Kanta devi dasi Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 03

Kanta: A few of the ladies were clustered together, and Palika was there. And at some point we noticed that Srila Prabhupada was going in the water, although at first it didn’t look like he was going to go in. Suddenly it was, “Prabhupada’s going in.” I looked at Palika, we had the same reaction: “We’re going in too. We have to be in there with Prabhupada, and we have to do it fast because he’s going to say Gayatri,” and we wanted to say Gayatri with him. But both of us had only been in India for a month, and we knew that the ladies bathed in the Yamuna but we didn’t know how they did it. Should we go in with our full saris and then walk around dripping wet? Because we only had a few seconds. Palika was down to her slip and I was, “OK, me too.” It didn’t matter anyway because as soon as we hit the water we went right under. So we were up to our necks in water anyway so we were covered. We wanted to get as close to Prabhupada as we could while he was saying Gayatri and we got really close, within 10 feet of him. Just our little heads, we were scrunched under the water, and we got to say Gayatri with Prabhupada that day. To me, that’s the most memorable experience of the whole thing was that Gayatri in the water with Prabhupada so close.