· CHAPTER 14 ·

IT’S NOT CLEAR what Devi expected to get out of her madly impractical trip to Saigon in 1966, when the Vietnam War was raging. In her writings and interviews, she says only that she went there to conduct meditations. The trip was part of a grand but amorphous project called the Crusade for Light in Darkness, which Devi began in 1965, but because it never really came to fruition, she didn’t write much about it. It’s likely that she was pulled to Vietnam by the same centripetal force that always drew her to the spinning center of things; even as she professed a desire to live outside history, there was a part of her that loved being close to the action. She’d had success in the past with impulsive leaps into foreign lands and barely constructed plans that somehow seemed to work out, and she had faith that wherever she went, even a country at war, the universe would ensure her well-being.

The idea for the Crusade arose during a fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963. Devi had quite a following in the city thanks to Elsie Frankfurt, who, along with her sisters, had founded Page Boy, the country’s first line of fashionable, upscale maternity clothes. Frankfurt, a millionaire and a minor celebrity, had met Devi while vacationing at Rancho La Puerta and been so impressed that she instituted daily yoga breaks for all employees in her Dallas factory, bringing Devi to town that spring to help start the program. Over two days, Devi went from department to department, offering individual instruction in deep breathing and restorative asanas, and then leading the whole office through relaxation exercises over the loudspeaker.

After her visit, every day at 1:55 p.m., switchboard operators at the factory would interrupt all calls to announce, “[Y]oga break starts at 2!” When the hour struck, the entire factory shuddered to a halt. Buyers in the showroom were told they could either wait or join in as Elsie or one of her sisters used the loudspeaker to lead the session. “The elevators are motionless and the porters lay down their mops,” reported the New York Herald Tribune. “Since there aren’t enough mats yet to go around, some of the employees stretch out on the floor and others push aside the maternity dresses and lie down on the cutting tables, while they breathe deep and perfect their yoga.” The story also noted that Frankfurt was planning to make yoga clothes—what she called a “lotus suit”—for expectant mothers, prefiguring the prenatal yoga boom by several decades.

Because of Frankfurt, the Herald Tribune reported, yoga was “running rampant” in Dallas. So it was a natural place for Devi to stop while on tour for her latest book, Renew Your Life through Yoga, which describes how yoga offers release from anxiety, the “Problem of Our Age” and “one of the greatest menaces the civilized world must face these days.” When she realized that she was going to be in the city at the same time as President John F. Kennedy—whose iconic wife, Jackie, had worn Page Boy attire during her pregnancies—she hoped to meet him and possibly teach him some deep-breathing exercises that he might use to cope with the enormous strain of his job.

He was dead before she got the chance. Kennedy’s assassination shocked her deeply and seems to have awakened in her some of the religious hunger she’d put aside during the years of her great American success. Like much of the emerging counterculture, she was becoming convinced that the world was in the midst of a spiritual crisis, one that yoga and meditation could perhaps help to solve. Thus, after years of trying to persuade Westerners that yoga had nothing to do with religion, she suddenly found herself ready for a divine quest.

The details of that quest, though, never quite got nailed down. Part of the plan was to build what she called a “Tower of Light” in Tecate, with an eternal flame that she would carry from country to country like an Olympic torch. This would be followed by a series of mass meditations held in stadiums in which people would “attempt to stir the ‘forces of light’ into action to combat the ‘forces of darkness’ so active in this day and age,” she told the New Cosmic Star, a monthly New Age newspaper. “We will stress the performance of acts of kindness, light and goodness…keep your heart clean, be extraordinarily kind.” Afterward, all participants would light a candle from the eternal flame and keep it burning in their windows until the end of the Crusade.

In April 1965, everyone in Devi’s address book received a typed fund-raising letter suggesting that they honor her sixty-sixth birthday by making a donation toward the project. “On May 12, her birthday, INDRA DEVI will start on a ‘CRUSADE FOR LIGHT IN DARKNESS,’ believing that this will bring LIGHT into the lives of thousands and possibly millions because she wants to spend the rest of her life on this CRUSADE,” it read. “Without adequate assistance, without proper organization and necessary funds, this COURAGEOUS LITTLE WOMAN who is always full of enthusiasm, always ready to help others has decided to start on this CRUSADE because she says, ‘the call is so persistent that she cannot disobey it and will just go ahead believing angels and men will come to help.’ ”

The Crusade kicked off at a ceremony on May 8, when the mayors of Tecate and nearby National City, California, joined her to lay the Tower’s foundation stone at Rancho Cuchuma. There was another ceremony on May 12 at National City’s Kimball Community Hall. That year, she released a vinyl record, Indra Devi Presents Concentration & Meditation, whose cover described her as “The World’s Foremost Authority on Yoga” and the “Founder of the Crusade for Light in Darkness.” Its front featured a portrait of Devi by the Dallas artist Dmitri Vail, known for his expensive paintings of socialites, celebrities, and politicians. She’s shown in a white sari with a sort of silver Renaissance halo behind her head. Eyes cast heavenward, she stands before what appears to be an altar and holds a small oil lamp in her hands, like an offering. Never before had she presented herself in such an overtly spiritual guise.

On the recording, which is less than a half-hour long, her voice is melodious and almost girlish as she instructs listeners to summon their inner light through visualization and concentration, and then to direct it outward, toward those they love as well as those they hate. She enlists her audience in a cosmic spiritual struggle, saying, “Those who are on the dark side are very active. They’re violent, they’re loud, they kill…and what are you doing, if you are on the side of light? You cannot just do nothing.” As she presents it, meditation becomes both a way of letting go of the world and of improving it.

Nothing more seems to have happened with the crusade until 1966, when Devi traveled to India “carrying the fire of peace and solidarity,” which she planned to present to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of her old friend Jawaharlal Nehru, on behalf of the women of Mexico.

Bringing a fire across the globe by commercial airplane, it turned out, wasn’t easy. After starting the flame with a magnifying glass atop Mount Cuchuma, Devi was determined not to extinguish it, lest she undermine the symbolism of her pilgrimage. Yet even in 1966, when airline security was far more lax than it is today, you couldn’t get on a plane with a burning candle. So, as she prepared to board a flight to New York for the first leg of the trip, she devised a clever solution. She used the fire to light some incense, which she somehow smuggled aboard in the folds of her sari and then hid in an ashtray. On the plane, she used the incense to light a cigarette, which, with the help of some obliging fellow passengers, was then used to light others throughout the flight. When the plane was to land and the No Smoking sign switched on, Devi hid one of the lit cigarettes in her ashtray, then used it to light yet another cigarette when the plane touched down.

“I assure you, I did not rest until we lit a match from this cigarette when we got to the hotel and then lit a large candle from this match,” she told the New Cosmic Star. She repeated this process on a flight from New York to Rome, where she carried the flame to the Vatican and somehow, she said, arranged to have Pope Paul VI bless it. From there, she went to Delhi, where Indira Gandhi had just, months before, been installed as prime minister following the death of the country’s previous leader, Lal Bahadur Shastri. A newspaper photo captured the ceremony during which Devi handed a lotusshaped vessel containing the flame to Gandhi. The Indian leader appeared reverent, her eyes downcast and her head covered by her sari. The caption noted that, from India, the flame was to be “taken all over the world.”

It was an extravagantly crazy idea to bring the Crusade to Vietnam, though there was also a certain logic to it. Devi was still deeply apolitical and never took a public stance on the war itself, but you didn’t have to be an activist to recognize that much of the world’s turmoil was distilled in that country. She doesn’t seem to have had a plan in place for what would happen when she got there, but she was used to charging into the unknown and having it work out. Perhaps she thought that when she arrived, men and angels would lead her to her next step.

On the way to Saigon, Devi stopped in Madras to see an old friend from her Theosophy days, a doctor named Sivakamu. (She was the elder sister of Rukmini Devi Arundale, whom Annie Besant had once come close to declaring the World Mother.) Devi decided to stay at the Adyar Theosophical headquarters, revisiting the tranquil, leafy estate where she’d first landed in India almost forty years earlier. It was just supposed to be a brief detour, but there, once again, people were buzzing about a new Indian messiah, and for Devi, learning about him would change everything.

Devi first heard the name Sai Baba from Howard Murphet and his wife, Iris, Australian Theosophists in late middle age who had come to India searching for divinity. As it happens, Howard’s fascination with yoga philosophy had been piqued while he was studying at the Sydney yoga studio of Michael Volin, Devi’s former assistant in Shanghai. Eventually, he and his wife decided to come to India in the hope of lapping up spiritual wisdom at its source.

“Was there, we wondered, anything left of the mysterious India described in the pages of Paul Brunton, Yogananda, Kipling, Madame Blavatsky, Colonel H. S. Olcott and other writers?” Murphet writes. “Were there still hidden fountains of esoteric knowledge or had the ancient springs dried up?” He and Iris began their quest by enrolling in a six-month “School of the Wisdom” at the Theosophical Society, after which they traveled the country seeking audiences with various gurus and holy men.

They met the Dalai Lama, not yet an international celebrity, in Dharamsala, the Himalayan town where he lived in exile. They visited the Sivananda ashram in Rishikesh, discoursed with cave-dwelling sadhus, and met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, thanks to the Beatles, would soon become a global superstar. Sai Baba, though, had captivated them above all others. “He seemed to lift us up to some high level where there were no more worries,” Murphet writes of his first encounter with the guru. “Life became larger than life, and the usual difficulties and conflicts of the mundane world were far off, unreal. There seemed to be an aura of happiness around us. Iris mentioned that she could not stop herself smiling for hours after Baba had talked to her.”

“He is the brightest star in the spiritual firmament of India today,” Howard told Devi. “He is an Avatar, a Divine Incarnation.”

“You must…you simply must meet him,” added Iris.

Devi, however, wasn’t interested. When they showed her his picture—“a fat, fierce-looking man in a bright orange robe,” with a nimbus of wiry hair like an afro—all she could say was “Why this wild hairdo?” Sai Baba was due to arrive in Madras, and the Murphets urged Devi to wait, but she was eager to continue her Crusade and disappointed them by leaving for Vietnam as planned.

In Saigon, she stayed with the Indian consul general. She told Natalia Apostolli, her biographer, that she conducted candlelight meditations in various temples and pagodas, but aside from that, no record exists of the weeks she spent in the city. In some ways it must have recalled her days in Shanghai and, before that, Berlin, with their strange mix of violence, terror, and antic gaiety. There were frequent Vietcong bombings. Protests against the South Vietnamese military junta were beaten back by riot police, leaving the streets full of teargas. The sound of artillery rumbled through the night, searchlights strafed the Saigon River, and fighter planes and jet bombers roared as they took off from Tan Son Nhat airport.

At the same time, the city throbbed with life. “Saigon swings,” the Associated Press’s Hugh Mulligan wrote around the period Devi arrived. “The streets are full of flowers and thronged with women shoppers, wearing the colorful form-fitting ow-dais [sic], until a bomb erupts and everyone scatters. German acrobats and Spanish flamenco dancers and Greek snake charmers and all sorts of other exotic acts from what surely must be the bottom of the vaudeville barrel perform in smoky nightclubs now crowded with American soldiers.” Such apocalyptic festivity, so strange to most people, would have been familiar to Devi.

Yet what was she doing there? It’s hard to imagine who in Vietnam she might have passed her sacred flame to. When six U.S. pacifists visited Saigon that spring, young anticommunists pelted them with eggs and tomatoes. There was mounting anti-Americanism among the organized Buddhists, who opposed the U.S.-supported regime and would almost certainly have been suspicious of overtures from a white-haired Western lady of indeterminate accent. The city was tense and complicated and full of conspiracy, and even as lucky and charismatic a woman as Devi could not blithely show up and expect any sort of welcome.

Whatever happened, she never wrote about the trip except in passing, as a detail in the story of how she found Sai Baba. For it was in Saigon, she writes, that a desire to meet him took hold, soon growing so intense that after a couple of weeks she decided to return to India early. Perhaps, in the sudden desire to see the guru, she was able to imbue a failed trip with meaning. Her roundabout route to him proved that the universe was watching out for her after all.

According to legend, shortly after Sathya Sai Baba was born on November 23, 1926, in a parched, remote Indian village called Puttaparthi, he was placed on a blanket that started, mysteriously, to move. There was a cobra beneath it, but it didn’t harm the boy. This was seen as remarkably auspicious, the cobra being a symbol of Shiva. From the beginning, the child was marked as divine.

By the time the boy—then known as Satyanarayana Raju, or Sathya, for short—was in elementary school, he was known for playful little miracles, producing, for instance, handfuls of sweets from an empty bag for other children. He played magical pranks, such as freezing a teacher to his chair. At thirteen, possibly following a scorpion’s bite, he went through an agonizing spiritual crisis, becoming, for a time, terrifyingly erratic. “He seldom answered when spoken to; he had little interest in food; he would suddenly burst into song or poetry, sometimes quoting long Sanskrit passages far beyond anything learned in his formal education and training,” writes Murphet. “Off and on he would become stiff, appearing to leave his body and go somewhere else.”

Believing the boy possessed by evil spirits, Sathya’s terrified parents brought him to an exorcist, who tried to drive away the incorporeal interlopers by torturing the body they were living in. The fearsome demon-fighter shaved the boy’s head; sliced deep, bloody crosses on his skull; and poured lime and garlic into the wounds. He dumped 108 pots of cold water over him, beat him on his joints, and rubbed a searing acid mixture into his eyes. Eventually, Sathya’s parents couldn’t stand it anymore and took their unchanged son away. They tried other doctors and healers, but no one could do anything to fix the strange, unstable child.

Then, his biographers say, after about two months of bizarre behavior, Sathya called his family members around him and, in a joyful mood, started materializing sugar candy and flowers with a wave of his hand. Neighbors crowded in, and the smiling boy plucked treats for them from the air—more candy and flowers, as well as rice balls cooked in milk. His father had been tending to his produce store while all this was going on, and when he heard what was happening, he was furious, convinced that his son was either fooling everyone with sleight of hand or, worse, using black magic. “This is too much! It must stop! What are you?” Sathya’s father asked. “Tell me—a ghost, or a god, or a madcap?”

“I am Sai Baba,” the boy replied.

Sai Baba had been the name of a deceased holy man from a town called Shirdi in the Indian state of Maharashtra. He was famous for combining Hindu and Sufi Muslim forms of devotion, and for preaching the unity of all religions in a country often convulsed by sectarianism. He lived in a dilapidated mosque and had a reputation as a miracle worker; ash from a sacred fire that he kept burning at all times was used as a cure for manifold ailments. Sai Baba of Shirdi had died in 1918. Now young Satyanarayana Raju insisted that he was this man’s reincarnation.

His parents continued to doubt him, but the boy’s following grew. A bouquet of jasmine was said to have spelled out “Sai Baba” when he scattered it on the floor. He produced photos of Shirdi Sai Baba with a wave of his hand and plucked dates and flowers from the air—offerings, he said, that had been left at the shrine of his previous body. Despite all this, his parents insisted he go back to school, and for a while he complied, until one day in 1940 he threw away his books and announced that he was leaving. “My devotees are calling me. I have my work,” he said.

After that he lived with followers, and wherever he was, worshippers would gather to sing bhajans, or devotional songs. People began to arrive from nearby towns and villages, and from Bangalore, one hundred miles away, to see the miraculous young man, now known as Sathya Sai Baba, or simply Sai Baba. Barely five feet tall, he had frizzy black hair that stood straight up from his head, a pudgy face, and soft, dark eyes overflowing with both compassion and mischief. His charisma was powerful but also effervescent; he loved jokes and preached a gospel of love. For devotees, simply being in his presence conferred blessings.

Sathya Sai Baba began to attract an elite following, including members of the royal families of Mysore, Sandur, Venkatagiri, and Chincholi, as well as landlords, government officials, and wealthy businessmen. In 1945 his devotees built him a temple at the edge of his village, and in 1950 it was expanded into an ashram called Prasanthi Nilayam, or “Abode of Supreme Peace.”

During those early years, his following was still small enough to be intimate. In the dry season, he’d take devotees to the sands of the Chitravathi River to sing and discuss matters of the spirit. “We’d sit there and talk, just a few of us, like a family, close and full of love,” one of his acolytes, a woman doctor, told the screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who published an admiring, enigmatic book about Sai Baba in 1971. “He’d start playing with the sand, pouring it from one hand to another the way a child does, and all of a sudden as the sand fell from one hand to the other you could see it turn into a ring or a necklace or a statue of Krishna.”

Other early devotees told stories of “wish-fulfilling trees” that, by Sai Baba’s grace, would yield any fruit they named. He cured illnesses and made food multiply. “At picnics he would tap empty dishes, and when the lids were removed, the dishes would be full of food, sometimes hot as if straight from the kitchen,” one of his followers told Murphet. Miracles, he often said, were his calling card, his way of gathering people around him and opening them to his message, which was about the oneness of all faiths and the need to love God in whatever form you envisioned Him. He was like a jolly Jesus, and his followers had the ecstatic sense that they were modern-day apostles, supporting players in a world-transforming drama.

In 1963, Sai Baba made an announcement: he was not just a guru, but an avatar, the living incarnation of the god Shiva and the goddess Shakti, a being in which the male and female aspects of the divine reach a sacred unity. The first Sai Baba, he said, had incarnated the male Shiva alone. He prophesied a third incarnation, Prema Sai, who would appear after his death and incarnate Shakti. (In some versions of the Sai gospel, the incarnations are reversed, with Sai Baba of Shirdi embodying the goddess, and the future Prema Sai the god.) What was significant was not just Sai Baba assuming the mantle of a celestial androgyny or positing himself as part of a holy trinity. It was his claim that he wasn’t simply here to lead people to God. He was God.

After she met him, Indra Devi would, for a time, come to agree.

Returning to India from Vietnam, Devi first went to Adyar, where she got a letter of introduction from the Murphets. From there, she headed three hundred miles inland, to Mysore, where, courtesy of a princess named Rani Vijaya Devi, she was put up at the palace where she’d lived while studying with Krishnamacharya. Then, packing just enough for a few days, she hired a car for the bumpy two-hundred-mile drive to the ashram.

The final hours of the trip were jarring, as the car jerked along a dirt track through barren, red-clay countryside, stopping whenever animals wandered in front of it. It was April, the height of summer in the region, when temperatures regularly climbed past one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Finally, they arrived in the desiccated South Indian town where Sai Baba was born. The ashram was on Puttaparthi’s outskirts and had become the center of its economy. On the dusty road to Prasanthi Nilayam’s main gate, makeshift stalls catered to a constant stream of pilgrims, offering photographs of Sai Baba and rings and buttons bearing his image. Dozens of women sat in the dirt peddling shriveled produce. Beggars, some with maimed or deformed children, put out their hands for alms.

Inside the brick wall that enclosed the ashram, things were more orderly. Rows of coconut palms lined the path to a spacious, whitewashed prayer hall, built in a vaguely Mughal style. It was the center of ashram life, and Sai Baba lived above it. Most Indian visitors camped out in enormous open tin-roof sheds, where up to two hundred people would sleep end to end on the floor and cook on small kerosene stoves. Westerners and upper-class Indians who were accustomed to greater comforts were put up in a spartan guesthouse, and that’s where Devi was assigned a room. There was a list of rules on the veranda. One of them forbade giving donations or gifts to Sai Baba, even customary offerings such as fruit or flowers. This was highly unusual for an Indian ashram, and it impressed Devi. Would a fraud refuse to let people give him money?

A young Swiss woman named Gabriella Steyer, one of Sai Baba’s earliest Western acolytes, met Devi and showed her around. They visited the small hospital, the only one for miles, which was built by Baba’s devotees and offered care for free. Though there were two doctors on staff, Baba was said to intervene in cases where medical treatment wasn’t enough, and the ashram buzzed with stories of remarkable, inexplicable cures. Steyer took Devi to the Veda-Shastra School, where boys studied religious texts, learning to chant the Vedas by heart, a project that could take twenty years. Tuition was free, said Steyer, and Baba gave students food, lodging, and clothes. There was a small press that produced a monthly ashram magazine in English and Telugu, the local language, as well as a post office, a bank, a police station, and a canteen staffed by volunteers.

Back in Devi’s room, Steyer regaled her with stories of Baba’s miracles. She recalled a holiday when Baba led the ashramites to a river outside the village and, after drawing on the sand with his finger, reached in and pulled out a silver idol, a chalice, and a spoon. He then squeezed heavenly nectar out of his closed fist, filling the chalice with it, and giving each of his devotees a delicious spoonful. Each time it ran out, he tapped the chalice to fill it again.

Devi was not yet convinced, but she was eager to meet the man said to work such wonders. Finally, Steyer took her to the prayer hall, where Baba was speaking privately with some of his devotees in a room set apart for such meetings. A side door opened to let some people out, and Devi got her first sight of the guru. Draped in a saffron-colored robe, he was slight despite his full face and more handsome than she expected—he looked hardly at all like the coarse-featured man in the Murphets’ photograph. His bristly hair seemed to form a black halo around his head, and he appeared divinely gentle, glowing with compassion. He said a few words in Telugu and disappeared. Someone translated: “No more interviews—it is too late.”

A few minutes later, though, Baba appeared on the balcony outside his apartment, surveying the crowd below. His eyes met Devi’s, and she felt sure he was going to summon her. Her heart started pounding. Sure enough, in what felt like an instant, he was standing in front of her, beckoning her into the room where he held his private audiences. As she walked toward him, she felt as if she were floating. Steyer and a few other women, who had also been invited, had to hold her up.

Sai Baba had an armchair in the room, but he took a seat opposite Devi on the floor. She told him she didn’t know why she was there—she’d heard his name for the first time only a few weeks before, and she didn’t need anything from him. “It was in Saigon that suddenly I was overcome by a desire to see you,” she said.

He asked her where she was from, and she showed him a picture of Rancho Cuchuma. “You must come there, Swamiji—it is a beautiful place,” she said. He took her hand and promised that he would, repeating it three times.

Then, looking at the sleeve where she kept the photo, he noticed that she also had a picture of Swami Vivekananda. She told him that she believed Vivekananda was her protector and guardian angel and that he must have guided her steps to Prasanthi Nilayam. “You would not be here otherwise,” he said.

As they parted, he asked her, “What do you want?” She had been told to expect the question. “Jyoti,” she replied. “Light. Light in my heart.”

“You have it,” he said.

“Not enough.”

“Bangaru, bangaru,” he said, a Telugu endearment. He told her he was going to give her something to keep with her during meditation. Turning his palm down, he made a circling motion. When he flipped his hand over, he held a little enamel image of himself, which he put into her hand. She was astonished and didn’t doubt the authenticity of what she had witnessed.

“Wait,” he said. “Let me also give you some vibhuti.” That was the name for the sacred ash that was Baba’s signature, a substance that linked him in some mysterious way to Shirdi Sai Baba and his ever-burning fire. Devi writes that he poured the vibhuti from his fingertips until it covered the image in her hand. Then he took the icon and the ash and wrapped it in a piece of paper.

“Call me whenever you need me, I shall hear you no matter what the distance,” he told her. “I am yours.”

She was overwhelmed, dazed, and ecstatic. Sai Baba had a way of making the world seem enchanted, as if the magic that filled ancient religious books could also pervade modern life. Devi had never stopped hungering for such rapture, even if she’d stopped actively seeking it after Krishnamurti. Now here she was at sixty-seven, as filled with spiritual excitement as she was in Ommen forty years earlier.

At five o’clock the next morning, Devi joined hundreds of other devotees to await darshan, the ritual in which Sai Baba allowed his acolytes to gaze upon him and feel the blessing of his presence. Life in the ashram, she quickly discovered, revolved around darshan—Bill Aitken, one of Baba’s biographers, calls it the “both the central communion and the theology of the movement.” As she walked toward the temple, the echoing sound of “Om” floated toward her from devotees who had already assembled. Two hours passed, anticipation mounting.

Then, finally, Sai Baba appeared outside his apartment on the second-story balcony and raised his hand in benediction. In the audience, a few lucky ones felt his eyes meet theirs, and bliss surged through them. Hope for such a moment was part of what kept them coming back, morning after morning, for the same wait and the same brief appearance. “Away from Sai’s presence,” writes Aitken, “our imperfection is almost too painful to behold, hence the provision of photographs, medallions and other seemingly trivial mementos of Sai Baba…hence, too, the discipline of sitting long hours in Puttaparthi, building up the longing of the heart for its moment of re-contact with the divine.”

Devi couldn’t return the next morning—she’d planned on staying only a couple of days, and she had to begin her journey home, but she felt changed by her short time in Sai Baba’s orbit. Back at the Mysore Palace, she absentmindedly packed her things, forgetting many of them in the drawers. From there, she went to Bombay, where she stayed with Enakshi Bhavnani, another old friend from the Theosophical Society.

As she prepared to go back to Tecate, she found herself growing despondent, just as she had when she left India after her rapturous first visit. It had been many years since she’d felt that way, and it unnerved her. How could she return home and lecture about the transcendent peace to be found in yoga when she herself was unhappy and unsettled? She began writing Sai Baba a letter asking for his help, and then put it in her handbag while she and Bhavnani went shopping.

Suddenly, she writes, while the two of them stood on a street corner waiting for a taxi, her sadness disappeared and she felt a flood of inexpressible joy, as if a “cascade of brilliant light” were pouring over her. Convinced that Sai Baba had answered her letter before she even finished writing it, she was flooded by the same sort of bliss she’d once experienced after meeting Krishnamurti, but this time, she’d found a guru who accepted the role.

Almost as soon as she got home, Devi started making plans to return to Prasanthi Nilayam. Howard Murphet recommended that she go for the Maha Shivarathri festival, a great all-night celebration of Shiva and a holiday when Sai Baba was known to perform public miracles. The festival is held during the dark night of the new moon in the middle of the Indian month of Magha, which in 1967 fell in early March. Devi arranged to arrive a month before.

At the ashram, she heard new stories almost every day about Sai Baba’s miracles. Most devotees believed that the guru spoke to them in their dreams, and so they eagerly discussed and analyzed their visions of the night before, looking for divine direction. Devi heard miraculous tales of healing and clairvoyance. The Maharani of Jind came to her room one day bubbling with excitement to tell her that Sai Baba had given her daughter, who was engaged to be married, a necklace of diamonds and pearls. “You have no father, so I am taking his place and giving you something befitting your status as a princess,” he told the maharani’s daughter.

A pearl fell off the necklace, but this didn’t lead anyone to question the piece’s value. Instead, Devi recalled the story of a man who started wondering about the monetary worth of a gold medallion Sai Baba had given him. As a result of his greed, the medallion vanished from its box. Then, when the man fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness, Baba returned it. The missing pearl was likewise taken as one of Sai Baba’s playful reminders to his devotees about what truly mattered.

As the festival of Shivarathri approached, more and more people arrived at the ashram. The sheds filled up quickly, so newcomers slept under trees. When there were no more spots near the trees, they unfurled their bedrolls in the open air. By the day of the festival, around thirty thousand people had crammed into Prasanthi Nilayam. That morning, Sai Baba hoisted the ashram’s flag over the temple, telling the ashramites to hoist the flag of love in their hearts. “Practice Yoga, or the mastery of the mind,” he said. “Then the lotus of the heart will bloom, and illumination be attained.”

He spoke of the significance of Shivarathri. The waning of the moon was associated with the waning of the mind, whose constant restless whirling and unending cacophony of desires obscured the apprehension of God. Shiva, destroyer of illusions, revealed to man his true, sacred nature. The day devoted to him was a uniquely auspicious occasion for progress toward spiritual liberation. It was a day of fasting, to abstain not just from food but from negative words, deeds, and thoughts.

Later that morning, the crowd assembled in and around one of the pilgrim sheds, which had been converted into an auditorium. On the stage, a silver statue of Sai Baba of Shirdi was placed on an urn shaped like a serpent. Sathya Sai Baba walked out to perform a ceremonial bath. First he materialized a statue of Ganesh, Shiva’s elephant-headed son, and placed it on the silver statue’s head. Then, as the crowd sang bhajans, Sai Baba held up a small vase and poured vibhuti over the idols. The ash kept flowing, far more than such a vessel could seemingly hold. There seemed to be pearls and precious stones intermixed with it, filling the serpentine urn. Devi felt herself falling into a trance, losing all sense of what was going on around her. When she opened her eyes, the ritual was over and the auditorium was nearly empty.

Shivarathri’s miracles had barely begun. At the ashram, the most exciting part of the holiday was the ecstatic all-night vigil that reached its apotheosis when Sai Baba produced lingams, the phallic oval objects that symbolize Shiva. This, more than anything else, was what Devi and thirty thousand others had longed to witness.

By the time evening approached, every inch of space at the ashram was occupied by yearning devotees. Walking around was nearly impossible. All eyes turned toward the Shanti Vedika, the ashram’s elevated rotunda, bathed in bright lights, where the night’s mysteries would unfold. People camped out for hours to be close to it, but as a foreigner, Devi would have been escorted to a privileged VIP area nearby.

At around 6:00 p.m., Sai Baba took the stage with a group of disciples. He spoke in Telugu about the meaning of the lingam as a symbol of God. He led the crowd in bhajans, whose delivery grew faster and more rapturous as the hours went on. Then he began to cough. He’d start to sing again, and then would stop, struggling. He appeared to be in pain. The crowd knew what was happening, since it proceeded this way every year. Over and over, they repeated the last line Baba had uttered, an urgent prayer. His agony seemed to mount until, finally, he held a white towel under his chin and the first lingam came out of his mouth and dropped onto it.

Baba was known to produce lingams made of all sorts of precious materials. This one, egg-shaped and four inches long, was the color of amethyst. The crowd’s singing became ecstatic. A second, smaller lingam of the same color emerged from Sai Baba’s mouth. He left the stage, and the lingams were placed on a flower-covered tray. The singing continued till dawn.

In the morning, Devi volunteered to help serve the food that was distributed to break the fast. She wondered how the ashram’s little kitchen could prepare meals for so many thousands of people and was told that the dishes multiplied at Sai Baba’s touch. “Why are you so surprised?” asked one young man. “Didn’t Christ feed a multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish?”

Over the following days, Devi was thrilled to find herself pulled into this Christ-like figure’s inner circle. Shortly after the Shivarathri festival, Sai Baba was due to travel to Bombay with a group of boys from the ashram school who were going to perform a musical about the life of Krishna. He asked Devi to come along. The caravan stopped for lunch in the village of Hampi, set amid the ruins of an ancient capital and dominated by an ornate, pyramid-shaped Shiva temple. Narayana Kasturi, Sai Baba’s official biographer, describes how much fun the guru had showing the boys around: “He caressed them lovingly like a mother and attended to the demands of their curiosity and wonder about the areas through which they passed.”

In Bombay, they stayed in a large, old colonial bungalow on the city’s outskirts. Sai Baba’s fame was spreading, and every morning, thousands of devotees gathered outside to sing bhajans, overflowing the lawn and crowding the streets outside. At 9:00 a.m., the avatar would emerge to wander among the throng, blessing household objects, accepting beseeching letters, or simply letting people touch his feet and experience his darshan.

The boys performed their play, written by Baba, for an eminent audience that included the governor of Maharashtra, the enormous state that had Bombay (now Mumbai) as its capital. Sai Baba addressed teeming crowds in city stadiums. An elderly man named Ramakrishna Rao, a hero of the independence movement and the onetime governor of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stood beside him, interpreting from Telugu into Hindi. Like Vivekananda, Sai Baba spoke of India as a light unto the world: “The greed and selfishness that are infecting this country are tragedies for humanity, for India has the role of guiding and leading mankind to the goal of self-realization.”

For Devi, the week in Bombay was like a “fairy tale,” each day suffused with whimsical magic. One day, as she sat on the bungalow’s veranda, Sai Baba came out followed by a local Bombay politician. He was trying to fit onto his finger a ring that Baba had given him, but it was too tight. Sai Baba took the ring, put it in his palm, and blew on it, and when he handed it back, not only did it fit, but it was now adorned with precious stones. Devi was amazed. “That is nothing,” another devotee told her. “I have seen him return sight to a blind man by just blowing into his eyes.”

Devi was flying home from Bombay, and on the morning of her departure, Baba lit a temple lamp for her Crusade for Light in Darkness and gave her a silver medallion bearing his image. “Be happy,” he told her. Happy didn’t begin to describe it.