The Atheist and The Lord

 

This is more of a personal account of one of our family stories, and the reason we are ardent devotees of Lord Shiva. We mythologically trace our roots to the age of Ramayana, as descendants of Sage Vasistha's lineage from Sage Saktri while historically we have records of our immediate family as early as the time of Babur and that of our ancestors from Kanauj.

Family Origins:

This was Gaur Banga or Bengal. My forefathers lived in the Jessore districts of present-day Bangladesh. They were descendants of Shaktri, the son of Ved Vyas, whose family lived in Kanauj U.P. and we are direct descendants of Sage Vasistha who taught Rama the Vedas. The Shaktri clan travelled from the Vasistha Ashram near River Beas to Kanauj in UP ( Present Uttarakhand) to teach and practice medicines there. They were Vedic-age Vaidyas. They were learned people of the Brahmin class trained to cure difficult diseases. Pandit Saktridhar Sen and his family were invited to King Adhisur's court in Bengal for his reputation as a curer.

Pandit Saktri Sen's original home was at Kanyakubja in Kanauj. Our Bengal family tree traces back to Srivatsa Sen who is the tenth generation from Saktridhar. We are often regarded as Sen Sharma in our religious rituals instead of Gupta.

Vasistha our forefather

The story:

Doctor Sarbeshwar Sen was my grandfather's grandfather. He was a medical practitioner at Jessore and the only one from his native village at Itna to become a surgeon. It was the time of the Islamic rulers of Bengal and his grandfather used to get gold coins as rewards for his surgeries from the city dwellers of Murshidabad. Our house at Itna as described by my grandfather was a large one and built by his forefathers.
When Sarbeshwar practised, it was an age of unrest between the Nawabs and the East India Company. Nevertheless, he maintained his practice at Jessore and had five sons and five daughters. His third son Pravat Sen is my great-grandfather. Sarbeshwar was the son of Kashiswar. Our ancestral home used to have Durga pujas every year and there was a Narayani Sheela (Black stone depicting Narayan) at our home. Only high-ranked Brahmins used to have this stone and it cannot be brought or sold, only passed from generation to generation in one family. We were not Kulin Brahmins or Brahmin by birth but because our family served as medicine men we were raised to the standards of the then social status.

One night Lord Shiva came to Sarbeshwar's dreams and told him to pray and bow to the Lord at his temple at Deoghar or Deogarh in present-day Jharkhand. It is one of the twelve jyotirlingas of the Lord. Being a person of a scientific mind and an atheist, he ignored the dream. After a few months he got the same dream again and this time the Lord angrily warned him of the consequences. Within a few months, his eldest son died of Liver failure leaving behind a teenage widow and a minor son. His second son followed with the same dream. He refused to worship the Lord. My great-grandfather Pravat Sen, his third son, fell ill. He too was diagnosed with liver cancer by another doctor and sent away to a place near Deogarh for rest. He was given strict instruction by his father not to visit the temple of the Lord. He died on his way back from there. My grandfather was only a year old and his mother was eighteen. Sarbeshwar's wife and daughters urged him to go to Deogarh once but he refused to budge.

The rest of his sons faced death within a year followed by his daughters. When his last son died young and heirless, angered he threw away the Narayan Sheela in the Bhairav River and stopped the Durga pujas at the ancestral place. The people of the village feared the wrath and curse of the gods on the family. Financially their position also became worse as the earning members of the family, all doctors by profession, were no longer alive. My grandfather moved to Kolkata at an early age and started working, along with his elder brother hoping to support the twenty-one other members of the family. When his last daughter was alive and ill Sarbeshwar's wife went into the Durga temple and urged the goddess to spare her life. She sat there all day in prayers not paying heed to her husband's warnings. The next day the daughter felt better and recovered but her mother was found dead inside the Durga temple.

Every relative isolated themselves from the family. They called him the madman. The wrath of the Lord was inevitable. The widows of his sons begged him to go to Deogarh but he did not. The Lord came to his dreams time and again. Sarbeshwar lived for eighty years and during his last days my grandfather, who treated him like a father figure, was always beside the man.

At night Sarbeshwar used to Shout in pain and say " There he is, trying to kill me with his trident. Go away you!" But nobody could be seen or heard. The day he died everyone rushed to his room at his call and found him lying on the floor blood-soaked. There were marks of three dots from a sharp weapon on his shoulder. But there was nobody who entered or left the room. People said it was Shiva's wrath. My grandfather saw these himself and could not believe his eyes. Nor did he expect anybody else to believe him.

Our village as shown on Wikimapia

After Sarbeshwar's death, the curse seemed to lure as many of his grandchildren also died at a tender age, and some could not have children. My grandfather too struggled to make ends meet and make a living in Kolkata after the Partitions. My father hearing this tale went to the Deogarh temple where we prayed to the Lord and felt his Divinity. It may also sound strange but coincidentally both I and my elder brother and were born on the Shivaratri tithi. And days got better after it.

This may be unbelievable to some and absurd to others, but my brother has heard these stories from my grandfather who eyewitnessed the situation, and my father heard the same from his grandmother, who was widowed at the age of eighteen. To our family, the story is more of a reality than blind faith. And sometimes the truth is true, stronger than fiction.