BIPIN CHANDRA MISRA, a New Delhi Supreme Court judge, admired Abhay’s missionary zeal and made modest monthly donations to help cover his living expenses. Abhay collected the funds each month, thanked the judge, and, in lieu of buying food, headed to the local paper merchant where he purchased however much he could afford. Workers loaded the stacks of paper onto a rickshaw, and Abhay set out for Surendra Kumar Jain’s print shop. There had not been enough money to print Back to Godhead since 1952, and now, four years later, there was just enough money from the judge’s donations to go to press once more. Abhay saved a few paise by skipping breakfast and walking to Jain’s shop to supervise the job.

“Abhay Babu,” Jain asked, “did you have anything to eat this morning?”

Abhay shook his head. “I just came to see the proofs.”

“That’s all right. I will get breakfast for you.”

They went through this ritual whenever Abhay came to oversee printing. The ruse was transparent, but it allowed Jain to feed his impoverished client without embarrassing him. They talked for hours, and, like others who knew Abhay, Jain became as much a friend as a supplier. That was Abhay’s way. Business or other excuses might bring people together, but the purpose of human interaction was to acknowledge one another as eternal souls, and he spoke with Jain from that level, honoring Krishna in the printer’s heart. It was a courtesy that had practical benefits, since Jain preferred to extend payment terms rather than draw attention to his friend’s poverty.

After collecting the newly printed edition of Back to Godhead, Abhay walked around Delhi, God’s paperboy, soliciting people at tea stands and outdoor restaurants to please purchase a copy. Most people ignored him or waved him away with the back of their hand. He delivered copies to his few subscribers and occasionally tried expanding sales by knocking on the doors of their neighbors. Reception was not always warm for an old man wearing worn cloth, in a city where there was no end of beggars.

“Go away!” one man shouted from his veranda. “We don’t want you here!”

In November 1956, Abhay sent the latest edition of Back to Godhead to Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the first president of the Republic of India. “I beg to submit herewith,” he wrote in the accompanying letter, “that by the grace of Shri Krishna and through his mercy personified—my spiritual master—I have realized most thoroughly that going ‘Back to Godhead’ is the highest privilege of mankind. Unfortunately, the present day civilization is overpowered by sense gratification. Please, therefore, save them from the great fall down,” he wrote.

“Believe me or not,” he continued, “I have got the clue of going ‘Back to Godhead’ just after leaving my present material body. In order to take along with me all my contemporary men and women of the world, I have started my paper, Back to Godhead, as one of the means to the way.”

A close reading of his letters from the years prior to leaving India reveals the depth of Abhay’s conviction. Krishna consciousness, as expressed in these many correspondences, was not one plan among others for moving humanity forward: It was the formula that would open the door to liberation from birth and death for “all contemporary men and women of the world.”

“Please do not think of me as a madman,” Abhay’s letter to India’s president continued, “when I say that I shall go ‘Back to Godhead’ after leaving my present material body. It is quite possible for everyone and all of us. I am seeking an interview with Your Honor herewith. I am sure your Excellency will be interested in cooperating with me. I am crying in the wilderness at the present moment. So please help me in this noble cause.”

Despite the urgent tone of Abhay’s letter, there is no record of Rajendra Prasad ever sending a reply.

He persevered with his door-to-door distribution of Back to Godhead. The streets of Delhi smoldered in 110-degree summer heat. As the day grew warmer, shopkeepers and apartment dwellers opened their doors and windows, and while delivering his magazines, Abhay became the casual confidant of a hundred conversations. In the midday heat, voices merged, the ground shifted, his head started to spin, and suddenly he keeled over. An acquaintance happened by at that moment. He helped Abhay into his car and drove him to a doctor who diagnosed heat stroke and ordered Abhay to rest.

Something had to change: Nothing was coming of this door-to-door routine in Delhi apart from fainting spells and rejection. He did not have to live in such an expensive and difficult place. He could move to Vrindavan, find a small spot to write his Bhagavatam commentary, and continue raising money to print books. Once the first canto of the Bhagavatam was printed, he would go to America. He was sixty years old. The clock was ticking.

He boarded the morning train, stepped down at Mathura station, mounted a tanga, and an hour later arrived in Krishna’s village.

THIS WAS HIS FOURTH TIME in Vrindavan. His first visit in 1925 had been a brief pilgrimage while on business in nearby Agra. In 1932, he had joined his guru on pilgrimage. Three years later, he again met up with his spiritual master and received the instruction, “If you ever get money, print books.” This time was different. He had come here for as long as it took to publish the first canto of Srimad Bhagavatam, collect his exit papers, and go where he had been ordered to go more than thirty years before.

Tall trees signaled that the tanga was entering the precincts of the village. Vrindavan was calm, unchanged, as if a pact had been struck between the people and all who lived there—humans and animals, plants and birds—that Krishna’s home would forever remain unsullied by the material world. It was as he remembered: somnolent cows and cunning monkeys, white-saried widows making daily rounds of temples, sadhus and pandits chanting verses. Peacocks trumpeted, and in the distance, purling waves washed onto the Yamuna’s shores. The sounds blended, reassuring one and all there was no reason to worry. The holy land of Sri Krishna was in good order. He walked the dusty streets as in years gone by, and there was always someone to greet, someone to talk to, someone to discuss philosophy with or share a kirtan, always someone who would tell a story or sing a song. At any moment, an old sadhu might sidle up, look him in the eye, and say, “Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was always chanting Hare Krishna!” and move on as though having bid him good morning. Oxcarts trundled along carrying fruits and vegetables to market. Children swam and splashed after school. In the evening, mothers cooked dinner, the men performed puja, pandits wrote commentaries by lantern light, and the temples filled with worshippers arriving for the final arati ceremony of the day.

At the end of a dirt road by the Yamuna River stood the small stone entrance to Vamsi Gopalaji Temple, a narrow, three-story building ornamented with domes and arches. Mahant Gopal, a temple pujari whom Abhay had befriended during his last visit, greeted him warmly. He led Abhay upstairs to the roof. From one side of the roof, Abhay saw the Yamuna flowing nearby. From the other, he saw temple spires and domes looming up over the village. Mahant Gopal showed him a small stand-alone room on the temple roof, with narrow double doors and barred windows to keep out monkeys. Gopal presented a government-stamped agreement. Abhay calculated that he could just afford the five rupees monthly rent and signed.

In the morning, he visited Vrindavan’s principle temples—those that had been built by the Goswamis—then shopped for groceries in the open-air markets. He returned to his temple-roof quarters and used a kerosene burner and three-tiered brass cooker to prepare dal soup, vegetables, rice, and potatoes. With a handful of flour and a splash of water he kneaded a simple dough, tore off small pieces, rolled them into six-inch rounds, flame-roasted a few chapatis, offered prayers, and sat down to consume his one meal of the day. He lived on pennies and kept an exact ledger of every expenditure as though still running a pharmaceutical company, noting the cost of supplies, bus rides, and postage. The rest of the day was dedicated to writing.

FROM THE OUTSET, Abhay calculated there were three texts he would have to publish to make a mission in the West successful: two from Sanskrit and one from Bengali. The Sanskrit works were the Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. The Gita was short: only 700 verses summarizing the essence of devotional life. The Bhagavatam was long: 18,000 verses divided into 12 cantos exploring Vedic cosmology and the lives of sages in remote times. Vaishnavas referred to the Bhagavatam as the post-graduate study of the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita ended with Krishna urging his warrior-devotee, Arjuna, to accept him as the Supreme Being, to set aside all other considerations and fight as an act of devotion. Still, the Gita only hinted at the destination after death of such a devoted soul. The Bhagavatam offered specific details concerning the structure of the universe and the migration of souls up and down its many planetary systems. Among all Sanskrit texts, the Bhagavatam was unrivaled, the “ripened fruit” of the tree of Vedic wisdom. “If all the books in the universe were burned to ashes,” Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati once said, “there would be no loss if only this one scripture remained.”⁴⁵

The Bhagavatam was also a prophetic work that described future as well as past events. The twelfth and final canto detailed what life would be like in Kali Yuga, the current cosmic age. People will not live long, the Bhagavatam predicted. Qualities of truthfulness, cleanliness, tolerance, mercy, and memory will atrophy. Law and justice will be for sale. Influence will be a matter of personal wealth, and wealth will follow deceit. Humanity during Kali Yuga will experience extreme shifts of cold and hot weather, and as a consequence, fruits and vegetables will shrink in size and lose their nutritional value. With food scarce, people will live in uncertainty and fear. The twelfth canto predicted that Kali Yuga would continue to deteriorate for 1,000 “celestial years,” the equivalent of 432,000 earth years. After that, the Golden Age, Satya Yuga, a time of peace and prosperity, would begin anew.

Stories in the Bhagavatam unfolded like layers in a nested Russian matryoshka doll: Tucked into each main narrative were hidden a dozen more. Scholars had given up trying to find the ur-text, the authentic original, since no sooner did one Sanskritist determine a date of origin than another found antecedents to a particular Bhagavatam story in yet older Sanskrit works. The Bhagavatam lacked not only a precise date of origin but a place of origin as well. References within the text suggested the Bhagavatam came into being at the dawn of time and existed in thousands of volumes on other planets, yet British scholars discounted the Bhagavatam as a later work, no older than perhaps a thousand years, long on sentiment and short on philosophy. “When we were in college,” wrote Bhaktisiddhanta’s father, the scholar-devotee Bhaktivinode Thakur, “we had a real hatred towards the Bhagavata. That great work looked like a repository of wicked and stupid ideas, scarcely adapted to the nineteenth century.” In his forties, Bhaktivinode located a copy of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s biography and found Mahaprabhu’s explanations of the Bhagavatam to be “of such a charming character that we procured a copy of the Bhagavata complete and studied its texts.

“Oh!” he concluded, “What a trouble to get rid of prejudices gathered in unripe years!”⁴⁶

The third text required for Abhay’s mission in the West, a Bengali work, was Chaitanya Charitamrita, the official biography of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu written by Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami within a half century of Mahaprabhu’s departure from the world in 1533. The title translated as “the characteristics of the living force in eternity.” Like the Bhagavatam, Chaitanya Charitamrita was also an elaborate composition of more than 11,000 verses. Abhay calculated that an English edition would comprise at least a dozen volumes.

Without the Bhagavatam, more complex dimensions of the Gita philosophy would be missing, and without Mahaprabhu’s biography, no one would understand how to live the teachings of the Bhagavatam. Together these three texts would form a sturdy liturgical foundation for launching Krishna consciousness abroad. Creating commentaries would exercise him on several levels. The writing needed to be accessible for Westerners unfamiliar with Bhakti theology. Once printed, the books had to be distributed, and time was short. There was a combined total of more than 30,000 verses to render into English and explain, and he was already in his sixties. The pace would be daunting.

ON DAYS SET ASIDE FOR selling Back to Godhead, he packed copies in a cloth sack and boarded the morning train. With nowhere to stay in Delhi, he had to return to Vrindavan by evening, which gave him only a few hours of daylight. Sales were minimal, and he did not always collect enough to cover costs. Some days he made appointments with wealthy men to request support. A few responded with token donations for his cause. He befriended an ayurvedic doctor who promised assistance. One day Bhakti Dayita Madhav Maharaj from the local Gaudiya Math was bicycling by and saw Abhay standing at the gate of the doctor’s large house.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I am waiting to get a five-rupee donation,” Abhay called back.

After some hours, Bhakti Dayita Madhav Maharaj again passed by on his bicycle. Abhay was still standing there. “Did you get the five rupees?”

“No. The gentleman has not yet arrived,” Abhay replied, “but I will wait.”

“Let it go. I will give you five rupees.”

Abhay thought for a moment. “Every month?”

The senior devotee noted Abhay’s torn and weary clothes. “Let’s make it ten,” he said.