Divine Joy At Play- As Realized by Basumati-Ma

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The story is about Basumati-ma and how, as a simple Bengali child of a Brahmin priest family she enjoyed the special blessings of Sri Ramakrishna which continued all through her long life.

She tells some charming personal stories about Thakur Sri Ramakrishna that nobody else can tell. Sri Ramakrishna was her Dada (respected senior relative) and as a family relation he used to come frequently to her father's house. Gradually, step by step he revealed his divine nature to her and guided her spiritual life so that she could recognize him as the Avatar.

It's a story telling how spiritual visions carry with them a transforming purifying power. It is a story telling how human life can be elevated to a life of spiritual joy.

It is expected that this book will also introduce to the English reader some heretofore untold intimate stories about Sri Ramakrishna and his dearest disciples. Besides telling these stories, the author has taken care to highlight and explain pertinent cultural practices of those days so that the full flavour of the incidents can be appreciated.

I have been blessed with the Darshan of Basumati-Ma several times during her last years at Varanasi. After reading this manuscript telling of her own experience with Thakur Sri Ramakrishna I cannot help but describe the spiritual personality of Basumati-Ma as I experienced.

On one of these visits I was accompanied by Gayatri Devi. She was expecting to see a simple lady with spiritual fervour but humble because I had told her that the cells in the body of Basumati-Ma were purified and divinized. She was expecting to see a halo around Basumati-Ma just like the effluvium which came out of the body of Sri Ramakrishna. What we expected to see we could not see but we both felt a radiant joy permeating the atmosphere and flowing into our hearts.

This tiny aged lady sitting before us in a torn rag which probably the poorest beggar would not want to wear was calling out in a cheerful voice Thakur Sri Ramakrishna's name.

We wanted to hear from her some events of her own life but she evaded us. Whatever she wanted to say was always broken after two or three sentences with, "Bhagavan Ramakrishna- Bhagavan Ramakrishna." Even though these joyful calls had no logical place in the grammatical sequence of her talk, uttering the name of Sri Ramakrishna she couldn't help because it was in her blood. His name was in her breath and in her cells.

The spiritual world needed someone who could show all assets, worldly, mental and spiritual, are to be dedicated to Sri Ramakrishna for the welfare of the common man of the world.

There were, of course, other householders who had great spiritual love for Thakur. There was Girish Ghose who had confirmed and implicit faith but his life pattern was that of a man of the theatre-not the life of a family man.