Pusta Krishna Prabhu comes to the Seva Ashram in the evening to give the lecture at the weekly Sunday feast. It has been over a year since I last saw him.
After the arati and the lecture, Pusta Krishna Prabhu and I take prasadam together, and he asks me about my visit to South Africa with Goswami Maharaj in June last year. Pusta Krishna Prabhu toured South Africa with Srila Prabhupada in October 1975, during Srila Prabhupada's first and only visit to that country.
I tell him that while I was in South Africa, I stayed for a while at the Prema Shanti Ashram in Chatsworth as a guest of Jivananda Prabhu's father, Mr. Krishna Swami Naidoo. Mr. Naidoo met Srila Prabhupada at the Louis Botha airport on his arrival in Durban, and helped to arrange for Srila Prabhupada's transport while he stayed in that seaside resort.
Jivananda Prabhu still has, and Pusta Krishna Prabhu still remembers, the original brown poster advertising Srila Prabhupada's "First Personal Appearance in South Africa." Pusta Krishna Prabhu has many personal recollections of that visit to South Africa, and we reminisce about the devotees, then and now, in Durban and Pietermaritzburg.
Pusta Krishna Prabhu was right there in my hometown, Durban, with Srila Prabhupada in October 1975. So many people went to see, and were inspired by Srila Prabhupad during that visit. Where was I? Alas, it would be six more years before I first heard about Krishna consciousness, when I read Srila Prabhupada's Bhagavad Gita As It Is in October 1981...
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