Life in Chennai
I found a nice house to live in, big enough to accommodate my family, and began my work. The job itself did not interest me much but I did it dutifully and
to the best of my ability, because I had a wife and children to support. All my spare time and energy were devoted to communing with Krishna.I made a puja room in my house, informing my wife that when I was in it, I was never to be disturbed. At 2.30 each morning I would get up and begin my sadhana. Sometimes I would read the various Krishna stories or the Upanishads or the Gita, but mostly I would do japa of the name. I synchronised the japa with my breathing.
Calculating that I breathed about 24,000 times a day, I
decided that I should repeat the name of God at least once for every
breath I took. I cultivated the idea that any breath I took that was not
utilised in uttering the divine name was a wasted one. I found this a
relatively easy target to meet.
Then the thought occurred to me: ‘There have been years of my life
when I did not chant the name at all. All those breaths were wasted. If
I increase my recitations to 50,000 a day, I can make up for all those
breaths I wasted when I was young.’ I soon achieved this new target,
managing all the time to synchronise the chanting with some part of
the breath.
I
would stay in my puja room, chanting the name, from 2.30 a.m. to
9.30 a.m., at which point I had to leave to go to the office. Work
started there at 10 a.m. At the end of each working day I would return
home, lock myself in my puja room again, and carry on chanting
the name of Krishna until it was time for me to go to sleep. I also
slept in the puja room, thus effectively cutting myself off from
all interaction with my family. I even stopped speaking with them.
One morning, around 2.00 a.m., I heard voices outside my door. I knew it could not be my wife because I had given her strict instructions that I was not to be disturbed while I was inside my puja room.It then occurred to me that it might be some of my relatives from the Punjab who had come to visit us. The train from the Punjab usually arrived at Madras in the evening, but it seemed quite possible to me that the train had arrived several hours late and that the passengers had only just managed to reach our house. My curiosity piqued, I decided to open the door to find out who they were.
Imagine my astonishment, on opening
the door, when I saw not a group of relatives but the shining forms of
Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman standing outside. I couldn’t
understand what they were doing there. I had spent most of my life
calling on Krishna, never feeling much attraction to Rama, or any
interest in Him. Nevertheless, I prostrated to them all with great awe
and reverence.
It was Sita who raised her hand and began to speak to me. ‘We have
come from Ayodhya to visit you because Hanuman told us that there was a
very great Krishna bhakta here in Madras.’ I looked at her
raised hand, noting casually all the lines that were
on the palm. That image must have imprinted itself permanently on my
memory because every time I recall that vision, I clearly see all the
lines on that hand just as they were on the day she appeared before
me. Their bodies were not, so far as I could ascertain, normal human
bodies because I could see through them and dimly take in what was
behind them, but they were all exquisitely beautiful. After some time
the vision changed into a landscape in which I saw a mountain and a
great garuda flying in the sky, moving towards me, but never reaching
me. There was no perception of time while all this was going on.
The
vision seemed only to last a short time, but I was eventually drawn out
of it by my wife calling to me that if I didn’t leave soon, I would be
late for work. I suppose, therefore, that it must have lasted from about
2.30 in the morning till about 9.30 a.m. Because of the vision, this was
the first day on which I failed to fulfil my self-assigned quota of
50,000 repetitions of Krishna’s name. Though the vision had been
awe-inspiring, I still felt guilty that I had neglected my japa.
I did not mention the night’s events to anyone in the office because I
had got into the habit of keeping my conversation there to a minimum. I
would speak when there was business to be transacted; otherwise I would
keep quiet.