My friend, Sanatan, is an exceptional engraver and trophy maker. He has made exquisite plaques and trophies for such luminaries as Michael Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa, to name a few. However, like many artists, he is not that neat in his personal life. His room is a mess and his office looks like a thief has just broken in and ransacked the place! So when Sanatan called me last week from his hotel room and told me that he couldn’t find his passport, I wasn’t at all surprised.
Sanatan was calling from his hotel room in Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia. Both Sanatan and I were among a group of Sri Chinmoy’s students attending a ten-day series of events centered around Sri Chinmoy’s efforts to inspire world harmony. Our teacher gave lectures on art and poetry, offered a free musical concert dedicated to inner peace, and had a meeting with the President of Mongolia. Towards the end of the visit, a second meeting with the President came up and Sanatan was frantically trying to prepare the special award that was supposed to be presented by Sri Chinmoy to the distinguished statesman the next day.
Knowing my friend, I told Sanatan not to panic, his passport was probably buried under a pile of dirty clothes somewhere in his room. He insisted he had searched his room high and low and that he couldn’t waste any more time looking. However, since our flight back to New York was in 2 days, he wanted me to ask the airlines about postponing his departure for a week to give him time to get a new passport. He figured that his passport had either dropped out of his pocket onto the street or else he had been pickpocketed.
This was not good news. Based on my years of experience as a tour conductor, I knew that is often difficult to change a group plane ticket, sometimes impossible. And it is always an ordeal to get a new passport in a foreign country, usually involving several trips to the local police station and the U.S. embassy. I felt sorry for Sanatan, but my sympathy didn’t last too long. Within minutes my artistic friend called me back and said that had found his passport by nothing short of a minor miracle!
Speaking a mile a minute, Sanatan told me what happened. After our first conversation, my friend said a brief prayer to God to help him get back his passport and resumed work on the trophy. His desk in the hotel room was cluttered with stuff (no surprise), so he cleared it off and tossed everything into the top drawer. The last item he threw in was a small photo of Sri Chinmoy, and Sanatan just happened to notice that the photo slid to the back of the drawer and disappeared. Assuming that the photo had fallen out the back of the drawer onto the floor, Sanatan searched under the desk, but came up empty-handed.
Armed with a pocket flashlight, my intrigued friend soon cleared up the mystery. He crawled under the desk and, peering up, discovered that there was a narrow wooden ledge just beneath the drawer. He could clearly see his photo sitting on the ledge and, right next to it, was his missing passport!
Sanatan, usually a pretty laid back guy, was excited. The chain of events were just too implausible to have happened by coincidence. In fact, my friend and I were both a little stunned by how effective his prayer had been. However, when Sanatan later told me that a pair of his dungaree shorts had gone missing in the room, I advised him to be grateful for the amazing experience that he had and not to push his luck!
