A story of greed By Sri Narasimha Swamiji

[Guest guest]

Sai Baba: Hallo! Veerabhadrappa! Even now, you have no pity for your

enemy Basappa though he has now taken birth as a frog, just as you have

turned into a serpent? Shame! Shame upon your hatred! Get rid of hatred

and rest in peace!

 

These words acted like magic. The snake let go its prey, dived into the

river and was lost to sight. The frog hopped away and hid in some tree.

 

Wayfarer: What a wonder! I cannot see why the snake dropped its prey at

your words. Which of these creatures is Veerabhadrappa? And which

Basappa? Give me their full history, please.

 

Sai Baba resumed his seat, shared a few puffs with his visitor at his

pipe and spoke: Some 6 or 7 miles off my place, there was a village

sanctified by a temple of Maheshwara. That temple was getting

dilapidated. So the villagers began to collect funds for its renovation.

The treasurer appointed was a rich miser. He spent but little of the

collections on the renovation which consequently made very poor

progress; and he swallowed much of the public funds. Seeing the work

thus hampered, God appeared in a dream and told the wife of the

treasurer: " If you spend any money in renovating this temple, Maheshwara

will give it to you back a hundredfold " . On waking, the wife

communicated the dream to her husband. But he sniffed " expenditure " as

the drift of her dream and this Shylock would launch into no such

venture. He replied that this was no business proposition. Was he not

the man in charge of funds? If God meant business, would He not have

come to him? And how far was he from her?

 

Another night, God again came to the wife in her dream and said: " Do not

bother yourself about your husband and his money. Give, if you like, out

of your own. " The wife then told her Lord that she was going to endow

the temple with the value of her own jewels. They were worth Rs. 1000.

Then this treasurer, not content with the amounts already embezzled by

him, wanted to do Maheshwara, even in this transaction. He told the wife

that he would take the jewels himself and give them to God i.e. the

temple, his vast stretch of land as its endowment; and the simple woman

agreed. But the land was not his. It was the property of one Dubaki, a

poor widow, who was just then too poor to redeem it. But there was no

period of limitation for exercising the right of redemption. And the

present possession of the land was worth nothing. It was barren, saline

coastland yielding nothing in the best of seasons.

 

Thus ended this transaction; and sometime later there was a terrific

storm. Lightning struck down the house of the treasurer. He and his wife

died. That lady was born in the same village, as the daughter of the

temple priest, to whom the above land, had been given as service inam.

And she was named Gowri. She had come back to enjoy the land and the

priest who was very fond of her devoted the land to her use. Then he

adopted a boy Basappa who was no other than Dubaki, the mortgager of

that land in the previous birth. Basappa was to have the reversion after

or a joint right with Gowri.

 

Gowri had to be married and the priest came to his great friend Sai

Baba, living in a mosque in that birth also, and asked for advice. Baba

told him to wait for the man destined to marry her would himself soon

turn up. Then came a poor boy of their caste, named Veerabhadrappa, and

he married Gowri. Who was Veerabhadrappa? That embezzler of public

money, and God's money, the treasurer. He had been born of poor parents

at Muttra and named Veerabhadrappa. Veerabhadrappa was at first devoted

to Baba as the latter had proposed his marriage to Gowri.

 

(to be contd..)

(Source Sri Sai padananda Jan 1999)