Blissful Smile
It happened in 1979. One year after arriving in Switzerland,
my wife met by chance a Sai devotee in a super market. She
recognised my wife as a Sai devotee by seeing Baba’s
locket in her chain. She became friendly and later introduced
us to another lady devotee, living at a distance of about
30 km from Berne. In a few months time, a housewife of a family
living in the same building as ours started showing interest
in Baba.
One day my wife and I were going round shopping and found
three small photo frames, oval in shape and made of brass.
They were of the size 7 x 4 cm and had a little design on
them. An idea occurred to my wife that it would be nice to
present the three frames with Baba’s pictures to those
three ladies on the occasion of
Diwali. Incidentally only three of these photo frames were
available in that shop. We took the frames home and realized,
then only that they were too small to contain any picture
of Baba, we had at home, even with necessary alterations.
Around this time, interesting thing used to happen at the
dressing table in our home. We kept a bunch of vibhuti packets
in one of the drawers of the table. One vibhuti packet used
to appear now and then on the top of the dressing table. I
would keep it back inside, thinking that my wife might have
by mistake kept it on the table. My wife would also notice
the same thing from time to time and would keep the packet
back inside the drawer supposing that I might have kept it,
by mistake, on the table. We came to know from each other
of this phenomenon only later.
After having failed to procure picture of Baba of the requisite
size, as Diwali was fast approaching, I decided to make use
of the picture on the vibhuti packets, lying in the drawer
of the dressing table. Those pictures were of ordinary quality.
So, on one sunday morning, I went to the dressing table to
take out the vibhuti packets from the drawer. But I saw on
the table itself a vibhuti packet green in colour. As the
packet carried a picture of Baba on it, I opened it to empty
the vibhuti and to later cut out the picture. But, then what
a surprise! I found three small colour pictures of Baba inside
the packet. The pictures were nicely painted on a glazed paper
and at the bottom of the pictures were printed the words “Blissful
Smile”. I was so much shocked that I took a few minutes
to call my wife to explain the incident. She was of course
equally surprised at the event and told me about the phenomenon
of one vibhuti packet appearing on the table now and then,
which I explained earlier. To satisfy our curiosity we opened
all the vibhuti packets lying in the drawer to see if they
also contained any picture of Baba. There were none. As the
three pictures were obviously meant for the three devotees
mentioned above, we fixed the three pictures in the three
frames and presented them in time for
Diwali.
Later on, I made several enquiries to know if anyone found
colour pictures inside vibhuti packets. No one replied me
in the affirmative.
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