Candramauli Swami and his pera.
A Prabhupada pastime at the New Vrindavan farm community in West Virginia, July 1974.
HH Candramauli Swami: When the word got back that certain persons had been chosen to go with Kirtanananda to meet Prabhupada at the airport and I wasn’t the one, so I was quite unhappy, very unhappy. I was devastated.
But I decided, “OK, I can’t go, but let me cook for Prabhupada.” So I started to make the pera [a type of milk sweet].
While I was cooking it, I was playing one tape of Bharadraj. He sings so beautifully, and I was feeling separation from Prabhupada.
So I was crying and cooking at the same time, which really doesn’t work so good.
So I had finished the pera, and then I looked at it and I realized that this doesn’t look like good pera. The texture was off, the color was off.
So I thought, “I can’t offer this to Prabhupada, so let me offer what I had made for the Deities,” they were nice. So I put that aside.
Then Radhanath brahmacari, he was going around collecting the milk sweets and all the other sweets.
So rather than taking the ones that I had set aside for Prabhupada, he took the other ones.
So when I came back, I realized what happened. I said, “Oh, God.”
I was thinking, “Prabhupada’s not even going to look at them, they’re so bad.”
Then the next day Kirtanananda…he hardly ever talked to me because he was always busy doing so many things…he made a point to come and see me, and he was incredulous.
He looked at me and he said, “You know, I saw Prabhupada do something that I have never seen him do before. He ate three of your pera, one after another.”