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Transcriptions of the Sridhar Swami: So we have about half an hour or 45 minutes to go, and we're going to hear from Her Grace Kausalya dasi, that wonderful young lady from Hawaii that you heard about this morning. Kausalya is now in California. She has a movie business with her husband. She has a wonderful relationship with Srila Prabhupada, and she has many wonderful stories about Hare Krishna Land. Srimate, do you want to come up and sit here too? Haribol! Srila Prabhupada ki jaya! Kausalya: I first came to India in October of 1970 with the first group of devotees that came, and I think the only people that were here earlier were Acyutananda and Jayapataka. They were in Calcutta. Then Prabhupada and some devotees came, and we all gathered in Bombay. Gurudasa was there and Yamuna and Malati and Syamasundara and Himavati and Hansadutta and Giriraja, of course, and Revatinandan and Dinanatha. I can't remember everybody, but there was a nice group and we did several nice engagements in Bombay. We were hosted by some wonderful Indian people, great people who became life members later on down the line. This was very early, so there was no life membership at the time. Very shortly after our arrival, we were swept away and taken on the train to Amritsar for our very first engagement. It was a Sadhu Samelan, and I wish Gurudasa was here because we were trading notes on the plane ride over and he was helping me remember some of these things. That was a wonderful engagement in Amritsar, and it was our very first engagement in India. It was kind of like a gathering like this except for instead of a crowd of…well, it was actually a crowd of a lot of different devotees. But instead of just us up here, it was a lot of different sadhus who would come and speak and Prabhupada was one of them. The thing that Prabhupada liked so much was to bring his American and European disciples, and he called us his dancing white elephants. And he enjoyed so much having Yamuna and I…we were actually the only women that were taken on that engagement, Yamuna and I, so he enjoyed having us lead the kirtans because it was very unusual to have women lead kirtans at one of these events. One time when we were leading kirtan, we were criticized for our imperfect Sanskrit pronunciation; And Prabhupada was so kind, he yelled at the person that criticized us and said, "They have more devotion than you will ever know in your entire lifetime." He was very protective of us. And since we were living in this…we were living in ashram in Amritsar and it was very cold, and there was just the two of us. They gave Prabhupada a place to stay that was inside, and Prabhupada decided that they should give Yamuna and I a place to stay that was inside. So we had a little room next to Prabhupada's room, and the men all had to sleep outside and kind of suffer. We thought that was very fair. But it was very nice because we were right next door to him. Since we were traveling, all of the programs were in his room in the morning. We had two little brass Radha-Krishna Deities that we were traveling with, and so every mangala aratik and every Bhagavatam reading was in Prabhupada's room. So Prabhupada often would do the mangala aratik in his room and he would sometimes perform the ceremony, and then sometimes he would have me do it or Yamuna do it. Then he would have a lecture and we would all kind of jam into his room, we'd squeeze in there, and it was quite intimate, it was really a wonderful, wonderful time. Prabhupada would always make sure that Yamuna and I would ride in the car with him. Because what we would do when we weren't on stage dancing for him and singing for him, when he was lecturing…and a lot of his lectures were in Hindi so we didn't even know what he was talking about. He would go from engagement to engagement to engagement, and what was really amazing was…I was 18 but everybody else in the group was probably in their early 20's or whatever, and we were exhausted because we would go from early in the morning when we'd get up for mangala aratik, very very early, to late, late, late, late at night, he would go on. And here he was much older than us, and he would be tireless, tireless, and we would all just be dragging ourselves through this grueling pace. And Prabhupada would be tireless, he would just keep going on and on and on, never getting tired. He would go from engagement to engagement to engagement. So as people would come for darshan…because our schedule would be in the morning we'd have the mangala aratik and the Bhagavatam class in his room, and then he'd give lectures, and then there would be darshan and people would come by the hundreds. They'd come by the hundreds to hear him speak and have darshan and touch his feet and see him. And many of those people would say, "Oh, please, Swamiji, please come back to my home," and invite him for meals and invite him to come and have an engagement to their home, so it would expand and we would do different things. So whenever we would go on these different engagements over the course of the day, Prabhupada would make sure that Yamuna and I rode in the car with him. The brahmacaris and the other men would ride on their own or find other ways to drive, but we would always ride in the car with him. One of my fondest memories is his spontaneity. One time we were on our way to one of these engagements and Prabhupada said, "I think I will stop and buy some new shoes." I'm riding in the back of the car with Yamuna and Prabhupada's in the front seat with the driver, and Prabhupada says, "Let's stop at the next Bhata Shoe Store." So the driver pulls up to the next Bhata Shoe Store, and I'm just ecstatic. I think, "I'm going to go shoe shopping with my guru, this is unbelievable!" So he stops at the Bhata Shoe Store, we all pile out, just the three of us, and we walk out and he sits down and he says, "You two find me the shoes." So Yamuna and I find these wonderful plastic sandals with white crisscrosses, and I pick up one, she picks up one, and we bring them over and slip them onto his feet. He stands up and walks around and he says, "Do you like them?" And we said, "We love them, Srila Prabhupada." And he says, "Good, then I will buy them." So he bought them, and we walked away and off to our next engagement. When we were there, he was teaching us how to drink the Indian way, not to touch the glass with your lips. It's been years, I'm not as practiced anymore. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about. So he taught us how to do that, how to peel a banana without touching it with our left hand, and all these different things. He wanted to make sure that we were properly trained so that when he took us out on these engagements we would behave properly. You know, when people would drop a roti on our plate not to touch it, and he was very, very conscious that we were trained well. Also in Amritsar, one of my favorite memories is he took us to the Golden Temple. One of the engagements we had in Amritsar was we were invited to go to the Golden Temple, which is one of the Sikhs' most holy temples. Have you all heard of that? And this is, of course, before there was a lot of animosity, so there was not a lot of bombing that had happened or a lot of bullet holes or anything like that so it was still in very pristine shape. This was October or November 1970, something like that. So we went in and Prabhupada saw…they gave him the tour and we all walked, of course, with him. And they had this wonderful chapati-making machine. Well, not really machine, it's hard to describe, but it was very, very large like an upside down wok where they had a fire burning underneath it and 10 men around with these giant spatulas flipping chapatis, and they were feeding hundreds of people. Prabhupada was really very impressed by that and said we should do that someday. Brahmananda: That's the reason Prabhupada brought us to that temple, because he wanted us… He had the idea of building temples in India even at that time, and he wanted us to manage the temples the way they manage in Amritsar. The way they manage the shoes [inaudible]. Kausalya: Brahmananda was saying that Prabhupada was wanting us to learn from the Sikh temple, the Golden Temple, how they managed to feed the people, the shoes, etc. Sridhar Swami: Everything, manage the crowds. Kausalya: Yes, to manage the crowds, they did a wonderful job. And we went inside to where they had the Guru Grantha Sahib and everything, it was really a beautiful tour they gave us. And when we left they asked Srila Prabhupada to sign their guest book, which I've always wished we could have copy of that because I'm sure somebody has it somewhere, it would be wonderful to have that in our Archives. But Prabhupada went up to the guest book and he had us all gather around, and he signed it in his wonderful way with that great flair. Then they had Comments, and under Comments he wrote "Very spiritual." And under Religion, because it said "What religion are you?", he wrote "Krishnaite." I remember laughing because I thought, "Not Hindu, not Vaisnava, Krishnaite," and it was wonderful. On our way home from Amritsar, "home" meaning back to Bombay…we actually didn't have a home in Bombay, but we were headed back to Bombay…there was a man that got on the train that Prabhupada got to talking with and he said, "Oh, you should start a temple in New Delhi." Gurudasa should tell you this story but Prabhupada decided that he was going to take him up on this idea and he was going to drop off some people to start the temple in New Delhi, and he decided that Gurudasa and Yamuna should be those people to do that. But in the meantime, prior to this all happening, Prabhupada had called us in. Prabhupada used to travel first class on the train if we could manage it, and then we would usually travel second class. So Prabhupada had called Yamuna and I into his room and said, "I would love to have some rice." And so we said, "All right, Srila Prabhupada, we'll get you some rice." So we found the train conductor and we said, "We need to cook our guru some rice." And he said, "Oh, no, that is not possible." And we said, "No, no, we need to cook our guru some rice." He said, "No, no, that is not possible." So Yamuna gets in the…you know how the trains have those openings between the cars. Yamuna gets in the middle of the opening and she says, "If you don't let me cook my guru some rice, I'm going to throw myself off the train," very dramatic. And I was afraid she was really going to do it, and I said, "No, no, don't do it!" So finally he let us, "OK, all right, all right," this crazy Western girl. What is this woman going to do? So he gave us this horrible, horrible, you can't imagine how horrible, little kitchen. Not really even a kitchen but it had a little burner and it was black, it was as black as you can get, this black pot. So we're up to our elbows in grease and we're scrubbing this pot, but we actually managed through all of this to cook him some rice. So we managed it and we made him some rice, we brought it in on a platter, he was so pleased. And by the time we came back with the rice, this man was there and telling them they were going to…and Prabhupada had decided that he was going to drop them off in New Delhi. So anyway, Gurudasa had decided he wanted certain people to come with him, me being one of them, but Prabhupada it turned out didn't want me to be dropped off in New Delhi. I found out from Gurudasa that Prabhupada had said, "No, no, I have plans for her. She can't be dropped off in New Delhi." I never found out what those plans were but, anyway, I didn't get dropped off the train. Brahmananda: When the train would stop, Prabhupada would say to a devotee, "All right, now you get off and start a temple." Kausalya: That's what they did. That's what happened. Brahmananda said sometimes what would happen is the train would stop and Prabhupada would say, "Now you get off the train and start a temple." Basically that's what happened with Gurudasa and Yamuna, and Giriraja actually was…Giriraja Maharaja was one of the other people that was dropped off in New Delhi on that trip on our way back from Amritsar to Bombay. Giriraja, Bhanu, Gurudasa, Yamuna and one other…no, it wasn't Dinanatha, one other devotee, but Gurudasa will remember. I wish he was here because he could tell you, and I don't know where he is. But he'll tell you when he tells his stories. So when we came back to Bombay, we didn't have any place to stay so we stayed in this horrible place. I don't know who gave it to us, I can't remember, but it was horrible. I ended up getting bitten by bedbugs all over my body. It was so horrible that some wonderful, kind Indian man took pity on us, and I don't recall his name, but he gave us this wonderful Rama temple to live in. Yeah, the Rama Mandir. Who was he? Anyway, we lived there for quite a while, quite a few months. We had a little apartment on this side of the Rama Mandir and, of course, the Rama Mandir was on this side, and it was actually quite small quarters. Prabhupada had one room, and the girls had one room, and the brahmacaris had one room, and we had one little kitchen. But we all kind of managed, and we were all stuck in there, nice tight quarters. Since Yamuna had been dropped off and she had been my teacher in many ways, in cooking and everything…I mean, this rice thing, I didn't known what I was doing, I was basically the pot scrubber. But Prabhupada said, "OK, Kausalya, you will cook." So I went, "OK. All right, I'll cook." So then I went in the kitchen and we're here at this Rama Mandir and I'm standing in the kitchen, and Prabhupada walks in and says, "Kausalya, you do not know how to cook." I said, "No, Srila Prabhupada, I don't." He said, "All right, I will cook." He said, "You will help me," and so he basically taught me to cook. I didn't know what to do. He brought out his little three tiffin and he cooked for all of us and I was his assistant, shredding the carrots, he made carrot halava, he made dahl and rice, and he made a wonderful little vegetable. I don't remember what the vegetable was, but it was basically just Prabhupada and I in the kitchen making prasadam for all the devotees. And ever since then I know how to cook thanks to Srila Prabhupada. But it was wonderful because he took pity on me. I didn't want to…when he told me I should cook, I figured I would be able to figure it out if I stood in the kitchen long enough. But when he came in the kitchen and I was just standing there, he looked at me like he knew I didn't know what I was doing and he decided to take it over, take over the situation and take control of it. You have to realize I was only 18 years old, I didn't know much about anything. Another really wonderful story from our time in the Rama Mandir, at least one very meaningful for me that I carry with me in my life at all times, is when we were living there, there was this Indian gentleman who came in and prostrated… As I told you, we had a regular program and every day there was darshan and a lot of people would come and see Srila Prabhupada. This Indian gentleman came and he prostrated himself in front of Prabhupada and he said, "Oh, Swamiji, you will save me." And Prabhupada said, "No, I cannot save you. I can teach you how you can save yourself, but you must do the work." And I remember that struck me so powerfully because I think sometimes…I don't mean to editorialize since I'm just trying to tell Prabhupada stories, but allow me to just for a moment. I think sometimes we think just by the association of a pure devotee we become pure. But it made me realize that it's not about just associating with him, it's about doing the work yourself, and that made a profound effect on me and made me realize it's about doing your own spiritual work. There are other stories about that time during the Rama Mandir, but being old and befuddled I don't remember too many more. I'm still trying to work my memory. One of our most wonderful experiences was in Surat. Shortly after we were living at the Rama Mandir, we were invited to go to Surat. That was also in 1970, it was late in the year, I think it was in December or so. We all went to Surat. It was an amazing, magical time. The entire town basically laid out the red carpet for us. We lived at a wonderful home, the home of Bhagubhai Jariwala. He was a very wealthy man, and he had a very big palatial home and treated us like royalty. So the whole town was so kind to us, and they would announce in advance the kirtan routes that we were going to do and then the ladies would drape…Surat has tall buildings on either side but they're narrower streets, and the ladies would drape beautiful cloth to shade the route all the way across the buildings on either side; and then people would stand in the windows and they would throw rice and flower petals as we were going along the kirtan routes. People would come out of their homes and garland us, so many garlands that we would have to be taking them off. They were so high, piled so high, you couldn't even see. And chandan and kumkum, and they would come out carrying milk and bananas. The kindness was just overwhelming, and every day we would go. Again, this time was amazing for all of us because Prabhupada's tirelessness was unbelievable. He would go from four in the morning until midnight and never get tired. His potency was just remarkable, we couldn't keep up with him, and we were all young. It was just unbelievable. We would go engagement after engagement after engagement. We were sitting there, basically just sitting listening to him, and he was doing all the talking and doing all the darshan and doing all of the greeting of all the guests. We were trying to do our best to help, but he was doing all of it and we were his…we would do the kirtan and dance and such, and sometimes he would have us lead the kirtan or speak or whatever. But really most of the work was on his shoulders and we were there to support him, but he never was tired. I remember myself, I was just dragging sometimes. It was really wonderful but it was also hard, it was a lot of work. But in Surat it was one of those times when even though it was hours and hours of constant sankirtan and preaching and going from engagement to engagement to engagement, the people were so kind and the love was so powerful that it was uplifting and it was giving you energy, so much energy, because the people were so good there. One time we went to this engagement. Prabhupada was so accessible to us in those days too. So whenever we wanted to talk to him, we would just go and sit with him and talk to him. And being the way I am, I would sometimes go and talk to him about different things. And probably I shouldn't have said this, but one day I went in to Prabhupada and I said, "Srila Prabhupada, I've memorized the Sri Isopanisad." He said, "Oh, very nice, very nice, Kausalya." So that must have stuck in his mind. And then one day we were at this engagement in Surat out in the…it was kind of a suburb of Surat. I guess you really wouldn't call it a suburb, it was a little village outside of Surat. [Indian man in audience identifies village] Maybe, I don't…were you there? [Indian man says he was there] Oh! Well, anyway, what happened at that wonderful village was Prabhupada decided that I should sing the Sri Isopanisad. So we were sitting there and after the lecture he says, "Kausalya, come here." I come over, he says, "Sing Sri Isopanisad." Suddenly I'm on the spot. So I get up, I sing the Sri Isopanisad, all the verses. And he was so thrilled that I pulled it off that he pulls me…he was sitting and he pulls my head on his lap, and he puts my head on his lap and he pats my head and he rubs my back like I was a puppy dog. It was the most affectionate he'd ever been. But he was so proud, he beamed like a proud papa, and it was the most wonderful experience…one of the most wonderful experiences of my life because he was so kind. What was the name of that town? Bardoli. I remember it so vividly, it was a wonderful little village. Is my time up? I have five more minutes. I'll just continue on. I hate to be so chronological, but it's easier for my mind. Srimate, do you want to talk for five minutes? Srimate: We'll finish this up and tomorrow we'll take over where we left off when we started working together. Kausalya: Since Srimate's been sitting here and I've been hogging the microphone… [Srimate says she is not prepared to talk] She doesn't want to talk right now, but she's being my moral support and I appreciate that. If she thinks of something, she's going to pop it up. Continuing on this wonderful trip. From Surat we went to Allahabad, the Kumbha Mela. And I remember Prabhupada said…and this was the Kumbha Mela in 1971. We went from living in great opulence at Mr. Bhagubhai Jariwala's house to living in freezing cold tents in Allahabad and very, very austere conditions where we were bathing with cold water in cold tents in cold weather. And I remember Prabhupada saying, "We do not care for material opulence. We were living in a palace, now we are living in tents, and it is the same to us." And I'm thinking, "Maybe to you, but it's not so easy for me." But it was fine, we tolerated it, but Prabhupada was so transcendental. He could live in an opulent palace and turn around and immediately live in a tent and it didn't…he was able to deal with it with no change of anything. It was amazing. So this was the first time for me that Prabhupada started telling me stories of mystical yogis, and he was telling all of us these stories. He started telling us stories that in Kumbha Mela there are yogis, and he said, "All you be very careful because there are very powerful yogis here." He said, "There are yogis who can go down in the Himalayas and come up here at Triveni, and they can do very many mystical things. They can travel and do all of the different siddhis, and they are actually very powerful men. So commit no offense to anyone." He told us many different yogi stories. A wonderful little story that's just one personal story. So Yamuna and I were determined to be in the Triveni at the moment…you all know what the Kumbha Mela is, where the nectar drops at the moment. So we decided that we would be there at that moment. So we got up at the crack of dawn and got there at that moment, and it was really early in the morning and we're there in the rivers singing and praying and meditating and singing our prayers. And just at that moment there's this announcement over the loudspeaker, "The sadhus are coming, the sadhus are coming. The saints are coming." And we look up a hill and down the hill is coming this mountain of Shaivites matted with ashes and hair matted and tridents, the naga-babas, running, racing to get to the spot at the exact same time that we're there. And we're just…we hightailed it out of there as quickly as we could because we would have been trampled. It was amazing. It was the funniest thing I've ever done. Anyway, it was very funny. I digress for a moment, but I just had to tell you that story. So I should probably stop, right? My five minutes is up? OK, I don't want to take too much of your time. Thank you. |