Give up all other duties and surrender unto Me. Have no fear.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA 18.65
VRINDAVAN, 1959
At last he was a member of the renounced order—poorer and older but free from the anchors that had held him back from full-time dedication to his guru’s mission. At his age, most men handed in their retirement papers, met up with friends, joined clubs, ate meals, and felt relieved the next morning to discover they had survived the night. Retirees played chess, settled into a routine earned after a lifetime of victories and disappointments, made a comfortable home, and awaited the inevitable.
There would be no such capitulating to the golden years for Swamiji, who felt zero compulsion to mellow with age and had not a drop of self-pity. During his nearly forty years of married life, when answering customer complaints, resolving supplier problems, or tolerating partnership with an embittered wife, not once did he ever mistake the drudgery as a prelude to comfortable retirement. Someone, somewhere, calculated that great innovations were made by pioneers before age thirty. Swamiji defied statistics. Now was the time, at age sixty-five, for a battle plan. He kept no souvenirs, harbored no regrets, and saw nothing now to stop him from taking on the world. He would finish the first canto and then leave for America. He would print three volumes now, and the rest would follow later, somehow. His English prose was not perfect, but this was Kali Yuga, an emergency situation, like a house fire. Even imperfect cries of alarm could save lives.
“Our capacity of presenting the matter in adequate language, specially a foreign language, will certainly fail,” he wrote in the opening passages of his commentary on the Bhagavatam, “and there may be so many literary discrepancies in spite of our honest attempt to present it in the proper way. But we are sure that with all our faults in this connection the seriousness of the subject matter will be taken into consideration and the leaders of the society will still accept this on account of its being an honest attempt for glorifying the Almighty Great so much now badly needed.”
GAURACHAND GOSWAMI, a caste Brahmin and head priest of Vrindavan’s famed Radha Damodar Temple, invited him to live in two of the temple’s ground-floor rooms, and Swamiji gratefully accepted. His quarters were modest enclosures, with an entrance so low visitors had to duck down. One room served as his kitchen and workspace. In this room he kept a trunk for clothes, papers, and a few pots. He slept in the second room, a few steps across a stone veranda, furnished with a kerosene lamp and wooden bedframe with woven rope mattress. The kitchen window gave onto the courtyard behind the temple. Each morning through the carved lattice came wafts of air laden with a heady blend of many scents: incense, the musky dust from crumbling bricks, the earthy aroma of cow manure, the loamy perfume of vegetables freshly cut, and an undertone of sediment from the nearby Yamuna River. Here, in Vrindavan, were the samadhis or tombs of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s chief disciples. Five hundred years before, Rupa, Sanatan, and the other followers of Mahaprabhu met in this sacred village to analyze Krishna philosophy, write their commentaries on palm leaves, cook together, and sing. Here, Rupa Goswami composed Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, which traced the development and subtleties of love for God. Here, too, the Goswamis wrote poetry and songs, for ultimately bhakti lifted followers beyond philosophy into the world of devotional music and dance and the heart’s spontaneous expressions of love for God. The small stone room, with its close proximity to the places of the Goswamis, was a perfect spot for the Swami to compose his scriptural commentaries.
His life was so impoverished at this time that B.V. Narayan Maharaj, a disciple of Keshava Maharaj, gave him his own wool chadar, concerned that he would fall ill without something to protect him from the morning chill. “The walls of his room were crumbling apart, but he was too consumed in the writing of Srimad Bhagavatam to care for that,”51 Narayan Maharaj recalled.
A young man, twenty-one-year-old Gopal Chandra Ghosh, befriended the Swami. Ghosh visited one evening and found Swamiji coughing. Ghosh paid his respects and left quickly so Swamiji could rest. The next morning, he returned to find him stronger and back writing.
“Today you are feeling better?” Ghosh asked.
“At night my Prabhupada came in my dream,” the Swami said, referring to his guru Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati. “He encouraged me, saying that I should write. I have received my guru’s mercy. He blessed me and gave me power. I was too much anxious for the Bhagavatam commentary. In my dream, he told me, ‘You just write, and all six of the Goswamis will help you.’ ”
In Delhi, the printer who had previously handled his flyers for the now defunct League of Devotees introduced him to Sri Krishna Pandit, proprietor of a temple in the Chippiwada neighborhood of Old Delhi. Pandit admired Swamiji’s determination to fulfill his guru’s order and offered him use of a room on the roof of his temple. Now the Swami would have a place to work in Delhi when he came to oversee printing or to sell his magazines. The journey from Radha Damodar Temple involved taking a horse-drawn tanga to Mathura, then a train from Mathura to the Old Delhi station near Chandni Chowk, then a walk down the broad avenue that ran through the city, past the famed Red Fort to the Chippiwada neighborhood where streets were so narrow no cars could pass. Balconies overhead, crowded only inches apart, formed a webbed umbrella through which stippled patches of sunlight filtered down.
At Chippiwada, he rose at 3:00 a.m. to translate verses and compose commentaries, which he called “purports.” At first, he wrote everything longhand. Eventually, he purchased a used American typewriter, a heavy Corona, old and awkward with keys so weighted it took strong fingers to strike the page. When not typing, the Swami accepted doles of vegetables and rice from his host and cooked them over a small stove fueled with cow dung cakes. Then he offered the humble meal to Krishna with prayers, as he had done since childhood. His modest meal finished, he returned to writing.
He referred to two books for his work. One was a commentary of the Srimad Bhagavatam by his spiritual master, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati; the other was a larger volume containing commentaries by Vaishnava acharyas of the past. The acharyas had written with a silver needlepoint stylus on fragile palm or banana leaves or else on strips of cotton cloth. When a manuscript was completed, the leaves were pressed between wooden boards and secured with a cord threaded through holes drilled through the boards and leaves. A manuscript could last hundreds of years if properly preserved, but whatever original manuscripts still existed sat on shelves in museums, temples, and academic institutions, exposed to the elements and crumbling into dust. Many of these were one-of-a-kind works. Publishers in 1950s India focused on technical manuals and postmodern fiction and had no interest in salvaging ancient scriptural writings. Swamiji’s volume of commentaries was one of the few compilations available.
“Every day he came, and we talked,” a Vrindavan merchant recalled twenty years later. “He would tell of his difficulties publishing books. Such difficulties! But he said, ‘I have temples already in America, and many people worship Krishna there. Only time now hides them from vision.’ He spoke like that, and who was I to question? He had the manner of a raja, a king, and I believed him.”
“You say that now,” a fellow Brijbasi broke in, laughing, “but back then you thought he was a beggar. We were thinking, ‘Why this old man has such fancies? He lives as a Vrindavan sadhu, so he has reached life’s goal—why was he bothering with such dreams? Only to disturb his mind?’ Of course, now we say, ‘Oh yes, Prabhupada was my good friend for so many years, I encouraged his mission, I knew he was a mahatma,’ and so forth. We were all fools. We could not see this old man was a future jagad-guru [world teacher].”52
In February 1961, on the birth or “appearance” day of Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, Swamiji attend a gathering of fellow disciples. The custom on such commemorative occasions was for each disciple to read an appreciation of their guru before the assembly. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s offering was more like an explosion.
“Merely having a festival of flowers and fruits does not constitute worship,” he began. “Actual worship of the spiritual master means to serve his instructions. Oh, shame, shame, my dear brothers! Aren’t we embarrassed by what we are doing? Our spiritual master has told us to go out and preach. Let the neophytes remain inside the temples and ring the bells. Just open your eyes and see the tragedy that has arisen. Everyone has become a sense enjoyer and has given up preaching. From sea to sea, crossing the earth, all of us should unite in purpose and flood the world with an inundation of Krishna conscious preaching. Please give up your stubbornness—there is no better time than this. Oh come, all my Godbrothers, this is the auspicious occasion to unite as one!”
His appeal may have impressed attendees, but it failed to inspire their participation. Many of the senior men in attendance had opened maths—some directly instructed to do so by Bhaktisiddhanta—and their priority was to propagate their guru’s mission in India. Others were old and lacked the strength to travel. If Bhaktivedanta Swami wanted to take Mahaprabhu’s message abroad, he was certainly welcome to try. But he would have to do so without them.
AMONG THOSE WHOM HE APPROACHED for funds to print the first volume of Srimad Bhagavatam was Hanuman Prasad Poddar, head of the Gita Press in Gorakhpur. At the time, Gita Press was the world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. The company’s catalog listed works in a dozen local languages. Publications included several editions of the Bhagavad Gita, the twin epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. and translations of the 108 Upanishads and 18 Puranas. Gita Press also published storybooks advertised as “especially for women and children” and transcripts of discourses by popular religious speakers.
Gorakhpur was 513 miles from Delhi, and the trip cost Bhaktivedanta Swami dearly. On August 8, 1962, his daily ledger showed a balance of 130 rupees, and by the time he arrived, his coffers were down to 57 rupees. But the trip turned out to be a well-calculated gamble. Poddar examined the manuscript and pledged 4,000 rupees toward its printing.
With funds in hand for printing volume one, Bhaktivedanta Swami next approached Hitsaran Sharma, owner and operator of Radha Press, whose sole machine printed tiny 10-point type. Bhaktivedanta Swami was an avid reader and objected that the type was too small. So Hitsaran Sharma took the project to a colleague, Gautam Sharma, of O.K. Press.
In the final months of 1962, the Swami traveled to O.K. Press to at last oversee the printing of volume one, first canto, Srimad Bhagavatam. Everything at O.K. Press was done by hand. Workers loaded the Swami’s supply of paper onto the press’s metal feeding platform. Then they smoothed layers of viscous black ink across the machine’s feeder well and started the press. As printed sheets spooled off the other end, workers folded them twice into eight-page signatures and collated the folded sheets into a completed book. At the next station, workers stitched the collated signatures together and positioned the book blocks one by one in a vise. Edges of each block were trimmed neat with a handsaw. Thick cardboard covers were positioned front, back, and spine, and a thin brown burlap cloth glued over the whole. Then the finished books were set aside to allow time for the glue to dry. While the rest of the world was advancing to larger, more streamlined methods of printing, India in the 1960s had not moved far past the days of Gutenberg.
Back at Radha Press, Hitsaran Sharma printed dust jackets that would be folded and wrapped around this first volume of Srimad Bhagavatam. “Swamiji had a great haste,” Sharma recalled. “He used to say, ‘Time is going, time is going! Quick, do it!’ He would be annoyed with me also, and he would have me do his work first.”
When the printing and binding were done, 1,100 copies of the 400-page book sat in stacks. He had done it: one book. The total cost was 7,000 rupees. Swamiji made an agreement with Sharma to take 100 copies at a time, sell them, and pay off the balance.
Setting out from his residence at Radha Damodar Temple in Vrindavan, he traveled each week to Delhi and presented copies to statesmen and scholars, requesting that they write endorsements. Hanuman Prasad Poddar wrote a review. So did the Adyar Library Bulletin, which noted the Swami’s “vast and deep study of the subject.” Fellow disciples of Bhaktisiddhanta offered favorable comments, as did the governor of Uttar Pradesh and India’s vice president, Zakir Hussain. With these reviews in hand, the Swami convinced libraries and universities to purchase copies for their collections. The Ministry of Education bought fifty copies. The U.S. Embassy purchased eighteen. He deposited the money and returned to his room in Vrindavan to continue writing.
It took him more than a year, but by January 1964, he had saved enough money to print the second volume of the Srimad Bhagavatam. Like the first volume, the second was 400 pages long, bound in heavy cardboard and covered with brick-colored cloth. One Delhi bookseller, Manoharlal Jain, founder of the Munshilal Manoharlal bookstore chain, was happy to see Swamiji return with a new book. Jain had sold more than 150 copies of volume one and expected to sell as many of volume two.
Courteous words, a few books sold—all well and good. But he was still in India. The money from these few sales was negligible, and his mission lay abroad. He was sixty-eight years old. Time had run out.
THROUGH CONTACTS IN DELHI, the Swami secured a meeting with S. Radhakrishnan. A letter of recommendation from India’s new president would certainly expedite his visa for America. During his tenure as Spalding Professor of Religion and Ethics at Oxford University, Radhakrishnan had been inspired by the teachings of eighth-century scholar Shankara, whose Advaita Vedanta philosophy defined Krishna as a temporary manifestation of a higher impersonal truth. The Swami knew Radhakrishnan was a Shankarite “Neo-Vedantist” with little sympathy for Krishna worship, but he did not mince words on arriving at the president’s office.
“I have been ordered to preach in the foreign countries,” he said, “and I need your help.”
“What will be the result of preaching in foreign countries?” Radhakrishnan replied skeptically. Religion was not high on his list of exports. Bhaktivedanta took the offensive, critiquing Radhakrishnan for not implementing religious policies.
“You may be president of India, but what are you doing for the nation’s benefit? There are so many criminals, yet you are failing to reform them. You should be like Narada with Valmiki,” he said, referring to the Vaishnava sage, Narada Muni, who had reformed a murderer by convincing him to chant the names of Rama. “My advice is that you begin yourself hearing the teachings of Srimad Bhagavatam,” Bhaktivedanta said, “and then teach the public that chanting will cure their materialistic disease.”53
If the impoverished Swami was bold enough to challenge India’s president on his record of social reform, Radhakrishnan was enough of a sport to issue a challenge in return. He proposed that the Swami teach Srimad Bhagavatam in a local prison. If, after some time, his efforts had any positive effect on prisoners, Radhakrishnan would provide a letter of recommendation. He arranged for the Swami to teach Tuesdays and Thursdays each week in a Delhi correctional facility, and after two months, prison officials deemed the experiment a success. “I am glad to see that my lectures have brought some changes in the mind of the young offenders,” Bhaktivedanta wrote to one of the guards. “The means which I have adopted is spiritual, and it works more quickly than any material means.”54
Radhakrishnan kept his word, and Bhaktivedanta had his letter of recommendation.
LITTLE BY LITTLE, he navigated the torpid waters of India’s byzantine bureaucracy in pursuit of the papers needed to travel to America. Still, before he could leave there was a third volume of the Bhagavatam to be printed. Funds remained low. He had heard from godbrothers that Sumati Morarjee, head of Scindia Steam Navigation Company, sometimes helped sadhus and that she had once made a donation to the Bombay Gaudiya Math. He traveled from Delhi to Bombay intending to meet her, but his first attempts through her secretaries were unsuccessful. One hot day he arrived at the Scindia offices and sat on the front steps of the building, prepared to wait however long until Morarjee came out. Late in the afternoon, Morarjee left the building and noticed the elderly man in sannyasa robes. The Swami rose, introduced himself, and showed her the first two volumes of his work.
“I want you to help me print the third volume,” he said.
“Come tomorrow,” Morarjee said.
SUMATI MORARJEE’S INTEREST in the Swami’s proposal reflected her own Vaishnava heritage. She had been born in 1907 to wealthy Bombay parents who named her Jamuna after the sacred river that flowed through Krishna’s village. As a follower of the Vallabha sampradaya (lineage) of Vaishnavism, Morarjee was a dedicated devotee of Sri Nathaji, a deity of Krishna popular in that line. Apart from their shared religious background, Morarjee may have been impressed with the Swami’s determination to break new ground, something she had done in her career as the first woman to head the Indian National Steamship Owners Association, a traditionally male bastion. At a young age, she married the only son of Scindia Steamship Navigation Company’s founder, Narottam Morarjee, and by 1946 had become head of the company, managing more than six thousand employees and dozens of ships servicing Germany, the Pacific coasts, Poland, and Canada. During the war years, Morarjee had kept close contact with Mahatma Gandhi and played an active role in the movement for India’s independence. “It is not purely for business motives that we today concentrate on shipping,” she once commented. “We did business in merchandise for centuries, but our most precious cargo has been ideas of universal brotherhood and deep spirituality.”55
“WE HAVE MET BEFORE,” Morarjee announced when Bhaktivedanta Swami arrived at her office the following day. “I remember meeting you in Kurukshetra,” she said and described seeing Swamiji sitting under a tree at that holy place of pilgrimage and watching him chant on his beads. “I approached you and asked for your blessings,” she recalled. Now she would be pleased to reciprocate by providing the money to print his third volume of Srimad Bhagavatam.
In January 1965, the third volume was printed, and Swamiji could prepare in earnest for his journey to America. There had never been any question where he would go first. Others wanting to leave India dreamed of London, but that was for selfish considerations: A British education guaranteed a well-paid position back in India. New York was the place for a missionary seeking to convert the world to Krishna worship. Some nights he dreamed he had already arrived and was walking the streets of the city.
“Most of us at that time were quite doubtful he would succeed in going,” said a Vrindavan resident, remembering back forty years later. “He was practically penniless, without sponsors or connections in the West. He came one day excited, having just finished his Srimad Bhagavatam third volume. ‘Now I am ready to go,’ he said and asked us to please bless his books so he could cross the ocean and be successful. He passed the books around, and we touched them.”56 The small group understood the risks of such a journey. One of the attendants from Radha Damodar Temple brought him a garland from the deity and placed it around his neck. They embraced and cried.
AN APOCRYPHAL STORY IS TOLD of Hridayananda Babaji, who lived next door to the Radha Damodar Temple, where Swamiji had his humble quarters. Often, after midnight, Babaji heard a voice crying from inside the temple courtyard. One night he climbed to the roof of his house and peered into the courtyard. There by the light of a full moon, he saw Swamiji kneeling down and sweeping the ground in front of Rupa Goswami’s tomb with a small broom.
“Hey Rupa! Hey Sanatan! Hey Gurudev!” the Swami cried through tears. “Please give me your mercy. Without your mercy, I cannot do anything. Give me the strength to fulfill your orders.”
Hridayananda Babaji approached him the next morning and offered to help with some of his chores. While Swamiji was out, Hridayananda noticed cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and brushed them away with a broom. Bhaktivedanta Swami returned to his quarters and found spiders crawling across the floor.
“Why have you disturbed them?” he asked.
Hridayananda explained that he had been cleaning but took care not to hurt them. That may be, the Swami replied, “but we are the newcomers to Vrindavan. These spiders and their ancestors have been residents for generations and deserve our respect.”
“Never have I seen anyone do sadhana like he did,” the elder Babaji recalled years later, referring to the Swami’s daily meditations and devotional character. “I have lived all my life in Braj [Vrindavan], and I have never seen anyone like him.”57
FINDING A SPONSOR for his entry into America proved as difficult as getting the money to go. A sponsor had to be a permanent U.S. resident, gainfully employed, and willing to guarantee that all his expenses would be met. A mutual friend introduced the Swami to a businessman named Agarwal. The Swami described his dilemma.
“I have a son,”Agarwal said, “an engineer in Pennsylvania.”
The Swami thought nothing more of it. Then, three months later, he was contacted by the Ministry of External Affairs and informed that his No-Objection Certificate had arrived from the Indian consulate in New York, signed by Gopal Agarwal of Butler, Pennsylvania.
On June 10, 1965, Bhaktivedanta Swami’s passport was ready. Now he needed a ticket. He returned to the Scindia Steamship offices in Bombay and presented the passport and sponsorship letter to Morarjee. Even with all the requisite papers, she refused to book him passage on one of her ships.
“You are too old,” she chided, “and New York is too cold for someone your age. Besides, nobody there will listen to you.” The Swami assured her that he would be fine and that Krishna would protect him. Reluctantly, Morarjee agreed to book him passage on the Jaladuta (The Sea Messenger), a cargo ship bound for New York harbor.
“This will be a return ticket,” she cautioned. “I fully expect to see you back here very soon. You will need a P-form,” she added, referring to a certificate from the State Bank of India declaring that he had no debts and was free to travel. While waiting to get the form, Morarjee invited the Swami to stay at the Scindia Colony, an apartment complex for employees of the company located in a residential suburb not far from Juhu Beach, north of Bombay. Each evening at 6 p.m. during the two weeks of his stay at the Colony, Morarjee sent her car to bring Swamiji to her home, and each evening he read to her from Srimad Bhagavatam. You will need warm clothes, she said, and sent her secretary to buy him a wool jacket and new dhotis.
THERE HAD BEEN A TIME when Indians took pride in their spiritual history, knowing India was the destination chosen by avatars and sages to make their appearance, a nation with wisdom to offer the world. After independence, that changed. India in the 1950s and 1960s was a nation preoccupied with factories and technology. Government leaders such as Prime Minister Nehru never invoked India’s spiritual past as a rallying point for the people; rather, they advocated training India’s children to become the workforce for an industrialized future. “Let Our Factories Be Our Temples” read government signs posted in classrooms across the country. Government money built thousands of schools, colleges, and institutions of advanced engineering with this industrialized future in mind. The funding assured that attention would focus not on the cultivation of devotion but on “progress,” meaning the construction of dams, irrigation canals, roads, highways, and hydroelectric power stations, and on retooling India to become a global power. As industry and commerce rose to the top of national priorities, religion sank to the bottom. Marching toward their future, Indians erased their past.
Bhaktivedanta Swami was keenly aware that India was part of his guru’s vision for a world Vaishnava culture, but he could never compete with a government hell-bent on modernization. If Indians were so fascinated by Western imports, then he would go to the West, establish his mission there, and bring back something truly worth importing: Krishna, courtesy of the United States of America.
THE JALADUTA was scheduled to sail from Calcutta on August 13, 1965. On the morning of Friday, August 6, Bhaktivedanta Swami traveled to Mayapur, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, to visit the tomb of his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, and consecrate the upcoming voyage to his memory. Most dead bodies in India were cremated, but the bodies of revered teachers were considered sacred by virtue of their lifetime of service and buried in samadhis or tombs that became places of pilgrimage. In a village near the samadhi of Bhaktisiddhanta stood the sixteenth-century home of Advaita Acharya, one of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s inner circle during those years when the chanting of Hare Krishna made its public appearance. The house was maintained by an attendant.
“In the 1940s and 1950s,” the attendant recalled, “a Bengali gentleman used to visit here every month or two. I never disturbed his devotions, but sometimes I noticed his eyes were full of tears and his voice would choke while chanting. After chanting for many hours, he would thank me and leave. Then he did not come for a long time. In August 1965, I saw a saffron-clothed sannyasi sitting in the back, and I recognized him as that Bengali man from before, but that day he was chanting and weeping even more than he used to. Evening came, and he paid his prostrated obeisance for a long time. When he stood up, I told him that I remembered him from long ago and asked who he was.
“ ‘My name is Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami,’ he told me. ‘My guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Prabhupada, gave me an impossible mission. He told me to cross the ocean to the Western countries. There are countless souls there who have never heard of Krishna and are suffering greatly. I do not know how this mission will be successful. I want to satisfy my guru’s desire, but I am feeling unqualified, so I have come to this place where the sankirtan58 movement began.’
“He had tears falling down his cheeks,” the attendant recalled. “Then he said that the following day he was leaving for America. He did not know what would befall him there. So he had come here to pray most earnestly for his guru’s help.
“Then he asked for my blessings,” the attendant said, “and he left.”
FOR THIRTY YEARS the Swami had attempted to launch his mission inside India, but nothing had worked. Contracts for properties fell through, pleas for financing failed, letters to heads of state went unanswered. He had even walked the streets of Delhi with a self-published newspaper, approaching strangers seated at outdoor cafes and politely entreating them to purchase a copy.
Here he was, finally on his way to America, and maybe Sumati Morarjee was right. It was foolish for a man his age to pursue a dream with no money or contacts. He was a strict vegetarian. What would he eat? Winter was coming. How would he survive the cold? Teachers who had gone West before him—Swami Vivekananda, Paramhansa Yogananda, Rabindranath Tagore, and others—were younger and more experienced travelers. Swamiji was about to turn seventy, and he had never been outside India.
He had written to his middle son, Mathura Mohan, letting him know that he was at last leaving on his mission and asking for his help. He offered Mathura Mohan a monthly salary of 100 rupees if he would agree to oversee future printings of his books and magazines while he was in America. Mathura Mohan had not forgiven his father for renouncing their family. He refused the offer of employment and declined to show up at the pier when his father boarded the Jaladuta.
The Swami placed a call to his youngest son, Vrindavan Chandra. Please come, he asked, and take me to the ship. Twenty-six-year old Vrindavan Chandra arrived by taxi at the Scindia residences in North Calcutta around 5 a.m. on August 13, 1965. The Scindia freight office had taken responsibility for loading onto the Jaladuta 200 sets of the Swami’s three-volume Srimad Bhagavatam packed in metal trunks, and Vrindavan Chandra found that his father was not carrying much, only a small suitcase, an umbrella, a trunk for personal items, and a bag of dry cereal. If the West provided nothing acceptable to eat, he could soak the cereal in water and live on that. They loaded everything into the taxi and drove off.
The Jaladuta’s gangplank was down, ready to receive its crew. Bhaktivedanta embraced his son, turned, and boarded the ship.
“I took it calmly,” Vrindavan Chandra remembered, “but psychologically, after all, he was my father. As a child, I had accompanied him on trips to Mayapur and Navadwip. I had stayed with him also in Chippiwada, Delhi, in 1964, but to be very frank, the family had an extremely hard time when he took sannyasa. We suffered from that. And now, going to America—I was simply crying. I was going to miss him.”
The crew of the Jaladuta knew what lay ahead. They had made the crossing before and were prepared for violent storms and gale-force winds. The trip across treacherous waters was scheduled to take more than a month. They had heard about their elderly passenger and watched him walk up the gangplank, ready to chase an impossible dream. Yet weren’t all great journeys just that, impossible dreams? Climbing to the top of the world’s tallest mountain with crampons and gloves, diving to the bottom of the ocean in a tin bucket, riding into outer space on a giant firecracker—was it so different, traveling halfway round the globe armed with an umbrella and a bag of cereal, determined to respiritualize humanity? There were only two possible outcomes to such folly.
He would succeed, or he would die trying.
YOUNG KISHANLAL SHARMA grew up in Vrindavan. By age ten, his duties included caring for his father’s cows and delivering metal containers of fresh milk to village residents. As a boy in the early 1960s, he watched Bhaktivedanta Swami go from house to house, begging alms. On days when the elder sadhu came to the Sharma home, dressed in his tattered dhoti and wearing dusty sandals on his feet, Swamiji held out a metal cup, and Kishanlal’s father filled it with fresh milk. They spoke for some time of the sad shape of the world, of how fortunate they were to live in Krishna’s land, and of the Swami’s plans to share Krishna with the world. Mr. Sharma smiled indulgently, marveling at how consistently an old man could nurse a dream.
Sometimes Mr. Sharma sent his son, Kishanlal, to bring milk to Swamiji’s room in nearby Radha Damodar Temple. One day, with the metal container swinging back and forth on his handlebars, young Kishanlal biked to the temple, but the gates to Swamiji’s rooms were locked. Kishanlal knocked on the door of the pujari, the temple priest.
“Where’s Swamiji?” he asked.
“Swamiji is gone,” the pujari replied. “He has gone to the West.”