Speaking Tree - Conversations with Rishis on a cot in Karachi

Speaking Tree - Conversations with Rishis on a cot in Karachi:

I vividly remember the living room of our house in Karachi, where i lived with my parents and siblings as a child and a school boy. The walls of this room, the central dwelling area of our home, were adorned with pictures of saints and sages of East and West. We had no artistic pictures of natural scenes; nor did we have flowers or still life paintings or geometric patterns with which many homes were decorated even in those days. There were only photographs and portraits of holy ones, and they were all hung very high up on the wall.

As a young lad, i could not reach any of them -- except for one.

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This was a picture of Sri Dayaram Gidumal, which was not only the smallest of them all, but which was hung so low down that even my small hands could reach it. The reason that this saint was so accessible to my hands was probably that he was still alive at that time. (If I remember right, he passed away in 1927, when i was nine years old. ) Therefore, the older and earlier saints who were no longer on this earth plane, were symbolically placed at a higher level!In those days, there was a low cot in our living room, which was slid away under the divan during the day.

I had told my family that i wished to sleep on my own at night. They said that i could sleep on the cot in the living room. I liked being on my own, even if it meant sleeping on the cot. Being on my own in a fairly crowded family house felt like royalty, as far as i was concerned. The cot under the divan became a great favourite spot of mine. Even during the day, when no one was around, I would quietly slip under the divan and lie down on the cot. I would take Rishi Dayaram’s picture down and take it with me.

No one was aware of this.   In my cozy cot under the large divan, i felt very happy and comfortable with the Saint’s portrait for company. Somehow, i felt instinctively close to him, and many were the intimate conversations i had with him!For those of you who may not have heard of him, Rishi Dayaram was a jewel of the Sindhi community. Born in a wealthy family of philanthropists, Dayaram was one of the greatest scholars of Sind, becoming the first Sindhi to win the prestigious Ellis Prize for standing ‘First class First’ in English, in Bombay University.

(This was an achievement to be repeated later by Gurudev Sadhu Vaswani). Rishi Dayaram rendered yeomen service to the cause of education in the Sind Province, founding centres in education known for their culture of discipline and value based education. This was the great soul who kept company with me on my cot in the living room. Many were the conversations I had with him, and many were the valuable lessons he taught me!Here’s a thought: True happiness, is an inner quality. It is a state of mind.

If your mind is at peace, you are happy. But if you lack peace of mind, you can never be happy.