According to Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata, what follows happened during a night of extraordinary ecstasy. The text itself describes that night as lasting twenty-one hours. In it, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu revealed His divinity to one intimate devotee after another. Later accounts place the scene at Srivasa Thakura's house in Navadwip. Shridhara's turn came in the middle of it. The Lord told him plainly to look: "O Shridhara, look at My form. Today I will award you the eight mystic perfections." And He showed him a four-armed form holding an enchanting flute. Balarama stood at His right side, Ananta Sesha held His thousand hoods overhead like an umbrella, and sages including Sanaka, Narada and Sukadeva looked on. Kavi-karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika had already identified Shridhara as the cowherd boy Kusumasava. This was the very form, Krishna and Balarama together, that Kusumasava had once served in Vrindavana. Now it was shown directly to the man who had spent years arguing with Him over banana leaves.
Shridhara did not take it calmly. He reeled and fell to the ground, struck with wonder. When the Lord asked him to offer prayers, he could only answer that he was too foolish to find the words. Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata says that Sarasvati, the goddess of speech, appeared on his tongue by the Lord's own order. Through her, Shridhara began to speak. He praised the Lord as the source of the mystic perfections, of prosperity and yoga, of devotional service and liberation, and of Brahma and Shiva, all of them under Him. In the same breath he confessed that his own sinful heart had never once recognized who he had been arguing with. When the Lord pressed him afterward to ask for a boon, repeating "Ask, ask," Shridhara's first response was caution, not eagerness. "O Lord, will You again deceive Me? Stay peaceful, for this will not be possible again," he said. It was the reaction of a man who had spent years being teased and was not sure, even now, whether to trust what he was seeing.
A Single Request #
When Shridhara did ask, he did not ask for wealth, mystic power, or liberation, though the Lord had offered all of it. According to Sri Chaitanya-Bhagavata, Madhya-khanda 9.223-225, his request was this: "Let that brahmana who forcibly took away my banana leaves be my Lord birth after birth. Let me always engage in the service of the lotus feet of that brahmana who constantly quarreled with me." A separate translation of the same verses, published by Gaudiya History, gives the same sense: "May that Brahmin who used to pinch my banana leaves and bark be my Lord, lifetime after lifetime. May that Brahmin who used to argue with me be my master, and I serve His lotus feet." The two translations use different words, but both agree on what mattered. Shridhara had just been shown that the person bargaining with him every day was Krishna and Balarama combined. Yet the only thing he wanted was to keep being bargained with, birth after birth. As he spoke, his love overcame him, and he began crying loudly with his arms raised. The Vaishnavas gathered around him saw him weep, and they were overwhelmed and wept along with him.
What the Boon Says About Him #
Notice what Shridhara's request leaves out. He does not ask to understand the Lord's pastimes, to be freed from material life, or to be given the mystic powers he has just been offered outright. The Lord's revelation had opened the way to all of these. He asks only to remain, in every future life, the servant of the same brahmana who had underpaid him and teased him for years. This is the clearest statement the tradition preserves of what Shridhara's devotion really was. It was not admiration for a Lord he had just found to be extraordinary. It was loyalty to a person he already loved, no matter who that person turned out to be. That loyalty carried on well past this one extraordinary night, as told in Legacy and Remembrance.
