Blissful Smile…

How Bhagawan often goes an extra mile to bring an extra smile on His devotee’s face… Sri N.V.N. Somayajulu shares an incident depicting His special touch of grace, fulfilling an earnest desire of one of His devotees.

It happened in 1979. One year after arriving in Switzerland, my wife met by chance a Sai devotee in a super market. She recognised my wife as a Sai devotee by seeing Baba’s locket in her chain. She became friendly and later introduced us to another lady devotee, living at a distance of about 30 km from Berne. In a few months time, a housewife of a family living in the same building as ours started showing interest in Baba.

One day my wife and I were going round shopping and found three small photo frames, oval in shape and made of brass. They were of the size 7 x 4 cm and had a little design on them. An idea occurred to my wife that it would be nice to present the three frames with Baba’s pictures to those three ladies on the occasion of Diwali. Incidentally only three of these photo frames were available in that shop. We took the frames home and realized, then only that they were too small to contain any picture of Baba, we had at home, even with necessary alterations.

Around this time, interesting thing used to happen at the dressing table in our home. We kept a bunch of vibhuti packets in one of the drawers of the table. One vibhuti packet used to appear now and then on the top of the dressing table. I would keep it back inside, thinking that my wife might have by mistake kept it on the table. My wife would also notice the same thing from time to time and would keep the packet back inside the drawer supposing that I might have kept it, by mistake, on the table. We came to know from each other of this phenomenon only later.

After having failed to procure picture of Baba of the requisite size, as Diwali was fast approaching, I decided to make use of the picture on the vibhuti packets, lying in the drawer of the dressing table. Those pictures were of ordinary quality.

So, on one sunday morning, I went to the dressing table to take out the vibhuti packets from the drawer. But I saw on the table itself a vibhuti packet green in colour. As the packet carried a picture of Baba on it, I opened it to empty the vibhuti and to later cut out the picture. But, then what a surprise! I found three small colour pictures of Baba inside the packet. The pictures were nicely painted on a glazed paper and at the bottom of the pictures were printed the words “Blissful Smile”. I was so much shocked that I took a few minutes to call my wife to explain the incident. She was of course equally surprised at the event and told me about the phenomenon of one vibhuti packet appearing on the table now and then, which I explained earlier. To satisfy our curiosity we opened all the vibhuti packets lying in the drawer to see if they also contained any picture of Baba. There were none. As the three pictures were obviously meant for the three devotees mentioned above, we fixed the three pictures in the three frames and presented them in time for Diwali.

II Samastha Lokah Sukhino Bhavantu II