Jai Radhu!

 

Radhu looked upto her aunt for everything in her life. She had lost her father while she was in her mother’s womb and lost her mother to insanity soon after birth. As a child she was crying, desperately crawling to catch her mother who was herself mentally a child then and was playing about trailing strings of many colors. Her aunt had rushed to take her up at that moment.

She grew on her aunt’s lap. Her aunt too was suffering from the loss of uncle and Radhu was her god-sent prop. But her aunt was soon becoming god-mother to each and every child and grown-up near and far and was doing a great job counseling many people and guiding the destiny of countless people who came to her.

Radhu surely must have felt jealous of all this. Which child would like a hundred sibling brothers and sisters competing?

She grew up a good girl. Her aunt did whatever she could to make Radhu educated though her other relatives, going with the times, tried to prevent the girl from getting smart.

Her marriage, done with glittering ceremony, was not a great success.

She turned to her aunt again. But she had her greatest shock when her aunt, in her last days, refused her.

Did it hurt her love?

Soon when Radhu’s end came, she bravely preferred to die of tuberculosis in the hut in which she had lived with her aunt, with her sacred memories than in a modern hospital with all facilities, in holy Varanasi.

She and her aunt were both beings of light, each acting according to her script.

Jai Radhu!

 

Swami Sampurnananda, Genre 273, No. 24.