35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

166
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
‘Who is ‘heaven,’ then? The man or the woman?’
He muttered something about not getting literal-minded with
symbols. Just as he was offering to sell me some ‘unbelievable Thai
stick,’ I saw the bhagwan hobbling across a distant section of garden,
and pointed him out to Swami Hariprasad.
‘No, man!’ he laughed. ‘That’s not Bhagwan. It’s Dadda, his father.’
I looked more carefully. The man did appear more like someone
in his mid-seventies than his mid-fifties. But the bald head and
white beard matched pictures I’d seen of Rajneesh perfectly. Little
more than two years before, during the Bombay period, he had
resembled the young Allan Ginsberg: balding, but compensating
for it with long black hair and a glossy sable beard so vast it would
have made Walt Whitman look clean-shaven. Now he’d caught up
with Dadda, at least as far as hair went, who was twenty-three years
older than his son.
Swami Hariprasad told me that Dadda was now his own son’s
disciple. Indian children traditionally touch their parents’ feet as a
sign of respect; now, however, it was Dadda who had to touch
Rajneesh’s feet, as any other disciple did. He wasn’t Dadda anymore,
either, although everyone seemed to refer to him as Dadda still.
Since October 15 of the previous year, Dadda – who was actually
Babulal – had been Swami Devateerth Bharti. The whole business
obviously satisfied the bhagwan, because he mentioned it often. In
a series of transcribed talks on Jesus, with a title like some all-singing,
all-dancing Broadway version of the gospel story – Come Follow Me
– the bhagwan had this to say:
Jesus’ father never came to Jesus to be initiated. John the Baptist
initiated many, but his own father never came to be initiated.
Krishna’s father was not a disciple of his. My father is rare – not
because he is my father: he is simply rare.
Dadda did not look so much rare, I thought, as old and sick. He was
only sixty-eight at the time, but would die three years later.
‘Try one,’ Swami Hariprasad urged, thrusting a Thai stick in my
bloodstained waistcoat, which he suddenly noticed for the first time.
‘Christ! What happened, man?’