By Visakha Priya dasi
On the day before Christmas eve, my godsister Gauri, her husband, Patrick, their eighteen-month old baby, Lochan, and I were walking back from the local supermarket in the bright late afternoon light of a Capetown summer. We had gone for a very small errand and carried no shopping bags; we only had our bead bags.
Mine was around my neck but my hands were out, and I was walking a little ahead, appreciating the quiet atmosphere of the pleasantly empty road. Suddenly, I heard Patrick’voice calling out urgently: “Watch out, he’s got a gun.” Only the first two words registered in my brain, and I braced myself for what I thought was going to be a dog bite. But then I got jostled and turned around to indeed face a gun. I just looked at it and I looked at the man, a youngish, light-bodied man with a colored skin, a toothless mouth, and a prayer hat like those Muslims wear on Fridays.
Before I could think of anything, he had snapped the strap of my bead bag off my neck and was running away with the bag. I couldn’t bear it. I had chanted on them since the time they appeared in front of me, floating on the sacred Ganga, on the Gaura Purnima day of the year 1996, just when I was entering the water to take a sacred bath at sunset. I couldn’t let them go, so I shouted, “It’s my beads.
There’s nothing in there, just beads. There’s nothing there. Just beads.” Perhaps I made some appealing gesture. I can’t really remember, but the man came back and put the beads in my hand. But then–and I suddenly felt so bad about it–he turned around and started searching Lochan’s pram and lifting Gauri and Patrick’s beadbags in search of cell phones and whatever. The three of us were protesting: “There’s nothing. It’s our beads. We are chanting.
There’s nothing in there.” And Patrick added: “Here’s the cell phone, take it.” But because the cell phone was wrapped in a small brown paper bag, the man didn’t believe it and started to look in Patrick’s pockets while Gauri, a veteran book distributor in the Capetown yatra, chanted “Krsna! Krsna! We’re just chanting Hare Krsna! There’s nothing in there. Krsna! Krsna! We’re just chanting Hare Krsna.” Finally, the man realized he was getting nowhere, and after a pat on the baby’s head, he just went away.
It was such a strange happening. We concluded that the man looked like a crazed drug addict in search of a quick object to sell and that the gun might not even have been a real one. Still, the whole episode was unpleasant. Upon further reflection, I concluded that all of us had been lucky: we got off unharmed and the man got a chance to hear the holy name and to touch a set of beads that came from Gangadevi herself.
Gaura premanande Hari Haribol!