Howard Wheeler Meets Swamiji

Howard Wheeler was hurrying from his apartment on Mott Street to a friend’s apartment on Fifth Street, a quiet place where he hoped to find some peace.  He walked up Mott Street to Houston, turned left and began to walk east, across Bowery, past the rushing traffic and stumbling derelicts, and toward Second Avenue.

Howard:  After crossing Bowery, just before Second Avenue, I saw Swamiji jauntily strolling down the sidewalk, his head held high in the air, his hand in the bead bag.  He struck me like a famous actor in a very familiar movie.  He seemed ageless.  He was wearing the traditional saffron-colored robes of a sannyasi and quaint white shoes with points.  Coming down Houston, he looked like the genie that popped out of Aladdin’s lamp.

Howard, age twenty-six, was a tall, large-bodied man with long, dark hair, a profuse beard, and black-framed eyeglasses.  He was an instructor in English at Ohio State University and was fresh from a trip to India, where he had been looking for a true guru.

Prabhupada noticed Howard, and they both stopped simultaneously.  Howard asked the first question that popped into his mind: “Are you from India?”

Prabhupada smiled.  “Oh, yes, and you?”

Howard:  I told him no, but that I had just returned from India and was very interested in his country and the Hindu philosophy.  He told me he had come from Calcutta and had been in New York almost ten months.  His eyes were as fresh and cordial as a child’s, and even standing before the trucks that roared and rumbled their way down Houston Street, he emanated a cool tranquility that was unshakably established in something far beyond the great metropolis that roared around us.