At eleven o’clock they called me to say that Pranab-da was waiting for me. I said, “I am so sorry. It is eleven o’clock. Please forgive me. I will come tomorrow.”
Pranab-da came on the line and said, “No, you have to come today.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “You have so many foreign admirers. In their own countries they cannot approach you. When they came to know that you would visit me, they asked if they could be present. They have been waiting here since 8:30 to see you.”
I said, “O my God, O my God!”
So I went to visit my friend. One foreign admirer was from Africa. God knows how he heard about me! One was from Manchester, and somebody else was from New Zealand. There were these three non-Indians, plus a few Indians. I was supposed to go there at nine o’clock, so from 8:30 they had been waiting with the hope of seeing me.
When I arrived, the visitor from Manchester approached me with folded hands. He begged me to have a photo taken with them. He said, “We know so much about you in England, but we can never come near you. Now that you are here, and people said you are accessible, we wanted to see you. Please allow us to have a picture taken with you.”
Unfortunately, my friend Pranab-da is now confined to his chair. When the visitors saw that we could not all be in the picture together, they said, “Let us at least have a picture of you and Dada together.”
They took two very nice pictures of Pranab-da and me sitting side by side.From:Sri Chinmoy,My express visit to India, Agni Press, 1995
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