Back in India

Tiruchirapalli

In an hour and a half we reached Tiruchi airport where we were received by Sri G. Pattabhiram. He had made arrangements for our brief stay at his hospitable home in the city. He and his wife were both vying with each other in seeing that we were comfortable in their place. We were provided with delicious lunch. It was not the lunch by itself that was tasteful, but they had mixed with it a lot of their pure love.

T. B. Sanatorium, Trichur

The same afternoon we caught the train that would take us to Kanhangad. At Coimbatore Railway platform we were greeted by a large number of devotees of the place. At Shoranur we broke our journey in order to pay a visit to the T. B. Sanatorium near Trichur. We went there to see on Ashramite, Sri Dayanand and an Ashram woman-worker Choichi, who have been staying for some months in the Sanatorium for treatment. It need hardly be said that both of them, as also Dayanand’s wife and Choichi’s mother, were highly delighted to see us. Ramdas was the guest here of Dr. Gopalakrishna Iyer who was all love and devotion. After remaining for about an hour with Dayanand, Ramdas went out and visited the wards of other patients. There was quite a commotion caused in the Sanatorium by our visit. We met here also many Trichur devotees who had come to see Ramdas. It was a gala day for all who were with us on this happy occasion.

Back at Anandashram

We travelled from Shoranur by another train that reached Kanhangad at 3-30 p.m. on the 2nd January 1955. As usual, at the Railway station there were many Ashram devotees present to warmly receive us. We reached the Ashram in a few minutes. We returned after an absence of five months from the Ashram. Naturally all the Ashramites were supremely delighted to have us back in perfect health and cheerfulness.

Thus ended the world tour!

Rani Lalita Devi’s Motherly Love

Before concluding this narrative Ramdas wishes again to express his feelings with regard to the kindly and loving solicitude which Rani Lalita Devi evinced for Ramdas throughout the tour. Even in small details she was very particular that Ramdas should have all possible comfort during the tour. As regards the question of food on which Ramdas’ health greatly depended, she saw to it that Ramdas was provided with the right kind of diet—strictly vegetarian, consisting of such articles of food as would be suitable to his health. She would herself go into the kitchen wherever we stayed and get things prepared for him by her own hands, such as rice and vegetable curries. She was, al! along the tour, overwhelmingly tender and good to Ramdas in every way.

God loves His Devotees

God is indeed a lover of His devotees who rely on Him completely. It has been our experience throughout the tour that in many mysterious ways God has come to our help and relieved us of the strain which is incidental to long air-journeys and the changing circumstances of life while travelling from one country to another, covering vast spaces of land and water. Ramdas can only say here that the entire tour is a demonstration of how God looks after persons who have surrendered themselves to Him.

This aspect of the tour is perfectly patent. It has a great lesson for the non-believers to learn that there is an all-beneficent and all-powerful God controlling the destinies of human beings. It goes also to prove how, by surrendering ourselves to Him, we can draw light, inspiration, courage and protection from Him. Man is nothing by himself; but man is everything when he has attuned his life to the Divine. For to dwell in the Divine is to become the Divine. The individual then becomes the expression of the omnipresent Spirit—God. For him the entire world becomes the playground on which he plays as a child does in the front yard of its house. The keynote of such a life is perfect joy and freedom. Man’s conceit, which is the outcome of his denial or forgetfulness of God, is responsible for his misery and bondage.