mother, she was obliged to use this room as a provision store and kitchen also. Thus she sat and slept with vegetable baskets and sacks of rice and pulses about her, while above her head hung in slings the pots containing special articles of food to suit the Master's delicate stomach. 'The room,' the Holy Mother used to say in later days, 'was so low that at first I would knock my head against the upper frame of the door. One day, I got a cut on the head. Then I became accustomed to it. The head bent of itself as soon as I approached the door. Many stout aristocratic women of Calcutta frequently came there. They never entered the room. They would stand at the door and lean forward holding the jambs. And peeping in they would remark, addressing me, "Ah, what a tiny room for our good girl! She is, as it were, in exile, like Sita." '
1.
The Master was not blind to the difficulties of her life at the Nahabat. But he was helpless in the matter of remedying them. For death had already removed from him his ardent devotee Mathuranath, the son-in-law of Rani Rasmani and the proprietor of the temple, who used to look after all his personal needs with scrupulous attention and unstinting liberality. Mathur would have made every arrangement for the Holy Mother's comfortable stay at Dakshineswar, had she gone there in his lifetime. But the new proprietor who succeeded him was not so close to the Master.
Besides, there was no other place in the temple suitable for her residence. For she was very shy by temperament and could never stand the public gaze. Even before the Master, she appeared only veiled in her
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1 While recounting these, the Holy Mother would turn to her nieces and say, 'You won't be able to stay in such a room even for a day' 'True, aunt!' they would ejaculate, 'everything is so different with you.' Today when we think of those days of the Holy Mother's life with a devotional halo superimposed on it, we are not likely to take a realistic view of the situation as it existed then, and therefore fail to make a proper estimate of the privation that the Mother had to suffer and the glorious ideal of devotion she has set thereby. No other devotee of the Master had to stand anything like that, except it be some of the young devotees of the Master like Swami Ramakrishnananda who waited on him day and night at his sick bed in his last days. This aspect of the Mother's life is an example of the highest ideal of Bhakti as Seva (service) wherein the difference between personal enjoyment and suffering gets lost in the sense of elation brought about by the knowledge that it is all undergone for the welfare or pleasure of the object of reverential love.