Jagatarini devi dasi Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 02

Jagatarini: There were so many unusual people there and Srila Prabhupada explaining that the people in general had become hippies because they were disillusioned with modern society; but if they didn’t find any guidance, then they would end up in a more difficult situation than the one that they had actually left. And he urged all of these drug-taking hippies to take up his message of Krishna consciousness and actually become first-class human beings. It was an amazing experience for me. I think it was what cemented my understanding that I should stay within the Krishna consciousness family. We would all do like that. We were each given a flower and then we would give it to him, and Srila Prabhupada would give us a flower in exchange. Occasionally he would stop and say something to one of the devotees, and we were all hoping that he would stop and say something to us. I remember I had been staying there in the temple for about two weeks, and one day he stopped and when I offered my flower he said to me, “Oh, you are new here,” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “Are you happy here?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “Very good.” I took the flower and he continued. But it was very exciting. That was the most exciting part of the day is we’d all line up kneeling on either side of the entranceway into the temple. The children would run down the middle and Srila Prabhupada would show them some extra affection and play with them a little bit, show them different flowers until they found one they liked. He was always very, very affectionate with the children.

Interview DVD 03

Jagatarini: There was a program also that he had of a Deity walk where we would take the Deities on Sunday and walk all around the whole block with the small Deities, and we were asked to go into the houses in the early morning and ask people if we could take a flower from their garden. Then we would bring the Deities around the back, down the laneway and past his window, and he would stand up. I remember we would all look forward to that, and he would look out of his window when he heard the kirtan coming. We would all stand there for some time jumping up and down, so happy to see him. Then we would go around, bring the Deities to the front, and outside the temple we would place the Deities and then each one of us would give a report. This was quite shocking for me because I was such a new devotee, but you’d have to walk up in front of the Deities with your hands folded and say, “My dear Lord, this is what I’ve done this week,” and say what your service was and so on and so forth. It was such a spontaneous kind of a mood to talk to the Deities like that. At first I was a little shocked but I grew to quite like that, and everyone in the temple would have to present themselves and say what they had done for the pleasure of the Deities. I remember that in Melbourne he gave me second initiation, and I had been initiated in 1971 by mail in Hong Kong. So I received one letter and he said, “Your initiated name is Jagajanani-devi-dasi.” And then very shortly after that we received another letter in Hong Kong saying that the name has been changed to Jagatarini because there was already somebody with the name Jagajanani. I had never received a fire sacrifice for first initiation so I sat in on the fire sacrifice in Melbourne, and then he gave me second initiation upstairs in his room. Then we all went out to collect guru dakshina, which was something new. It was a bit of a novelty, we weren’t familiar with that concept then. I remember going down one street nearby and going shop to shop, and one of the shops that I went into was a butcher shop and that man gave more than anyone else. So when I came back, I commented on that to Srila Prabhupada and I said I’d gone into this butcher shop. It was kind of a childish thing to say. And so he said, “Oh, that is very good,” and he was very kindly and fatherly. At the end of that visit to Melbourne, I brought my parents to see Srila Prabhupada. My mother and father came in, and my mother was very suspicious, she was uncomfortable. But my father was gracious and so he sat near to Srila Prabhupada, and my mother hovered by the door; and then they gave her a seat, and she sat down. Srila Prabhupada had this blue-colored type of a couch, French-style chaise lounge or something like that, and he was sitting on that and he looked so elegant, so genteel. They both sat down and then the first thing Srila Prabhupada did was he looked at my father, who was respectful, and he said, “Your daughter will deliver you.” And my father was a little embarrassed, I think, he couldn’t really understand Srila Prabhupada’s accent. So he started laughing nervously and he said, “Oh, yes, we always thought she’d do something like that.” And then Srila Prabhupada looked at him quite earnestly and said, “Don’t think that she’s given up your service.” He said, “Because of her, so many generations forward and backward in your family will be delivered because of her.” And he went on to explain to him that he had gone so many places in the world and wherever he went, people thanked him for what he had done for their children and he’d saved them from so many vices and so forth. My father was very gentle and so he was respectful, and afterwards Srila Prabhupada turned to me and said, “Your father is a gentleman.” Then my mother, who was also very pious in that sense but she was nervous, at the very end of that darshan, Srila Prabhupada took this carnation garland, it was solid and full of carnations, and he took it very gracefully from his neck. And then he asked his servant, “Give this to her.” And so they handed her this garland, and she was so taken aback. He was so charming, and she didn’t know what to say. She took that garland home and put it on a plate of water and kept it on a vase, in some way kept it and preserved it as long as she could in appreciation from that visit with him.