Srila Gour Govinda Swami Thakura, 1978
We set out from Bhubaneswara early, taking bicycle rickshaw to the bus station. While waiting to board, Gour Govinda Swami explained to me the qualities of certain round white sweet balls which I had noted, displayed behind glass cases there. "These are a specialty of Bhubaneswara", he explained, "They cook sugar with cardamon, camphor, ghee, and black pepper, until it is well done and very hard. Very tasty, very sweet !" He smiled with an exclamation. Maharajah did not eat many sweets, or very rarely, neither did we have them about the ashrama much, and we had no taste for sweets shopping that early .
When I moved into the ashrama from Canada, after a while, I started to purchase ocasional white-cardboard boxes of milk-sweets, in town. It was too much to ask to live so frugally, essentially, and not spend any money on at least some occasional milk products, I thought to myself. For a Western devotee, though used to Iskcon austerity,
