Shrirang

In the lanes of Devla, a trading village in the Dhundhar country that would later grow into the kingdom of Jaipur, a young householder named Shrirang was going about some ordinary business of the day when a man stopped in front of him and spoke his name. Shrirang looked twice. He knew this face. It belonged to a servant who had once carried water and swept the courtyard of his family's house, a man who had died some time before and been mourned and, in the way of households, half forgotten. Yet here he stood, unaged, dressed in something that was not quite the cloth of the living, addressing Shrirang with the same easy familiarity he had used across that courtyard years earlier.

"Do not be afraid, merchant," the visitor said, "I have not come to trouble you, only to repay an old kindness with a stranger one." He explained, in the plain way one might describe a change of employment, that since leaving this world he had entered the service of Dharmaraj, the lord of the dead, and had risen there to be one of his principal yamadoots, the messengers sent out to close the accounts of the living when their hour comes. He had been sent to this very village on business, he said, and seeing his old master, he could not pass without showing him something worth seeing.

"Look there," the yamadoot said, pointing toward a knot of banjara traders who had brought their pack-bullocks into Devla to buy grain. "I have come for the life of one of those men. Watch, and I will take it by making his own bull turn its horns on him, this very hour. Watch closely, merchant, and understand something: without bhakti to Sri Sitaram, this is the kind of death that waits for every person in this world, however comfortable his house, however full his granary. It is a low death, a death with no meaning in it. If, having seen this with your own eyes, some grace stirs in you and wakes you from your sleep, then go and take refuge at the feet of Sri Anantanand Swami."

Shrirang followed him to the spot, more from the sudden dread the words had put in him than from any wish to see a man die. What he saw stayed with him the rest of his life, by every account the Bhaktamal keeps of him: the banjara's own bull, the beast he had walked beside and fed and driven for years, wheeled without warning and drove its horns into its master's body, killing him where he stood. Shrirang watched the man he had never met fall in the dust of his own village, and when he turned to speak to the servant who had brought him there to see it, there was no one beside him at all.

Whatever comfort Shrirang had taken until then in his family's trade and his family's faith, that comfort did not survive the sight of the banjara in the dust. He set aside, from that day, the observances of the household in which he had been raised, a family that had followed the Jain Shravak path with sincerity and long habit, and he went looking for the teacher the vision had named. He found Anantanand Swami, a direct disciple of the great Ramananda and already, in those early years of the movement Ramananda had set moving through northern India, one of its most trusted elders. From him Shrirang received the pancha-samskara, the five sacraments of Vaishnava initiation, crowned by the Ram-mantra, and he did not leave his household to do it. He stayed a grihastha, a man with a home, a wife, and in time a son, and became within that ordinary life one of the great devotees of his generation.

No chronicle beyond the Bhaktamal itself fixes the years of Shrirang's birth or death, and none should be invented here to fill that silence. What can be said with some confidence, because Nabhadas's root verses name him for it directly, is that he stood among the small circle Anantanand raised to the front rank of the sampradaya: Gayesh, Karamchand, Alhadas, Krishnadas Payahari, Sariramdas, and Shrirangacharya, touched by their guru's feet until, the old verse says, they shone with a glory equal to the lokapalas, the guardians who hold up the four quarters of the world. It is good company for a merchant's son who had, not long before, been an ordinary man doing an ordinary errand in an ordinary lane.

Years later, in that same household, a different kind of fear moved in. Shrirang's own son began to waste away, sleeping badly, eating little, flinching at shadows, until his father sat him down and pressed him for the reason. The boy admitted, haltingly, that something came to him at night, something that was not a dream, and that he had been too frightened to speak of it before. Shrirang did not scold him for his silence. He simply told the boy to sleep elsewhere that night, and went himself to lie down in the boy's usual place, a weapon within reach, and waited for whatever it was to come at its accustomed hour.

It came. Shrirang rose in anger, ready to strike at the shape in the dark, and the thing that had been terrorizing his son threw itself down and begged him to stop. It was not, it said, a demon with any wish to harm the boy for harm's sake. It had been, in life, a goldsmith of that same village, a man who had let his heart go toward another man's wife, and the weight of that betrayal had bound him after death into the wandering, hungry existence of a preta, unable to rest, unable to move on to whatever came next. It had drifted through the world searching for someone whose grace might loosen that binding, and something in it had recognized, in Shrirang, a man capable of granting it.

Shrirang's anger did not survive the confession any better than his old faith had survived the banjara's death. He knelt by the spirit that had spent months frightening his child and, in the plainest gesture of Vaishnava mercy available to him, gave it charanamrit, the water that has touched the feet of the Lord, and prayed over it. The preta was released from its low and grasping form and rose, the story remembers, into a divya roop, a form of light, freed at last into whatever good gati awaited it. It is a small scene in the record, a father solving a household trouble, but it carries the whole of Shrirang's theology inside it: that the mercy which had rescued a frightened merchant from a meaningless death was not his alone to keep, and that even a soul bound by its own worst hour was not beyond the reach of a devotee's compassion.

One more visitor found his way to that house, and this time Shrirang did not see him coming at all. He was deep in manasi puja, the wholly inward worship in which a devotee builds the entire ritual, the bathing, the robing, the offering, inside the theatre of his own mind, and had just set an imagined crown upon the imagined form of the Lord when he found, in his mind's eye, that the garland he meant to lay beside it was cut a little too short to sit right. Before he could puzzle out the difficulty himself, a voice called to him from outside the room, from outside the house even, telling him simply to loosen the knot and let the garland fall open. It was exactly the answer his private, unseen difficulty required, and no one alive should have known that difficulty existed at all.

Shrirang came out of his worship shaken and went looking for whoever had spoken. He found a wandering mendicant standing near his door, plainly dressed, and in his confusion he put his question badly, demanding to know who this stranger was with none of the courtesy owed to an unknown sadhu. The visitor did not take offense; he only pointed out, gently, that this was not how a devotee asked a holy man his name, that one offered one's own name and one's need first. Corrected, and humbled by the correction as much as by the earlier voice from nowhere, Shrirang asked again properly, and learned that his guest was Pipa: once the Rajput ruler of Gagaron, who had laid down his throne and his kingdom to take initiation from Ramananda himself, and who was, through that same guru, an elder guru-brother of Shrirang's own Anantanand. Shrirang fell at his feet. Pipa stayed in that house for a month, and by every telling that has come down of it, the whole village of Devla turned, in that month, toward the worship of Sri Sitaram.

Shrirang's own line did not end with him. The Bhaktamal records that Narharidas came after him as his disciple, carrying the lamp forward another generation in the household he had rebuilt around a vision he never asked to see. What remains of Shrirang, across these few remembered scenes, is not the biography of a famous man but the shape of an ordinary one who was shown, once, exactly what an unblessed life comes to, and who spent the rest of his days making sure his own household, his own son, and even a stranger's tormented ghost, were not left to that same low ending. It is worth praying, reading this, that whatever grace found him in that Devla lane on an unremarkable morning might find the rest of us as plainly.