A Luminous Life

Krishna: the childhood companion

Long before any of this, my search for my Guru had already begun — when I was only four years old.

My earliest memory is of Krishna: a boy just a year or two older than I, my playmate and constant companion. I did not know that he was not an ordinary child, that others could not see him. I would tell my family about our conversations and our games, and though they listened with a certain respect, they took it for a child's fancy. My mother told me long afterwards that she used to ask, "Child, where did you go? You disappeared for a while." "Oh, I was in the garden with Krishna," I would say.

My very earliest memory is bound up with what Mother later called the Aspiration flower — the Parijatha, which legend says Krishna brought to earth from Indra's garden. Waking each morning in our house on a small hillock in Puttur, I would run to the window to see if Krishna and his cowherd friends were out grazing in the distance; I could just make out the shapes of boys and cattle among the green knolls, and hear the sweet notes of a flute. "He has come!" I would cry, and rush out to the Aspiration tree by our door, gathering the fallen flowers spread like a carpet beneath it, stringing them in haste into a garland for him. That joy, and that urgency, are as vivid to me now as they were then — though I know now that none of it happened in the physical sense.

For some years I did not know this. I would tell my mother everything, and she kept it to herself. But when I was put to school and made the mistake of mentioning Krishna to a classmate or two, word spread, and the older girls began to mock me — even losing a milk tooth became an occasion for teasing: "Has Krishna taken it away?" I began to feel that I was strange, not normal, and it hurt me badly, for at that age one only wants to belong. So I told my mother, and she said, gently, "You see, they don't see Sri Krishna — only you do. So don't speak of it to anyone else. You can tell me, yes, but not others. They won't understand." After that I kept my mouth shut completely, and did not open the subject again until I wrote to the Mother, many years later, as I was about to settle here permanently — and then shut it again, not speaking of it even to my spiritual brothers and sisters in the Ashram, until I finally set it down in writing in my late seventies, when I felt it would no longer matter.

There was one exception, much later, when a related experience of mine — of quite a different kind, which I will come to — met with the same kind of quiet mockery from a colleague I had trusted. But that belongs to another part of the story.