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IV

YATRA – PILGRIMAGE
“I thought of Thee and was caught in Thy Grace; And like a spider in Thy web didst Thou Keep me captive to swallow me in Thine own hour.” (Aksharamanamala of Sri Maharshi) The builders had put the finishing touches to my small mud hut in Palakottu garden on April 4, 1936, and although its walls and lime plaster were still wet, I decided to enter it the very next day. Palakottu is a large garden of about ten acres in area granted by the Government over eighty years ago to a ViraShaiva community for the purpose of growing flowers in it for the big Arunachaleswara temple in the township of Tiruvannamalai. It lies on the Western boundaries of Ramanashram, and has a clean and well-preserved deep tank seasonally fed by the rain water, which falls down the slopes of the sacred Arunachala hill, apart from two or three natural springs in its bottom. Around the huge, century-old trees of this garden, devotees of Sri Ramana Bhagavan since many years had built their small kutirs, where at different times lived Paul Brunton, Yogi Ramiah, Sri B.V. Narasimhaswami, the author of “Self-realisation,” Sri Muruganar Swami, the Tamil poet who filled a bulky tome of songs in praise of Sri Bhagavan, and many others, and where some sadhakas still live. In Palakottu, then the only inhabited place within a mile radius from the Ashram, I chose for my hut a lonely site to
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