I had a very interesting night. I met with Samba, Hayagriva’s eldest son. He has multiple boxes of memorabilia that Hayagriva had stored at his mother’s house. As his grandmother approached the end of her life, Samba retrieved the boxes and has had them for five years.

He has started cataloging the items and amongst them he found a collection of letters that Hayagriva had from Srila Prabhupada to himself, his wife Shama, as well as some to Kirtanananda and a few others. Tilakini has been cross referencing them against the VedaBase, and has found 70 or more that aren’t in the archives.

Samba lent me the book that has copies of all the letters in the collection that Tilakini has been working with. I stayed up way too late reading through them as you may well imagine. Many of them are SP taking care of business, as he was prone to do, but lots of nectar too, and several about New Vrindaban.

I have started scanning some of them and getting them converted to digital form and have permission from Samba to post them on brijabasispirit.com so they will start showing up there soon, very soon.

He plans to compile them into a book about his father, along with all his BTG articles and other writings eventually, and he has also talked to BBT Archives about them getting access to the unpublished letters.

Besides the book of copies, he also has the originals in photo albums, along with some other stuff, like canceled checks to SP with

“For deposit only
AC Bhaktivedanta”

on the back. SP’s autograph!

I have seen a picture of Hayagriva being given gayatri mantra by SP and the very card on which SP hand printed out the mantras that he gave to Hayagriva at that time.

I have seen the recipe for carnamrta handwritten on the back of a letter to Shyam from SP. Yikes! What a nectar night for a fan of SP.

Samba had a harrowing story to tell about his trip to New Vrindaban. While the copies and other stuff were in NV, he had kept the original letters in a safe in Los Angeles. He was bringing them to NV I think so the devotees from the archives can do their thing with them, deacidifying or something like that.

In any case, he had them in his carry on luggage. He had to stow them in the back of the plane because there wasn’t any room in the over head by his seat. When he went to retrieve them when the plane was unloading, the bag was gone!

He immediately went to the counter and had the terminal paged, then went back to the plane to double check. Nothing. Sick to his stomach at the loss of such a treasure trove of nectar, he hopped on the tram to the main terminal. He was the only one on board and found himself in tears.

He went to the baggage carousel and announced in a loud voice that someone had taken his bag from the plane by mistake and could they please return it. Amazingly, he saw a man who had his bag! Even more amazing, he had gone to the wrong place, the arriving from San Fransisco carousel instead of the Los Angeles one, but so had the passenger who had taken his bag so he was able to retrieve it!

 

What are the odds? Hard not to see Krishna’s hand in that scenario. In any case, watch brijabasispirit.com for upcoming releases.