The 20-year-old dancer who fed the teenage ascetic. Sri Ramana Maharshi and the Dancing Girl Rathnamma

The most moving story of the 20-year-old dancer who fed the teenage ascetic. Praise his memory: Rathnamma

Via: http://murtymandala.blogspot.com/2011/07/devoted-dancer.html

Many years later, recalling Ratnamma and her association with him, the Maharshi nostalgically remembered the past event in his own words in a talk on 12th April 1948 to his diarist Suri Nagamma: “Another thing happened when I was living under the Madhuka tree. A twenty year old dancing girl by name Ratnamma saw me one day while going to and coming out from the temple after her dance. She gradually got devoted to me and sometime later got disgusted with her profession. She told her mother that that she would not take food unless she gave some food to the Swami. So, both of them brought food to me. But I was in deep meditation at that time and opened neither my eyes nor my mouth, even when they shouted. But somehow they woke me by asking a passer by to pull me by the hand. They then gave me food and left. When Ratnamma insisted that she should daily feed the Swami before she took food, her mother said “You are quite young and so is the Swami. He does not wake until someone touches him and pulls him up. We can’t do that. What can we do?”. Ratnamma then asked a first cousin of hers for assistance and with his help she used to give me food daily. After sometime, the relatives of the boy felt that this work was undignified and so stopped sending him to assist Ratnamma. Ratnamma, however, would not give up her resolve to feed me. So, at last the mother herself came regularly and being elderly and thinking that there was no harm in it, she used to wake me up by shaking me and then I was given food. Shortly thereafter the old mother passed away and I also shifted to a distant place. Ratnamma could no longer travel that distance to come and feed me and so gave up her attempts. Since she could not live unless she earned by her profession Ratnamma thereafter confined herself to only one man. What does it matter to know to which community she belonged. She was pure at heart. She had great non-attachment and great devotion. She had never liked her profession. As she did not want her daughter also to follow the same profession, in course of time she married her off.”