Ranchoddoss was not really very different from any other member of the family. He was hard-working, devoutly honest (a lie on earth costs a kingdom in Vaikuntha — heaven, his mother used to say) and was a genteel husband. He had two elderly sons, one nineteen and the other fourteen, and a daughter called Sudha. The boys were good at school, and so was the girl, though she went to Saint Mary’s Convent School, off Peddar Road. The bus took her to school and brought her safely back. Sudha was always the pet of Ramaben, her mother, and, ‘Sudha do this,’ and ‘Sudha do that’ ran like a thread amidst the noises of the household, for all the brothers lived together, and their children as well, but Sudha was the most loved of all. She was also the youngest. They say on the day she was born suddenly a peacock, wings outstretched and keening, strutted past the courtyard (the mother had gone to Kathiawar, to her own mother, for the childbirth) and everybody said: ‘Well, this girl, she will bring in holy riches.’ However no gold-lotuses rose in the backyard fountain on Girgaum Road, but money came in more and more — the Maharaja of Bhavnagar sent his own Dewan for the nephew’s marriage, and since the purchases went over a lakh of rupees (and those were the true old days when the rupee was still worth its weight in solid silver) and the honesty of Ranchoddoss impressed the Dewan so greatly, the Rajas of Gwalior and Indore came along, and even that American wife of the old Indore Maharaja. Sudha brought prosperity no doubt, but Sudha who was so full of song and fun, suddenly grew serious, as the women’s things on her chest arose, and she would hide her face behind pillars, even when her uncles and cousins passed by, or on her bed lie covered up with a light white sheet, all day. She hated talk, and she began to go less and less to school — but who cares? — a girl is meant for marriage as a wheel is destined for the cart. You don’t use a wheel for a ladder or for hanging your clothes on, do you? The wheel is meant for a chariot, a bullock cart, or even for a brougham, like those wheels rotting at the housedoor as there is no spring or axle to wheel the box. And all that European talk of women going to become politicians or professors is so much like making the river run backwards back. Of course you can make the river run backwards through canals, etc. But when the floods come, the dam and the sluices and the canals are washed away as so many cold weather leaves — so too the woman.
Yes, Sudha was very much a girl — a woman, in fact, for she was fourteen years of age, and she hated marriage. For her marriage (and all the girls at St Mary’s Convent School, only talked of boys and marriages) was something stupid, no, more than stupid — sinful. ‘Why touch a man?’ was her problem. Men seemed to her (all except her father, her uncles, her brothers) either awkward or evil. One never understood from where she got this idea — some said later it’s the way the Christian girls talked of boys, or it’s after she started going to films, and it’s the European films that did it. Sudha, however, sat for hours on end in the family sanctuary, repeating the Name of the Lord. ‘Rama, Sri Rama,’ she said and went on naming His Name a thousand times, and little by little three thousand times, a day. She even started on fasts and days of silence, and sometimes took a vow to name the Name-of-Rama a lakh of times in ten days. She grew pale but beautiful. The family did not worry — she was after all only fifteen.
But one night, however, a few years later she had a real vision. In three days, it revealed, a sadhu would come to initiate her, and she would then become a true devotee of the Lord. Indeed, as foretold (and she had told no member of her family of this vision, except it be to her father, whom she revered), a handsome-looking sadhu, hardly thirty-five years of age, came into the house. He was a man from the South, and was, so he explained, on his way to Badrinath and Kedarnath in the Himalayas, and then finally he would come down and go, he would, to the holy city of Benares. ‘Passing by this street, Mother,’ he said to Ramaben, ‘I could see some sincere soul was living here. Is there anyone living in this house who’s deeply devoted to the Lord?’ Sudha, who was inside, knew this was the saint whose arrival she was anticipating, and throwing away her bedsheet, and coming out, fell prostrate at his sacred feet. ‘Too long have I waited for you,’ said the Sadhu. ‘Where have you been?’ ‘You, Lord, know more than I do,’ she whispered back in reply. The Mother could not understand. But Sudha suddenly remembered, so she explained later, all of her past life. A large house, somewhere in Kathiawar, or was it elsewhere? They spoke a strange tongue. She was forty or forty-five years of age, and had raised four or five children. And they were gay and prosperous, horses in the stables and elephants in the yard — some men went to the wars, others played cards or roamed with women, but her husband suddenly died and she then knew she loved him more than she did God Himself. Her husband was, though a prince and real Rajput, the worshipper of a great Guru. For every sneeze and scratch he would run to the ashram of his Guru which was on the marble cliffs of our beautiful Narbada. She did not care for God. But once her husband had departed, her one thought was he, and her union with him. How noble it was in the old virtuous days: you could be burnt with your spouse, your Lord. It’s a pity the British came and stopped it all. She went back to the same ashram on the Narbada, But the Guru had, by now, given up his body. His disciple who had succeeded him gave her a secret mantra. She repeated the mantra again and again and vowed she would find God now that she had no husband. She died however without seeing God and not even having an intimation of His Holy Presence. She died beautifully though (she could now see her own funeral procession) — people throwing flowers on her bright, elderly, saintly figure.
And she was then born to Ranchoddoss, and when the time came, the past life returned too, if not tell me why this hatred of marriage? Her Lord of one life was the Lord of all lives. And there he was. He knew. She ‘saw’. And he stayed on in the house, and in a way the whole house became a roundabout for him — the elders said even the business was suffering because of this Sadhu. After three months, on an auspicious day Sadhu Sunderanandaji (for that was his name) initiated her with the full consent of Ranchoddoss and Ramaben, to sannyas. She put on the white sari and a few days later with the sadhu, she departed for the Himalayas. Her family did not weep — they were too grave to weep (except the mother, who said, “Lucky I am to have borne you, my daughter, but Lord give me peace of mind. I cannot live one day without my daughter’). However the household moved on as before except that Ranchoddoss began to look more and more like his daughter, talk like his daughter, and he also began to fast and festivate for this and that. The business nevertheless prospered. His two sons Govinddoss and Vithaldoss were honest, devout and money-minded. Now and again when the business was not too bright, he would open to Vishnu Purana or the Bhagavatham, and read chapter after chapter of one of these sacred texts.