The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  When she met Larsson, Devi had known about the rumors for years. In 1976, Tal Brooke published a febrile, apocalyptic memoir, Lord of the Air—later republished as Avatar of Night—in which he reveals that Sai Baba molested him and several other devotees, pulling down their flies and masturbating them during private interviews. At first, Brooke writes, he convinced himself that Baba was administering some sort of tantric purification or simply testing Brooke’s allegiance. Eventually, however, he came to believe that the guru was deeply evil. Describing one of the last times he saw Baba, Brooke writes that it “felt as though the spirit that inhabited the bright-robed body was so putrid, so foul, so horrifying that if the crowds could just see it for a second denuded, they would scream and run in terror.”

  Brooke, however, was easy for Baba’s followers to dismiss, and not just because of his book’s acid purple prose. Lord of the Air culminates in Brooke’s conversion to evangelical Christianity. It treats Baba not as a fraud, but as the Antichrist. “A sovereign hand and a restraining power seemed to gently cloak me from Baba’s venomous crossfire,” Brooke writes of his final confrontation with his onetime guru. “I got a very real feeling that an ancient battle was going on about me that I was only dimly aware of, a great controversy between the creature in red and an unnamable infinitely vaster might.” Other Christians might have thrilled to Brooke’s story of spiritual warfare on the Indian subcontinent, but if you didn’t share his faith, you could write him off as an angry fanatic.

  Yet other stories kept bubbling up. Indeed, they were only half-secret, since many in Baba’s inner circle accepted what he did, seeing it, as Brooke had at first, as either a sacrament or a test. After all, the Judeo-Christian God had commanded Abraham to kill his son to prove his devotion. Was it really so inexplicable for the avatar to demand that his followers demonstrate a willingness to violate their own cherished taboos? When Larsson told another Swedish devotee (a woman who later became his girlfriend) what Sai Baba was doing during their private audiences, he says she didn’t seem surprised. “She explained that this act by Baba was of a sacred nature, and only those who were specially chosen were vouchsafed it,” he wrote.

  Devi never said a word about any of this publicly, but she later told one of her closest friends that she knew what was happening. The realization can’t have been easy—she was in her eighties, with no family except her slowly dying husband and nowhere else in the world to go. She had no desire for an ugly public confrontation. Besides, though Devi was disturbed when she learned of Baba’s sexual proclivities, she retained faith in his powers.

  This was not unusual. Years later, when the advent of the Internet unleashed a flood of stories from devotees coerced into sex with Sai Baba, some when they were young boys, many of his followers declared him beyond ordinary human categories of good and evil, purity and sin.

  On the website “Sai Baba—A Clear View,” an American devotee calling himself Ram Das Awle writes of struggling with doubts but eventually concluding that Sai Baba was engaged in rarified tantric practices designed to free his followers from sexual karma accumulated over several lifetimes. “Many souls on this planet have had the karmic thorn of lust deeply embedded in their hearts, due to repeated misuse of sexual energy in the human realm, thus creating a painful obstacle to their happiness and spiritual evolution,” Awle writes. “As an incarnation of God, Baba will know just how to most efficiently remove those thorns, which otherwise could burn and fester in those souls for eons. Sometimes the best way to remove a thorn is by using a similar thorn to dig it out; then both can be thrown away” (boldface and italics are Awle’s).

  Awle even explains away Baba’s sexual encounters with children: “[I]t’s important to understand that when Baba looks at a person He doesn’t just see a human being of a particular age and gender. He sees the soul, an ancient spark of the infinite Divine flame—along with all the accumulated karma and mental tendencies that form that soul’s bondage.” Further, Awle argues, the ability to accept the seemingly unacceptable was the mark of a true devotee. “[W]hen He acts in such a way that a doubt is created in our mind about Him…He is only reflecting the doubt that was already latent within our mind, bringing it to the surface so it can be faced directly.”

  In 2004, BBC News aired an exposé about Sai Baba, The Secret Swami. In it, Isaac Tigrett, a cofounder of the Hard Rock Cafe and one of Baba’s most well-known followers, says that he believes the rumors about Sai Baba having sex with adolescent boys are probably true, but that they haven’t compromised his faith. “He could go out and murder someone tomorrow, as I said, it’s not going to change my evolution,” says Tigrett.

  Devi would never have gone this far; she was much too independent. Yet even when she learned the truth about Baba, she remained silent. Later, she would tell a close friend named Piero that she didn’t want to destroy the hope Baba’s followers felt. Perhaps she wasn’t ready to let go of her own hope, either—or of her place in Baba’s organization, the center of her identity, the reason she’d dragged her still-suffering husband away from his home. So she kept quiet about her realization and appeared as ardent as ever in her worship. She continued to travel on Sai Baba’s behalf, and wherever she went she hung his picture in her room, along with photos of her mother and Nehru. Yet she was pulling away, looking outside his orbit for another shot at salvation.

  —

  Around this time, Devi received a letter from Paul O’Brien, who’d been thrown out of India for overstaying his visa. He’d gone to Sri Lanka to get a new one, and there he discovered a bearded young holy man, Swami Premananda, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Vivekananda. As Premananda well knew, Sai Baba once predicted that Vivekananda would be reborn in Sri Lanka, and the enterprising swami went out of his way to present himself as the embodiment of that prophecy. He often wore a Vivekananda-style turban and demonstrated his divinity with Sai Baba–style materializations and magic tricks.

  Premananda’s main ashram in Matale, a town in the center of Sri Lanka, was humble. He had only a few thousand followers, a tiny fraction of Sai Baba’s, but like Sai Baba, he had a powerful, playful charisma. “He was totally illiterate—he was illiterate in his own language—and yet he had the most magnetic personality of anybody I’d ever met,” says O’Brien. “He was so instantly attractive in this weird, Scorpionic sort of way. He was just delightful. He was childlike. He would just laugh, and he was so happy, and yet he had this power—he had this ability to assert authority anytime he wanted.”

  O’Brien describes once sitting shotgun in a van full of Premananda’s followers while the guru drove them to a religious festival. He had no driver’s license and careened around wildly, passing cows on the road so closely that a swishing tail hit O’Brien through the open window. Grinning at his terrified passenger, Premananda said, “Swami can drive and materialize at the same time!” With that, he waved his left hand and then handed O’Brien a wad of paste made with the red kumkum powder used by Hindus for religious markings. O’Brien looked at him and said, “Swami, that’s great. If the police stop you, you can materialize a driving license!” Premananda gave him a big smile and replied, “Nooooo problem!”

  O’Brien wasn’t completely sure about Premananda’s divinity, but he thought Devi should meet him. Besides, he missed her terribly. So he wrote to her, telling her that Vivekananda had returned and was living in Matale. To his delight, she arrived a few days later.

  Just as O’Brien thought, she was immediately taken with Premananda, and the guru was gratified to be visited by the woman who’d done so much to make Sai Baba internationally famous. Speaking through an interpreter, he told her that they’d been connected in their previous lives and that their meeting was predestined. “Now she’s like his new best friend, he’s leveraging her to legitimize himself,” says O’Brien.

  The next day, they traveled north to the second of Premananda’s three ashrams, located in the town of Puliyankulam, in the heart of Sri Lanka’s Tamil country. Surround
ed by lush green jungle, Devi adored the ashram’s atmosphere of “love, devotion and peace.” It was a Spartan place, but to Devi, that only added to its charm—she praised the swami’s “utter disregard for money, comforts and possessions.”

  There might have been a subtle rebuke to Sai Baba in these words. As Devi well knew by this point, the guru’s rejection of donations was only a pretense. Once in the fold, believers who had funds were encouraged to wire money to a bank in Andhra Pradesh. One of the lesser revelations of Brooke’s Lord of the Air is that Devi herself gave Sai Baba several hundred thousand rupees, or tens of thousands of dollars. Others donated much more. Tigrett—who made “Love All, Serve All,” a Sai Baba saying, the slogan of his Hard Rock Cafes—gave tens of millions of dollars. Much of that money was used for charitable works—Tigrett’s money funded the building of a three-hundred-bed hospital in Puttaparthi—but the guru also traveled by Rolls-Royce and lived in veritable palaces.

  Premananda, by contrast, slept on a board resting on bricks in a tiny room behind the ashram kitchen.

  From Puliyankulam they traveled to the provincial capital of Jaffna, where Premananda had Devi introduce him before one of his public discourses. Ardent devotees welcomed him with garlands of flowers, some of which he bestowed on Devi. When it was time for her to leave for her return trip to India, he materialized a watch for her—she had recently lost hers—and asked her to come back for his thirty-first birthday, on November 17, only ten days away. This would be difficult, because Sai Baba’s birthday was on November 23, and there were huge festivities in the works at his ashrams. Yet Premananda was so sweet she couldn’t resist.

  So a week and a half later she was back. Amid the celebrations, Premananda begged her advice. Should he continue with his humble ashram life or take his Sai Baba—like message to the world, working to awaken people’s spiritual energies, to urge them onto the path of love and devotion? Devi told him that the choice was already being made for him—after all, a newspaper had just called him “Sri Lanka’s Sai Baba.” When one of the devotees at his birthday celebration invited him to visit the Philippines, it seemed to confirm her wisdom.

  “Mataji, you must come with me,” Premananda pleaded. She had responsibilities in India (including her husband, whose condition was worsening by the day), but again, she couldn’t turn him down. Besides, she was readying herself to break with Sai Baba, and she must have known that taking up with Premananda would force the issue. In January 1983 she met the latter in Manila.

  Their first day there, he surprised her by shaving off his beard, which she had always hated. Without it, he looked uncannily like a young Sai Baba—he even had the same pouf of wiry hair. Also, like Sai Baba, he was ecumenical—when a Filipino reporter came to interview him, he materialized a crucifix for her.

  Their days were filled with receptions, interviews, and lectures, and wherever they went, enthusiastic crowds surrounded them. “Perhaps it is the country’s spiritual psyche which has also drawn quite a lot of attention to our faith healers, mystics and other supernatural phenomena, but Swami Premananda felt at ‘home’ almost immediately here,” reported one Manila newspaper.

  Devi was embraced as well, staying behind after Premananda left so she could conduct a three-day yoga seminar. She met the Reverend Alex Orbito, a world-renowned practitioner of so-called psychic surgery. In her book Going Within, Shirley MacLaine describes how Orbito reached through her skin to heal her: “There was a great deal of sloshing as blood and guts were rocked from side to side…He extracted more ‘negative stress clots’ and soon withdrew first his right hand, then his left.” He “operated” on Devi’s eye—her eyesight had started to decline, and she was too vain to wear glasses—and the results left her amazed. Orbito was left with a bit of blood on his fingers, she wrote in a letter to friends, but she’d felt no pain at all.

  It was all tremendous fun, until she returned to Whitefield. There, she found herself frozen out. To her friends within the Sai Baba movement, it was clear what had happened: she had let her ego run wild, and the master was putting her in her place. “She had to realize even with her exalted position, there were limits, and she didn’t recognize the limits,” says Biggart. Everyone in Sai Baba’s orbit knew he tested people. “These people that are well known and have had a lot of grace from him, he takes them down a peg or two,” Biggart says.

  Yet rather than waiting and reflecting when her guru stopped paying attention to her, Devi had run off to Premananda. Then, even worse, she’d started talking about her new guru among Sai Baba’s followers. “That was the biggest mistake in the world,” says Biggart. “I said, ‘Mataji, you can’t go to the ashram and sit there in the first row and pass around pictures of Premananda.’ She said, ‘Oh, but darling, he’s Baba’s devotee!’ ”

  Soon, ashram authorities gave Devi an ultimatum: either swear off Premananda or be banished from Sai Baba’s community. With her faith in Baba already attenuated, there was no way she was going to compromise her liberty, though after all he’d meant to her and all she’d done to proselytize for him, it was a painful moment. In her memoir, she says nothing about the sex scandals, framing her break with him as yet another example of her detachment. “I try not to be subject to anything, because I like my freedom,” she wrote.

  Thus in 1983 she ended her ties with Sai Baba’s organization and began making plans to move to Sri Lanka. Premananda was remodeling a large hilltop home to serve as a meditation center, and he suggested that Devi buy the neighboring estate and re-create her yoga school there. She found a nursing home for her husband in Matale, moving him even farther away from anything familiar, and she rented a house across the street.

  Then came the Black July riots. There had long been simmering tension and occasional bursts of violence between Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils, most of them Hindus like Premananda, and its Sinhalese majority, most of whom are Buddhist. The riots during the summer of 1983, however, marked the outbreak of a full-scale civil war. It began when the Tamil Tigers, a group of guerrilla secessionists, ambushed a Sri Lankan military patrol, killing fifteen soldiers. Vicious anti-Tamil pogroms broke out in response. Hundreds if not thousands of Tamils were murdered—estimates vary widely—and Tamil homes and businesses were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of Tamils soon fled the country.

  Among them was Premananda, whose meditation center was left in ruins. Along with some of his followers, he resettled in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where he would eventually construct a new ashram.

  This left Devi with little reason to stay in the increasingly unstable Sri Lanka. She could spend only so much time by the side of her suffering, debilitated husband. Whenever she asked him what he was doing, he responded, “dying,” which she chose to interpret as a sign of his bone-dry sense of humor. Healthy and restless at eighty-four, she was far from done living. Devi’s refusal to take care of the people she loved demonstrated the dark side of yoga philosophy—or yoga philosophy as refracted through Western individualism—but her vitality was a testament to yoga’s invigorating power. She was ready for new exploits, fresh journeys.

  Luckily, an Argentinean rock star had just invited her to Buenos Aires.

  · CHAPTER 17 ·

  BY THE TIME Piero De Benedictis returned to Buenos Aires in 1981, he had grown weary of the fiery politics that had driven him into exile.

  Born in Italy but raised in Argentina, Piero had been a famous balladeer, known throughout Latin America by his first name, like Madonna or Cher. In the early 1970s he became involved with the left wing of the movement calling for the return of populist president Juan Perón, who had been deposed by a military coup in 1955. His music grew increasingly militant—he sang stirring calls for a people’s liberation (“Para el pueblo lo que es del pueblo”) and excoriations of military involvement in Argentinean politics (“Que se vayan ellos”).

  After the 1976 military coup that marked the escalation of Argentina’s Dirty War, songs such as these could get a person kille
d. The government’s junta kidnapped and murdered as many as thirty thousand left-wing activists and alleged sympathizers, including students and journalists. Censorship was both ubiquitous and capricious. Wrote one scholar: “There were words whose use would be punished, but it was never made known which ones…as time went on, and the unspoken and mysterious ‘list’ of proscribed vocabulary continued to grow, musicians found themselves with an ever-decreasing pool of words for self-expression at their disposal.”

  One day the singer’s sister’s ex-boyfriend, the son of someone in the regime, saw Piero’s name on a list. Knowing he was about to be arrested, Piero fled to Panama—that country’s leftist military leader, Omar Torrijos, was a close friend who knew Piero’s songs by heart. From there, he made his way to Italy before finally settling in Spain, in a small town near Madrid. He made little new music, instead spending his time farming and meditating. After the junta instituted limited reforms, he returned home to Argentina in 1981, his militancy softened by a commitment to nonviolence and a growing interest in Eastern religion. Some of his former fans were disgusted that the onetime troubadour of revolution was now singing songs such as “Manso y tranquilo” (“Meek and Quiet”). Still, he reestablished himself, forming a new band called Prema, a Sanskrit word that means “love,” and finding legions of new, younger fans.

  Prema’s guitar player was fascinated by Sai Baba, and in 1983 he invited Piero to a seminar being given by a devotee from India, a female yoga master. “And that,” said Piero, “is where I fell in love with Mataji.”

  It was Indra Devi’s second visit to Argentina. She’d first come for three weeks in 1982, accepting an invitation from a local Sai Baba center. At the time, the country was in the middle of the calamitous Falklands War with Britain, which would soon lead to the fall of Argentina’s dictatorship. She’d adored Buenos Aires, finding it at once melancholy and exuberant, an outpost of old Europe on the tip of South America. The city adored her back. Argentineans have always been uniquely introspective—the country has far more psychotherapists and psychoanalysts per capita than any other, the United States included. The blood-drenched insanity of the dictatorship—particularly in a country that had prided itself on its First World sophistication—had left people traumatized and reeling, desperate for spiritual solace. Piero was far from alone in his recent embrace of Eastern mysticism.