Krishna Prem asked Dilip Kumar Roy, a composer and singer renowned across India, to sing Brindabaner Lila, one of his best-loved airs. Roy tells us that he sang this lengthy song – the English title is Krishna, the Evergreen -“with an overwhelming emotion such as I had never felt before. Time seemed almost to stand on tip-toe.”
When he had finished the song, silence reigned.
They had all thought that Ma, not well that day, was in her room. But suddenly one of the devotees – Alec, an English doctor who had come to Mirtola to work and worship with Prem – exclaimed: “You know, Krishna Prem, Ma was listening, standing in the verandah with folded hands!”
Dilip Kumar Roy describes what happened next:
Krishna Prem gave a start.
“Ma! Good heavens! How dare she walk along the other way all by herself. She might have collapsed!”
“I noticed it too late,” Alec sighed. “Just when she had turned back, at the end of Dilip’s song.”
They trooped around to Ma’s room. Dilip Kumar Roy entered:
She was sitting on her bed with folded hands, as though petrified; just two streaks of tears glistened on her cheeks in the candle-light.
Krishna Prem said reproachfully: “Ma! – how could you possibly?”
“Sh-h!: Motirani sushed. “Don’t you see she’s in bhavsamadhi (partial trance)?”
So we waited in silence, watching breathlessly. After a few minutes she opened her eyes, now swimming in tears, and gave a beatific smile. Then she asked me to draw near and sit close to her.
I complied hesitantly, as so far I had never sat on her bed; the others sat on the floor on the mat.
Ma placed a loving hand on my shoulder.
“You didn’t see anything, Baba? She asked, tenderly.
I caught my breath.
“See? No! What should I have seen?”
“Thakur!” she said simply. “He had come, and was standing beside you!”
A shiver passed through my spine.
“You mean Krishna?” I gasped.
She smiled. “Whom else could I mean, Baba? When…” She spoke now in staccato, through her tears…” You were improvising on the last verse. He came first and stood for a second in my room and then…then stepped across the threshold…I…could not follow Him that way. So I took the…other way…till I got to the veranda…and saw Him…standing beside you, listening …Yes, Baba…I…I did see Him, with open eyes…as I often do…You didn’t see?”
“No, Ma. But I did feel-”
But she went on as though she had not heard: “And he was standing … beside you… in person… looking so…so tenderly… at you!…And…I…I appealed to him: ‘O Thakur, give him the blessed boon of vision…so…so he may see that you… you yourself have come down to hear his son…blessed, blessed, boy!”
I bowed down and kissed her feet -and wept.
And then she opened herself to me and went on telling me, very simply, her varied spiritual experiences. I had never yet-except once-heard her speak of her supraphysical visions, nor the incredible miracles of Grace to which she had borne witness. But on this memorable night it was as thought a sluice had been suddenly opened and her words came down in a ceaseless torrent.”
Excerpted from The Secret Life of Genius
John Chambers
