Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell.
—Ram Dass
The Central Team gathered Monday morning at WHO. D.A. and Isao Arita came in from headquarters in Geneva. Zdeno Jezek was back from South India. Bill returned from Lucknow. Nicole brought our Indian counterparts, M.I.D., Dutta, Basu, and the others, into the meeting room behind Mrs. Boyer’s reception desk. Everyone was studying the results of the urban searches, and the first early case reports from West Bengal.
Smallpox had been surging; there were already forty-three thousand cases reported and many believed that at least that number were still hidden. More than one-third of all the world’s smallpox was in India. Tens of thousands of health workers were brought in from every government department. The family planning, malaria, maternal and child, sanitary workers, and junior doctors needed to be trained and carefully placed into the structure of the campaign. The largest peacetime “army” of health workers was assembling.
My job was primarily clerical: to draw up papers for the delegation of staff and to create the training manuals for the hundreds of foreign doctors we expected to arrive. After training the foreign doctors, I would get my first field assignment, to organize the search in the district where I saw my first cases of smallpox. The campaign was shifting into high gear. It had been a very long Monday. I left the office at midnight.
At 4 A.M. Tuesday I was awoken by a pounding on the door of our barsatti. It was the first time since we moved to Delhi that anyone had visited our tiny rooftop apartment. I staggered out of bed and saw an older Indian man I did not recognize. He looked like the night watchman.
“He is no more,” the man said softly when I opened the door. “He is no more.”
“What?” I think I said. “What?”
“Neem Karoli Baba is no more,” he repeated.
I recognized him now. He was the driver for R. P. Vaish, a devotee of Maharaji, who was the general manager of Delhi Transport Corporation, the city bus system. When I began working at WHO, Vaish had been one of several Indian families that helped orient us.
“Who?” I continued. “Do you mean Maharaji? Has he left Kainchi?”
“He is gone, mahasamadhi,” he said.
Mahasamadhi. The words mean “great enlightenment,” but it is also a euphemism for death. The death of a great saint, the finality of the physical presence of an enlightened soul for whom there could be no finality was too much weight for a common word like “death” to carry.
I stood there talking a bunch of nonsense, asking over and over, “What do you mean Maharaji’s no more? Do you mean he is not in Kainchi? He’s moved?” When it hit me, I doubled over. The guru, my gateway to God, was supposed to be forever—not like my father and grandfather, who had died and left me. The center of our lives was gone.
Girija heard us and woke up. I could barely get the words out. “He says Maharaji has died.”
Her body heaved. We held each other tightly. I thought back to the double rainbow that had reassured us after the weird night at Kainchi. It had been a lie. We looked at each other with empty and dejected eyes. Girija and I threw on some clothes and walked like zombies down the many flights of steps to the car. Only when we got into the car, where Vaish and his wife were waiting to take us to Vrindavan, did it really hit me. This was real; Maharaji was gone, dead. This wasn’t one of his jokes.
Vaish was told that Maharaji had collapsed at the Mathura train station, perhaps from a heart attack. His translator Ravi Khanna and several bystanders got Maharaji into a taxi to Ramakrishna Hospital, where he died. His body had already been moved to the Vrindavan ashram. Despite his own grief, Vaish had driven out of his way to collect Girija and me. Intimate with death in a way we are not in the West, Indians have another gear for kindness in the face of loss.
The ride was silent except for our sobs, each of us alone with our thoughts. The sun was just beginning to rise when we reached Vrindavan. The car eased into the gate of the Hanuman Temple. The bright rays of the morning sun lit up the ashram like spotlights shining on an empty stage. No one had yet arrived on the buses coming down the mountains from Kainchi.
Maharaji’s body, covered by a thin white sheet, lay on blocks of ice. Girija and I held each other while we stumbled across the same courtyard where he used to give darshan. Now, his body lay alone. Bright yellow marigolds lay on his chest, a garland around his neck. He looked serene, beautiful, dead. I sat on a block of ice and cried like a baby, harder than I ever thought possible.
Ravi told us that Maharaji’s last words before he died were, “Jaya jagadish hare,” Hail to the lord of the universe. The ashram was in mourning; everyone had blank stares and dead eyes. It was also in chaos; no one was in charge. The widows, called “the Mothers,” who were always with Maharaji—attending to him, learning from him, caring for him, always dressed in white—hadn’t arrived yet from Kainchi. His close devotee Professor Dada Mukerjee hadn’t arrived from Allahabad.
With the sun reaching higher came more heat, and then the flies. For six hours, Girija and I stood, or leaned, or sat on blocks of ice, fanning flies away from our guru’s body. I loved him so much, neither more nor less in death as in life. I thought of him neither more nor less Godlike, even with flies buzzing around his face, still vibrant in death. Death is the final common pathway of all flesh, as the Buddha taught, even for the holy ones. Sacred or secular, we take birth alone in blood and pain, and we exit in much the same way.
As the ice blocks melted, we replaced them. Bit by bit we stopped crying, sadness replaced with emptiness, sorrow with devotion, fear with duty. Eventually, the buses carrying Indian and Western disciples arrived from Kainchi. I tried to get myself together to help the newcomers who got off the bus in disbelief and moved through confusion and sadness and helpless wailing just like Girija and I had only a few hours before. When Dwarkanath and Ravi Das (Michael Jeffery) got off the bus, they looked into our eyes hoping to find something there that would tell them it was all one of Maharaji’s long-distance jokes, a way to get everyone from all the ashrams together in one place. We kept asking one another, “Do you understand this? Do you know what to do next? Do you know what it means?”
When the Mothers arrived, their grief was physical, flesh and blood, deep, personal, and so thick it filled the entire ashram. They rushed to his body, caressing and crying, wailing and moaning.
Too soon, a shouting match began between Kainchi hill people and Vrindavan plains people—loud, harsh, plaintive—over where to cremate Maharaji’s body. Some wanted to cremate him in the sacred Yamuna River, a few hundred yards from the ashram; others wanted to take him to Benares. Villagers and devotees flooded the ashram, each adding to the argument. Then a large entourage of yogis and pundits poured through the ashram gate in a disciplined single file. “You fools,” Pugal Baba shouted when he arrived at the head of the line. He held up his hand to halt mourners who had been getting ready to move Maharaji’s body. He was a venerated local saint and yogi whom Maharaji had loved.
“Stop it! You do not understand who he was—and you have no authority. A normal mortal, yes, when they die, you take them to the river ghats for cremation because the holiness of the river will sanctify and bless their bodies. This is no normal mortal. He was not a man! You don’t know who he was. He was like God. You don’t sanctify him by taking him to the river. If you burn him by the Ganges, his body will sanctify the Ganges. If you burn him by the Yamuna, his body will sanctify the Yamuna. Burn him here in the ashram, where people can visit. And then build a temple over the site of the cremation.”
Pugal Baba settled the matter and ceremonial arrangements were quickly made. Brahmins and ashramites placed the body of Neem Karoli Baba onto a bier. He was wrapped in a simple white dhoti and covered with flowers. It seemed as if the entire city, already filled with thousands of widows who had come to serve Krishna, waiting to die among Vrindavan’s sacred shrines, had been affected by an atmospheric change. The air was twinkly; it smelled different. Colors were more vivid. The heat made everything shimmer, the edges of objects blending into each other like a Monet painting. People and conversations moved in slow motion and seemed to be deeper, more meaningful, heavier with import. We held our breath. In each encounter, we would freeze the frame, expand, and share the moment so intimately that we were inside of each other. Everything opened, especially our hearts.
Vrindavan came to a halt. There was no commerce, no school, no city services. The ceremony began, transforming pain and loss into gratitude. Hundreds walked alongside the processional or followed in vehicles. Along the route peacocks released their strangely beguiling calls. Girija and I followed just behind Maharaji’s bier, which was covered with red and yellow silk, secured by four posts on top of an improbable red 1955 Chevy station wagon with wood side panels. Any American car in Vrindavan would have been odd, but this one, for us at least, became part of Maharaji’s legend. When we caught up to the vehicle, moving slowly through the winding narrow streets, we saw full-color stickers of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Minnie Mouse on its bumper. It was Donald Duck that floored me. From the moment we had met Wavy Gravy and joined the Hog Farm, whenever anyone died, Wavy would say, “Good grief,” like Charlie Brown, and then add, “Death is Donald Duck,” which made as much sense as death itself.
It was a little uncomfortable, a little magical, and very, very weird that our guru’s corpse lay on top of that old Chevy plastered with Donald Duck decals. It was the only American car with Disney decals I would ever see in India. Maybe it meant everything. Maybe it meant nothing. We were in such an altered state of reality, nothing surprised us, nothing frightened us, nothing made us happy.
Jai, jai, jai, Neem Karoli Baba”—Hail, hail, hail, Neem Karoli Baba—or sometimes “One hundred and eight times honored is Neem Karoli Baba” echoed through the narrow caverns created by the ancient buildings lining the medieval streets. The traditional local greetings Raday Sham and Jai Radha, hail to the dark one, Krishna, the dusky blue-colored god, rang out. Victory to Krishna and his consort Radha, the goddess of the gopis, the milkmaids.
We followed the Chevy to, how could it not be, the levee, the ghats, the banks of the Yamuna River, through the Krishna peacock gardens, through the streets filled with ancient temples, and to Banki Bihari Temple where Maharaji loved to send Westerners to visit. We made a parikrama, a circumambulation of Vrindavan, and turned toward Maharaji’s Hanuman Temple.
When the processional returned, the ashram was swollen beyond capacity. Brahmins, pujaris, and sadhus chanted Sanskrit prayers and mantras. There was a fire pit and a worship service for the fire god Agni, with pundits pouring ghee into the pit, raising the flames, bellowing “Swaha! Swaha!” So be it! So be it!
Maharaji’s body was lifted onto an eight-foot-long pile of kindling and logs. It was covered with ghee. The cremation fire was set alight underneath him with a long stick wrapped in cotton cloth soaked in ghee. The torch was laid on top of the logs by someone I’d never seen; I was told his name was Dharm Narayan.
Maharaji’s body burned for several hours while the fire puja was performed. When only the outline of a skeleton remained, Dharm Narayan picked up a long thick stick, light enough to lift but heavy enough to deliver a strong blow. He swung it overhead and brought it down hard, cracking open Maharaji’s burnt skull, liberating his sacred soul from maya, the illusory cycle of birth and death, freeing him to merge into Brahma, the great consciousness of existence, the great mystery.
The sound of the stick cracking Maharaji’s skull magnified the drugless psychedelic experience. The ceremony ended, my guru’s remains smoldered. Although he had escaped from central prison, Girija and I and all the others who loved this man, cherished him, believed in him, depended on him, we all fell back to our earthly jails.
For the next two days, people stayed around the fire, crying, hugging, drinking tea, and, later, walking around the town, heading to bed if they had one or sleeping anywhere they could find a spot. Others were still arriving after hearing the news late. When a new member of the satsang arrived to find out it was true that Maharaji had been cremated, each of us who was there relived the experience all over again.
The morning after the cremation, Girija and I woke, both still in a fog, and walked the short distance to the ashram to be sure the ashes had cooled. We filled a silver urn with many of his ashes. We did not know whether that was okay, but we wanted to keep him with us always. A saffron-robed sadhu with an eight-by-ten glass-framed photo of Maharaji dangling from his neck was walking around the smoldering bier softly saying prayers.
“Where do you come from?” we asked him.
“Akbarpur, where Maharaji and his children come from.”
Children? It had never occurred to us that Maharaji had children. I don’t think I had ever thought about it; I had assumed he was a celibate saint.
“You saw his son performing the ceremony to release his soul yesterday, when he cracked Maharaji’s skull,” the sadhu, Madrassi Baba, said, as we tried to comprehend this new set of facts. “He went back home to Agra.”
“What?”
“Yes, one son, Dharm Narayan, lives in Agra and another, A. S. Sharma, lives in Bhopal. Go to Nib Karori station and ask around. It’s the same station where Maharaji performed the first big miracle.”
What miracle?
Maharaji’s birth name was Laxshmi-Narayan Sharma. When he was young, during the Raj, he was on his way home when a British constable stopped his train at Nib Karori and ordered all Indians to disembark. But Laxshmi-Narayan wouldn’t budge. The police forcibly removed him. “Start the train,” they said to the train’s engineer once all the Indians were off the train. But it would not move. The engineers could find nothing wrong with the engine, and nothing the engineer tried could get it to move.
“Put me back on,” Laxshmi-Narayan said. “Then it will go.” After quite a bit of haggling, Laxshmi-Narayan returned to his seat and the train began to move. Thus he became known as Nib Karori Baba—or the “baba from the town of Nib Karori.” Westerners bungled the pronunciation, calling him Neem Karoli Baba.
Girija and I decided we needed to go to Nib Karori to explore this mystery. We crowded into a taxi with four other Westerners.
At the Nib Karori train station, we found many Indians with Maharaji’s photo around their necks, wandering around with the same vacant eyes we had seen at the ashram. Some had shaved their heads, a sign of mourning. They guided us to the cave where we were told Maharaji had meditated for seven years. A Hanuman image seemed to emerge from the back of it. Locals invited us to see the tree near where he had lived and the temple where he had prayed. A man at a small kiosk was selling photos of a young Laxshmi-Narayan Sharma before he became Maharaji, photos that we had never seen. We bought them all to give to our friends at the ashram. At the tree a young man with a shaved head sat with one of the huge framed photos of Maharaji hanging from his neck. I asked in Hindi whether he knew the directions to the village where Maharaji had been born. Of course he did, and he jumped into our already crowded taxi and guided the driver the half hour to Akbarpur.
We walked up to the house where our new friend said that Maharaji had been born. His father had been wealthy—the house was made of brick, unlike the rest of the adobe homes in the city. Maharaji’s father was known as the local zamindar, or “lord of the Earth”—he was a landlord and owned much of the farmland and the village itself. Maharaji grew up rich, but from childhood, he kept running away with the sadhus to sit with them at their fires listening to tales of mystical India. Trying to stop him, his parents married him off when he was still a child.
Thinking about Maharaji with a family was like imagining our own parents’ primal scene. A young man sitting on the stoop saw us wandering and said, “You should meet his son in Agra.” He joined us in the crowded taxi and guided the driver to an address in the center of that city.
Thus one day after the cremation, still in dismay, still in the same clothes we had left Delhi wearing forty-eight hours before, we pulled up to a house in Agra and knocked on the door. Three men, Maharaji’s two sons and a grandson, looking like younger versions of him, each with a freshly shaved head, appeared at the door. Dharm Narayan recognized us from the cremation and welcomed us inside for tea. A woman rushed by, quickly covering her face with her sari. “That’s Maharaji’s wife and my mother,” Dharm Narayan said. His brother, A. S. Sharma, added, “You have found us on this important day. Now you are part of our family, of Maharaji’s family.” After tears and tea, the elder son, A. S. Sharma said, “You are welcome to visit my son Dhananjay, Maharaji’s grandson, and my family in Madhya Pradesh. We live in the capital city of Bhopal. Also, if you get to Dhanbad in the state of Bihar, please visit my sister Girija. That’s where she lives.”
Girija. Maharaji had named his daughter Girija. So casually revealed. My own beloved Girija burst into tears, overwhelmed that Maharaji had given her the same name as his own daughter by birth.
“Don’t tell anyone about the family,” Vaish advised the six of us when we returned to Vrindavan. Later that day the Barmans said the same thing. It was a secret that distanced those of us who had been in that taxi from the rest of the satsang for a while.
I have no idea where Maharaji fits on the hierarchy of angels and gurus and saints and mystics. It does not matter. He was more than enough for me, high enough for me, close enough to heaven for me, wise enough for me. He was my gateway to God. And he was so completely different from the rest of us. He had no personal possessions. He didn’t care about what he wore or what he ate or where he slept or how he looked. He never talked about his accomplishments or powers. He seemed unaffected by the highs and lows of daily events. He was different from the rest of us in almost every way, except in death, in which we are all the same. Maharaji, Jesus and Mary, Mother Teresa, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad—all of these amazing beings—my father, my grandfather, and your mother and your grandmother each left or will leave behind a corpse around which flies will buzz in the heat. But while Maharaji’s death and the pilgrimage to his family taught us more about his life, his corpse underscored Buddha’s teaching of the truth of suffering and death.
One more lesson for me was to separate out the inevitable from the impossible. Even while knowing death and suffering are inevitable, many kinds of suffering could be ended. And while death itself was unavoidable, there was nothing at all unavoidable about death from smallpox. That could be pulled out by the roots, unmulan, eradicated.
My duty could not have been clearer.
I had come back to India to be “spiritual,” thinking it was the next step after “radical political” and “countercultural.” I thought it meant meditating, fasting, living in an ashram, and retreating from the world. Maharaji had shown me that my spiritual path, my dharma—no better than anyone else’s destiny, no more or less exalted, no easier or more difficult, noble or venal—was to reach for God through karma yoga, doing good deeds without attachment. Mahatma Gandhi, in a conversation with his disciples about what constituted good deeds that would bring them closer to God, had said, “I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it?”
Now that I had been to villages with smallpox, it was clear to me that nearly all the rich people were vaccinated, but the poor were not; that the scars of smallpox were not on the faces of the rich, but on those of the poorest and most oppressed, who lived on the margins, in the shadows, the lowest classes, the lowest castes, the outcasts.
Eradicating smallpox would be consistent with Gandhi’s talisman, with my adolescent search for the greatest good, the summum bonum, with Christ’s Golden Rule, with the Jewish admonition of tikkun olam, to heal the broken world, and exactly what Neem Karoli Baba had told me to do.
Tomorrow I would go back to work.