After the death of his mother, he left his home never to return, due to his spiritualleaning. He reached Bombay, after his wanderings, during the Navy Bandh month of 1944, at a tender age of seventeen. He did many jobs for his livelihood; such as, atan art silk weaving unit, selling bananas etc., He always lost his job or made lossesin his small business ventures. He even worked as a railway porter at Sion railwaystation. He sometimes became roadside scribe, outside Matunga Post Office,earning the odd four annas (present day twenty five paise) for his daily needs. The friendships he struck up in Bombay were only with those who showed interestin the pursuit of the Self. Some of those persons disappointed him by leaving thePath and opting for worldly lives. Also, he befriended those who were in need,providing them with cheer and food of which he had very little himself. Matunga,Mahim, Sion were his haunts; and the seashore was a place for his meditation.But in Sree Muthaiah Swami, who hailed from Vallanadu Village of CoimbatoreDistrict, he met his MENTOR. Though Sree Muthaiah was a householder, he reallyconsidered him as his GURU, par excellence; and made spiritual progress under him,learning much about the Self, Meditation, Vedanta etc.,Bombay was not to be Sivanesan Swamiji’s home for a long time. Again hewandered, spending some time in the ‘math’ of Sree Nityanand Swamiji atVajreshwari. He deeply venerated Nityanand Swamiji and had the good fortune of being in His Divine Presence, drinking deeply of the Knowledge he imparted. The desire to find and meet the Divinity he saw in his meditation again uprootedhim. There was a Divine Call, which he could not deny. So, he moved on Tryambakeshwar, in Nasik District, became his next halting place. He grew veryclose to Mauni Baba there, who was not observing ‘moun’ or silence, then. After avery congenial stay, he left for Shirdi, with a great wrench for both of them. He puthis feet on the sacred soil of Shirdi in 1953, around Sree Ramnavami time, to bewith the Jagathguru Sainath Maharaj, the Divinity since his early years and hisMaster.Shirdi was home. After reaching Shirdi, he never crossed the borders of Shirdi,except on some special occasions. In fact, in his latter years, he did not even leavethe temple complex. He was hospitalized once a private clinic; and on one occasionhe crossed the main road to go to the Sainath Hospital to meet a patient. There wasa panic among those who beheld that scene, as they feared that he was leavingShirdi. In the early years, his Guru came to Shirdi to tend him through a severe
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this treatise on Sivanesan swami is a rare account of the life and times of a Sai bhaktha who later became a margadarshi of thousands of sai devotees especially from the south