There was the time when Shri Nathji was at Dehra Dun and he received a letter from his old devotee, Justice Nanavati, in which he wrote: O Nathji, you have forgotten me. I have had no letter from you from such a long time now…I have developed a very dangerous sore on my tongue which refuses to heal…I need your blessings… please cure me…. the doctors want to operate upon it.
No sooner had Shri Nathji got this letter than he began developing a sore on his tongue. The sore became big and dangerous and no medicinal treatment was of any use. His attendant at the time was Sardar Sohan Singh, who was greatly worried over the event. When all the cures proved of no avail, Shri Nathji went out with Sohan Singh to a chaat shop, and ate the chaat available. It proved to be a wondrous cure for the sore, which healed the very next day!
Sohan Singh was in a state of jubilation. Normally, the spiced water of the chaat would have aggravated the sore. But in Shri Nathji’s case it affected a complete cure! Another letter was received from Justice Nanavati a few days later: his sore had cured itself without any further treatment!And Sohan Singh said to Shri Nathji:
Uskaa chhaalaa liyaa aur chaat se thheek kar liyaa! You took his sore and cured it with chaat!
Shri Nathji showed an infinite capacity for enduring suffering. He would not complain when his body was racked by high fever and body aches. Indeed, his attendants would be hard put to discover whether he was really ill or not, so little did he appear to show the illness. He would deliver sermons while still in fever and pain, and continue to smile as if he were normal. And, most of all, he would go on giving endless peace and bliss to people even while being in physical pain himself.
He endured acute suffering in his right arm, before and after the operation, in 1943. He went into the operation theater singing a ghazal, and he emerged equally cheerful. The doctor had put a metallic strip around the arm, which had penetrated deep inside the flesh. This was revealed only when the plaster was removed and the wound discovered. Shri Nathji had not complained of the unbearable pain.
A body as delicate, as soft and beautiful as his, must have been much more sensitive to pain than normal human bodies. It was not that he did not feel the pain. He felt the pain as any normal human would have done, and even more so, but he endured it without complaint, and continued to give peace and happiness to others.
Shri Nathji used to say:
I am more sensitive to pain than ordinary human beings–this is because I am not accustomed to coming in a human body upon earth! However I endure the pain without complaining. I very seldom come into my body consciousness!
The illnesses that came to Shri Nathji’s body were never his own. Truly, when ordinary man suffered, it was from the law of Karma. He would be paying for his sins. But when the avatar suffered, it was for the sins of man.
The avatar intervened in the laws of his own creation, and removed the pain of others. But so that the law may not be violated altogether, he took the pain of the man’s karma upon himself. After all, the exacting law demanded that the pain must go somewhere. It was like one man shielding the body of another with his own body, and taking the blows meant for the other, upon himself. Or like the mother shielding her child from a stone and receiving the stone on her own body.