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

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
3
‘I Am Always with You’
PUTTAPARTHI, 1974-75
A stick floats on the waves of the sea. So does a swimmer. It is the swimmer
that the sea loves to bear, for he has sensed its depths.
– Sathya Sai Baba
Beyond Bangalore’s sputtering, inchoate suburbs you descend
toward mountainous plains, a primeval landscape of stark, rocky
outcrops, palm-cluttered desert, and outrageously fertile paddies
that look as if some Titan had mischievously plugged them into the
smouldering wasteland for the sheer hell of it. A ragged blue ribbon
of road snaked through haphazard villages of thatch and palm that
seemed to exist solely because of the trade this crumbling shred of
asphalt brought their way. As predictable as small towns in the
American Midwest, though with barely a fraction of the opulence,
these outposts of humanity elicited first despair, then, finally, abject
boredom. They were anonymous, miserably interchangeable.
I was travelling with a nineteen-year-old girl from Arizona who
called herself Joy but had once been Betty. She had been in India for
over two years, and had put me on to our driver, a shifty-looking
character named Abdul. Joy wanted to ‘share’ the cost of paying
him for driving us in his taxi to Puttaparthi. Her notion of ‘sharing’
meant I’d share her company in return for paying the taxi fare. She
was a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, and had followed the holy man
around for two years now, dumping her passport in the Ganges at
one point, and writing to inform her parents that she was no longer
their daughter – she was the bride of God. Gopi was the term she
used for herself – gopis however, in this case at least, being one of
the horde of sixteen thousand nubile milkmaids who are often
portrayed as the god Krishna’s harem. She believed Sathya Sai would
one day marry her.
‘He provides for his own’ was all she would say about how she
financed herself without parents.
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