It’s almost always been my habit to get up pretty early in the morning, so it was no problem for me when he wanted to get down to the river, the Ganges, at five o’clock in the morning, just when the action started.
That’s a sight I’ll never forget. I had read about Benares and it had a certain legendary quality for me, but you never believe that things will be as exotic as they really are. I visited the temples. I saw the burning ghats along the river, where they were cremating the bodies of their dead. The Ganges was just a stream of mud and crap. But it’s holy. Boy, if that’s holy! The people had come down to the river just as soon as the sun was up, before they had to go to work, and they were bathing in this brown soup, this slop, and drinking it.
I was so horrified that I was fascinated. I couldn’t leave even though I knew I was in mortal danger.
I watched, and then we left the river and we marched up some steps to get back to the town. Our car was parked quite a way away, because the streets were narrow and it was impossible to drive a car through them. I was surrounded instantly by beggars. I had deliberately dressed in my oldest clothes, but it didn’t matter, I was obviously an American, and therefore rich. The beggars were a collection such as I’ve never seen before in my life. I had seen beggars in Mexico – small children come up to you and beg, and you give them a few pesos and they go away. But in Benares there were dozens of filthy, horrible, maimed little children, on the verge of starvation. They maim them at birth so they’ll do well in their begging career. The men and women importuned in such a way that I felt as if a mob was menacing me. They yelled and shrieked and whined, and waved stumps in my face – the guide and I gave them what little money we had and managed to get out of there.
On the edge of this crowd, on the steps leading up from the Ganges, was an emaciated old man covered in dust and ashes. He wore nothing but a white loincloth. He was moving himself along the street, along the rough cobbles, on his knees. He wasn’t a cripple – he could walk if he wanted to. But he didn’t. And his knees were like a battlefield, scarred and bloody, and his skin was not only caked with dust but full of scabs. People were bowing down toward him when he crawled by.
I said, ‘Who – what’s that?’
The chauffeur said, ‘That’s a very holy man. He’s crawled that way from some village many hundreds of miles away, and he’s come to die in Benares, because to die in Benares is to be assured of liberation.’
I said, ‘What do you mean, liberation?’ I was astonished, and he looked at me with equal astonishment and said, ‘Why, liberation means to have your soul freed, to join the One.’
I smirked. This was the kind of nonsense that made me put those books aside. But it did astonish me that an ordinary chauffeur, a guide, should speak this way. So I looked at the holy man again. He had terrible bloodshot eyes. He couldn’t have been less than seventy, with short white hair, limbs just skin and bones. The crowd treated him with great respect – but I didn’t get it. He looked like he belonged on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. To me it was a man who had lost all dignity.
‘That’s enough of India for me,’ I said to myself. ‘I want to get out of here.’
We saw another holy man on the road, on the way back to the hotel. He was standing on one leg, staring up at the sun. That’s what he did in life, stood on one leg and stared at the sun.
The guide said he was a guru. I thought, these people are in a bad way to think a masochist like that is a guru. I’d heard about Western boys and girls who go out to India on their pilgrimages, to discover the East and throw off the chains of their middle-class backgrounds and fill up their knapsacks with drugs. That appalled me. Not only the drugs, but the appointment of India as a place for the ultimate spiritual pilgrimage. India has had a good publicity agent for the last twenty-five years, since the British finished raping the country and pulled out. The young Americans, I decided, looked at the masses of poor people on the streets – perhaps starvation gave the Indians a kind of faraway look – and the kids said, ‘How holy and beautiful these people are.’ All I’d seen so far in India was the result of centuries of oppression followed by a few decades of hypocrisy, and the people were either pretentious or half-starved, depending on whether they were rich or poor.
I went back to the hotel in Benares and scrubbed myself from head to toe, soaked in the bath in cold water with a powerful antiseptic, closed the shutters against the sun and the heat, and then lay down on my bed under my mosquito netting and just sweated. There was no air-conditioning, just an overhead fan that rattled away like – well, like a broken fan. India’s barely in the twentieth century.
I decided to leave the next day.
That night, when I slept, a strange thing happened to me. I dreamed of a dark-skinned bearded man who put his hand on my shoulder gently, and said, ‘Come along with me, Sonny.’
Yes, he called me Sonny. No one had called me that since I was a kid. I didn’t mind it at all. I didn’t even mind his hand on my shoulder, touching me, and usually I mind that a lot. This bearded man exuded an aura of pleasantness, and smiled at me in a way that gave me confidence in him, made me feel he liked me and understood me.
In my dream, I asked him where we were going. He said, ‘Nowhere. Are you ready for that?’
Then I woke up. The fan was still rattling away but the room was cool. It was dawn. Usually, you know, I can’t remember my dreams. But this one was quite clear and fresh. In fact, there was an amazing reality to it. And I knew right away who the bearded man was.
Was it Ernest?
My God, no. Ernest had a suntan but he wasn’t dark-skinned. No, it was a man I’d never met. But Helga had told me about him. It was a man named Sai Baba. His real name was Sathya Sai, but he was called Sai Baba by his disciples, and he lived near the city of Bangalore, in an ashram, a spiritual center where he taught.
Helga had said to me, ‘When I catch up with you in India, Howard, I’d like to take you to meet a man named Sai Baba. He’s a great man, a true guru. I went once to his ashram.’
I had said, ‘Well, we’ll see,’ but of course what I meant was, ‘Hell, no. Don’t insult my intelligence and waste my time.’
Then I dreamed about the man, and he said, ‘Come along with me.’
So I followed my instincts and decided to go.
Just like that? Immediately?
Those decisions have to be made immediately. If you think about them, juggle the pros and cons, you never act, or you run out of available time. I’d learned that lesson when I was designing airplanes and when I was flying. You had to follow your instincts if you wanted to achieve anything of significance or get somewhere in the fastest possible time.
I made my decision immediately. I packed my bag, sent Helga a cable telling her where I was headed, checked out of the hotel in Benares, took a limo to New Delhi and a plane down to Bangalore.
That’s in the state of Andra Pradesh, in southern India, and it’s dirt-poor down there – the Mississippi of India, if you like. The people are darker than up north. It’s hot, dusty, and dangerous. But I felt I had to go, and somehow I convinced myself that the health risks were minimal. I spent a night in Bangalore in the comfort of the Taj Hotel and then early the next morning I hired a car and driver to get down to Puttaparti, which is the nearest village to the ashram. That trip took nine or ten hours. It was like driving through the worst parts of Nevada in the heat of summer, except that in Nevada you had paved roads. This was a dirt track. It passed through a bunch of hovels that were full of the most wretched poverty you can imagine. All transport was by ox and cart, and the oxen were so thin that sometimes they had no strength to pull the cart.
Finally, when I thought I might collapse from fatigue, we got to the Chittravati River. The village of Puttaparti was on the other side. The river was barely a trickle – brown, sluggish, hardly moving – but the driver said he couldn’t drive across it, it would ruin the transmission of his car.
‘Then how am I going to get
to Puttaparti?’ I asked.
‘Sahib,’ he said, ‘you will have to walk.’
I hired a boy to carry my luggage and I splashed across the river, through the brown muddy water, which at its deepest was about two feet. I felt like Moses.
It was evening by now, and dark. I was exhausted and I didn’t really know where I was. I mean I was so worn out that I was disoriented. But I found the ashram, on the edge of the village, checked in, so to speak, asked for a single room, had to argue my way into getting one, succeeded by paying out a few extra rupees – money talks, even in a spiritual center, at least to the poor people who work there – and finally stretched my bones out on a narrow little cot in a room that was about the size of a prison cell. Someone who spoke English said to me, ‘Darshan is at six.’ I didn’t know what darshan was and I couldn’t have cared less. I finished my supply of butter cookies that I’d bought at the airport in New Delhi and went to sleep.
When they woke me it wasn’t light yet. I didn’t wear a watch in those days but I’ve always been able to tell the time by the position of the sun, or just by instinct. I guessed that it was five o’clock in the morning. I was still disoriented, because I got up like a zombie, splashed some water in my face, put on a shirt and loose trousers, and let myself be herded out with everyone else into this big dusty square. Then I sank down into a heap.
Close to two hundred people were sitting out there with me, almost all of them Indians, with maybe half a dozen westerners. Everyone was silent. They were meditating, or, if they were like me, they were half-asleep and sitting in a kind of pre-dawn daze. It grew light, and I don’t know how long we all sat there, or where I found the patience to do it, but I did.
Did you meditate at all?
I’m going to tell you the truth, even though it sounds awful. I meditated, in my way, about my problems in the TWA lawsuit, and how to slide out of that fine the court had levied on me, because the interest was being added to the fine every day and piling up like a dungheap. Treble damages, I kept thinking. Treble damages! Those bastards! I had to squirm out of those treble damages. I sat there for about two hours, trying to figure a way.
I didn’t know then what meditation was all about. I learned later.
When it grew light I could see that there was a little Indian temple on the far side of this square, and we all sat facing it. When I say temple, that doesn’t quite fit: it was a modest place, probably as big as a three-bedroom ranch house, and decorated with figures of various deities like Shiva and Krishna and such other bigwigs in the Indian lineup of gods. I found out later that Sai Baba lived in a back room. That was his home. The ashram was his home. He’d been born in a shack in Puttaparti and that shack became the ashram, it sort of grew up around the shack, until finally his disciples tore down the shack, or it collapsed one rainy season, and they built the temple for him and he took a room in the back as his living quarters.
I didn’t see him come out, I just heard a murmur all around me, maybe two hours later, and I raised my head and there he was, right in front of us. He had a lot of curly dark hair with some gray in it – almost an Afro. His face was a little pudgy, and he had big brown eyes and a sweet smile. He wore an orange cotton robe and old sandals where you could see, if you had a sharp eye, that the straps had been repaired. He was a moderately large man, although not tall, and not at all skinny like the holy men I’d seen up north in Benares. I’d have to guess he was in his middle forties – I never did ask him his age. My main impression of him was his sweetness. I’m going to use a word you never heard come from my mouth: his goodness.
He wandered around in front of us, like he didn’t quite know where to settle, and finally he picked a place in the dust to curl up. He made a speech. He had an ordinary voice, not too loud, and of course he spoke in Hindi. So I dozed off.
I woke up when someone kicked me, or, let’s say, nudged me firmly in the butt with his foot. I opened my eyes and sat up. It was Sai Baba who had done it. He was barefoot. He was standing in front of me, smiling.
He said to me, in English, ‘I’m glad you came.’
I said, ‘I dreamed about you.’
‘We’ll talk later,’ he said. ‘Another day.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’
I looked around me. It was late in the morning, maybe eleven o’clock. The point is, a number of hours had passed while I slept and while Sai Baba talked in Hindi.
When he walked away from me and I walked back to my room with the rest of the people -darshan was over, I realized – I found myself thinking about what he had said. Not the brief conversation we’d had when he came up and booted me in the bottom, but the words he’d spoken to all those two hundred people while I slept. I could remember them. And you’ve got to understand: he spoke in Hindi. But I remembered in English.
What did he say?
He talked about what he called ‘the middle path.’ He talked about what he called ‘the seven internal foes of humankind.’ They were Lust, Anger, Greed, Attachment, Conceit, Hatred, and Control. ‘These nocturnal birds infest the tree of life and foul the heart where they build their nests.’ He also said, ‘What is required in life is an awareness of the vicious game that the mind plays. It presents before the attention one source after another of temporary pleasure. It doesn’t allow any interval for you to weigh the pros and cons. When hunger for food is appeased, it holds before the eye the attraction of, for example, a new movie that everyone is talking about. Then it reminds the ear of the charm of building something, and then it makes the organs crave for the release of sexual tension, and then it requires us to get in touch with and chastise someone who hasn’t behaved in a way that we expected him to behave. The yearning for comfort, for ownership, for various satisfactions, becomes subtly all-powerful. The burden of desires gradually becomes too heavy and man becomes dispirited and sad.’
I knew instantly what he meant. I knew that it was true. I understood that it wasn’t original, that such things had been preached for centuries by various religious and spiritual leaders worldwide. That made no difference to me. He had said it. And he had said it at the right time and in the right tone of voice to the right person. He was talking to me. He was talking about me.
Of course he brought in a few Indian names and concepts like Dharma and Avatar and Krishna and the divine Atma, but I was able to filter them out and keep to the meat of the message.
I wandered around the rest of the day, found a primus stove, and managed to cook myself a little meal. Then came evening darshan. I went outside, curled up, and listened again. This time I stayed awake, and of course I couldn’t understand a word. But Sai Baba’s voice was friendly and soothing and for the most part I thought of what he had said that morning.
That went on for several days. During that time he also pulled a few tricks. He was a kind of magician, or sleight-of-hand artist. He would come up to some of the people, right after darshan, and pluck things out of the air. Not rabbits from a hat, although he did on one occasion produce a red silk handkerchief that he gave to a young Indian, and on another occasion he produced a ring with some semi-precious stone in it that he gave to a middle-aged German woman. Most of the time, what he produced, or manifested – ‘manifested’ is the word his followers used – was a powdery substance called vibhuti. It was supposed to be sacred ash. You could eat it, or rub it on your body. It was meant to be purifying.
Did you ever meet him and talk to him personally?
Not for a few days. Then, after evening darshan, he beckoned to me. He did this often, with various of his devotees, but I had been told that you had to hang out there a long time and have a certain seniority before your moment came. However, I had been there less than a week when he gave me the nod. I was pleased, and a little nervous. I followed him into the temple.
I knew by now that Sai Baba was a poor man, didn’t want worldly goods other than what he needed to live in simple comfort. Some of his better-off Indian and Western fol
lowers gave him money, but he put almost all of that into the physical upkeep of the ashram or the construction of a little hospital he was setting up there, or he fed and clothed beggars and found little jobs for them at the construction site. For himself he kept just what he needed to eat and buy a new robe now and then. He was a very clean-looking man. He smelled of spices. I liked that.
So I wasn’t surprised by the sparseness of the furnishings inside the temple. Sai Baba sat on a cane floor mat in the lotus position, in front of me. He offered me a stiffbacked cane chair - no way I could ever have got into the lotus position like he did. He knew that. I sat down. He made the sign of welcome by placing his palms together, smiled at me, and said, ‘Is there anything you would like to ask me?’ ‘Yes. Why do you go through all that hocus-pocus,’ I said, ‘with the manifesting of ash and jewelry?’
His smile grew broader. ‘You think that’s hocus-pocus?’
‘What else?’
‘What’s wrong with a little hocus-pocus?’ he asked. ‘Does it harm anyone?’
I laughed. ‘I guess not. Maybe you need to do it to impress a certain kind of person. Means to an end. I can understand that.’
Still smiling, he reached out to my ear and pulled a handful of dark ash, what they called vibhuti, out of it, or out of the air, or out of his sleeve; who knows. ‘Here,’ he said. He pressed it into my palm. ‘You keep this handful of “means to an end.” Eat it, or anoint yourself with it, or throw it away. Do whatever you like with it.’
I laughed again, mumbled a kind of thank-you and put it in my pants pocket.
‘Now may I ask you a question, sir?’ Sai Baba said.
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