Prabhupada Talks of His Childhood

He talked of his childhood at the turn of the century, when street lamps were gas-lit, and carriages and horse-drawn trams were the only vehicles on Calcutta’s dusty streets.  These talks charmed the boys even more than the transcendental philosophy of "Бхагавад-гита" and drew them affectionately to him.  He told about his father, Gour Mohan De, a pure Vaisnava.  His father had been a cloth merchant, and his family had been intimately related with the aristocratic Mulliks of Calcutta.  The Mulliks had a deity of Krishna, and Prabhupada’s father had given him a deity to worship as a child.  He used to imitate the worship of the Govinda deity in the Mulliks’ temple.  As a boy, he had held his own Ratha-yatra festivals each year, imitating in miniature the gigantic festival at Jagannatha Puri, and his father’s friends used to jest: “Oh, the Ratha-yatra ceremony is going on at your home, and you do not invite us?  What is this?”  His father would reply, “This is a child’s play, that’s all.”  But the neighbors said, “Oh, child’s play?  You are avoiding us by saying it’s for children?”

Prabhupada fondly remembered his father, who had never wanted him to be a worldly man, who had given him lessons in mrdanga, and who had prayed to visiting sadhus that one day the boy would grow up to be a devotee of Radharani.