Lunch With Swamiji

At noon the front room became a dining hall and in the evenings a place of intimate worship.  Prabhupada kept the room, with its twelve-foot-square hardwood parquet floor, clean and bare; the solitary coffee table against the wall between the two courtyard windows was the only furniture.  Daily at noon a dozen men were now taking lunch here with him.  The meal was cooked by Keith, who spent the whole morning in the kitchen.

At first Keith had cooked only for the Swami.  He had mastered the art of cooking dal, rice, and sabji in the Swami’s three-tiered boiler, and usually there had been enough for one or two guests as well.  But soon more guests had begun to gather, and Prabhupada told Keith to increase the quantity (abandoning the small three-tiered cooker) until he was cooking for a dozen hungry men.  The boarders, Raphael and Don, though not so interested in the Swami’s talk, would arrive punctually each day for prasadam, usually with a friend or two who had wandered into the storefront.  Steve would drop by from his job at the welfare office.  The Mott Street group would come.  And there were others.