The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Nothing more seems to have happened with the crusade until 1966, when Devi traveled to India “carrying the fire of peace and solidarity,” which she planned to present to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of her old friend Jawaharlal Nehru, on behalf of the women of Mexico.

  Bringing a fire across the globe by commercial airplane, it turned out, wasn’t easy. After starting the flame with a magnifying glass atop Mount Cuchuma, Devi was determined not to extinguish it, lest she undermine the symbolism of her pilgrimage. Yet even in 1966, when airline security was far more lax than it is today, you couldn’t get on a plane with a burning candle. So, as she prepared to board a flight to New York for the first leg of the trip, she devised a clever solution. She used the fire to light some incense, which she somehow smuggled aboard in the folds of her sari and then hid in an ashtray. On the plane, she used the incense to light a cigarette, which, with the help of some obliging fellow passengers, was then used to light others throughout the flight. When the plane was to land and the No Smoking sign switched on, Devi hid one of the lit cigarettes in her ashtray, then used it to light yet another cigarette when the plane touched down.

  “I assure you, I did not rest until we lit a match from this cigarette when we got to the hotel and then lit a large candle from this match,” she told the New Cosmic Star. She repeated this process on a flight from New York to Rome, where she carried the flame to the Vatican and somehow, she said, arranged to have Pope Paul VI bless it. From there, she went to Delhi, where Indira Gandhi had just, months before, been installed as prime minister following the death of the country’s previous leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri. A newspaper photo captured the ceremony during which Devi handed a lotusshaped vessel containing the flame to Gandhi. The Indian leader appeared reverent, her eyes downcast and her head covered by her sari. The caption noted that, from India, the flame was to be “taken all over the world.”

  It was an extravagantly crazy idea to bring the Crusade to Vietnam, though there was also a certain logic to it. Devi was still deeply apolitical and never took a public stance on the war itself, but you didn’t have to be an activist to recognize that much of the world’s turmoil was distilled in that country. She doesn’t seem to have had a plan in place for what would happen when she got there, but she was used to charging into the unknown and having it work out. Perhaps she thought that when she arrived, men and angels would lead her to her next step.

  On the way to Saigon, Devi stopped in Madras to see an old friend from her Theosophy days, a doctor named Sivakamu. (She was the elder sister of Rukmini Devi Arundale, whom Annie Besant had once come close to declaring the World Mother.) Devi decided to stay at the Adyar Theosophical headquarters, revisiting the tranquil, leafy estate where she’d first landed in India almost forty years earlier. It was just supposed to be a brief detour, but there, once again, people were buzzing about a new Indian messiah, and for Devi, learning about him would change everything.

  Devi first heard the name Sai Baba from Howard Murphet and his wife, Iris, Australian Theosophists in late middle age who had come to India searching for divinity. As it happens, Howard’s fascination with yoga philosophy had been piqued while he was studying at the Sydney yoga studio of Michael Volin, Devi’s former assistant in Shanghai. Eventually, he and his wife decided to come to India in the hope of lapping up spiritual wisdom at its source.

  “Was there, we wondered, anything left of the mysterious India described in the pages of Paul Brunton, Yogananda, Kipling, Madame Blavatsky, Colonel H. S. Olcott and other writers?” Murphet writes. “Were there still hidden fountains of esoteric knowledge or had the ancient springs dried up?” He and Iris began their quest by enrolling in a six-month “School of the Wisdom” at the Theosophical Society, after which they traveled the country seeking audiences with various gurus and holy men.

  They met the Dalai Lama, not yet an international celebrity, in Dharamsala, the Himalayan town where he lived in exile. They visited the Sivananda ashram in Rishikesh, discoursed with cave-dwelling sadhus, and met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, thanks to the Beatles, would soon become a global superstar. Sai Baba, though, had captivated them above all others. “He seemed to lift us up to some high level where there were no more worries,” Murphet writes of his first encounter with the guru. “Life became larger than life, and the usual difficulties and conflicts of the mundane world were far off, unreal. There seemed to be an aura of happiness around us. Iris mentioned that she could not stop herself smiling for hours after Baba had talked to her.”

  “He is the brightest star in the spiritual firmament of India today,” Howard told Devi. “He is an Avatar, a Divine Incarnation.”

  “You must…you simply must meet him,” added Iris.

  Devi, however, wasn’t interested. When they showed her his picture—“a fat, fierce-looking man in a bright orange robe,” with a nimbus of wiry hair like an afro—all she could say was “Why this wild hairdo?” Sai Baba was due to arrive in Madras, and the Murphets urged Devi to wait, but she was eager to continue her Crusade and disappointed them by leaving for Vietnam as planned.

  In Saigon, she stayed with the Indian consul general. She told Natalia Apostolli, her biographer, that she conducted candlelight meditations in various temples and pagodas, but aside from that, no record exists of the weeks she spent in the city. In some ways it must have recalled her days in Shanghai and, before that, Berlin, with their strange mix of violence, terror, and antic gaiety. There were frequent Vietcong bombings. Protests against the South Vietnamese military junta were beaten back by riot police, leaving the streets full of teargas. The sound of artillery rumbled through the night, searchlights strafed the Saigon River, and fighter planes and jet bombers roared as they took off from Tan Son Nhat airport.

  At the same time, the city throbbed with life. “Saigon swings,” the Associated Press’s Hugh Mulligan wrote around the period Devi arrived. “The streets are full of flowers and thronged with women shoppers, wearing the colorful form-fitting ow-dais [sic], until a bomb erupts and everyone scatters. German acrobats and Spanish flamenco dancers and Greek snake charmers and all sorts of other exotic acts from what surely must be the bottom of the vaudeville barrel perform in smoky nightclubs now crowded with American soldiers.” Such apocalyptic festivity, so strange to most people, would have been familiar to Devi.

  Yet what was she doing there? It’s hard to imagine who in Vietnam she might have passed her sacred flame to. When six U.S. pacifists visited Saigon that spring, young anticommunists pelted them with eggs and tomatoes. There was mounting anti-Americanism among the organized Buddhists, who opposed the U.S.-supported regime and would almost certainly have been suspicious of overtures from a white-haired Western lady of indeterminate accent. The city was tense and complicated and full of conspiracy, and even as lucky and charismatic a woman as Devi could not blithely show up and expect any sort of welcome.

  Whatever happened, she never wrote about the trip except in passing, as a detail in the story of how she found Sai Baba. For it was in Saigon, she writes, that a desire to meet him took hold, soon growing so intense that after a couple of weeks she decided to return to India early. Perhaps, in the sudden desire to see the guru, she was able to imbue a failed trip with meaning. Her roundabout route to him proved that the universe was watching out for her after all.

  According to legend, shortly after Sathya Sai Baba was born on November 23, 1926, in a parched, remote Indian village called Puttaparthi, he was placed on a blanket that started, mysteriously, to move. There was a cobra beneath it, but it didn’t harm the boy. This was seen as remarkably auspicious, the cobra being a symbol of Shiva. From the beginning, the child was marked as divine.

  By the time the boy—then known as Satyanarayana Raju, or Sathya, for short—was in elementary school, he was known for playful little miracles, producing, for instance, handfuls of sweets from an empty bag for other children. He played magical pranks, such as freezing a teacher to his chair. At thirteen, possibly foll
owing a scorpion’s bite, he went through an agonizing spiritual crisis, becoming, for a time, terrifyingly erratic. “He seldom answered when spoken to; he had little interest in food; he would suddenly burst into song or poetry, sometimes quoting long Sanskrit passages far beyond anything learned in his formal education and training,” writes Murphet. “Off and on he would become stiff, appearing to leave his body and go somewhere else.”

  Believing the boy possessed by evil spirits, Sathya’s terrified parents brought him to an exorcist, who tried to drive away the incorporeal interlopers by torturing the body they were living in. The fearsome demon-fighter shaved the boy’s head; sliced deep, bloody crosses on his skull; and poured lime and garlic into the wounds. He dumped 108 pots of cold water over him, beat him on his joints, and rubbed a searing acid mixture into his eyes. Eventually, Sathya’s parents couldn’t stand it anymore and took their unchanged son away. They tried other doctors and healers, but no one could do anything to fix the strange, unstable child.

  Then, his biographers say, after about two months of bizarre behavior, Sathya called his family members around him and, in a joyful mood, started materializing sugar candy and flowers with a wave of his hand. Neighbors crowded in, and the smiling boy plucked treats for them from the air—more candy and flowers, as well as rice balls cooked in milk. His father had been tending to his produce store while all this was going on, and when he heard what was happening, he was furious, convinced that his son was either fooling everyone with sleight of hand or, worse, using black magic. “This is too much! It must stop! What are you?” Sathya’s father asked. “Tell me—a ghost, or a god, or a madcap?”

  “I am Sai Baba,” the boy replied.

  Sai Baba had been the name of a deceased holy man from a town called Shirdi in the Indian state of Maharashtra. He was famous for combining Hindu and Sufi Muslim forms of devotion, and for preaching the unity of all religions in a country often convulsed by sectarianism. He lived in a dilapidated mosque and had a reputation as a miracle worker; ash from a sacred fire that he kept burning at all times was used as a cure for manifold ailments. Sai Baba of Shirdi had died in 1918. Now young Satyanarayana Raju insisted that he was this man’s reincarnation.

  His parents continued to doubt him, but the boy’s following grew. A bouquet of jasmine was said to have spelled out “Sai Baba” when he scattered it on the floor. He produced photos of Shirdi Sai Baba with a wave of his hand and plucked dates and flowers from the air—offerings, he said, that had been left at the shrine of his previous body. Despite all this, his parents insisted he go back to school, and for a while he complied, until one day in 1940 he threw away his books and announced that he was leaving. “My devotees are calling me. I have my work,” he said.

  After that he lived with followers, and wherever he was, worshippers would gather to sing bhajans, or devotional songs. People began to arrive from nearby towns and villages, and from Bangalore, one hundred miles away, to see the miraculous young man, now known as Sathya Sai Baba, or simply Sai Baba. Barely five feet tall, he had frizzy black hair that stood straight up from his head, a pudgy face, and soft, dark eyes overflowing with both compassion and mischief. His charisma was powerful but also effervescent; he loved jokes and preached a gospel of love. For devotees, simply being in his presence conferred blessings.

  Sathya Sai Baba began to attract an elite following, including members of the royal families of Mysore, Sandur, Venkatagiri, and Chincholi, as well as landlords, government officials, and wealthy businessmen. In 1945 his devotees built him a temple at the edge of his village, and in 1950 it was expanded into an ashram called Prasanthi Nilayam, or “Abode of Supreme Peace.”

  During those early years, his following was still small enough to be intimate. In the dry season, he’d take devotees to the sands of the Chitravathi River to sing and discuss matters of the spirit. “We’d sit there and talk, just a few of us, like a family, close and full of love,” one of his acolytes, a woman doctor, told the screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who published an admiring, enigmatic book about Sai Baba in 1971. “He’d start playing with the sand, pouring it from one hand to another the way a child does, and all of a sudden as the sand fell from one hand to the other you could see it turn into a ring or a necklace or a statue of Krishna.”

  Other early devotees told stories of “wish-fulfilling trees” that, by Sai Baba’s grace, would yield any fruit they named. He cured illnesses and made food multiply. “At picnics he would tap empty dishes, and when the lids were removed, the dishes would be full of food, sometimes hot as if straight from the kitchen,” one of his followers told Murphet. Miracles, he often said, were his calling card, his way of gathering people around him and opening them to his message, which was about the oneness of all faiths and the need to love God in whatever form you envisioned Him. He was like a jolly Jesus, and his followers had the ecstatic sense that they were modern-day apostles, supporting players in a world-transforming drama.

  In 1963, Sai Baba made an announcement: he was not just a guru, but an avatar, the living incarnation of the god Shiva and the goddess Shakti, a being in which the male and female aspects of the divine reach a sacred unity. The first Sai Baba, he said, had incarnated the male Shiva alone. He prophesied a third incarnation, Prema Sai, who would appear after his death and incarnate Shakti. (In some versions of the Sai gospel, the incarnations are reversed, with Sai Baba of Shirdi embodying the goddess, and the future Prema Sai the god.) What was significant was not just Sai Baba assuming the mantle of a celestial androgyny or positing himself as part of a holy trinity. It was his claim that he wasn’t simply here to lead people to God. He was God.

  After she met him, Indra Devi would, for a time, come to agree.

  Returning to India from Vietnam, Devi first went to Adyar, where she got a letter of introduction from the Murphets. From there, she headed three hundred miles inland, to Mysore, where, courtesy of a princess named Rani Vijaya Devi, she was put up at the palace where she’d lived while studying with Krishnamacharya. Then, packing just enough for a few days, she hired a car for the bumpy two-hundred-mile drive to the ashram.

  The final hours of the trip were jarring, as the car jerked along a dirt track through barren, red-clay countryside, stopping whenever animals wandered in front of it. It was April, the height of summer in the region, when temperatures regularly climbed past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

  Finally, they arrived in the desiccated South Indian town where Sai Baba was born. The ashram was on Puttaparthi’s outskirts and had become the center of its economy. On the dusty road to Prasanthi Nilayam’s main gate, makeshift stalls catered to a constant stream of pilgrims, offering photographs of Sai Baba and rings and buttons bearing his image. Dozens of women sat in the dirt peddling shriveled produce. Beggars, some with maimed or deformed children, put out their hands for alms.

  Inside the brick wall that enclosed the ashram, things were more orderly. Rows of coconut palms lined the path to a spacious, whitewashed prayer hall, built in a vaguely Mughal style. It was the center of ashram life, and Sai Baba lived above it. Most Indian visitors camped out in enormous open tin-roof sheds, where up to two hundred people would sleep end to end on the floor and cook on small kerosene stoves. Westerners and upper-class Indians who were accustomed to greater comforts were put up in a spartan guesthouse, and that’s where Devi was assigned a room. There was a list of rules on the veranda. One of them forbade giving donations or gifts to Sai Baba, even customary offerings such as fruit or flowers. This was highly unusual for an Indian ashram, and it impressed Devi. Would a fraud refuse to let people give him money?

  A young Swiss woman named Gabriella Steyer, one of Sai Baba’s earliest Western acolytes, met Devi and showed her around. They visited the small hospital, the only one for miles, which was built by Baba’s devotees and offered care for free. Though there were two doctors on staff, Baba was said to intervene in cases where medical treatment wasn’t enough, and the ashram buzzed with stories of remarkable, ine
xplicable cures. Steyer took Devi to the Veda-Shastra School, where boys studied religious texts, learning to chant the Vedas by heart, a project that could take twenty years. Tuition was free, said Steyer, and Baba gave students food, lodging, and clothes. There was a small press that produced a monthly ashram magazine in English and Telugu, the local language, as well as a post office, a bank, a police station, and a canteen staffed by volunteers.

  Back in Devi’s room, Steyer regaled her with stories of Baba’s miracles. She recalled a holiday when Baba led the ashramites to a river outside the village and, after drawing on the sand with his finger, reached in and pulled out a silver idol, a chalice, and a spoon. He then squeezed heavenly nectar out of his closed fist, filling the chalice with it, and giving each of his devotees a delicious spoonful. Each time it ran out, he tapped the chalice to fill it again.

  Devi was not yet convinced, but she was eager to meet the man said to work such wonders. Finally, Steyer took her to the prayer hall, where Baba was speaking privately with some of his devotees in a room set apart for such meetings. A side door opened to let some people out, and Devi got her first sight of the guru. Draped in a saffron-colored robe, he was slight despite his full face and more handsome than she expected—he looked hardly at all like the coarse-featured man in the Murphets’ photograph. His bristly hair seemed to form a black halo around his head, and he appeared divinely gentle, glowing with compassion. He said a few words in Telugu and disappeared. Someone translated: “No more interviews—it is too late.”