by Shobhaa De
“What will you tell your husband?”
“I don’t have to tell him a thing. I’m so excited, I can’t wait.”
“You’re behaving like a raging nympho. Control yourself, woman.”
“It’s not the seduction part that’s turning me on—it’s the novelty of the experience. I wonder how he’ll handle it.”
“Expensively,” I told her.
“What do you mean? You think I’ll have to pay for it? You must be joking.”
“I kid you not. If I know how this game works—you’ll pay.” As we were conversing Mataji waddled up. She was a huge, ugly woman with stringy hair and mean eyes. Her teeth were heavily paan stained, and she wore two big rudraksha malas around her neck. Like Babaji she had rings on practically every finger. She smiled a phony smile and touched Ritu—“Give me your hand, beti. Open it and give it to me.” She extended her right hand, palm up. Mataji shut her eyes and held it between both hers. I looked at her thick, stubby fingers and thought, “I’m sure she can’t count notes fast enough.” After a bit, she started to breathe heavily and say between short gasps, “Yes, yes, yes—I can feel it.The breeze—yes I can feel it blowing. Cool breeze, cool, cool breeze. Beti—your kundalini is rising, I can feel it.” Ritu was ready to giggle but I stopped her with a frown. This was getting interesting. Mataji nearly swooned over Ritu’s hand and finally opened her eyes. “Kneel down, little one. I want to touch your head. I want to feel your spine.” As soon as Ritu knelt, Mataji was all over her. It made me ill watching those sausage-like fingers pummeling Ritu’s back. “Your chakras . . . something is wrong . . . here, right here.Your kundalini gets stuck at this point. We must ask Babaji to do something. He will help you, beti. I saw him talking to you, you will be all right now.” After that initial fit of suppressed giggles, Ritu played along marvelously I thought. She bowed low with gratitude and asked softly, “Tomorrow? At the Taj ? What shall I bring with me?” “Beti, you are a blessed woman, you are fortunate, you are wealthy. Do not ask what offering to bring before God.Your inner voice will guide you. Babaji has already entered your body now.”
Once Mataji had lumbered away, I said to Ritu, “Let’s get the hell out of here. This is getting a bit much—are you really serious about going tomorrow?”
“Of course I am.”
“Listen Ritu, I don’t want to play Agony Aunt, but you should be careful. This isn’t one of your games. These guys can be dangerous. Maybe he’s a hypnotist. Or a blackmailer. Or worse—maybe he’s one of those tantriks. He could cast a spell on you. Black magic and crap like that. I wouldn’t fool around this time.You can live without a holy you-know-what for heaven’s sake.”
But Ritu was already halfway there. I could tell from the moony expression on her face. This was one conquest she wasn’t about to pass up.
“What if Anjali finds out?” I asked her, hoping to shame her into changing her mind.
“So what if she does? Babaji isn’t her property.”
“No, but Kumar could turn nasty. Maybe he’d set Murty on you.”
“Calm down—nothing has happened. Maybe nothing will. It may turn out to be just an ordinary darshan—that’s all.”
“You’re sounding disappointed already. There are other, less tricky ways to get your kicks. This is heavy stuff. Maybe you won’t be able to handle it on your own.”
“Are you hinting? Do you want to come? Well—why don’t you just come right out with it and say so? I’m not dying to go alone.The more the merrier. Maybe we could set up a mini-orgy and throw in Murty.”
“Ugh! and ugh again. No, my dear. I’m not interested—well, let me be truthful. I don’t want to participate. But I don’t mind being a fly on the wall. I’m at a loose end tomorrow anyway. The husband will be in Delhi, and I don’t feel like lunching with the mother-in-law. If it doesn’t cramp your style too much, I think I will come along. Maybe Babaji will bar my way when he sees me.”
“Let’s play it by ear—we’ll both present ourselves on his doorstep and take it from there.”
“Fine. But one thing—let’s leave all our jewelry at home and carry twenty bucks between us—that way, even if we are robbed, we’ll be all right.”
“Yes,” giggled Ritu. “Let him steal our chastity, but not our purses.” “Precisely.”
The encounter which we were both so keyed up about turned out to be disappointingly tepid.When we presented ourselves at Babaji’s suite, he was being given an almond oil massage, and we were asked to wait. We were amused to hear romantic ghazals being played on the music system instead of bhajans. Mataji came bustling out and her piggy eyes narrowed further at the sight of us. “Nice. Very nice. Good. Good. Good,” she said. “Babaji will be happy. Very happy.You wait. If you want, we can meditate.”
We declined her offer. She sat in front of us staring unabashedly.
“What your husband is doing? Business? Or naukri?” she asked Ritu.
“Naukri,” she said.
I thought Mataji looked disappointed. “Nice.Very nice. And your husband? He is also having job?” That was for me.
“Having job,” I lied.
“Good, good, good. Officer—no?”
“Yes—both officers,” we chorused.
“Government? Police? Or private office?” We pretended we hadn’t heard and started talking animatedly to each other. But Mataji wasn’t the sort to be put off so easily. She butted in. “Babaji is a very holy man. Very holy. Faith—so much faith people are having in him. Simply they worship him. See that rose there—one disciple gave him two years ago. Fresh—it is still fresh. It has smell like best Paris perfume. Ask me why? Because Babaji blessed it. It is always here now. He travels, he takes rose. Never it is fading. Always smelling. Touch it—see, good smell. Soft. That is called faith.”
“How long does Babaji’s massage take?”
“Depends. Sometimes the chakras are all right. So it is shorter. Babaji takes the world’s troubles on his own head. If there is riot, war, floods, anything bad, his chakras take time to calm down. Then the massage is longer.”
We heard a new ghazal tape being switched on. I was getting quite bored. Mataji left us to attend to the phone which had begun ringing almost nonstop. Other devotees began drifting in. Babaji, it seemed, had quite a following and it appeared an exclusively female one. Ritu and I exchanged glances as a beautiful woman, for tyish, came in with two teenage daughters. What seemed strange was the way the girls were dressed. Both of them were in long, lacy gowns—the sort English flower girls wear at weddings. And to top it all, they were wearing tiaras—that’s right—tiaras. Their mother was dressed like an aristocratic Gujarati woman in a standard white organdy sari with tiny daisies embroidered on it.Whopping big diamonds glittered on her shapely fingers, and she was wearing a pretty mangalsutra. She had a pinched, thin face with high cheekbones and very sad, sunken eyes. She would have been stunning had she looked happier. The three of them sat stiffly while Mataji chatted to them (another minion was answering the phone now). They were obviously known to her. One of the girls was holding on to a gift-wrapped package and kept fiddling with the satin bows. Soon the masseur appeared. He resembled Hercules unchained. He must’ve been a wrestler in his youth. Now, he was overweight—gross, in fact—and bald. Mataji rushed past him, signaling to us to wait. She was back in a minute.
“He is being bathed,” she announced.
“Note,” I said sotto voce to Ritu. “Being bathed—did you hear that?”
Sure enough, five minutes later, a young woman appeared, wet towel in hand. “Mataji, there is no shampoo in the bathroom. What is this? Please call room service at once.”
After a terse call, a basketful of shampoo sachets were delivered. We waited and watched.
By now it was well past lunchtime. Mataji was busy arranging sliced fruit on an enormous silver thali.
“Babaji eats only fruit at this time. And goat’s milk. Arre baba, it’s so difficult to get goat’s milk in your city. Behenji here is v
ery kind—she bought a bakri for Babaji, and her driver brings fresh milk in the morning. Thank God! What would Babaji have drunk otherwise?” she said to the room in general.
“Coffee?” I said deliberately.
She slapped her hand to her forehead. “Chee! Never. That upsets the chakras.”
Ritu decided she’d had enough. “Mataji, we can’t wait anymore. Please tell Babaji we’ll come again some other time after checking in the newspapers about war, riots, accidents, floods.”
“As you wish, beti. But Babaji will be disappointed.”
“Tough,” I muttered.
On the way home, I said to Ritu, “What a waste of time. Don’t tell me you want to go again?”
“No. I’m not sure I’d like to. I got bad vibes today.” Which was just as well. Subsequently, we heard all sorts of vile stories about the guy—but never from Anjali. She continued to be faithful and protective. There was one particularly delicious scandal Ritu heard about, but Anjali hotly denied it when we asked her. It involved one of the young Gujarati flower-girls we’d seen in Babaji’s suite that afternoon. Apparently, the doting devotee, the pinched-faced mother, had “offered” her daughter to Babaji on the very day we’d seen the trio—which was the child’s sixteenth birthday (that explained the gift-wrapped parcel on her lap—a cake??). Babaji had blessed her with his ministrations and decided to adopt the other sister as well. Now, he had himself a threesome including the mother—the recent widow of a wealthy businessman.The woman had stripped her home of all the priceless antiques her late husband had collected over the years to buy a bungalow in the hills for Babaji. She had installed him there, along with a menagerie and her daughters, who had, by then, dropped out of school. One day another devotee driving up to the air-conditioned ashram in the hills had been surprised to see Babaji’s car parked at a lonely, wooded spot, a little distance from the road. He also recognized the driver who had been standing at a distance, smoking indifferently.The disciple had rushed up to inquire whether anything was the matter—maybe a flat tire? Engine trouble? “Babaji is blessing a disciple.”The driver had smirked.The older disciple had gone up to the car for a closer look and had found Babaji in the back seat with the flower-girl going hell for leather at it.
The story did the rounds and died a quiet death. Anjali refused to discuss it insisting Babaji’s enemies were spreading ugly stories to malign him.
“Jealousy. Nothing but jealousy,” she assured me on the phone.
“Just make sure you keep Mimi away from him—just in case,” I cautioned.
“Nonsense. Mimi loves him—like a father. Of course, Abe doesn’t believe in such stuff and discourages her from accompanying me. But I know that Babaji’s heart is pure.”
“His heart may be pure as driven snow. But what about lower down? Are all the other parts of his anatomy equally pure? And that ugly cow—Mataji? Don’t tell me her heart is pure too.”
“She represents the Earth Mother. She is shakti. They need each other.”
“Indeed they do—one has to hustle and the other to con. They make a super team.Who manages the lolly? And how much of it have you parted with?”
“Don’t talk like that, please. It really hurts my feelings, we give what we can. K is a total believer you know. He is into yoga these days. He is feeling fit and cleansed.”
“Other people use an enema for the same purpose.”
“I meant he is spiritually cleansed—free of sin.”
“You mean he’s going straight and that you are sharing a bed?”
“Rubbish.We both value our privacy. I only mean that he is leading a constructive life, thanks to Babaji.We are thinking of setting up a foundation—of course, both of us will be the managing trustees—or whatever the term is.”
“You mean, you’ll control the funds.”
“That’s important, isn’t it? It is our money.”
“True.”
“So we’ll probably organize that in a year’s time and then all the activities will be monitored by us.”
“You will be in charge of marketing Babaji—is that it?”
“Somehow you have the knack of making everything sound ridiculous and petty.”
“Not at all. I think you are on to an excellent thing. If you handle it carefully and professionally you will clean up.”
“We are not looking at it as a business venture. This will be for mankind. We want the world to discover Babaji. We want people to find love, peace, joy, happiness.”
“You can find that in a hash joint.”
“Stop talking nonsense—you know what I mean. This is a very important thing for humanity. Babaji has the answers for nuclear war. He has a message for the universe. In fact, K has sponsored a few ads bearing Babaji’s message. They will appear on his birthday. You will see the response for yourself. Then maybe you’ll feel convinced also.”
“Are you going through an ad agency and getting artworks designed? Or are you doing a straight paste-up job?”
“I don’t understand all these terms. But watch out for these ads. K has really worked hard on them. He got one of his film contacts to put us on to the best photographer in town—remember the chap who photographs Sri and all the others? He’s fantastic. Costs the earth. But worth it. He did a session with Babaji last week. Black and white, color, video, everything. And guess what. I designed his outfits!”
“Outfits? What do you mean ‘outfits’? I thought the guy only wears loincloths.”
“No, for these pictures, we wanted to show him as a modern-day saint. He had to look contemporary. So I had these fabulous robes stitched at that men’s boutique at Juhu—you know—Maharajah? We had to get the bead work and sequined stuff done by someone else. The clothes turned out really lovely. In fact, I felt like wearing them myself.”
“I can’t wait to see these ads. Maybe Babaji will get a few film roles. Or at least modeling offers.”
Anjali giggled despite herself. “Actually, all the Juhu crowd, especially the actresses, just die to be photographed with him. They keep calling to ask when he’s coming to our home. He has so many women drooling all over him. Especially these hard-up heroines. Babaji isn’t at all interested and he discourages them all the time. But what can he do if they throw themselves at him and send all these gifts?”
“Poor chap. Must be really hard.”
“It is! I see him telling Mataji to send all those crazy women away—but no—they refuse to go.”
“By the way, I notice your godman is very nattily rigged out. Nothing but the best for him, huh? Silk lungi kurtas, diamonds and sapphires, gold and silver.”
“Naturally, silly. He’s a rajyogi—a prince on earth. How can he wear ordinary clothes or behave like an ordinary man? Besides, he doesn’t buy anything for himself. Ask him and he says he doesn’t own anything. He isn’t attached to anything. He wears whatever his devotees give him—that too, only to make them happy. He doesn’t want to hurt their feelings. I have never seen such an unselfish man. I wish you wouldn’t misunderstand him.”
“I don’t. Believe me, I don’t. On the contrary, I think I understand him only too well.”
For the next few months Anjali was virtually incommunicado. I assumed this was because she was busy with her Babaji. Every now and again I’d hear stories about their latest joint activity. Maybe an ambulance donated to the local hospital, or a scholarship set up for needy students. I knew the number of Babaji’s devotees was growing, because he began to appear in the press frequently. His pronouncements sounded almost comical, but they were carried without comment. He took to holding press conferences at various five-star venues and declaring his views on everything from virginity to sati. Sometimes, I’d spot Anjali and Kumar on the dais. Mataji was fairly active on her own as well. Maybe she was tired of being Babaji’s sidekick. She’d started to hold discourses in school and college gyms. She’d come up with strange theories about the nails telling the whole story. She’d read finger and toe nails for a fat fee, and depend
ing on their pinkness or the absence of it she would make her predictions. But all this was very much a part of the background noise of my life for I had finally plunged into an activity that wasn’t merely going to parties with friends or the husband or reading books. My initiative was entirely due to the husband—but I don’t mean this in any complimentary sense.We’d had one of our usual fights and sometime during the course of it he had yelled angrily at me—criticizing me again for a no-hoper and saying that I would never amount to anything.Why, he asked (for the millionth time), didn’t I involve myself in some activity instead of making his life miserable. Once again, as had happened earlier, I felt guilty: maybe he was right, I told myself, perhaps I was as frustrated as I was because there was nothing I was doing.
Which is how I became involved with theater and with Krish. Well, more Krish than theater; but that will explain itself. Krish was a friend of my husband, but he was the first of them I found fascinating—a hot-blooded Bengali rebel from the late ’60s, he had flirted with all the right things—poetry, theater and politics. After a particularly tumultuous decade, during which he staked his claim to fame as a fiery college union leader and activist, he disappeared. Just like that. Everybody assumed he had gone underground, though nobody could figure out why. He may have been sympathetic to the Naxalites, but it was well-known that he wasn’t one of them. Neither was he a card-holding commie. In fact, he came from an affluent background with a noted barrister for a father and a school principal for a mother.They lived in one of the larger badis in Calcutta and he was amongst the chosen few in college who actually drove up in a car each morning. But, as it was fashionable at the time, he rejected his bourgeois roots (but only in theory) and decided to work for the toiling masses. This went on till his father decided enough was enough and packed off sonny boy to law school in America. Krish was too ashamed to let this dark secret get round, so he fled without telling anybody—and that’s how my husband and he met.
When Krish returned to Calcutta, he refused to join his father’s firm! He turned his back on law altogether and took up a job in an ad agency. He was perfectly cut out for that world—glib, good-looking, convincing. The kind of guy who could sell crocodiles to a fish farmer. He still wore the khaddar kurta pajama uniform of his revolutionary days, but now it looked more of a fashionable pose than a symbol of anti-establishmentarianism. Like a lot of his peers, theater had become his main love. Poetry was now relegated to the odd session in someone’s garage, where scruffy versewallahs gathered to compare each other’s doggerel.