When God Walked on Earth

Within two fleeting hours this morning, the ancient Deccan village of Puttaparthi, once remote in the bucolic backwoods of a fabled land for untold centuries until the 23rd of November, 1926, became inextricably enmeshed in the web of history. On this day, this essentially humble peasant village became immortalised in the highest spiritual traditions of India and mankind.

Today was the day of the Maha Samadhi of not only Puttaparthi’s most illustrious son, Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who became known to millions in India and around the world in the 85 years of His life as the Embodiment of Truth and Love.

Today many who silently observed the last rites over His remains would have felt the full import of His teachings through the decades here in this humble village pretending to be a city. The years of its sudden growth, like some exotic mushroom, are destined to become embedded in the annals of the spiritual history of mankind.

By this morning, the thousands who poured into this overgrown village for the past three days seemed to have become inured to the inescapable truth that their beloved guru had left this dimension. Perhaps it was only then that many among them started to reflect on His often repeated declaration: “I am not this body.”

Perhaps it was only this morning, in the full glare of unrelenting television cameras, that many realised, as I did, that rather than being the body in which we temporarily find ourselves from time to time on Earth, we are really eternally free universal spirit, children of the cosmos wandering in time and space.

 

Although I was spending the morning with my dear friends Sue and Roy Christie in their flat overlooking Kulwant Hall, I decided to go out and walk about the streets of Puttaparthi before we sat down to lunch. So I picked up my hat and my camera and took the lift down into street and the heat of the Indian summer. I am glad I did that.

In walking into these sunbaked streets, I discovered immortal, timeless India, although I have lived in this upstart of a village for years. In that immortality I saw the message of the Being whose Maha Samadhi we were observing this ethereal morning, bereft despite ourselves. He had often declared, “In my life is my message.”

He meant the works of His life, of course, so in my walk I looked at those.

I started in the village where He was born, now grown considerably since I first saw it twenty years ago. Even in this humble village within a village, there were signs of the new prosperity that has come to India in recent years, even though in these impoverished rural areas new prosperity tends to creep rather than gallop.

At the traffic circle which marks the entrance to the old village, a giant television screen had been set up by the Sri Sathya Sai Trust. Hundreds of local people and visitors were sitting in the dusty circle around the screen just in front of the ancient Hanuman temple complex where their beloved Swami played as a child, their heads tilted upwards to the screen.

 

It came through subconsciously that there was something strange about the scene. It took some time to realise what it was. For Puttaparthi, it was unusually quiet. Indians are not quiet people. They are more likely to be noisy and argumentative in the best of times. The local equivalent of a fishwife is a local farmer’s wife with a basket of vegetables. Yet, in all fairness, there is often little anger no matter how vociferous they might sound.

The crowds assembled around the TV screen quietly separated to let me pass as I walked through, while a man pointed out a shady spot under the neem trees at the entrance to the temple. There were dozens of people sitting in the shade of those trees. A young man passed me a plastic sachet of cold water. As they moved out of my way to let me pass, I became aware of their quiet humility.

There were mostly village people there, distinctive in their peasant clothing. Yet there were a fair number of visitors from other parts of India and several westerners, including myself. The villagers made us feel welcome. After taking some photographs, I decided to move on.

The crowds of yesterday had gone, although there were large clusters of people all along the main road lined by shops, banks and hotels that have sprung up in the past decade or so where market gardens and coconut groves grew only recently. As I neared the back gate of Prasanthi Nilayam, I heard a shout. It was directed at me.

“Sir!” the voice shouted. ”Where are you going in the sun?”

It was only then I realised that, not unlike the mad dogs and Englishmen of that famous entertainer of yesteryear, Noel Coward, I often strode out into the heat of the sun in the belief that my khaki hat would protect me from sunstroke and other horrors of the tropics.

I turned around to see Mehboob Baig, his auto rickshaw replaced by a sleek black and red motor cycle.

“Come, sir”, he shouted from across the street in Hinglish. “I’ll take you where you going.”

He was wearing a skull cap, the Islamic version of the Jewish yarmulke. Seeing that I had noticed it , he said: “Today is the day of Swami’s samadhi. To me and my family, this is a holy day.”

So this Muslim boy, my favourite among the auto rickshaw drivers I often use, was wearing his yarmulke in deference to Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s samadhi. I was touched.

He explained that his auto rickshaw, like all the others, had been banned by the police until after the funeral. Because of this, he was rescuing people he knew on his motor bike.
“This is my seva for Swami”, he said, smiling.

I told him that I wanted to go past Prasanthi Nilayam, Sai Baba’s ashram, and through the town as far as the Gokulum down the main road to take photographs. On the way I wanted to see and photograph the stadium and other landmarks and perhaps even go down to the Super Speciality Hospital that Swami built and where He finally left this dimension.

“Climb on and I’ll take you where you want to go”, he said, gesturing to the pillion seat behind him. I mounted with great alacrity. Despite my age and several admonitions by my doctor friend Sara Pavan, I cannot resist a motor cycle ride. Motor bikes and blue jeans help me thumb my nose at creeping age and decrepitude.

We rode slowly past an enraptured crowd captured like so many colourful moths by another giant television screen and took a side lane to come out into the main street on the rise near the police station. Mehboob stopped the bike and I looked back towards the famous Ganesha Gate to take pictures. The sounds of sonorous chanting in Sanskrit by priests wafted over loudspeakers. The road in front had been closed to mechanised traffic by the police.

 

Prasanthi Nilayam over which we gazed is now a far cry from the bone dry and rocky hilltop it was only fifteen years ago. It is now green and lush, carefully-tended lawns and paths under neem and other shade trees. The giant papal tree with its spreading branches dominated the spot at the Ganesha Gate before the Ganesha shrine from which it gets its name. The ashram was closed to the general public this morning, so we moved on.

Passing under the arch across the road, we entered perhaps the most impressive section of the main road after Prasanthi Nilayam. Here were the manifestations of the Education in Human Values philosophy of the Guru of Gurus. For a quarter of a kilometre, the road is lined with the various educational institutions that He established over the decades: the colleges and hostels, the planetarium and indoor sports stadium for His treasured students, even the elephant enclosure originally built for His beloved Sai Geeta but now housing her successor Luxmi.

We rode past the college buildings and the entrance to the Hillview Stadium, now filled with crowds gathered silently around more giant television screens. Turning into a side road, Mehboob headed for the Gokulum, the dairy established by Swami. Coming back to the main road further on, he told me he was heading for the “Big” Hospital. Locals differentiate between the two hospitals established by Swami by referring to the Super Speciality as “Big” and the one next to Prasanthi Nilayam as “general”.

After being surrounded by outside broadcasting vans and hordes of media people and policemen in the weeks Swami was being treated, the hospital was almost deserted. After the nail-biting events of the past four weeks, it looked almost forlorn. Yet it impressed me as it always does since I saw it for the first time on a hot day some fourteen years ago.

It then rose out of that flat and featureless landscape like an exotic mirage that could suddenly melt away at any time. But this remarkable institution is far from a mirage and rather than melt away it has treated and given another lease of life to thousands of patients from all over India and even countries abroad.

By all accounts, it would do so for a long time into the future. I read somewhere some years ago that it would still be standing in a thousand years. Perhaps by then, well into the Golden Age, mankind would be free of disease and the hospital would be perhaps a monument to the tribulations of the past. This is where some of the finest doctors India has produced and even some from abroad fought for four weeks to save Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s life in vain.

Where there was only a few years ago bare and rocky ground with scattered thorn trees, there is now a sizeable satellite town, all attracted there by Swami’s living memorial, the Super Speciality Hospital.

 

Mehboob stopped the bike in a shop-lined street next to the hospital and went in. He returned with two bottles of a soft drink and handed me one. I offered some money but he held up his hand.

“No, no sir”, he said, shaking his head. “Today you are my guest.”

I took more pictures of the hospital and the town that has mushroomed around it. Then we headed back to Puttaparthi. As we neared the Hanuman Temple circle, I noticed people on the roofs of some buildings. They were all gazing into the sky in the west. I wondered aloud at what they we looking. Mehboob said that they were searching for signs of Swami’s return. A story that He would come from the sky has gained currency in the past few days.

“Are you also expecting His return?”, I asked.

“Not really, sir. Not in that way, from the sky”, he said. “But I think there will be some great miracle, a bigger one than we ever saw when He was still with us. That miracle will show us that He is still here though we cannot see Him. That would make everyone happy, because the world is so lonely without Him. We felt better when we knew He was here to protect us.”

We shook hands when he left me outside Sue and Roy’s flat.

“Sai Ram”, he said before riding away.

As I waited for the lift to the flat, I thought I had already seen a miracle today. Swami often said that His life was His message. In His works that I saw in my ride with Mehboob, I read His message of hope to mankind.

In the museums, colleges, stadia, the great ashram and hospitals created by this humble, once abjectly poor village boy whose head was filled with all knowledge of mankind and Mother Earth, His message was loud and clear.

At the end of my tour with Mehboob, only one word arose in my mind: “Love”.

Only intense love for mankind could have created all that I saw this morning, from the sweet humility of the multitudes around the giant screens, to a high-tech hospital rising like a mirage from rural fields, to Mehboob refusing to take money from me for a nostalgic tour.

Yes, I read the message clearly. Swami has not left; only the body that He so often declared was not Him has been interred in Sai Kulwant hall.

Everywhere else, His indomitable spirit of love and service to mankind prevails. Everything that He created in Puttaparthi and wherever else the great organisation that bears His name serves mankind in dozens of countries around the world, is the living Embodiment of His Love.

Like the Christies and many other westerners, I shall continue to live in Puttaparthi, to concentrate on recording for posterity as much as I can recall of my own extraordinary experiences during a time that God walked the earth.