‘A huge light filled the room, it started speaking through me to my mother. I didn’t understand most of what I was saying, lots of things about an orange robe came out, Mum started filling with light and I was in a state of bliss. Two years later I was in my art gallery and a guy turned up, he showed me a photo of Sai Baba and I yelled, “That’s him, that’s God!” I understood all the orange robe stuff. I said I have to go to him.’
In 1996 God called up Shivani Ma in England by dialling in on her karmic plane.
‘I lost my job, my flat, he sent a man who’d abused me in my childhood back into my life. Then Sai Baba came to me in a meditation and called me to India.’
Shivani Ma told me when she first saw the form of Sathya Sai Baba he became a ball of light and merged into a rainbow. She bought an ashram flat with her inheritance and still lives there. Shivani Ma and Krishini made me promise that one day I would come and see Sai Baba, and now the opportunity arises.
Jonathan has to fly from Mumbai to Bangalore to film an internet technology story, and since God’s ashram is only a quick trip from Bangalore I decide to hitch a lift and see what all the fuss is about.
Sai Baba says he is a purna avatar – a manifestation of God in human form and a coming predicted in the Bhagavad Gita, a Muslim Hadith and the Bible. He claims to be a modern Christ, Krishna and Buddha in one, capable of manifesting in many places and bodies at once and of bending time. Devotees believe they’ve seen him resurrect the dead, take the moon from the sky, cure AIDS, stop tornadoes, hold back floods, regurgitate lingams, materialise watches and pour vibhooti (sacred ash) from his hand.
But God is here to do more than tricks. Sai Baba says he’s come to save the world and he will not fail.
I love Bangalore instantly, it sits on the top of a plateau and must be at least ten degrees cooler than Mumbai. Its air is also clearer, with a touch of bright Sydney light. The IT capital of India has drum and base clubs, shiny new computer centres, great south Indian food and even a sushi bar. Jonathan and I indulge in some raw fish and copious amounts of alcohol before getting to bed rather late.
In the morning I suffer by the pool while Jonathan does some interviews, and after lunch we catch a taxi ride to Sai Baba’s ashram at Whitefield, an hour up the road from the city. While Jonathan has been dealing with the facts and reality of modern India, I have been indulging in the boundaries of belief and the unbelievable; he’s keen to catch a glimpse of my world. The adventure begins below a giant billboard of a freaky dude with an afro and a rainbow falling from his hand. We are in Sai Baba World. There’s Sai Travels, Sai Cyberspace, Sai restaurants, Sai music shops and a Sai Market which sells Sai books, Sai CDs, Sai tapes and photos. There are photos of Sai Baba on perspex pyramids, lockets, bracelets, pens, rings, watches, clocks, postcards and prints. Salesmen and beggars hail us with ‘Sai Ram’, the swami mantra, and then hit us for cash.
The ashram is a sanctuary from the dirty, dusty town, but it’s stark and sterile compared to the chaos of Amma’s World. With buildings painted pink for girls and blue for boys, it’s ringed with signs forbidding handbags, pagers, water bottles and mobiles. Devotees are only allowed to carry fans, cushions and specially approved Sai Baba chairs. Most pilgrims wear Indian dress teamed with a western scarf tied around their necks in a boy-scout knot (swami likes group consciousness, so different coloured scarves signify groups by nationality or spiritual association). I feel naked without a neckerchief and begin to have flashbacks to the childhood nightmare of not wearing knickers to school. What’s more, Jonathan is not up on ashram etiquette and walks in the girl’s gate. He is pulled up and lectured; he laughs. I feel upset, awkward and suddenly rather nauseous.
‘Good,’ snaps an American girl in the canteen as she hands me a well needed water. ‘That’s the swami getting rid of your bad karma, already. This is a hothouse for clearing bad karma – it speeds up the process. Sai Baba says when you are dripping from every orifice thank him.’
Jonathan laughs loudly again and looks surprised when I don’t giggle. I’ve become used to such talk.
Thankfully I don’t drip and I’m well enough to queue on the women’s side for one of Sai Baba’s daily appearances. Jonathan disappears into the crowd of men and I see the swami’s first miracle – hundreds of Indians are waiting in ordered queues in total silence. The only people who talk are dressed primly in white with special blue scarves and big gold badges imprinted with the symbols of the major faiths (Islam’s moon, the Zoroastrian fire, the Hindu Om, the wheel of the Buddhist dharma, the Christian cross and the Jewish star). These are the ashram prefects – scouts in saris who keep strict order. They let the person at the front of each line pull a number denoting the position in the hall for that queue. My group is about the tenth to move. I stand up and nearly get knocked over in a silent stampede to the metal detector. We whip past the fashion police and trot towards the floor. Everyone wants to be close to the stage that Sai Baba sits upon for his afternoon darshan.
On the platform Sai’s red velvet chair is sprayed with disinfectant, towels are placed on its arms and a statue of Ganesh is garlanded with flowers. The bhajans begin softly and the band plays muzak versions of holy Hindi hymns. No-one in the crowd utters a word. Right on schedule a door swings open like magic and God steps onto the stage. He doesn’t look holy – he seems small, rickety and has a bit of a stoop. But his hair is cosmic. It’s a blue-black afro – the Hair Bear Bunch meets Jimi Hendrix meets Jackson Five. Sai Baba’s eyebrows slant strangely, his double chin quivers and his nose is reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s pre-surgery (and aged sixty years). His hands are strangely compelling. Delicate, long and almost ash-blue they flit below the orange robe like butterflies, opening to point the palms up, pointing and twisting, keeping time with the music, and writing on the wind. He sits on his throne for twenty-five minutes, then shuffles off. The crowd stays – stunned, crying, ecstatic, mesmerised and meditating. I quietly head for the exit.
Jonathan runs towards me yelling, ‘Christ what a weirdo, I don’t reckon he’s going to make it much longer, he looks a bit sick, yeah?’
Except for sensing the hostile glances at my husband, I don’t get a transmission of anything from Sai Baba or his ashram. So in the morning I get up early and return alone for the darshan where the swami actually moves among his disciples. At six, the queue is already long. The devotees are immaculately groomed and dressed in their very best chiffon saris and white kurtas. All want to attract God’s attention and earn an interview after the darshan, but thousands will be disappointed. Again the lineup, the queue lottery (apparently controlled by him) and the hushed hurry to flank the red carpet he will walk upon. I get close; I must have good karma. Then God performs another miracle. Sai Baba is the first Indian I’ve ever seen arrive early. He shuffles along the carpet as the crowd ripples and does a Mexican wave of namaste moves, touching their hands together in the prayer position.
The living god is like a moon pulling the tide – wherever he walks the crowd reaches to touch his feet, plead for an interview and whisper wants. His hands have more colour this morning and do more than write in the air. Swami grasps hundreds of letters, pats people on the head, chats to some, points to the lucky ones earning an interview and motions for others to come and kiss his feet. At one stage he jerks his arm, circles his hand and drips a stream of sacred ash into an ecstatic devotee’s outstretched hands. Sai Baba then stretches his hands upwards as if to say ‘nothing up my sleeves’ and moves on. He spends most of the time on the male side, chooses mostly blokes for interviews, and then slowly shuffles out.
His divinity has not been revealed to me, but Sai Baba has been charged with revealing much more to other westerners. Foreign male devotees have accused him of massaging their genitals, demanding a head job and kissing them on lips. But in India, Sai Baba seems beyond reproach. He has twenty-five million followers, including chief justices, an army chief-of-staff, ex-prime ministers, senior politicians and cricketers Sunil Gava
skar and Sachin Tendulkar. A court has already ruled his gold comes from God and it seems there aren’t any Indian investigations into the sexual allegations. Most followers even believe these matters are all part of God’s plan. Shivani Ma laughed when I raised the subject with her at Amma’s ashram.
‘He is just a mirror, showing us the number one issue in the world at the moment is abuse – sexual, physical and mental. He paid those making the allegations to say it.’
Yet if she was here, Shivani Ma would be disappointed in me – I see no ball of light, no rainbow and no dancing Ganesh. She had told me that if I didn’t see God in human form, then she’d pray for me to be around for his next earthly incarnation. Sai Baba has said he will die in 2020. Eight years later he’s promised to be reborn as Prema (love) in Gunaparthy, Karnataka, but says he won’t have anything to do with this ashram. I’m glad. Whitefield feels too sterile and ordered; I dislike its uniforms, its patter of passwords, its fastidiousness and the cold, humourless sanctimoniousness of his devotees.
I sit in a corner and read Sai Baba’s message. He says all religions should be honoured as pathways to God, that meditation is a way to the divine, that community work is good and that we should all try to be free from sin. As I prepare to leave, I tell a Swedish devotee that I like Sai Baba’s words but I’m going without seeing his divinity. She tells me it’s not too late, that the great one comes to those who ask. She holds my hands and makes me repeat after her.
‘Oh swami-ji.’
‘Oh swami-ji.’
‘Please come to me tonight in my dreams.’
‘Please come to me tonight in my dreams.’
‘Let me see you.’
‘Let me see you.’
‘Go now, sister, see him.’
I return to the hotel in Bangalore. In the middle of the night I wake up from a dream in a warm sweat with a racing heart.
Coming to me across the waters is an Australian God of the small screen. Max from ‘Sea Change’ in a wetsuit.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hail Mary and Goodbye God
Back in Delhi it seems a few of the ABC staff are upset with me. Abraham hardly talks on the way home from the airport, Rachel doesn’t make my favourite juice and Peter seems unimpressed by my Sai Baba stories. I ask Neeraj to find out what’s up with the troops. He reports back with a click of his heels and a salute.
‘The Christians are cranky, skipper. You keep going to Hindu saints and Parsi people and Buddhist retreats but you’re ignoring your own faith.’
The Christians have a point. I’ve avoided their God like the plague because I’ve always been hyper-critical of my own culture’s dominant belief system. We always judge those things closest to us the most harshly, and I’m no different. As a child I appreciated the way Jesus loved everyone but as I grew up I became increasingly appalled by the behaviour of the major Christian institutions. Their hypocrisy and sexism, their vast accumulation of wealth, and the egocentrism, anthropocentrism and superiority complex contained within their teachings upset me most. I couldn’t cope with the insistence that those who didn’t turn to Jesus would rot in hell; I didn’t like the belief that humans were given the earth to do with what we liked; and I was sickened by the notion of missionaries spreading the word. I couldn’t understand why a religion so suited to ancient times in the desert was relevant today and I perceived Christianity was presently dying a slow, painful death. But in India I’ve already begun to see the religion differently. For it gives people with so little so much. Rachel, Peter, Mary and Abraham adore their faith and their weekly trips to church. I can see the comfort and happiness the love of Jesus stirs in their hearts, and admire their ability to love the teachings without shooting the messenger. Christianity thrives here and two percent of the Indian population proudly wears its religion on its collective sleeve. Our office manager Peter is named after a saint, Rachel wears a cross around her neck, Abraham has a giant Jesus poster on his wall and Mary mutters prayers as she cleans. They all meet up at church every Sunday and we give them Easter and Christmas (as well as Hindu) holidays.
I confess my sin to them and ask for forgiveness and suggestions of where I should go to see Christian India. They smile sweetly and answer as one.
‘To Our Lady of Velangani.’
Christianity first came to India in CE 52 when Saint Thomas the Apostle arrived in Kerala. Its beginnings were peaceful – while the Romans were feeding Christians to the lions, Keralan converts were building churches. The faith spread further via the Portuguese who arrived in Goa in the fifteenth century. Here the church was not so compassionate – some of the ancestors of modern-day Indian Catholics were forced to adopt the faith or risk being burnt to death during the days of the Inquisition. Others eagerly embraced the Christian concept of equality, its social projects for the poor and its quality education. Aarzoo and many of her friends even went to a Catholic school and loved the ‘sweetie nuns’ who never tried to convert them. I’ve already seen God’s army on display in Kerala. I remember a Godzilla-sized Jesus weeping down from a billboard, glass tubes containing life-sized Saint Anthony manikins, tiny Mary dolls in the nooks and crannies of market places and the scene from the stable on many a dashboard. I’ve never heard of Velangani. It’s not in the travel books but India’s Christians see it as the Rome of their country.
Jonathan is back in Kabul – some Australian and German aid workers have been accused of trying to convert Afghans to Christianity and he is covering their Taliban-run trial. My former Sydney flatmate Emma and her husband Matt have just arrived in Delhi and I convince them to travel with me to Velangani on the southeast coast of India in the state of Tamil Nadu. Emma and I make as odd a couple as Aarzoo and Billie. She is a midwife and everything I am not – calm, composed, practical, beautiful and content. Matt is an ER doctor – tall, intelligent and guarded. Emma is Catholic, Matt an atheist, while Rebecca, my dancing friend, just loves Christian kitsch – she’s also in for the trip. Our timing is perfect; on September 5th it will be the Virgin Mary’s birthday and the anniversary of one of her visits to earth.
We set up a mobile home on a second-class sleeper for a forty-hour journey south to Chennai. It has dirty blue bunk beds, cream paisley curtains and a table for our Tupperware that Rachel has filled with goodies. As we eat and play cards we are constantly interrupted by a parade of men carrying trays covered in deep-fried goodies. They scream: ‘Miloooooooo, chhaaaaaiiieee, carfeeeeeeee, parattttthha, somossaaaaa, vegeeeeeetable cutttttttllllllllllet, omeeeeeellllllettte. You like, yes?’
The word gets out that a very tall man with three wives is in the carriage and a queue forms to file past us. I feel like I’m giving darshan but the passengers seem particularly entranced with Rebecca’s red hair, pale skin and green eyes. There’s no room to perform our Indian dancing, so Rebecca and I sing a medley of ABBA songs to keep the crowd entertained. Matt and Emma are humiliated but the fellow passengers smile and hum along nicely. On the first night we rock to sleep to a soundtrack of snores, farts and burps. But we wake in fright in the early hours when the carriage fills with a blood-curdling cry.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh HHHHHheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’
I sit bolt upright and bang my head on the ceiling; in the bunk opposite, Rebecca is rocking with laughter. Below me, a new passenger is screaming in his sleep. He’s an elderly man wearing his hair back in a John McEnroe headband and it appears he’s playing dream tennis and losing. He doesn’t wake up when we hit him.
As the sun rises and the train trundles south, the dusty fields give way to long strong corn, which gives way to wet rice and finally electric green lantana with fat fleshy leaves. Tiled villas with slated peaks and thatched huts replace the concrete bunker homes of the north. The people beside the tracks become smaller, and darker. Men’s pants are replaced by lunghis, long checked sarongs or miniskirts that they constantly fold and refold. Some of the women do not wear the sari tops; their breasts hang like empty wine sacks and floppy babies drip from
their hips. Buffaloes become bigger, their horns bend in to form love hearts with bells tingling on their tips. The train fills with a southern smell – heavier and darker than the sweat of the north, it’s a combination of jasmine, coconut, hair oil and damp skin.
At Chennai we hire an Ambassador taxi to drive to Velangani, about four hundred kilometres south. Its velour bench seat sinks in the middle, its springs are shot, its cabin is full of exhaust fumes and it has no airconditioning. It’s about thirty-eight degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity and we melt, sweat and swear along the goat track of a highway. The landscape is drier and flatter than the southwest coast of Kerala and life seems harder. Yet I realise how used to India I have become.
Matt and Emma sit staring out the window with their mouths agape, much like I did nearly two years ago in the taxi to Rishikesh. They’re aghast at the putrid-smelling monkeys beside the road, the bamboo huts, the psychedelic movie posters, the scarecrows keeping crows off partially built buildings, the tough female road workers shovelling bitumen, the matted hair of the street children, and the towns with more temples than Chinese takeaways. They scream ‘fuck’ and flinch every time the car swerves to narrowly avoid head-on collisions with trucks, cars and slow-moving tractors. They take photos of the chillies drying on the road and the people stacking hay. They attempt to plug their ears to the blast of the horns and endlessly politely repeat ‘no thank you’ to the people who push and invade their space every time we stop and get out of the car. By the end of the first day they look limp and filthy, exhausted and like they could kill me.
On the second day the road is worse, the drive more dangerous and we all get splitting headaches. Yet we feel we are about to arrive somewhere special, for along the road shuffles an endless ragtag ribbon of bandy-legged men in orange robes and skinny women in fluorescent silk saris. All have heavy loads – babies on hips, bundles of belongings on heads and occasionally a huge statue of the Virgin Mary rocks on a sea of staggering shoulders. They are pilgrims walking up to five hundred kilometres to join the Christian Kumbh Mela.
Holy Cow! an Indian Adventure Page 26
