Harikesa: My job had been to renovate Prabhupada’s quarters in the Brooklyn temple. I did not go to the airport like everybody else so I could finish the threshold on the doorway between the hallway and his living room to prevent Prabhupada from tripping. It was old marble construction and I was having a hard time making things fit properly. I was so absorbed in this project as I lay across the doorway trying to figure things out when all of a sudden Prabhupada stepped over my head. I didn’t even know he walked in because he was so quiet. As he stepped over me, I thought to myself, “Oh, my God. Is it okay that I am here?” Prabhupada turned around and said, “Yes.” [chuckles] Then I thought to myself, “Wow! I didn’t even verbalize my question!”
I first went to Vrindavan in October of 1972. What immediately struck me was how incredibly dirty everything was. I had just come from Bombay where things were much better, relatively speaking, and Vrindavan was in a very decrepit condition. There was open sewage and things were in disarray. There was litter everywhere and I was quite discouraged by that. In fact, one of the first things I did was to sweep the entire Radha-Damodar temple. On one morning walk with Prabhupada, I mentioned to him, “It is very dirty here in Vrindavan.” He said, “That’s because of the neglect by the city commission. Those responsible for it will have to take birth as hogs and dogs to learn their lesson and atone for not taking care of Vrindavan.” The most significant feeling that I had after hearing that was not so much thinking about the mayor, but rather thinking about how Prabhupada was so determined to keep everything nice and that he felt it was actually our duty and responsibility to do so. When Prabhupada spoke with so much emotion, I understood how much he cared and that was for me the most significant part.
Before Prabhupada came to Brooklyn in June of 1971, all of us who were involved in building the press were working basically day and night with no break whatsoever. We were young and strong, pouring concrete and mixing things and putting up shelves and getting things together and ultimately bringing the press up to speed. About three months before Prabhupada came, the work of the press was actually started and the printing and the pre-press work was going on full-time. Advaita, who was in charge of the press, was very dedicated to accomplishing these tasks. He was so dedicated, however, that he completely set aside all other parts of his life and just dedicated himself to the press. The word got out somehow or other that Advaita was not chanting his rounds. When Prabhupada arrived and heard of Advaita’s situation, he did not think that was a good idea at all. In defense of Advaita, however, I know he felt that his work at the press was more important for his spiritual life. I had to go and get him and bring him to Prabhupada’s room. He stood there in a very humble way, as he wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen. Then Prabhupada asked him about his lack of chanting and he said, “Well, Prabhupada, I thought you felt that this was the most important work there was. So for me to make the sacrifice didn’t seem to be so important. I mean for me to sacrifice myself for your books to be published was more important.” Then Prabhupada told him, “No. I am here for you. The time is now for you to chant, and if you chant and you do the work, that is the perfect combination.” I am paraphrasing somewhat because I can’t possibly remember the exact quote. But that was the gist of it. I was quite impressed with that because I felt that this is not just a utilitarian act. It was difficult for us because we had been working like mad men for months to get everything ready. And yet at the same time, what was more important was our spiritual life, the spiritual basis upon which we did all of that. That was a good lesson.
Our work for producing books for Prabhupada and his BBT was in our minds the most important work we could possibly do. Our goal was to catch up with Prabhupada’s translation work so that more books could be produced and published. I would get a tape from Prabhupada, transcribe it that morning, and it would go immediately to whoever was doing the Sanskrit work. Then it would be off to Los Angeles and we would have everything going very rapidly. Now the problem was that in Los Angeles, Ramesvara and others were very enthusiastic and they wanted Prabhupada to write more, which of course everybody did, so there was nothing wrong with that. I went to Prabhupada and I explained the dilemma we were having, “We want you to write more so that we can produce more books.” We were discussing how we could make this happen by perhaps getting him more time so that he didn’t have to worry about management affairs. As far as I could, I took care of whatever political issues, or whatever kind of other issues there were, and I tried to shuffle them off to GBCs so that he could do his writing. Now the real problem was that he spent a large part of his time in Vrindavan talking with people, as he was basically open all the time to the public. He had time in the morning to do his translating, but then there were so many locals that wanted his darshan, and that would take up his time into the evening. So I suggested, “I know this is not usually what is done but maybe have less darshans or don’t have them at all. Take a vacation and just work on your books.” He said, “That is very difficult because these people come here to see me and this is my responsibility. This is my home.” These were not exactly his words, but the essence was, “This is where I work from and, therefore, my responsibility is to speak to these people because they inquire. They want to know.” Later that afternoon Prabhupada called me in and said, “You should do the darshan.” I said, “Me?” [laughs] “Me?” He said, “Yes, you should sit there and you should receive the people who come and you should answer their questions and you should speak with them.” I said, “Okay,” [laughs] knowing I had little choice in the matter. So the next day we did that. After Prabhupada honored his lunch, he went into his room and started working on his books. I positioned myself outside his room and sat on a little cushion that was there, looking very “darshanable.” I was ready to speak to anyone who would come. One man finally did come and he sat down staring at me. I didn’t know what to do because he was looking, waiting for me to speak. Other people came, looked in, and said, “Where is Swami?” I said “I’m assisting him in this way today.” They said, “Huh?” and walked away. After a dreadful period of time passed, Prabhupada walked in and he said, “Well, how did it go?” I said, “Well, actually it went terribly. [laughs] There was nobody. One person came and the others walked away. They weren’t interested in me.” He said, “That’s the problem. They come here to see me. That’s why I have to sit there. This is my responsibility.” And so I never brought it up again. We shut down all the activities to try to free him to write more. We just accepted the situation.
I came to realize that Prabhupada’s act of writing was very deep and significantly considered. Every single word he wrote was not whimsical in anyway. I found very early on when transcribing Prabhupada’s tapes what it actually entails to transcribe. It’s not that you just simply hear some words and you start typing with your fingers because only some of the dictation was in English. A lot of it was in Bengali or Sanskrit. If you have never heard a verse before and you hear it in Sanskrit, you’ve got to put it on the paper exactly. I don’t know if people have ever thought about that, but it was a big job. Prabhupada had many books that he used for the verses and as references for his purports. Some of the books were from Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura’s translations and commentaries. Others were from Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura, and then there was a big book that had eight acharya’s commentaries in it. Now this was a big thing. Each Canto was thick. When Prabhupada would be speaking, you had to not only hear what he said in English, but you had to hear it in Sanskrit or Bengali. Then you had to know where it came from in order to properly transcribe it because you never heard these verses prior to that moment. Before I even got to the Sanskrit/Bengali obstacle, there was the fact that Prabhupada was using an Uher Dictaphone. The machine had a remote hand piece that contained a microphone, and the problem was that when the button on the hand piece was pushed to initiate a recording, there would be a half-second delay before the microphone picked up the voice. And the recording would stop as soon as Prabhupada would release the button on the hand piece, but Prabhupada sometimes was quick in hitting the button prior to his finishing his sentence. The effect was that quite often the beginning syllable and end syllable of his dictation would be cut off. For example, “Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead” would come out as “...shna is the Supreme Personality of God...” Another issue while transcribing was that Srila Prabhupada would say one word and then pause for several minutes while thinking of the next word. He would take long pauses since he wanted to get his thought precise. He didn’t want to go back over his work because this was his one chance and he took great pride in what he wrote. So when he would say “and,” for example, all you would really hear was the click of the button and the sound of “d.” So what I did was to carefully examine the context of the sentence and I would learn what those fragments were. Then when I was confident I had it right, I went to Prabhupada, and I said, “I am going to read you this sentence. You tell me what you think.” I didn’t tell him why. I said, “Blah blah blah blah blah.” He said, “Yes. So?” I said, “No, fine.” [laughs] I actually got it correct. Then when it came to the Sanskrit, there might be ten different purports you had to refer to from various sources. I also knew what books he had on his desk because I put them there. If the book was, for example, Caitanya-caritamrta, when he was just using the Gaudiya Math version, it was a piece of cake because I knew where to find the quotes in the purports. But if he had multiple books, which was most of the time, it was extremely difficult. What I had to do was hear the verse, memorize what he was saying, and then look to find that pattern in all of the Sanskrit and Bengali for eight different acharyas for this one verse. Sometimes, especially like Sanatana Goswami, he had ten pages of commentary! So it would take a long time to figure it out. And sometimes it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in any of the books! [laughs] Then I gave up. I would say, “I can’t handle this.” I went to Prabhupada and said, “You said this. Where is that from?” He would say, “That is from over there.” I would run to the book and there it was. Now that was phenomenal! Prabhupada’s Sanskrit capacities were incredible. He knew esoteric verses from obscure sources that were not those usual quotes that everybody knows nowadays. One time it took me a full week to find a particular quote. It was important because if you didn’t have it, you couldn’t type it. And if you didn’t know where it was, the Sanskrit people couldn’t double-check your transliteration. In order to transcribe, you also have to do the transliterations because they wouldn’t do it. They were doing other duties. I remember an incident when we were transcribing the subject of the universe from the Fifth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam. We brought up a professor from Udupi who was a big time Sanskrit scholar and he was giving his ideas of what some verse meant. Then Prabhupada said very humbly, “Oh, actually I thought it meant this.” The man was stunned. He just shut up immediately. He couldn’t say a word and he just looked down with humility realizing that Prabhupada was correct. From that point on, whenever somebody would say something about Prabhupada’s scholarship, I would say, “Yes, but in the real world of interaction and scholarship, many times these scholars found that they didn’t know as much.” I found that to be very significant.
I had just finished receiving my sannyasa initiation in Mayapur from Prabhupada when he asked me to come up to his room. When I entered his room, he looked up at me and imitated taking an arrow out of a quiver and putting it on a bow. Then he said, “Be careful of Cupid’s arrow. Everybody is influenced by Cupid’s arrow. You have to preach.”
One of the many cooking difficulties I had came about because I had to constantly cook in totally new environments in each place where we traveled. In the Paris temple the kitchen itself was very narrow. And there were counters on both sides so there was barely enough room for two people to fit in there. I needed help because I didn’t know where anything was, so a French devotee girl was designated as the one to help me. However, while I was trying to get things together in the kitchen, she and I would constantly rub up against each other and it really bothered me. I was trying to be a good brahmacari. I was cooking for Prabhupada and I didn’t want this kind of thought in my head at all. This was happening way too many times and I finally said, “That’s it!” I stomped out of the kitchen and into Prabhupada’s room where he was getting a massage. I said, “Prabhupada, “I cannot cook in this place.” I said, “This girl in the kitchen, she is just in the way all the time, constantly distracting me, completely pushing up against me.” I said, “I am a brahmacari. I can’t do this any more!” Then Prabhupada said, “So I shall not eat!” I was trying to make excuses, “Well, that is not exactly what I meant. I meant maybe some lady can cook or she could cook.” But he said, “No, I shall not eat. You are my cook. I want you to cook. I shall not eat!” I felt terrible and then he said, “There are girls everywhere, women everywhere in the world. If you avoid them like this all the time, you will have nowhere to go. What will you do?” So I understood that lesson very well. It was a very important lesson that sometimes you have to do what is important, and you just have to bite the bullet, so to speak, or do whatever is required to get it done. So I went back in the kitchen and I begged her that we just please avoid touching one another as we did our service.
I had to cook in some really horrible situations. There were places where there was no kitchen or places where there was just a shelf and a hot plate. Mauritius was one of those places where the flour that was given to me was like sawdust. It was bad. I would struggle to make a chapati and it came out like cardboard. Prabhupada was getting upset because food meant a good chapati. [laughs] He would sometimes say, “If you could make a good chapati, everything else was forgiven.” Finally we made it back to Bombay. And I was struggling in Bombay because the stove there had no gas pressure. The flour was better than in Mauritius, but the chapatis were not up to the standard. Prabhupada looked at them and he said, “Big, big brain, can’t even make a chapati.” Then I said, “Prabhupada, nobody can make a chapati on these stoves.” I was talking about the stoves everywhere. I said, “Nobody. I don’t care who they are.” He said, “Nobody?” Again he said, “Nobody?” I said, “Nobody!” He said, “Nobody?” Then he pushed his hands against the table, got up, and walked into the kitchen. Then he said, “Where is the dough?” I was sitting behind him while he was in front of the stove rolling out the dough forming a perfect chapati. He put it on the stove and it didn’t blow up. I smirked. [laughs] I was close to him so he heard me smirk. He looked back at me and with more force got a new handful of dough, rolled it out even faster, and chucked it on the grill. This time it puffed up perfectly! Prabhupada picked up the chapati with the tongs and threw it at my nose. [laughs] As it bounced off my nose, he got up and walked triumphantly out of the kitchen. I was left sitting there laughing hysterically. It was the greatest thing that ever happened. It was just spectacular to get a chapati thrown at me by my spiritual master and then to have it bounce off my nose. [laughs]
We were having a feast up on the second floor in Juhu where Prabhupada stayed. I cooked some of the preparations for Prabhupada and helped serve out in the living room area that was outside his room. Prabhupada was eating, and he said I should eat, which I did at the doorway between the two rooms so I could keep an eye on what was going on. As I was eating, Prabhupada told me to come over and give him more of some preparation. I said, “Okay, let me go wash my hands.” He said, “No, just give it to me now because a Vaishnava’s hand is never contaminated.” I thought, “For sure now I am going to go and wash my hands.” I did, and when I came back and served him, he didn’t say anything about it. I did it right away because I realized that I was not in the category of a Vaishnava and the sink was only ten feet away so I could quickly run back. In retrospect, perhaps I should have heeded his instruction, as he was saying basically, “I am hungry and I want it now and it doesn’t matter if your hands are clean or dirty.” It was a dilemma.
I have consistently said that I have never met anybody more intelligent than Srila Prabhupada. He had a deep intelligence and his wit was very fast. He had the capacity to respond to any subject in a very short period of time, and his answer was not only amazing but a few steps ahead of you. His teachings were of great significance to the world and specifically to me.
