One evening early in September, while Surendra Nath Mitra was meditating in his household shrine, Ramakrishna appeared to him and said: “What are you doing here? My boys are roaming about, without a place to live. Attend to that, before anything else.” Hearing the Master’s command, Surendra hurried to Narendra and told him everything that had happened. He promised to provide the same amount of money every month as he had given for the Cossipore house prior to Ramakrishna’s passing. Immediately Narendra and the disciples began to search for a house, and found one at Baranagore, midway between Dakshineswar and Calcutta. Dreary, dilapidated, and deserted, it was a building that had a reputation of being haunted by evil spirits. It had two storeys; the lower one was infested with lizards and snakes. This house was chosen because of its low rent and proximity to the Cossipore burning-ghat, where the Master’s body had been cremated.
M. wrote about the first Ramakrishna monastery at Baranagore in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: “The members of the Math [monastery] called themselves the ‘danas’ and the ‘daityas,’ which means the ‘ghosts’ and the ‘demons,’ the companions of Shiva. They took these names because of their utter indifference to worldly pleasures and relationships… . Narendra and the other members of the Math often spent their evenings on the roof. There they devoted a great deal of time to discussion of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Shankaracharya, Ramanuja, and Jesus Christ, and of Hindu philosophy, European philosophy, the Vedas, the Puranas, and the Tantras.”
In later years, Narendra reminisced about the early days in the monastery:
After the passing away of Sri Ramakrishna we underwent a lot of religious practice at the Baranagore Math [monastery]. We used to get up at 3:00 a.m. and after washing our faces, etc. — we would sit in the shrine and become absorbed in japam and meditation. What a strong spirit of dispassion we had in those days! We had no thought even as to whether the world existed or not… . There were days when the japam and meditation continued from morning till four or five in the afternoon. Ramakrishnananda waited and waited with our meals ready, till at last he would come and snatch us from our meditation by sheer force… . There were days when the monastery was without a grain of food. If some rice was collected by begging, there was no salt to take it with! On some days there would be only rice and salt, but nobody cared for it in the least. We were then being carried away by a tidal wave of spiritual practice. Oh, those wonderful days! (Source: God Lived with Them)