By Vanita Shenoy
Kandlurkar Narshimha Prabhu
My memories of Param Poojya Swami Nityananda of Ganeshpuri date from a very young age. I remember having seen swami quite vividly. I was 10 years old when swami took samadhi. I remember sitting on my father’s shoulders and watching all the proceedings on that day with a heavy heart. A sense of loss is still felt. I grew up listening to his stories from my parents and other relatives. I was born after Swami blessed my mother. My mother was from a small village near Sagar in Karnataka state. She was around 14 yrs of age when both her parents died leaving behind 5 children my mother being the eldest. One of her sisters died soon after her parent’s demise. She had two brothers aged 12 and 6 and a sister aged 8 yrs appx. at that time. There was no one to take care of them as the village hardly had any houses. All relatives were in Sagar which was 5 km away no one could look after them regularly. They were living in constant fear in a big house and had a huge farm to take care of and no adult to depend on. She had an uncle (mama) who was in Mumbai and an ardent devotee of swami Nityananda. His name was K. Narasimha Prabhu he was popularly known as Kandloorkar. He was a small-time sandalwood businessman. He had a great spiritual bent of mind and used to visit Swamiji regularly. He once asked Swami to give him Sanyas. Swami declined, he persisted and said that he would not get up from there unless Swamiji gave him sanyas deeksha. Swamiji got very angry and threw stones at him. Kandloorkar was bald and hence got injured, his head was bleeding but he stayed put. Swamiji then smiled at him and with great love told him that Sanyas was not for him in this lifetime. Then Swamiji said, “There are two girls in the village, go get them to Bombay, you have to take care of them”. He knew that Swami was referring to his two nieces in the village as even he used to be worried about their safety and did not know how to solve the problem. So these two girls were brought to Bombay along with his mother. Kandloorkar had no house of his own so he kept both the girls and his mother in Chembur in Chembur Bhat’s(Sushilakka (wife of Sitaram Shenoy) daughter Ahilya’s father-in-law’s} house. All of them regularly used to visit Swami Nityananda every week, stay in one of the two rooms adjacent to Swamijis nivas, carry foodstuff, grains, rice, and masalas, and cook on mud sigrees. They would make simple food like rice sambar, saar, etc., and offer it to swami who used to eat very little and preferred nonspicy food. The interesting part of this incident was that Kandloorkar’s sandalwood business flourished during this time so much that he was known as a leading trader in his circle. He then bought a house in Karnataka Society, Matunga, and shifted them there. In one of the visits to swami, Swami suggested to him that there was an eligible bachelor, Sitaram Shenoy’s brother-in-law. Kandloorkar approached Sitaram Shenoys’ family and my mother was married to Anand Kamath, my father. who was Sitaram Shenoy’s cousin. At that wedding, my father’s cousin’s sister {Koppaliaakka’s} brother-in-law saw my mother’s sister and offered to marry her. Thus with the grace of Swami, both the girls got married with great fanfare. Thereafter, Kandloorkar got married at the age of 50, had a wonderful family, and was blessed with two sons. Swami’s words that Sanyas was not for him in this lifetime came true.
However, my mother did not conceive for four years, and it was a belief at that time that if a woman did not conceive within a year of marriage, the man used to get married again to another woman. My mother was similarly threatened and during her next visit to Swamiji, one night quietly went and sat in the middle of the jungle so that some wild animal would come and eat her up. She just wanted to end her life because she didn’t want to be a burden on her uncle who did so much for her. As she was sitting there crying suddenly a flash of light fell on her face, and swami was standing before her with the torch. He flashed the light on her face and said,”Everything will be alright” but my mother said she didn’t want to live as she wasn’t wanted by anyone. Swami again said, “Get up and go to your room, everything will be alright”. She quietly obeyed him. I was born soon thereafter everything was alright as Swami said. I was visiting Swami every time with my father. We used to take all our problems and concerns to Swami and he used to bless us with solutions. My mother told me when I was six months old, I had some kind of skin rash all over my body and it couldn’t be contained with doctors medicines. I developed a very high fever with it. My parents took me to Swami and he asked my mother to bathe me in the hot water kundas and then bring me to him. After my mother took me to him Swami asked one of his sevaka to give me coconut water and he picked up two bananas and gave one in my hand. I held that and as soon as he gave me another banana in the other hand, I left the first one….Swami played thus for some time. I was given coconut water and a banana…imagine despite a high fever,.. with great faith I was fed that, and within two days all my rashes disappeared without any trace!
Another very vivid memory I have is again with my mother. My mother developed a huge abscess on her waist which was so bad that she was bedridden with the infection and pain. No amount of doctors’ medicines could help. Our family doctor gave up saying that it should be treated only by surgery. It was not as easy to perform surgery at that time as it is now. My father rushed to Swami and narrated everything. Swami told him to go to Dr. Menon (or Nair, I don’t remember) at Matunga and get his medicines. My father then went to that doctor, and the doctor was shocked and said he is only a Homeopath and such a serious case is very difficult to cure with Homeopathic medicines. However, he said since Swami had directed, he would give medicines because he believed that Swami was the one to cure her. So every week he used to give homeopathic medicines holding them before the photo of Swami and a small diya kept in his cupboard at the clinic. Within a fortnight my mother was completely cured. No surgery… nothing except the homeopathic pills. My mother did not even have the scar of the wound later.
There are many such stories when Swami protected and guided us. My mother also told me about her experience of Swami’s love and compassion for his bhaktas. When my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she craved to eat sweets and fruits. However, she lived in a large joint family and couldn’t fulfill her cravings. Once when she had gone to visit Swami, she noticed huge piles of sweet boxes, flowers, and fruits before Swami as usual. As soon as she sat in the crowd in front of Swami, he called her near him and picked up a few large boxes of sweets which she couldn’t hold properly as they were really big and heavy, covered them with a variety of fruits and blessed her. Mother said she ate only the sweets and fruits for the next few days and all her cravings were gone forever.!! such was Swami’s love and compassion. Mother always remembered this in her entire lifetime and told me a million times with tears rolling down her cheeks with a great sense of gratitude. She always said, ” Swami is my mother and father who took care of me at all times.” My own experience is nothing much different from many devotees that all sincere prayers to Swami though he is not in physical body, are always answered. My brother was seriously ill in 2002 and doctors had declared that he would not live for more than a couple of days. I was devastated, I looked at Swami’s photo and prayed to Swami and requested Him not to give the pain of putrshoka to my old, aged parents. The next day when I went to the hospital, the doctor treating my brother had not come as he had left for some conference in the US which I was not aware of. Another physician temporarily took charge of him and gave some very expensive injections to him as an experiment, and my brother miraculously got up from his deathbed within 5 minutes. He survived till my mother and father expired, did their Yearly Shraddh, and expired immediately within two months of doing it in 2008. Everyone was surprised how he lived for so long with an incurable disease. Swami fulfilled my wish.
As for Kandloorkar, he remained an ardent devotee of Swami Nityananda and did a lot of sadhana and even used to enter trance. He did not speak much but used to quote many words which Swami used to utter. He always said that only those whom swami wanted to see could reach him. Others with evil intentions and minds who would want to come to swami to make fun or criticize or test his divinity would find it so difficult to reach Ganeshpuri that they would abandon the journey. Either their vehicle used to break down or the engine would get burned or they would fall sick, something or the other would stop them from reaching him. But those who wanted to go to him with devotion, love, and reverence or those who were in real difficulty would find everything working in their favor and were protected from all difficulties. Those days transportation was very poor and hence these things mattered most. Even today I have experienced, whenever we long to go to Ganeshpuri, and even if it is decided suddenly everything works in our favor and when we reach we find that some special occasion is being celebrated there. Swami’s grace, what else? Kandloorkar on one Laxmi Pooja day in Diwali got a paralytic attack and his one side got paralyzed. He refused to go to the hospital, refused entry to any doctor in his house, and started his sadhana, meditations within 6 months, without any medication started walking and talking to a great extent. He lived up to the age of 86 years.
Once he was travelling by train to Vasai to go to Ganeshpuri. He had carried DasBodh with him and was reading the same on the train. He did not know that there was one page less in the book. When he reached Ganeshpuri and went to have Swami’s darshan, Swami told him that there was one page missing from the book. This is told to me by his daughter-in-law.
Vanita Shenoy is the daughter of Shri Anand Kamath, brother-in-law of Shri Sitaram Shenoy
