All Baba’s disciples were very poor, so I began to buy fruits and medicines for him. I also took food for him in the mornings and evenings.
A week later, Baba started insisting on going back to the cave. Ammaji knew only I could dissuade him. I did my best. I even shouted at him and said he could not go back till he got better. Baba nodded meekly. The next day when I took him food, he said, ‘Shivaprakash, I need some money. Give me five hundred rupees.’
Though I had the money, I did not give it to him. I felt that he would use the money to take a taxi back to the cave. I said, ‘I don’t have that kind of money now. I will give it to you after my return from Bellary, two days later.’ Baba’s face turned pale.
When I arrived at the hospital the next morning, I was told that he had been discharged the previous night. I dashed to the cave but he was not there. There was no way of finding out where he was and I could not find Ammaji either. On my way home from the cave, somebody picked my pocket and I lost the five hundred rupees I had in my wallet. It occurred to me that Baba had wanted just that amount.
That day, I was meant to leave for Bellary for a literary programme, and had to borrow money from my friend Pandu. Sleeping in my hotel in Bellary that night, I dreamt a huge minar was falling. The moment I returned to Bangalore the next day, I ran to the cave, only to find it empty. Again, there was no sign of either Baba or Ammaji. The same evening, the Arab woman called me and told me that Baba had died the previous day. Ammaji had called her and given her the news.
While I was trying to absorb this news, the Arab woman began to complain about Baba’s other disciples. It seemed they had approached her for money and she had told them they had no right to come to her for help; she was committed only to her own master. I felt very hurt by her insensitive reaction at a time like this.
The next day, Muniappa came to my college and together we went to the cave. Ammaji was back. She sat quietly; there were no tears. She just said, ‘I served your Baba daily for twenty years. I have nothing left in the world now.’
Suddenly, I became aware that we were not alone; a stranger sat in a corner, watching us. Taken aback, I asked him how he had found his way into the cave. He said that he was a tailor from Frazer Town, and belonged to a Sufi family. He had never heard of Baba but the day before his passing away, Baba had appeared in the man’s dream and given him the address of the house where he lay dying. It turned out Baba had chosen this man to perform his funeral rites; apparently, Sufis could only be buried by other Sufis.
I was told about what had transpired after I saw Baba that final time in the hospital. He had been very hurt and had asked repeatedly, ‘Why did our Shivaprakash talk to me like that?’ He decided to leave his body in Muniappa’s house. Just before he stopped breathing, he said, ‘Everybody is here except for Shivaprakash.’ Then a strange fragrance started emanating from his body, and he passed away peacefully.
Baba was buried next to his guru’s tomb in Sultan Palya. Months later, Ammaji met me and expressed a desire to build a big mazaar for Baba. I told her what Baba had said to me when he had wanted to build his guru’s mazaar.
It took me a long time to get used to the world without my Baba.
A few months after Baba passed on, he appeared in my dream. He was sitting on top of a huge building, holding his rosary and praying. I apologized to him for not having given him the money. He smiled and said, ‘You think I can be angry with you for such a small mistake?’
I saw him again in another dream a few weeks later. He was sitting in namaz. He said, ‘I am praying for you. Your bad times have begun.’
Exactly as he predicted, trouble came; I had to pass through a great ordeal. It seemed that the whole world was conspiring against me. I was completely shaken and all my belief systems crumbled. I found myself having to confront the harshest truths of life. Then I remembered Baba saying, ‘How can the dal get cooked if the water doesn’t boil?’
In the next dream, Baba appeared in the form of a beggar. He said sarcastically, ‘Give me whatever money you have.’ I fished out a hundred-rupee note from my pocket. He said, ‘Don’t flatter sadhus by giving them so much money. Just give me five rupees.’ Just five. I have never forgotten the five-rupee notes that Sri Mrityunjaya Swami used to send me when I was a child.
At this time in my life, I had a secure government job and enjoyed a certain amount of fame as a poet and playwright. There was enough love in my life but I did not have a stable family. My future was uncertain. Baba had always refused to make predictions for me. He used to say that other people needed such a crutch but I did not. His advice was that whenever I was going through difficult times, I only had to think of him with love: ‘When your heart is filled with love for the guru, you can pass through any ordeal.’ He never attached any importance to miracles. The essence of his message was the miracle of unconditional love for the whole world through surrender to the guru. And so, as I went through these difficult times in my life, I thought of Baba with love. And he was there for me.
After Baba passed away, two other sons of Ammaji’s started living with her in the cave. The temple priest tried to get them evicted. He lodged a fake police complaint stating that they were into drug trafficking. Ammaji and her sons were summoned to the police station and beaten up. Strangely enough, the complainant died six months later in a most violent accident.
Meanwhile, one of Ammaji’s sons decided to cash in on Baba’s spiritual power. He declared himself Baba’s successor and started sitting in Baba’s seat despite Ammaji’s warnings. His career was cut short when he met with an accident and lost both his legs. I recalled Baba saying that the guru’s seat is a blazing fire and no mere mortal can sit there.
One one occasion, Baba had asked me to spend the night in the cave with him, and he wanted me to remain awake the entire night. He sat in his silent namaz. When the first azan of the morning was heard from the nearby mosque, he asked me to sleep for a while.
I dreamt a vivid dream. Baba was sitting on his seat with a trishul in his hands. He struck my neck with the trishul and cut off my head. Everything went dark. Then I heard the ringing of bells and auspicious music. When I woke up, I found Baba smoking his ganja. He asked, ‘Did the Guru show you a movie?’ I told him about my dream and asked him its significance. He said, ‘The Guru has cut off your maya-head. Now your name has entered the Guru’s record book. I will bequeath one of my possessions to you after I leave the world.’
Baba had an old copy of Guru Charitra in his possession, and he regarded this book as a sacred object. Soon after Baba’s passing, Muniappa took it away. Some years later, Ammaji gave me Baba’s yoga danda (the wooden support he used to rest his elbow on while counting rosary beads) along with the rosary he had used for his sadhana. These remain precious possessions.
Years went by. I was in a mazaar in Panipat along with my friends, Khalil and Peeran Sahib. This shrine was dedicated to Baba Kalandar. The person who looked after it was unusually good to me. While I sat there thinking of my Baba, he brought a green turban similar to the one Baba wore and wound it round my head. Baba’s words came back to me. ‘Our headquarters are in Baghdad. We have branch offices in Nizamuddin, Ajmer and Panipat.’
‘The child may forget the mother, but can the mother forget the child? The guru cannot forget his disciples either.’
I am reminded of these words as I bow down to Ashad-ullah Quadri Wali Shivayogi for having prevented me from collapsing in one of the most trying periods of my life. Without my knowledge, he sowed in me the seed of the Guru. Though he was teaching me every moment, I could not see the enormous significance at the time. It took years of experience and a lot of suffering to understand how much he had meant to me.
Hebbal
(To Ashad-ullah Quadri Wali Shivayogi)
Only between the tombstones
Does this flower bloom;
Only in the earth-filled cracks
Of sun-split rocks
Does this seed sprout;
> Only in the cave,
The home of bats, snakes and scorpions
Does this flame burn.
Just wait for those fingers
To touch the lifeless ektara,
Or the passion-tide to rise
To the smoke-filled throat;
Those primeval melodies,
The ancient rhythms
Of the heart and breath;
Narayana’s songs,
Brahmiah’s visions
Turning the serpent-like mind
Into a dancing heavenly maid.
It is not just the songs
That shower feelings,
So do his words
That turn the body into the beam,
The ears into strings
And play thirty-three ragas:
The food, drink and tears
That the earth gave,
The traps the guru set,
The shade of the trees;
The love of women
Ending madness,
Giving a new birth.
Are the Vedas just four?
Are they just Sanskrit?
Vedas are beyond all languages
Whatever their meaning;
They are slipping into silence
Just like the Koran or the Bible.
This is Shiva, austere in meditation
Or playful Krishna having fun:
All beneath a green flag.
Certainly not mythology, all this,
But history beyond geography
Or even cosmology—
The history of milliseconds
Coming alive
In every atom of lived memory:
How the dense forest
Flowered into a colossal city
Replacing oil lamps with bulbs;
How, alongside gods,
Humans walked like wild beasts;
How amidst the factory smoke
Glittered blinding heaps of gold;
How tears became the drink and food
In heavenly gardens;
How, now here, now elsewhere,
Sprang a few oases:
Guru’s history, all these.
Guru in the switch,
Guru in the ditch,
Guru in airplanes, rockets,
In every line of every letter
Of every page of every volume
Of myriad worlds,
Guru in every dot of every line.
Waiting for Kaliyuga
To explode like a bomb;
Always waiting for the guru
To draw the curtain of the cosmic drama;
This body became prey
To an unnamed disease
Coughing, groaning,
Everything vanished;
The life breath of the Koran,
The body of Mecca;
The green turban
Dissolving like towers and minars
Into the void.
The face has vanished,
But not the smile;
The attar has vanished
But not the fragrance—
The fragrance guru brought
To human life.
The boiled water
Turned into steam,
Which gathered thick in the heart’s sky.
Look!
The lightning bolt of light within
Listen!
Thunder
Feel!
The love of rain
Smell!
Countless buds and blossoms
In the garden of the body—
Gulistan and Brindavan!
EIGHT
A Personal Jesus
My interactions with Baba coincided with my frequent meetings and conversations with Brother Nandakumar.
I met Brother Nandakumar in 1988. My friend from All India Radio, Dr Basavaraj Sadar, lived in Rajaji Nagar in Bangalore. Sadar would sometimes invite me for dinner. When my former colleague, Prof. Abdul Majid Khan lived in the same house years ago, I had been a frequent visitor there. At that time, I had noticed that a Christian family lived in the house opposite. When I started visiting Sadar here, a board indicating visiting hours had been put up outside that house. Sadar told me that this was the home of Brother Nandakumar; his profession was to pray to Jesus and then offer guidance and solutions to people.
I was still teaching at the college, and was having problems there. The new director of my department was against me. The reason for this was that the previous director had been close to me, and these two men were at loggerheads. As a consequence, the new person considered me his opponent. To make matters worse, the editor of a weekly (and my literary rival) wrote and published a piece in which he hinted that I had conspired with the previous director (a person from my own community) to prevent the present one from taking over the director’s post at the appointed time. The new person happened to be a Muslim.
As a consequence, the new director wanted to take revenge on me, and arranged for my transfer to some distant location. Transfers are quite normal in government service but my personal situation was such that I had to be in Bangalore. To make matters worse, another rival of mine—and a well-known literary critic—spread the word that I belonged to the RSS. This fuelled the new director’s fury.
Just before I left for my new posting, someone suggested I meet Brother Nandakumar, who could help in such situations. At this time in my life, I was not given to prayer. In fact, I looked down upon prayer as a spiritual practice. I thought it was the path of the weak. I also scoffed at material happiness and prosperity. Little did I know in those days that this was the beginning of the dualistic view that pulls apart the world and the spirit, leading to eternal restlessness and exhaustion. Now, of course, I know that prayer is the beginning of spiritual life. Akka Mahadevi said that one should not accept sandal and turmeric rice from those whose hearts do not melt.
Partly due to the miserable situation I found myself in and partly because I was also keen to understand a person who walked on the path of Christ, I decided to meet Brother Nandakumar. When I walked into his house, I recognized him immediately. He had been a student at the K.L.E. Evening College where I used to teach at the start of my career. He, however, did not recognize me at this meeting. Although he looked pretty much the same, he had now grown a long beard, much like the ones you see in images of Jesus in popular art.
Before meeting him, I had been warned that he spoke little. When someone went to meet him, he would greet them with the same question: ‘Yes, Brother?’ Visitors would tell him the problem. He would then close his eyes for a couple of minutes and talk to Jesus in his mind. After this, he would place his right hand on the visitor’s head and pray aloud to Jesus. On their way out, visitors would make a donation they could afford. Many people had been healed; others had found solutions to their problems.
My conversation with Brother turned out to be a little different. When I shared my work problem with him, he said, ‘Lord tells me that he’s always with you.’ He prayed for a few moments and said, ‘It is good that you came. That man wants an excuse to fire you.’ After this, he placed his hand on my head and prayed aloud, ‘Holy Father, surround this brother with your divine light and stop Mr— from his evil ways. Also, help this brother attain the spiritual heights that you have told me he is destined for.’
At the time Brother Nandakumar was praying for me, my dearest friend Khalil Rahman was talking to Mr S.M. Yahya, the education minister, asking him to help me. I found this out later. For the first time, I saw how prayer worked: I managed to remain in Bangalore.
On another occasion, Brother appeared in my dream and said, ‘Come tomorrow. You have a problem.’ I met him the next day and told him about the dream. He closed his eyes and prayed. Then he said, ‘The Lord has brought you here. Your boss is even more irritated now because you got transferred back. He is trying to gather evidence to get you suspended again. But the Lord tells me it will boomerang on him in fifteen days.’ Again, prayer worked. Exa
ctly fifteen days later, an inquiry was launched against the director. He had no more time to trouble me.
Brother’s prayers mitigated many of my problems. Yet, he consistently refused to guide me because Jesus had not told him to, although he gave me some suggestions about spiritual practice.
One day, he said, ‘Jesus has been telling me, since the very first day you came, that you will have a vision of Light. According to our mythology, there are seven circles in the form of light surrounding the Godhead. I always see you in the first circle, closest to the Light. However, you need to worship the Cosmic Mother. Jesus is telling you to follow her.’
It was this suggestion of his that made me take to Shakta sadhana again. Shakta sadhana is sadhana that enables you to realize Shakti, the cosmic feminine power. For some reason, Shakti would not respond to me at the time. She did so only a couple of years later when my mahaguru gave me a special mantra to invoke her. Finally, she appeared before me. Dressed in a red sari, she said, ‘The world has become hell due to the incorrect teachings that separate the world from the Divine. I assign you the duty of proving to the world that there is no distinction between the two.’ I remember that she revealed to me the nature her consort, Mahakala, who is an infinite stretch of inky darkness. This was an unforgettable experience. I had many experiences with the Cosmic Mother later, but I will share these in the sequel to this book.
I was very moved by Brother and the power of his prayer, and took many friends to him for help. He solved all their problems. Once, when J.H. Patel was the chief minister, there was a strong rumour that his cabinet would fall because of excessive dissident activity. My friend Lingaraju happened to be close to Uma akka (the chief minister’s sister), who wanted to consult Brother. Though Brother knew who she was when they met, he talked to her the way he talked to everyone else. When she mentioned the problem to him, he prayed and said that her brother would stay in power his entire term. After that, his political life would be over. This is exactly what happened.
Brother rarely talked about himself. With me, however, he was kind enough to share his history whenever he had the time. On the basis of several interactions with him, I am writing down an account of the path he had travelled.
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