When Devi spoke, more than eight hundred people showed up to hear her, those who couldn’t fit in the auditorium milling around outside. Afterward, people rushed forward to hug her and kiss her face. It was as if she were being passed from one set of arms to another, floating in a sea of affection and gratitude. In all her eighty-three years, she had never experienced anything comparable.
Thus when Baba’s Argentinean devotees invited her to return the next year, just before she left the organization, she happily agreed. She stayed with a wealthy couple, Hugo and Elsa Baldi, and their daughter Francesca, all Sai Baba devotees. After her talk in Buenos Aires, she was to join them in the picturesque lakeside city of Bariloche, at the foot of the Andes. They invited Piero to come along.
She and the singer, then in his thirties, with a handsome face half hidden behind oversize glasses and a long mop of curly brown hair, quickly bonded on the short flight. He plied her with questions about yoga and Hindu philosophy, especially reincarnation. Did she believe in it?
“Of course,” she said. How else to explain the world’s injustices, why some die in infancy and others live to eighty, why some deserving people are destitute and cruel people wealthy? She had never entertained the idea of a universe without a guiding morality, and to her, only reincarnation provided a satisfactory way to understand the persistence of suffering and evil.
Piero was eager to accept this. Two years earlier, his youngest son, Mariano, had died in infancy, and Piero cherished thoughts about the child’s return. Talking to Devi left him elated. She seemed angelic. He asked if she wanted to hear him sing, and she agreed. They flew together from Bariloche to a concert he had scheduled in the city of Tucumán.
She’d known Piero was a musician, but she hadn’t realized that he was a star, and the size of the crowd, at least ten thousand people, stunned her. So did the connection between Piero and his audience, their electric fervor. “[Y]ou have a responsibility,” she told him afterward. “You have to give them something for their energy. Something positive.”
From Tucumán, they went to Salta, where fifteen thousand people showed up for an outdoor concert. After performing “Miedo niño,” a song of encouragement to a scared child, Piero asked his new friend to join him onstage so he could introduce her to his fans. Taking the microphone, Devi told the audience, “You have to do what Piero says and fly! You have to detach and fly!” Then, as he sang, the tiny old woman in the sari leapt from the stage and into the upraised arms below. People screamed in delight, passing her over their heads. At the next two concerts, she did the same thing. Piero was amazed. “She loved it!” he said. “She loved it!”
When Devi left, Piero took her admonition seriously. He didn’t want to return to political activism, but he wanted to do something to help heal the world. Thus was born Fundación Buenas Ondas, or “Good Vibrations Foundation,” a network of loosely organized groups that would simply perform acts of service. Rather than fighting for any sort of ideology, people would come together to sweep the streets, build schools in poor neighborhoods, and visit hospitals and prisons. The groups also meditated together, and Piero wanted Devi to teach them yoga. In August he wrote her a letter telling her that Argentina needed her. She wrote him back, telling him to meet her in Los Angeles the next month for a trip to Egypt.
Devi had always wanted to go there; it was one of her last unfulfilled ambitions. She’d been inspired to take the journey by Paul Brunton’s book A Search in Secret Egypt, in which he writes of a nighttime vigil in the Great Pyramid of Giza, where he struggles against malevolent forces before coming face-to-face with the luminous spirits of ancient Egyptian priests bearing secrets from the lost city of Atlantis. To help her get there, Bettina Biggart, who was working as a travel agent, had put together a yoga cruise down the Nile, where Devi could teach and travel for free.
Devi was bringing a small entourage with her, mostly women who’d studied with her in Tecate or accompanied her to India to meet Sai Baba. (Her husband would remain with hired aides in Sri Lanka.) Among the travelers was Shama, formerly Maggi Calhoun, a ravishing raven-haired woman who had abandoned a career as an aspiring actress after discovering her psychic abilities. A Baba devotee, Shama had heard about Devi’s school in India in the late 1970s and volunteered to collect clothes for the children. She and Devi started writing letters to each other—Shama was deeply moved by Devi’s salutation, “Dear Unknown Friend”—then met in person when Devi came to speak at one of the Sai Baba centers in Los Angeles.
“The first time I met her I was so enamored with her,” said Shama. “She said, ‘Will you drive me to Ojai tomorrow?’ I said, ‘I’d drive you to the moon!’ ”
Devi, who had always loved talking to mediums, was tremendously impressed with Shama’s abilities. Shama never claimed to be able to read minds or see the future at will; rather, she said, her visions came in sudden flashes. She was, if nothing else, persuasive. In the 1970s, she’d dazzled researchers at the UCLA Parapsychology Laboratory, run by an eccentric psychology professor out of the school’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. There, she says, she consulted on murder and missing persons cases for the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. Devi raved about her to everyone she knew. She couldn’t wait to introduce her to Piero.
Shama saw a strange, inexplicable sort of love affair blooming between the old lady and the crooner. “He was like her pet project, the son she never had, the love she never had in her youth,” Shama said. Shama did a reading and determined that Piero had been Devi’s father in a past life—and in Egypt, no less! Now Devi and Piero were returning there together. In their deep, mystical friendship, the universe assumed a pleasing, reassuring symmetry.
The trip was a joy, with yoga classes in the morning and a packed itinerary of sightseeing in the afternoon. Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, Piero played guitar and recorded Devi talking about her life. They hoped to spend the night there just as Brunton had, but couldn’t get the necessary permission. They left vowing to return.
After that, Devi started spending more and more of her time with Piero in Argentina; however, with her ailing husband still holding on in Sri Lanka, she couldn’t officially move. Though she rarely stayed with Dr. Knauer for long, the idea of his dying alone haunted her. She’d never admit to feeling anything as dull and unproductive as guilt, but she badgered Shama with questions: “Will I be there when he dies? Will I? Will I? I have to be there!” Shama couldn’t answer. Yet despite her concern, Devi seemed to live on planes, gleefully telling Shama about practicing headstands in the aisle.
In the end, when Dr. Knauer finally slipped away on the night of December 20, 1984, Devi was at home with him, though not at his side. By then, he was in so much pain that he’d accepted morphine injections, and during his last few days, he hardly spoke. He died quietly; Devi realized he was gone only when one of the nurses she’d hired went into his room and found him completely still.
Anthroposophists believe that it takes three days after death for the etheric body, the life force that animates the physical body, to dissolve fully. During that time, the disembodied self reviews his or her entire life. So Devi, in keeping with her husband’s beliefs, some of which, over their marriage, she’d come to share, left his corpse untouched for three days. She surrounded his bed with candles; played Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven (his favorite composers); and kneeled by his side, whispering words of comfort to ease his journey away from this world.
Shama had once asked Dr. Knauer what his life was like with the legendary Indra Devi. “My life with Indra Devi?” he replied, a hint of joking incredulity in his voice. “Most of the time she was gone!” Their separations had pained him far more than her. Now that he was gone, though, she felt the loss acutely.
After three days, she emerged to plan her husband’s cremation. The funeral was held in Sri Lanka. Unable to bear the sight of his casket, Devi pasted pieces of paper to the inside of a pair of sunglasses and then wore these blackout shades as she stood at the back o
f the church. “It was the only time she ever, ever, ever said anything vulnerable in all the years I knew her,” said Shama. “When he died she said to me, ‘Shama, I feel so alone.’ ”
Yet being alone also meant being free. “I had the possibility of determining a new course for my life,” she wrote. She was eighty-five and ready to start over one last time. On February 15, 1985, she flew to Buenos Aires to settle in Argentina for good.
She moved in with Francesca Baldi, who took charge of organizing her activities. It wasn’t easy work—part diva and part incorrigibly free spirit, Devi wouldn’t let herself be bound by anything as banal as schedules or appointments. Once, Francesca arranged for her to give a talk in the province of Santa Fe, but at the last minute, Devi decided she’d rather spend a few days at Piero’s farm in Cardales, a village outside Buenos Aires. Francesca had to scramble to find a replacement. Devi was sympathetic but unapologetic. She always, Baldi wrote, followed her instinct for “adventure and independence.”
Piero’s farm, covered with eucalyptus trees, was often her refuge. He’d bought it as part of his Fundación Buenas Ondas, turning it into a bucolic retreat for street kids and those who’d been in trouble with the law. It included classrooms and workshops where the children would study agriculture and ecology. On Saturdays, Devi gave yoga classes, sometimes staying over in a small room that Piero kept just for her. She loved lying beneath the trees, watching their branches sway in the wind and the clouds drift by overhead. Sometimes she would throw her arms around a eucalyptus trunk, the thin skin of her cheek pressed against the bark, trying to hear the tree’s vibrations. Often she rolled in the grass like a little girl.
In Buenos Aires, she initially taught in borrowed studios, until she and Francesca Baldi bought a place on Calle Azcuénaga in the stylish Recoleta neighborhood. A journalist visited one of Devi’s classes the day after her eighty-sixth birthday and noted that she showed no signs of enervation: “She is restless; constantly moving with coordinated, targeted and expressive gestures; she expresses each word with her body, completely in control of it.”
Devi’s partnership with Francesca didn’t last. The younger woman was still a Sai Baba devotee, and though Devi continued, in some ways, to venerate her former guru—she never stopped believing that he had supernatural powers—his organization regarded her as an apostate. According to Devi, Francesca was forced to choose between them and so severed their partnership just a few months after it began. Devi was, as ever, unruffled. She knew someone else would come along to take care of things. The world had always conspired to spare her from paying attention to life’s quotidian details. Why would it stop now?
Sure enough, a young couple named David and Iana Lifar soon stepped in. Devi had first met them when Iana attended one of her talks in Buenos Aires. At the time, the young woman was mired in a crushing depression following a series of health problems—the lecture was the first thing in ages she’d shown any interest in. When it was over and Devi was making her way through a crowd of admirers, a little boy with developmental difficulties, left by his mother to play nearby, took off one of his shoes and sent it flying through the air. It hit Iana on the head in a place where she’d recently had stitches, and she burst into tears.
Devi took Iana in her arms, murmuring “niña querida” (“dear girl”). Iana’s family was from Russia, and she thanked Devi in her mother tongue. The sound of the language awakened Devi’s affections—this skinny, lost, blue-eyed young woman with pale skin and pretty, soft Slavic features reminded Devi of her long-ago self. Devi instructed her to start practicing yoga and promised to make her a disciple. Iana was overcome, but at first lassitude got the better of her, and she ignored Devi’s advice. Two weeks later, she received a letter from Devi checking on her progress. Ashamed that she hadn’t made any, she went to the Sai Baba center, where a hatha yoga course was being offered. Soon she was a self-described fanatic.
Initially David Lifar, who was running an import-export business, saw Devi as a sweet old lady, nothing more. The son of a Jewish immigrant from Poland, he was far more interested in politics than religion. Gradually, however, she worked her impish magic on him. In 1987 she had planned to meet Iana in Punta del Este, a resort city on the coast of Uruguay, where she was scheduled to give several presentations. At the last minute, the person who was supposed to handle the logistics couldn’t go, and David, organized and practical, stepped in.
All the events went smoothly, and when she was done, Devi asked David to set up one more: a visit to a prison. In the last decades of her life, Devi made a point of visiting prisoners whenever she could. After all, who was in greater need of techniques for relaxation and mastering the mind? David, curious to see a prison from the inside, agreed to help.
By the time they arrived, the guards had gathered a group of inmates to meet them, telling the prisoners that a “very important person” was coming. The prisoners looked at the beaming old woman with contemptuous hostility. When she started talking, there was derisive laughter.
Then, saying that she was going to show them the power of words, she performed a demonstration, one she often did before a skeptical audience. After coaxing a reluctant volunteer from among her surly listeners, she asked him to hold his arms straight out and keep them there while she attempted to force one of them down. Before trying, she heaped praise on her subject, telling him that he was good, generous, beloved, and able to accomplish what he wanted in life. When she pulled on his right arm with all her might, he resisted easily.
Then she repeated the exercise, but this time, she insulted and mocked the man. She called him a selfish drunk who had mistreated his wife, his children, and even animals. She told him that nobody loved him and that he would always be unhappy. Then she pulled on his right arm again, and it fell easily.
Our thoughts, she told the prisoners, shape our reality. They can make us strong or weak.
The men were astonished and had her try again with a particularly burly, intimidating inmate. Utterly self-assured, Devi pelted the menacing man with calumnies, and then forced his giant arm down. Now the inmates were paying attention, and thirty or forty followed her outside for a yoga class and a short meditation. Their eyes closed, they repeated after her: “I am light. I am love. I have in my heart the divine spark that is God.” As they breathed deeply and slowly, the edgy, caged aggression among them evanesced, replaced, for a moment, by tranquility. Devi circulated among them, caressing their heads. When the practice was finished, she hugged and kissed each of the men. Some of them started to cry. At that moment, David Lifar realized he wanted to help her however he could.
Soon David was handling all the practical matters of Devi’s life, which was as hectic as ever. She continued to travel incessantly—with the world on the cusp of an unprecedented yoga boom, she was widely in demand. The year after the prison visit, she and David would inaugurate the Fundación Indra Devi, a yoga school. Eventually, it would grow to encompass six studios throughout Buenos Aires. There was just one more big adventure first.
· CHAPTER 18 ·
IN OCTOBER 1986, Piero took Devi to meet an old friend, Panamanian colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera, at a suite at the Buenos Aires Sheraton. The colonel and his wife, Maigualida, had taken a Boeing 727 from Panama’s air force and flown to Argentina on vacation, hoping to escape, at least for a little while, the political intrigue and suffocating anxiety at home. In Panama, Díaz Herrera was, at least nominally, the second-in-command to strongman Manuel Noriega, but he knew that Noriega didn’t trust him and that he was on the way out. Already high-strung, Díaz Herrera had felt his nerves flayed. He took tranquilizers, and sometimes he locked himself in his office and wept. Arriving in Buenos Aires, he and his wife had gone on a bit of a bender, and the sitting room Devi entered was strewn with empty champagne bottles and drained whiskey glasses.
Devi, who always enjoyed the company of powerful men, took to the colonel right away. At five foot four (an inch shorter than Noriega), Díaz Herrer
a was known behind his back as el enano, “the midget.” He had a handsome face, though, and unlike his shy, introverted boss, he was charming and loquacious, a born storyteller with a gift for mimicry. There was, Devi told him later, “something I really liked about you. There is no logical explanation. It was just a feeling.”
Initially, however, the feeling wasn’t mutual. In no mood to entertain a white-haired anciana, Díaz Herrera went into the bedroom to get Maigualida. “Help me take care of this old lady,” he pleaded. Tired, she refused. So Díaz Herrera walked back out, poured himself a highball, and made conversation. Very quickly, he found himself captivated.
The colonel had always scorned the occult superstitions that pervaded Panamanian politics. His boss, Noriega, practiced Santería, believed in astrology, and consulted a longhaired Brazilian psychic named Ivan Trilha, but Díaz Herrera had no time for such peasant notions. Yet Devi, he quickly realized, was no low-rent village sorceress—she was an aristocrat, a woman who’d known Jawaharlal Nehru and Anastas Mikoyan, as well as all sorts of Hollywood legends. She was at once radiantly calm and playful—he would later describe her as “an enlightened piece of the universe that got into the body of a wonderful goblin.” He had been desperate to relax. Here, it seemed, was someone who could help him.
They talked for hours. Near midnight, as Devi tried to explain prana, she asked if there was any fruit around. There were a few leftover slices of apple on a room service tray, which she said would be good enough. She instructed Díaz Herrera to stand with his arms outstretched and she placed an apple slice in his left hand. Then, in a demonstration like the one she’d performed in the Uruguayan prison, she told him to clench his fists while she tried as hard as she could to push down his right arm. Devi was strong for an eighty-seven-year-old woman, but Díaz Herrera was able to resist.
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