Vedantic Tales : The Blue Pellet

It is no use, sir, Madhav said to the sadhu who had befriended him. To leave her would be to kill her.

The sannyasin drew back the corners of his mouth and looked off across the river. The iron gray stubble that covered his scalp gave him a look of severity. He said nothing.

They were sitting on the worn stone steps of a broad ghat that led down to the waters of the Ganga. For hundreds of years, geruaclad sadhus had stopped here on their way from one place of pilgrimage to another. They would sit alone, doing japa or meditating, or they would give religious discourses to villagers who gathered around them men on one side, women on the other. They would beg their meals from houses in the neighborhood, which is how Madhav's mother had met this stern sadhu who now wanted to steal her son. He had talked awhile with her, and she had, indeed, liked him.

The ghat was like a temple to Madhav: the unbroken, persistent search for God, the long, unwavering devotion arising through the centuries from the hearts of hundreds of thousands of sadhus and devotees seemed to permeate the stone steps, even as the waters of the holy Ganga had washed them through un reckoned time. The atmosphere here was like a palpable force. He longed to be a part of it, to carry it with him wherever he went, to be a sadhu among sadhus. He had often talked earnestly about his desire to renounce the world with the sannyasins, and this particular sannyasin, after questioning him at length, had agreed to initiate him. It had been on that occasion that Madhav had run all the way home and burst in upon his mother.

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