Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
subjecting the strange little boy to painful ordeals in an attempt to
make him normal. For days on end, according to a village elder
who had witnessed it, Baba would sit in trance, chanting verses in
Sanskrit - a language he had never studied, which was by then the
sole preserve of Brahmin scholars.
On March 8, 1940, at around seven in the evening, so the story
goes, Sathya Narayana was stung by a big black scorpion. No one
else ever saw a scorpion or snake. In any case, the boy then fell stiff
and unconscious. A day or two later he revived and began to act in
an even more bizarre manner.
His parents were completely exasperated by now. On May 23
that same year, his father demanded to know who or what he was. 'I
am Sai Baba,' the boy calmly replied. 'I shall not remain in your
house any longer. I am no longer your Sathya. I am Sai. I don't
belong to you. My devotees are calling me.' With that, he left home,
sitting in a nearby garden and ecstatically chanting spontaneous
hymns to the small group of locals who revered him even back
then.
Having named his son Sathya Narayana, his father was
understandably perplexed to find the boy calling himself a name
that then meant nothing to him. It turned out that Sai Baba had
been the name of a holy man in Shirdi, a town weeks away from
Puttaparthi and some days' journey north of Bombay. This Sai Baba
had died at the beginning of the century, and had been a low-key,
enigmatic figure to whom miraculous powers were attributed by a
small circle of devotees. No one even seemed too sure if he was a
Muslim or a Hindu. His starkly unadorned message had been one
of love and the unity of all faiths, his dress ambiguous, his home a
ruined mosque. To his followers he had announced that he would
be reincarnated in the South eight years after his death. He had died
in 1918.
Someone once told me a story that appeared to confirm this. M.
K. Raman was ninety-seven when I met him. He'd been an ardent
devotee of Shirdi Sai Baba, one of those who'd personally heard the
holy man announce his next incarnation. Nearly half a century
elapsed before he learned of a South Indian guru who claimed to be
the reincarnation of Sai Baba and thus felt 'mildly obliged' to set
