My dear Srila Prabhupada,

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to your divine appearance in this miserable world of illusion.

Another year goes by and another year measures our inexorable steps to our inevitable date of departure. We are seeing more and more of our once-youthful, seemingly eternal companions do their last dance in the lap of death and disappear from our limited mortal view.

Looking at a collection of videos today about early ISKCON I realized that a good portion of those joyful enthusiasts whose forms of matter, frozen brief and fleeting on film, I took as their eternal selves and whom I took to be my immutable confederates in the samkirtana of Caitanya’s lila, are now gone, retreated behind the screen of matter, unmanifest to those who remain.

Where is Padmalocan, blest of vision beyond the ordinary and with special sight, who refused a chariot of the gods, now to be seen?

Where is Vicitravirya, whose last desire was to dance and chant down the hallows of Oxford Street harinama one more time with his co-conspirators of youthful exhuberant defiance all for the love of his guru and Krsna, now residing?

Where is the zestful Rasajna, beautiful and sparkling as she strode on stage to project to thousands the images of immortality and grace from the Ramayana and Puranic lore?

Where is the Goswami, Prabhupada’s Tamal, the preaching commander, the dutiful ever-watchful secretary and watchdog of his spiritual master’s last days on earth?

Where are Upendra, Gauri, Bali Mardan, Sudama, Amekhala, Hemanga, Nirguna Krsna, Lokamangala, Sridhara Swami, Jayananda, Mulaprakriti, Samjnata, Dhami, Kusakratha, Grahila, Lohitaksa, Rudrani, Aindra and all the many others, known and unknown, whose convivial embrace of ISKCON’s creation we thought would carry us together, ever-forward, ever-lucid, ever-linked, arm-in-arm, into the indestructable clime of transcendence?

One by one we are picked off, slipping out of these fallible cadavers to move on in obedience to the higher diktat, a command whose call cannot be contended, leaving gaps in the ISKCON fabric to be filled, or not, by those that survive and succeed us.

I am next. The time is marked although I know it not. I see so many going before. I write your words in my books: “And everyone is going to die. I am going to die tomorrow, he is going to die day after tomorrow-everyone will have to die. Who will live here? So what is the anxiety? Chant Hare Krsna. That’s all.” But I understand them not.

Those words of yours in your last days in Vrndavana when you told Satadhanya “Do not think this will not happen to you” I stubbornly think you were only speaking to him, not to me.

I look at the videos and see a form marked Hari-sauri dasa that I do not recognize in the mirror. The effortless energy and youthful strength, the careless disregard for time’s grinding wheel from those days of yore have left me with a legacy of disbelief.

The signs are all there for my imminent exit. Theoretically I know it, but in practice I avoid. I waste my time, I allow my attention to be distracted, I don’t do what I know I must. I pay spiritual lip-service even as my body deteriorates, and keep up the pretence of false immortality. In a flash I will be gone, but I don’t expect it will be soon.

How many more lifetimes of this charade will it take before I get serious about my fate, which the dictionary defines as a pre-determined outcome? When will I act with complete conviction that my destination is to join you and all your faithful disciples in what you described as “another ISKCON in the spiritual world”? Is there a place for me there, or will I have to stay behind with Mr. Nair?

I know the choice is mine. That one gift is your real legacy. Not the promise of eternal happiness in the best of company, of unlimited exchange with unparalleled freedom and illuminated being. These things are undoubtedly real. But do I want them? That choice you have left with us and us alone.

Srila Prabhupada, please forgive me for being so weak that I have to ask you to make sure I make the right choice. This very prayer I know contradicts the very principle for which I beg. And yet I must, because I find myself a miserable and undeserving miser, incapable of accepting your gift. With choice comes responsibility and I am a most irresponsible wretched being who toys with his allotted time and fails to utilize it for the fate you would bestow.

In Delhi in 1976, when Gurudas asked “What is krpa-siddhi” you replied: “Krpa-siddhi means that you are not willing to take this bag of money. I say, ‘Take it! Take it! Take it!’ That is krpa-siddhi. Even you are unwilling, I give you in your pocket, push it. That is krpa-siddhi.”

Srila Prabhupada, please make me a recipient of your gurukrpa-siddhi. You are all I have, and I chose you.

Your aspiring and wretched pretend servant,

Hari-sauri dasa