The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  When Devi first started going back and forth to India, Dr. Knauer stayed behind in California. He didn’t like her constant traveling any more than Sasha had, but he knew better than to try to stop her. Until he was in his late seventies, his work continued to fill up most of his time, though at some point—precisely when is unclear—authorities cracked down on his unorthodox cancer cures. Losing his license, he “spirited away to his home across the Mexican border carloads of his precious remedies,” in the words of Nancy Poer, a close friend and patient, and set up a practice in Tecate. Devoted patients from California would drive over the border for his ministrations.

  Often when Devi returned from one of her innumerable trips, he’d meet her at the airport with flowers. In Tecate, they sometimes worked in tandem—his patients would take classes with her, and he’d treat her students. At any one time, the place would be full of earnest aspiring yoga teachers, ailing minor aristocrats, and scruffy hippies whom Devi was determined to clean up. Drug addicts came to detox with Dr. Knauer’s help and mixed with the socialites popping over from Rancho La Puerta.

  Devi grew especially close to one of her students, a beautiful dark-haired woman named Rosita. She stayed on as Devi’s assistant, helping to teach classes and handling the administration of the school. Often Devi referred to Rosita as her adopted daughter.

  There was a schedule at the ranch, but it wasn’t rigidly enforced. Time and again, Devi would spontaneously propose various health regimens. “Who wants to do a watermelon fast?” one of her yoga students, Bettina Biggart, recalled her asking. Everyone would be put to work. “She always had a group of people at her beck and call,” said Biggart. “Darling, you do this, you do that.”

  When Biggart first went to Rancho Cuchuma, she was a yoga teacher in her thirties who had studied with B. K. S. Iyengar. Arriving for a one-month teacher-training course, she was assigned a room with an older German lady who was being treated by Dr. Knauer. The two women immediately bonded, and when Devi swanned in and saw them talking, she said to Biggart, “Darling, she’s sick. You just give her a coffee enema.”

  “Mataji,” Biggart replied, “I don’t know how to give enemas.”

  Having none of it, Devi fetched the enema bag and gave her pupil a quick explanation. “Here’s this stranger that I’ve been asked to give an enema,” said Biggart. “Somehow I did it, and the next day she was well enough to come to the class.”

  Under Devi’s guidance, both women became Sai Baba devotees.

  Dr. Knauer had his first stroke one Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, when he and Devi were taking care of last-minute errands before heading to Tecate for the holiday. Devi knew something was wrong when her husband, a usually punctilious driver, sailed through several red lights without noticing. She looked at him and saw that his face was contorted. Soon he started losing his vision, and half his body became paralyzed.

  After a while he started to recover and was able to resume his work in Mexico. Hoping Sai Baba could fully cure him, Devi convinced her husband to accompany her to Puttaparthi, renting a house for them on the ashram’s outskirts. It was a punishing journey even for a young, healthy person and was hard on the aging doctor, an austere, orderly man who had never liked the dirt and chaos of India. There, Sai Baba materialized thirty-three pills, which he said were to be taken daily. When Knauer got worse, the guru said it was his karma at work and must be accepted.

  In 1980 Knauer suffered another stroke, one that would leave him needing a full-time caregiver. Devi had no intention of stepping into this role; her freedom was too important to her, her antipathy to quotidian domestic obligations too deep. Knauer went to stay with Nancy Poer and her husband, Gordon. “There gathered around him a large community of friends, providing care, special food, and funds,” Poer writes. “Soon the house filled with flowers, old friends, children who played the harp and flute, and dozens of souls to meet and support him.” With their solicitude, he began to improve, and was able to celebrate his eighty-sixth birthday at a gala party. “One felt that those present represented a microcosm of his world-flung practice…various races and nationalities, the very old, the famous, tanned teenagers and babes in arms,” writes Poer.

  Yet Devi, who loved her husband even if she wouldn’t make many sacrifices for him, wanted Knauer with her. Rosita, her assistant, had married one of Dr. Knauer’s protégés and was spending less and less time in Tecate. Both strong, demanding personalities, Devi and Rosita’s husband found themselves in a power struggle for Rosita’s attention. As Devi tells the story, Rosita, uncomfortable in the middle, eventually told Devi she couldn’t work with her anymore. Devi understood—she knew she could be a prima donna—and wished her well. Without Rosita, though, she couldn’t maintain both her school and her peripatetic life. She decided to take Dr. Knauer and move to India, using their savings to buy a house in Whitefield, where they could live out their lives in the shadow of the avatar.

  As it happened, the avatar was not particularly pleased about this. Devi was far more useful to Sai Baba in the Americas than in India, and he wanted her to stay put. Even the will of God, however, was no match for her restlessness.

  Knauer’s friends were understandably horrified. Almost everyone he loved was in California; there was nothing for him in India except his wife, who could scarcely be counted on to stay by his side. Years later, when a friend and former patient penned an obituary for Knauer in an Anthroposophical Society newsletter, the anger at Devi was still raw. “For some reason known only to the angel of destiny, Sigfrid Knauer was to finish his long life in the East,” wrote Barbara Betteridge. There, she continued, “he was further estranged from all he had known. Children and grandchildren were far away. Blind, he could not even read his beloved Rudolf Steiner, and there was often no one to speak or read to him in any of the four languages he had lived by.”

  Devi, though, was determined, and heedless of her husband’s needs. Initially she enlisted a young man named Paul O’Brien to help her husband make the journey. At the time, O’Brien was a seeker who yearned to undertake a great global pilgrimage, visiting sacred sites the world over. He wanted to meet a truly enlightened being—and he hoped that getting out of the country would help him escape his cocaine habit. In preparation for his travels, he signed up for a ten-day meditation course at a California ashram. At the end of it, Devi came to lecture. Her talk, aptly, was about the relationship between love and nonattachment.

  “She was so sweet throughout, and she just enchanted everybody,” O’Brien told me. At the end of her speech, she announced that she was looking for two men to travel with her husband in exchange for airfare and room and board when they arrived. It seemed like a perfect opportunity, and O’Brien wrote her an impassioned letter about why she should choose him. Impressed, she told him to get ready to leave. When he called back, though, he was told he was no longer needed. Apparently, Devi had found others, perhaps with medical experience, to take care of Knauer. O’Brien didn’t try to hide his surprise and disappointment, but Devi told him, “We have something else for you. I want you to help me write my autobiography.”

  It was a project Devi had long been planning. She routinely saved the biographical sketches people wrote to introduce her at various events, and made scattered notes and time lines that she intended, someday, to turn into a book. Thus O’Brien ended up in India as Devi’s secretary and amanuensis, though in the end she was too restive to devote any real time to the project. She told him stories, and he wrote them down, but he couldn’t get her to work systematically. They traveled around the country constantly—Devi was always being invited to spiritual festivals. Sometimes, she would go on the road with Baba. “I could never get her to sit still,” O’Brien said. She might have preached the necessity of stilling the mind, but she’d never been much interested in keeping her own ricocheting enthusiasms in check. What she called detachment occasionally looked more like whirling escapism. Knauer, meanwhile, was stranded in Whitefield in the care of hired aides.
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  In her restlessness, Devi had embarked on a new project: building schools for local street kids with money raised through her revived Crusade for Light organization. As one of her foundation fund-raising letters somewhat cringingly put it, “One day she went out into the street and literally called out, ‘who wants to go to school?’ In an instant she was surrounded by eager, hungry little faces.” She found a room in the village of Sorahunase, four miles away from her home in Whitefield, and hired an instructor to teach Hindi, English, and handicrafts—she herself would teach yoga and bhajans. Called Sai Kiran, the school was inaugurated with a speech by Narayana Kasturi, Sai Baba’s biographer and a major figure in the Sai organization.

  At around the same time, Devi wrote that she came across a group of small children whose mothers left them in a dark garage while they went to work in a factory nearby; they were, in the words of the fund-raising letter, “all huddled together like a basket of tiny kittens.” For them, Devi opened a nursery. She also began providing meals and yoga lessons for some of the street kids in her neighborhood.

  Bettina Biggart helped her raise money for this work, from Sai Baba devotees in the United States. People were generous, Biggart said, “because [the money] went straight to take care of the kids. She’s not paying any salaries, she cleaned these kids up, these kids were getting an education.” Whenever Devi visited California, she’d solicit funds herself. “When she turned on the charm, it was a sight to behold,” said Biggart, who recalled one Hollywood producer writing a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.

  Devi was doing useful work, but she found the small scale of it unsatisfying. She started to think bigger. A 1980 fund-raising letter said that Sai Kiran was “only the first phase of a model village project” that would serve “as a host community, when living quarters are built, for others from identical villages to learn to practice the principles of living by mutual support systems.” This idea was abandoned, however, and instead Devi decided to build a pyramid-shaped temple that could serve as a school, a yoga center, and a place for spiritual lectures. When the Hollywood producer who’d given her twenty-five thousand dollars heard that that was where it was going, he was livid. Biggart was embarrassed on Devi’s behalf, but Devi, as always, was blithely unapologetic.

  “That’s the way she was with money,” said Biggart, exasperated and affectionate. Devi never set out to con anyone. It’s just that her devotion to nonattachment sometimes extended to her own promises, as well as her own cash. At some point she’d started carrying thousands of dollars at a time in her purse, which she was always losing. “Mataji, why are you doing that?” asked Biggart, alarmed by the large sums Devi kept on hand. “Well, you never know, darling,” Devi replied. In someone else, this might have looked like senility or a distrust of banks rooted in her tumultuous history. In Devi, though, such defiant impracticality was part of her insouciant charisma, at least to those who loved her.

  Meanwhile, in Whitefield, Knauer was suffering horribly. He told his wife he couldn’t imagine what he had done in a previous life to deserve such a miserable end. She was saddened by his decline, but she refused to let it dominate her life. “It wasn’t like she was ever going to be sitting at somebody’s bedside for very long,” said O’Brien. “She was peripatetic, adventurous, rambunctious and high energy. There’s no way she’s going to be domesticated.”

  Devi’s callousness was striking, particularly in one who held herself out as a spiritual teacher. At Sai Baba’s ashram, people gossiped about the way she treated Knauer. Baba himself was unhappy. “One time Baba said, ‘Where is she running off to; why isn’t she taking care of her husband?’ ” said Biggart. “A lot of us would go and spend time with him. The man was so brilliant. It was pretty hard on such a brilliant man. He didn’t have a chance to do anything but read.”

  Devi never tried to defend herself. In her memoirs, she acknowledges that she was constantly on the road and that she spent little time with her husband. “But I never claimed to be something I wasn’t, and those who know me know that I’m not a conventional woman, and that I practice what I call ‘Love and Detachment,’ ” she writes.

  She never stopped believing that personal spiritual development came before relationships. In the Hindu spiritual culture she lionized, the householder who abandons everything, family included, to become a wandering ascetic is revered. Devi was no ascetic, but she found sanction in that tradition for her own roaming. Years later, speaking of married couples to Roberto Díaz Herrera, a Panamanian colonel who idolized her, she put it this way: “I do not understand how they can let the other person, whoever they may be, stop their mission in life. How will you explain that to God? Imagine: ‘God, my wife did not let me grow!’ or ‘I had a bad husband!’ ”

  Critics of the Western embrace of Eastern religion have often feared that it would nurture attitudes such as this one. If it’s possible to be at once nonattached and deeply emotionally enmeshed with family and friends, few have figured out how. Nor are many Americans or Europeans—Devi very much included—truly interested in the systematic dissolution of the ego that is a goal of Hindu and Buddhist disciplines. Instead, in a strange sort of inversion, New Age movements have often used Eastern spiritual techniques to strengthen individualism.

  In 1977, Harvey Cox, a left-wing Christian theologian with a serious Buddhist meditation practice, decried what he viewed as the moral hazard inherent in the Western appropriation of Eastern philosophies. “What comes out looks much like irresponsibility with a spiritual cover, a metaphysical license to avoid risky, demanding relationships, a mystical permit to skip from one person, bed, cause or program to another without ever taking the plunge,” he writes. Devi’s treatment of her husband is surely the sort of thing Cox is talking about.

  Yet it also seems that Devi’s practice of detachment served her, if not those around her, quite well. Knauer’s agonizing decline appeared to cause her little suffering, at least consciously. (Anyone with a psychoanalytic bent will likely see her frenzied activity during these years as an escape mechanism.) Her detachment was so well developed that it extended to faith itself. It meant that, unlike many of those caught up in the Eastern cults of the 1960s and ’70s, she would emerge unscathed when things started to fall apart.

  · CHAPTER 16 ·

  WHEN INDRA DEVI met the Swedish Sai Baba devotee Conny Larsson at the beginning of 1981, he was the talk of both Whitefield and Puttaparthi. Several months earlier, while at home in Sweden, he shattered his knee in an accident with a horse, and he was still on crutches when he traveled to Prasanthi Nilayam. During a Christmas darshan, Sai Baba called Larsson to the front of the mandir, or temple, and, before tens of thousands of people, ordered him to throw his crutches aside and walk. Somehow he did it, electrifying Sai Baba’s flock. Larsson later insisted that he’d already been on the mend, but at the time, he couldn’t admit this to himself, let alone anyone else.

  “I was caught in his net and also felt the pressure from the thousands of believers who witnessed the spectacle,” he writes. “We were only too willing to believe, and who was I to diminish Sai Baba, my God?” Wherever he walked in the ashram after that, Larsson seemed an embodiment of Baba’s astonishing healing powers. People tried to kiss his hands and feet. Soon, the attention at Puttaparthi grew overwhelming, and he decided to go north to Whitefield, where the cultic energy was usually a bit less intense.

  There, early in the New Year, Devi approached him in the ashram canteen. She was famous in Sai Baba circles, and though they had never met before, he was immediately drawn to her—the small, white-haired woman appeared radiant, even saintly. As soon as they started talking, he sensed she wasn’t really interested in the putative miracle. Instead, she asked him questions that made him uneasy. “She somehow talked to me in a very peculiar way,” he said. “She was very friendly, very gentle, the most lovely person I ever had met around Sai Baba, but I didn’t sense her as a follower. I sensed her as someone who was on her way out.”
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  Larsson, a former actor who’d been a child star in Sweden, was well known as one of Sai Baba’s favorites. The guru always had a few, most of them young men, though Larsson was thirty-two. Sometimes, like Tal Brooke, these favorites would be entrusted to lead bhajans or to speak on festival days. They were called in for private interviews more than anyone else. Devi wanted to know what happened during these audiences. Why was Larsson invited so often? Did he go with other people or alone? How did he feel about his relationship with Baba? “She kept on going around in circles, to get some small pieces out,” Larsson said.

  Over two conservations, in response to her patient probing, he began to tell her how Sai Baba was raising his kundalini energy, which he did by rubbing oil on his penis and massaging his testicles. At this, says Larsson, Devi’s soft smile disappeared and her face went gray. “As soon as I saw that reaction, I withdrew a little bit, because I felt ashamed,” Larsson said. “She showed me a mirror, her face became a mirror, so I could see that there was something wrong.” He didn’t reveal everything—that Sai Baba “sucked my cock, he took my sperm and so on,” as Larsson said later—but he must have revealed enough to confirm Devi’s growing suspicion.

  For Larsson, the doubt Devi planted in his mind wouldn’t fully flower for many more years. “That was in fact the triggering point that made me think that something was awkward here,” he says. “And then of course I later denied that, and since she was away and I never saw her, I forgot about it.” Larsson’s unease lay dormant until six people were killed in Sai Baba’s apartment in 1993, after which he began asking questions and finally turned on the man he’d once seen as God on earth. By then, though, Devi was long gone.