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.
He had endured acute suffering in his right arm before and after the operation in 1943 at Lucknow. He had gone into the operation theatre singing a ghazal, and emerged equally cheerful. The doctor had put a metal clasp around his 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 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. It was that he felt it, and endured it without demur.
The illnesses that came to Shri Nathji’s body were never his own.
Truly, when ordinary men suffered, it was from the law of Karma. They would be paying for their 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.