babu’s grove, belonging to Balaram Babu’s family, on the Yamuna.

It was about the middle of September when the rains were over and the woods of Vrindaban looked fresh and smiling. The trees had thick green foliage; the ground was covered with grass; the air was saturated with the sweet smell of flowers; all around could be heard the cry of peacocks and the lowing of cattle; there were deer grazing fearlessly by the wayside and taking to flight with raised ears at the sound of human steps; and the Yamuna, full to the brim, was coursing down with a murmuring sound. Vrindaban had still its wonted beauty and those associations of old—the Nikunja grove, the dust made wet by Radha’s tears of separation, the fields of Vraja hallowed by the longing lingering looks of the cowherd girls searching for Krishna—all these were there, and everywhere the deep indelible impression of Krishna en-kindled an irresistible desire to see him; but he himself was nowhere to be found. So after arrival at Vrindaban, there welled forth from the heart of the Mother, bleeding from the recent wound of separation, an excruciating moan of agony. Before this, she had visions of the Master at least three or four times. But the lack of an inalienably tangible union with him to whose feet all the strings of her heart were tied, oppressed her mind and aroused in it the endless question, ‘Where is he?’ After coming to Vrindaban the Mother was ever in tears, and to these were added the tears of

Yogin-Ma who had preceded her there. When the two met, the Mother clasped Yogin-Ma to her heart. Having heard everything from others and having the mournful Mother before her very eyes, Yogin-Ma also began to bemoan the loss continually. Then the Master appeared to them one night and said, ‘Well, my dears, why do you weep so much? Here am I. Where indeed could I have gone? It’s just like walking from this room to that. ’

Following this vision and assurance, the Mother’s flow of tears lessened; but the pangs of separation were still there, and they now found expression through a different channel. In the section of the Bhagavata, called the Gopi-gita, we read that when Krishna suddenly disappeared from the field of his amorous disport, the cowherd lasses, overpowered with grief and forgetful of everything around, began a long search for him; but baffled in this and therefore lost in anxious longing for him all the more, they gradually came to identify themselves mentally with the object of their intense love, so much so that they started impersonating him in various ways. In the body and mind of the Mother also was now to be seen a similar self-absorption. Forgetful of herself she sometimes walked across the vast sandy shore to the waters of the Yamuna unknown to anybody and she had to be searched out and persuaded to return. One does not know, she might have then thought of herself as Radha, the sweetheart of Krishna, and of Sri Ramakrishna as Krishna, and was thus lost in the bliss of union in the Vrindaban of her heart! It is said that she once told a devotee, ‘I, indeed, am Radha.’ At times, again, rapt in the thoughts of the Master, she became one with him One day she lost all outer consciousness in a deep samadhi from which she could not be roused in spite of Yogin-Ma’s repeating the Lord’s name in her ears for a long time. Then Swami Yogananda made a similar attempt, when there appeared signs of reawakening, and she said, ‘I shall eat,’ just as the Master used to say after a deep samadhi. When some food, water, and betel were held before her, she took a little just like the Master; nay, she chewed the betel just like him, after biting off the conical portion with her teeth. At that time Swami Yogananda put several questions to her, to which she replied in the Master’s manner. In fact, all her gestures and postures at that time resembled those of the Master. After coming back to the normal plane, she herself admitted that the Master had engulfed her for the time being.

The Mother being thus occupied with the thoughts of the Master, her talks and movements appeared to be unrelated to the actualities of life and rather like those of a simple child. One day, on seeing a dead body, covered with flowers and garlands, being carried to the cremation ground with music, she said with some eagerness, ‘Look there, look, how the man (by dying in Vrindaban) has attained (the eternal) Vrindabani. We came here to lay down our bodies; but we never had so much as fever for a day! You can well calculate how old we have grown — we have seen our fathers, and the elder brothers of our husbands!’

Yogin-Ma and others burst out laughing at this and said, ‘What a strange thing you say Mother: you have seen your father! Who ever does not see one’s father?’

The Mother lived at Vrindaban for about a year. A month later Master

Mahashaya’s wife was attacked with malaria and she had to leave for Calcutta with Swami Abhedananda. Swami Adbhutananda also went to Calcutta after six months on getting some sad news from Ramachandra Datta’s house.

The long stay at Vrindaban had the effect of bringing to some extent the Mother’s mind down to the normal plane. The Master ultimately granted her a continuous flow of bliss in proportion as he had previously given her grief. She went round the temples daily, seeing the different images and sitting for meditation at suitable places. She must have been blessed with many visions at that time, though she never gave them out. Only of one of these incidents did she tell Yogin-Ma. That day she had been to the temple of Radharamana where she had a vision of the wife of Navagopal Ghosh (both husband and wife being devotees of the Master), standing by the deity and fanning Him On her return home she said, ‘Yogen, Navagopal’s wife is very pure. I had such and such a vision.’

Some time during their stay there the Mother and her party undertook a ceremonial circumambulation of Vrindaban for more than a fortnight. During this walk the Mother seemed to be looking at the roads, fields, and forests of the place with intense interest; at times she stopped altogether lost in her reverie. To Yogin-Ma and others it was clear that she was in a spiritual mood and was having some visions too. So now and then they put questions to her out of curiosity. But the Mother put them off with a simple answer, ‘No, that’s nothing; move on.’

Here the Master got one of his unfinished tasks accomplished through the Mother; and in the Mother’s life too a new chapter opened. The Master appeared before the Mother and said, ‘Give this mantra to Yogin.’ on the first day the Mother thought that it was a mere fantasy and so did nothing. Besides, she felt ashamed, thinking, ‘People will say, “ Mother has begun to have disciples within such a short period (of her mourning)”’ She did not also pay heed to a second vision of this kind. On the third day she remonstrated with the Master, ‘I don’t so much as talk with him (Yogin); how can I impart the mantra?’ The Master suggested, ‘You tell daughter Yogen; she will be present. ’ He also told her the mantra. The Mother inquired of Swami Yogananda through Yogin-Ma whether he had his initiation. He said, ‘No, Mother, the Master didn’t give me any particular mantra of any special deity. I repeat one according to my own choice.’ He further let her know that he too had been asked by the Master to be initiated by the Mother, but he could not make the request because of his natural modesty. At last the Mother agreed to initiate him. On the appointed day, the

Mother had an onset of spiritual fervour as she sat in worship before the picture and the physical remains of the Master. She called in Swami Yogananda and, while still in that ecstatic mood, imparted the mantra, which was uttered so loudly that Yogin-Ma could hear it from the adjoining room Swami Yogananda was the Mother’s first disciple.

Towards the end of this period of stay at Vrindaban, the Mother once went to Hardwar with Swami Yogananda, Yogin-Ma, Golap-Ma, and Lakshmi Devi. On the way, Swami Yogananda was suddenly attacked with high fever in the train. When Yogin-Ma was giving him pomegranate seeds, the Mother saw as though the Master himself was being fed. In a state of unconsciousness resulting from high temperature, Swami Yogananda saw a terrible form standing in front of him and telling him, ‘I would have seen you through but I am helpless. There’s the order of Paramahamsa Deva (Sri Ramakrishna), and I have to quit at once.’ When departing, the figure pointed to a deity with red clothes and directed him to offer some rasa-gollas to her. The fever abated at once. At Hardwar the Mother bathed at the Brahma-kunda and visited the temples. She had with her some nail-parings and hair of the Master, a portion of which she intended to offer in the holy water of the Ganges at Hardwar. This she did at the Brahma-kunda. Besides, she crossed the Ganges to climb the Ghandi hill and worship the goddess Chandi there.

Then with her companions she went to Jaipur. After they had seen the main deity Govindaji, they went on visiting the other deities, when suddenly they came to a goddess, on seeing whom Swami Yogananda cried out that this was the very deity he had seen during his last fever. She was Sitala, the goddess of small pox. The goddess was offered half a rupee worth of rasagollas which were fortunately available near the temple gate. From Jaipur they went to Pushkar where the Mother climbed the Savitri hill. Though her right leg had become rheumatic at Dakshineswar, she could still move about freely, so that it was not too strenuous for her to ascend the Savitri and the Chandi hills and walk round Vrindaban for a fortnight.

After spending a year in the holy places of the north, they proceeded to Calcutta by way of Allahabad, where at the sacred confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna, the Mother offered the remaining portion of the Master’s nails and hair. Of this the Mother said, ‘Is the Master’s hair an ordinary thing? When I went to Prayag (Allahabad) after his demise, I carried with me his hair for immersion in the holy water. As I took up the hair in hand with a view to offering it in the placid water of the confluence of the Ganges and the

Yamuna, a wave leaped up unawares and took away the hair from my hand and hid itself again in the placid water around. That holy place snatched away that thing from my hand for its own sanctification. ’

At this place Lakshmi Devi, a widow as she was, had her head shaved clean according to the custom of the place; the Mother did not do so. Before her mind’s eye was being played then the drama of her constant union with the Master and through the physical eyes, too, she was having frequent visions of him Accordingly, she could not remove her hair just as she could not take off her ornaments earlier. Thus brimming with the happiness born of visiting the most sacred places and the repeated visions of the Master, she returned to Calcutta, where she stayed in the house of Balaram Bose.

1. A Bengali sweet made with balls of cheese boiled in syrup, to make them spongy and juicy; whence the name rosa-golla or juice-ball.