Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I decided to give it a try. I thought about the Doctor, to whom I was still most abjectly
attached. I thought about how she was full of stool and urine. About how she was nothing
but flesh and bone. About how she would grow old and die. I saw her in a hospital bed, old
and dying, full of stool and urine. A tourniquet of compassion seized me across the chest.
My eyes filled with tears. It wasn't working.
Shri Baba was still talking. He wanted to get some things straight about stool. He was,
dare I say,
attached
to the topic. There were twelve kinds of it, he said, and proceeded to
lay out the whole taxonomy, stool by stool. The body was a factory of stools, he said. It
was folly to perfume and beautify something so polluted.
I know he was just trying to help his sadhus control their libido. But seriously, why so
down on stool? Is our human plumbing really so vile? And wasn't the Yamuna itself full of
stool and urine?
I sat back, tuning out. As Shri Baba segued into a disquisition on lust, I watched two
pigeons fornicate enthusiastically on a ledge above the doorway. A third pigeon arrived,
and there was a fight, and then some more pigeon sex. It was hard to tell the sex from the
fighting.
The sermon went on, in the gentle, alternating monotones of Shri Baba's words and
Brahmini's translation. In a daze, I saw a fly circle out of the air and land on my forearm.
I watched its head of eyes pivot back and forth. Then, hesitant, it lowered the mouth of its
proboscis, and touched it to my skin.
“Baba is calling you,” Brahmini said, and we went in for our audience.
Shri Baba was sitting on a small dais in a long, bright chamber on the temple's upper
floor, profoundly expressionless, profoundly bald, cross-legged. We put our hands togeth-
er and sat at his feet. It was like the scene near the end of
Apocalypse Now,
when Martin
Sheen meets Marlon Brando, except Shri Baba wasn't scary like Colonel Kurtz, and it was
daytime, and I wasn't there to kill him. A dull roar of drumming and chanting emanated
from downstairs.
He began talking in Hindi. I had feared he would tell us that only by the chanting of holy
names could Yamuna be “salvated,” but I detected a practical mind-set even before Brah-
mini started translating. Between my few words of Hindi and the language's liberal bor-
rowing of English, I could get the gist.
Yamuna. Eighty percent. Water. Wazirabad. Twenty
percent. Government not honest. No awareness.
Brahmini translated, and then indicated that I should ask some questions.
