Donations (1): Peach Tree

The latest donation

The bhaktas (vaishnava slang for devotee-hangarounds) love to donate to the temple. Nimaihuset regularly gets all kinds of donations – exotic and domestic fruits, sweets, juice, kitchen machines, cups and glasses, tea-lights, flowers, ingredients for laddus for Laddu Gopal, vaccum cleaners (yes, more than one), cars (yes, more than one), even a cat (Felix, very sweet and polite, but we had to move him to a better place), and what not more...

And of course money, from various sources. Bhakta Johan, for instance, has an interesting hobby: he goes to various Internet betting companies and plays them out against each other. Football, tennis, whatever. 100 % safe winnings, sometimes minor, sometimes more. Although he goes to not one but at least two betting companies, and although he places bets on both of them after meticulously checking the odds, and although it requires some skills and knowledge – not of tennis but of betting companies – and although it is a question of calculation and timing, he sternly maintains that it is not gambling. The other day he stepped into the temple with a bunch of 100-bills in his hand, counted quickly, and said it was the monthly donations until august 2014. Let's make a compromise and call it righteous gambling. 

Yesterday, however, the temple got the strangest donation as far as can be remembered. Bhakta Lukas phoned and happily told us he had donated a peach tree to the temple, which is to be delivered by truck as soon as the holidays are over. A peach tree in Sweden is not only exotic – and in the environment of the temple, situated between the motorway and a major road, by a heavyily trafficked crossing and a parking house, it would appear very exotic – but also they are normally impossible to grow here. But bhakta Lukas told us this is a new kind of peach tree that can be grown under swedish conditions and that will actually yield real peaches, soft and sweet. 

Allright, but neither inside nor outside the temple... So Makhan Chor das, who lives in a fancy villa outside Gothenburg (and who also took care of the cat – and a dog, but that was not a donation to the temple), will graciously receive the peach tree at his place and grow peaches for the temple Deities there. We will get back to our readers as soon as the first peaches are harvested.