In plain words
Students! Since this purity of cooking cannot be checked, I shall show you a living example of how great it is to offer our food to God. Until quite recently there was the Saccidānanda āśram in Hṛṣīkeś. In it they would give food and roṭīs to all the sādhus. Devotees, and those who went there as pilgrims, would each arrange a meal for the sādhus. Merchants in Hṛṣīkeś too would give a meal to the sannyāsīs once a week or on some special day. Meanwhile a Marwari set up a shop selling all kinds of provisions. A man who weighed out rice, dal and the like worked for him. This man’s wife had died. He had a daughter of eighteen, of an age to marry. There was no one to arrange the girl’s marriage or to stay at home and look after her, poor man. While things stood so, the Marwari sent word to him through go-betweens. He did not have the courage to ask him direct. The Marwari was very young: sixty-five years old. They came asking him to give his eighteen-year-old daughter in marriage to this Marwari of sixty-five. The poor father wanted to be free of his duty to the girl somehow. He agreed. She will live well, surely. There will be plenty of comfort, to eat and to wear, he thought. He greedily hoped the man might help him too. At an auspicious hour he gave his daughter in marriage to the Marwari. From the day of the wedding the poor girl spent her days in nothing but tears. Whenever one looked at her, she was weeping. Thinking, “My life has come to misery, has it not?” On the third day they brought her to the Marwari’s house. None of the wealth and comfort she saw gave her any joy. The Marwari gave her houses, comforts, food and drink as much as she wanted, every convenience, silver, gold, this and that, every jewel she could want, poor fellow. Can money, gold, goods and carriages take away pain that is in the mind? No one can take that away. That same night, while the Marwari slept, snoring soundly, she opened the door and went out. She threw herself into the Gaṅgā. Then she was washed up on the bank. Everyone came to know. They recognised who she was. On the eleventh day, at the time of the rites the Marwari held, he sent two thousand rupees to the Saccidānanda āśram, asking them to make roṭīs, pāyasam, vaḍas and whatever else was wanted, and to make them well. That day there was a fine feast for all the sannyāsīs in the āśram. They made rich almond kheer. They made halwa; they made everything. Everyone ate well. In that āśram lived a sādhu called Ātmānanda, pure of heart, spotless in citta, ever absorbed in dhyāna. He had come to Swami many times, poor fellow.