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day, a holiday. I hated the crowds, mostly, and the chaos that disrupted
my tranquil pastoral idyll. Baba seemed to place great importance
on them, though, taking pains to ensure that the arrangements for
the influx of people were adequate, and always putting on a lavish
display of Hindu pomp: Brahmins chanting the Vedas, elephants
dressed up for parades, bands, free food, and always making a speech
himself, then leading
bhajans
. Festivals were also where he performed
some of the more extraordinary public materialisations - but that
was then. Now he apparently never materialised anything more than
vibhuti
in public.
I remembered watching him wave his hand inside a small jar,
showering a three-foot-tall silver image of Shirdi Sai Baba with
enough
vibhuti
to completely cover it - about three hundred times
as much as the jar could have contained had it contained any at all
before he put his hand inside.
Coming back to the present, I saw something I
did
recognise: the
ashram wall. Over that wall, somewhere, was the person who had
dominated half my life.
Then I recalled the time in 1974 when he'd said to us that
Puttaparthi would be a city one day, and that the crowds around
him would be so vast we would be lucky to catch a distant glimpse
of him. I'd forgotten about it.
Now the memory made me tremble. Everything he'd said had
come true. At the time it had seemed absurd, impossible. Yet here it
was. I told the driver to pull over, jumped out, and went in the back
gate to the ashram, as I'd always done, where the little shrine to
Ganesh stood.
Prasanthi Nilayam was packed. Possibly a hundred thousand
people milled around - Indians, Westerners, Chinese - all dressed
neatly, all fairly orderly, too. The ashram had also grown, rows of
dormitories stretching off farther than I even wanted to see. But the
Mandir, the temple where Baba still lived, had not changed at all.
The sand around it had been replaced by concrete; but the three
domes and the wedding-cake sculptures, and the atrocious pastel
pink, blue and green colour scheme, were exactly as I remembered.
Someone had once asked Baba what these colours signified.
Bad taste
, I'd said to myself, but Baba had answered: 'Blue is for
