Please give me his address."
"You mean Ram Gopal Muzumdar. I call him the 'sleepless saint.'
He is always awake in an ecstatic consciousness. His home is at
Ranbajpur, near Tarakeswar."
I thanked the pundit, and entrained immediately for Tarakeswar.
I hoped to silence my misgivings by wringing a sanction from the
"sleepless saint" to engage myself in lonely Himalayan meditation.
Behari's friend, I heard, had received illumination after many
years of KRIYA YOGA practice in isolated caves.
At Tarakeswar I approached a famous shrine. Hindus regard it with
the same veneration that Catholics give to the Lourdes sanctuary in
France. Innumerable healing miracles have occurred at Tarakeswar,
including one for a member of my family.
"I sat in the temple there for a week," my eldest aunt once told
me. "Observing a complete fast, I prayed for the recovery of your
Uncle Sarada from a chronic malady. On the seventh day I found a
herb materialized in my hand! I made a brew from the leaves, and
gave it to your uncle. His disease vanished at once, and has never
reappeared."
I entered the sacred Tarakeswar shrine; the altar contains nothing
but a round stone. Its circumference, beginningless and endless,
makes it aptly significant of the Infinite. Cosmic abstractions are
not alien even to the humblest Indian peasant; he has been accused
by Westerners, in fact, of living on abstractions!
My own mood at the moment was so austere that I felt disinclined
to bow before the stone symbol.
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