A charming young stranger named Babu approaches the three-some and tells them he has a small cab company which ferries devotees to Puttaparthi to see Sai Baba. They are perplexed about whether to trust a stranger to drive them so far away. Finally, they pray for God’s protection and decide to plunge ahead and to trust Babu the cab driver and to sing bhajans along the way for protection.

Although it’s still morning the March heat is beginning to penetrate the dark cool interior of the Bangalore Airport. Most of the mob of deplaning passengers from Madras has just dispersed. Jim, BP. Yap, and I huddle in the center of the airport discussing our plans to hire a cab to the Prashanti Nilayam ashram in the tiny village of Puttaparthi. "Puttaparthi is three or four hours north of Bangalore by cab," BP.’ says, "and the ride will be hot. We’ll need to fill our canteens now before we start out." While he speaks a dark, slight man with a mustache walks up to me and says "My name is Babu. I am a cab driver. My speciality is taking Sai Baba’s devotees to Puttaparthi. You are going to Puttaparthi, are you not?" Babu looks a bit suspicious with his greased black hair, narrow black trousers and glittering eyes. His voice is soft and low yet he is insistent. He sighs at our reluctance to commit ourselves and brings out a tattered sheaf of "recommendation letters" from his bag.

Knowing that such letters can easily be faked, we step a few yards away for a discussion. We hadn’t booked a cab in advance and have heard stories about bandits in India. It seems risky to go on a three hour journey into the Indian countryside with a stranger who approaches us so eagerly, but after half an hour of stalling around we have no excuses, Babu patiently tells us his unusually low fee for the fourth time. "Shall we go now?" he asks.

Alone with him in the airport, we look at each other and nod our assent. We have delayed too long as it is and must set out for Puttaparthi before the heat becomes too intense. "Let’s hope he’s what he says he is." I mutter under my breath.

Babu once more takes out his collection of photos, letters and testimonials from people around the world. As I examine them I see that they all extol his virtues as a guide, friend and cab driver. There is a letter on Esalen stationery and another from a Mama Theresa, his benefactor in Germany. She apparently sent him the money to buy three cabs for the sole purpose of ferrying Sai Baba’s devotees back and forth between Bangalore and Puttaparthi.

"Six years ago I was a poor man but Baba helped me to have my own business through my German friend and now I am successful. I owe everything to Baba." Babu smiles as he ushers us into his small black cab and fastens the luggage to the overhead baggage rack.

It is immediately apparent that Babu is a skillful, aggressive driver. He deftly steers us around soot-belching lorries, past lumbering cattle, through narrow alleys and finally to the outskirts of Bangalore where the fields are green with a variety of healthy crops. After about an hour the villages and hamlets along our route thin out. There are fewer fields planted with crops. New colors are introduced to the landscape. The flat fields of reddish-brown and putty are handsomely balanced with the cornflower blue of the sky. To the west, a bank of lavender-tinged mountains entertains the eye with occasional gray boulder clusters and flat mesas barren of vegetation.

During the remaining two hours of the trip, BP. assumes the responsibility of teaching Jim and me some bhajans. "You see, Connie, we will be singing bhajans every day for an hour before dawn, and hour at midmorning, and an hour in the late afternoon, so it would be a good idea if you know some of the songs before we arrive." With infinite patience, BP and Babu led us in several of the easiest songs until we can sing them alone. One line at a time BP sings the strange Indian melodies and foreign words, clapping his hands to keep up a rhythm.

The humor of our situation dawns on me as I glance over at Jim, who sings quietly with eyes closed against the dust clouds which swirl in on us. A month ago I had expected to be sunning on a white sand beach in Tahiti by now, relaxing after an adventuresome year of living in Asia. Instead, here I am bellowing strange songs at the top of my lungs while we rumble down the bumpy road toward Puttaparthi in Babu’s funny little black cab, hoping we won’t be waylaid and abandoned in some remote dusty field. How vastly different our lives are - BP’s world of finance and the Singapore Stock Market and Jim’s worlds of jungle and city as an engineering project manager. Then there’s my own life of consulting, travel and adventure, plus writing, speaking and counseling, and dozens of board meetings and service projects. I think of Babu’s arduous life and the hundreds of times he has driven this road with foreigners like us — the curious as well as the devoted.

My own life of writing, consulting and public speaking has taken numerous surprising turns thus far. It’s as if my arms have become elastic, embracing hundreds of new friends and colleagues, dozens of new countries, scores of unaccustomed ideas and attitudes. Now this. Sai Baba. Will He prove disappointing? Will He be a clever fake? Or merely an over-rated mediocre man of messiah pretensions? How can we know unless we see for ourselves, and even then…

Local farmers turn to stare as we sing Sai Baba’s bhajans under BP’s direction. "These are wonderful songs. Sing with joy! Louder! Have confidence!" BP tells us. Dust clouds furl up in ocher plumes behind the car while strains of Ganesha Sharanam escape the cab windows. All lushness has vanished from the landscape now. The fields are dry and the ground is a harsh red clay, relieved occasionally by low tufa brick buildings, grape arbors, and dun-colored plains. A ridge of purple mountains appears faintly in the distance and a pang of homesickness for Colorado sweeps over me.

By now it’s over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the dry air shimmers over the plains. Even in the heat, this clear dry air seems such a relief after the heavy wet cloud of tropical humidity ever-present in Singapore. I smile at my pleasure in seeing the immense sky overhead - so like the American West. "Yes," I think, "I have missed this kind of spare beauty…spacious, pared down landscapes of horizontals, earth colors, subtle simplicity of desert, mesa and plateau. Singapore’s green abundance and floral excesses are balm in their own way yet even paradise can pall without variety or contrast. And Singapore is a vertical place with its tall palms, skyscraper-filled center city, ubiquitous deafening pile-drivers and angular cranes raising the steel skeletons of still more new buildings. This land of south India is stripped to the bare essentials of existence."

The closer we get to Puttaparthi the more Biblical the people and terrain seem. Waves of heat shimmer from the road and create images of lakes ahead. They are mirages. Packs of gray monkeys cavort beside the road, leaping down from the red-trunked trees bordering the narrow highway. Although this is my third trip to India, my whole body fills with tension as the opposing traffic charges toward us right down the center of the road. Both vehicles seem to accelerate as if suicide is the agenda on both sides of the mad convergence. At the last instant the oncoming vehicles swerve aside and we are once more miraculously spared an early death by head-on collision.

Scraggy clumps of corn and vegetables sag in the hammering sun. On the road ahead a patch of brilliant fabric color catches our interest. Women in saris and men in dingy white dhotis labor away with hammers, chipping gray boulders into gravel for the road bed. They must be of a caste which builds roads by hand. They painstakingly move the earth and stones from hillside to roadbed in woven baskets carried on their heads.

A bus roars by spraying gravel and dust, and blaring its horn. It bears a suffocatingly crowded-in load of humanity, heads pressed against the windows, standees crammed into the aisles, onto the dashboard, into the stairwell. Each seat appears to hold six people and they even seem to hang from the ceiling. We remind ourselves to resist the temptation to take the bus from Bangalore should we come this way again — no matter how romantic it might seem to our heat-addled brains at the time.

Long before we arrive at the ashram we drink the last of the warm water remaining in the canteens. We are covered with khaki dust like a quartet of hard-rock miners who have just emerged from a tunnel cave-in. The ground becomes hilly and a few simple huts come into view. Ancient gnarled trees make blue shadows in the biscuit-colored dust. Mongrel dogs bark half-heartedly in the heat. More small, simple, white washed houses are clumped together near groves of trees. We are passing through a miserably poor village as our anticipation mounts.

The hamlets seem cleaner, more orderly and more prosperous as we near Puttaparthi. Approaching the ashram property, the town gates come into view and our hearts race with excitement. After having experienced the serendipitous plane trip where we met BP Yap, and this dusty taxi ride, we wonder if Sai Baba will even be here at the ashram. Visitors have frequently been disappointed after much longer journey than ours.

After passing several white-washed huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs we arrive at the edge of Puttaparthi. A large pink multi-storied school comes into the frame of the front window of the cab, then small whitewashed houses with flat roofs. As we approach the pink, cream and blue gates of Prashanti Nilayam itself, it occurs to me that the ethereal looking building appear like giant birthday cakes adorned with pastel angels. The Abode of Great Peace is indeed a heavenly spot, like nothing I have ever experienced. There is an unearthly quiet throughout the grounds. Green parakeets with red bills flit through the trees and gray monkeys scamper amid the shrubbery. There are no cars in the ashram. The only audible sound is birdsong and notice signs nailed to large shade trees petition: SILENCE IN THE ASHRAM, PLEASE.

Babu smiles triumphantly and says softly, "You see, I have brought you safely to Baba. He is here at the ashram now. My friends told me so two days ago. Enjoy your stay. When shall I return for you?" Immediately we agree on leaving a week hence, ashamed that we had mistrusted Babu at the outset. Smiling still, he unpacks the cab, and directs us to the Public Relations Office where we check in and receive instructions.

At the desk inside the small bare office, we are met by a handsome elderly man in white. "Please leave your shoes at the door and remember that in India we don’t wear our dusty shoes inside" he chides us gently. "And you, Madame, will need to remove your Western clothes and cover your arms and shoulders with a large shawl. Everyone is very modest here in the ashram to keep our attention on our prayers and meditations, rather than on the distractions of the comings and goings of Baba’s many foreign devotees. You have seen our signs requesting for silence? We also observe silence in the canteens. Men and women eat separately. The food is Indian of course. It is simple but you will find it nourishing and very filling. You may eat as much as you like and we hope you will have a comfortable stay."

We thank our host and set out to find our room in order to change into the white cotton clothes we have bought in the Indian district of Singapore. Although in Western society I would be considered modestly dressed, I am keenly aware that in my short-sleeved sport shirt and tailored slacks I seem flagrantly immodest here. It will feel wonderful to be dressed in the cooler cotton Indian kurta and slacks and to lie down on a bed before the afternoon darshan begins in an hour.

A group of shabbily dressed men and boys sit in the shade of a tree near the office. As we approach, they quickly surround us, each wanting to earn a tip by carrying a piece of luggage to our room. We have become accustomed to being pressed by people on the streets of India crying, "Baksheesh! Money! Denaro!" We are glad that Baba does not permit begging in the ashram, choosing instead to provide food for people in Puttaparthi and work for many of the villagers. Having selected some porters we say goodbye to BP for the moment, since his accommodation is in another building "for those who have stayed at Prashanti Nilayam before."

Leaving the other porters sullenly behind, we troop up several flights of stairs outside one of the dorm buildings and down a long veranda to our room. Upon entering, we are astounded to find that instead of a dresser, bed and closet, the room is completely empty. Absolutely. There must be some mistake. There isn’t a stick of furniture in the room. The floor is unpainted concrete without even a small rug. Not even a closet, screen or mosquito netting. There is a small bathroom with a Western toilet, broken toilet seat, no mirror, sink or shower. Instead of a sink there is a naked pipe with a spigot over a red plastic bucket. A sign tells of a severe water shortage and instructs us to bathe from the bucket before eight in the morning or between eight and nine at night. "Water will be turned off between 8 A.M. and 4 P.M." Walking back to the green wooden door we notice that the padlock is broken. We have brought our own lock, as our friends in Singapore recommended, but don’t intend to stay in this room, which is obviously just a storeroom of some kind.

Feeling certain that there must be some mix-up in our room arrangements, I rush outside the empty concrete cell and peer into the room next door to us. Large shade trees cast dappled shadows on the sandy courtyard below. The room next door, occupied by a Catholic priest from Brooklyn, is exactly like ours. May be we’re on the wrong corridor. This wing must be for special people practising asceticism. It’s probably for extra-devout clergy. At a quick but apprehensive trot, I investigate all of the rooms along our veranda as well as all the cubicles on the other outside halls in the building and am dismayed that they are all the same, with the exception of a few sparse decorative touches, such as photos of Sai Baba, placed there by the Westerners.

Our neighbors seem to be an assortment of Americans, Canadians and Europeans of every imaginable type: students, business people, couples, families, nuns, rabbis, ministers and teachers. Many have placed candles in the single alcove of their rooms along with incense and pictures of Sai Baba. On the floors are straw mats and simple thin mattresses with piles of luggage beside them.

"This must be the place, Jim. They all look like ours. This is going to be pretty spartan. We’ll have to hurry outside the ashram gates and buy mattresses and mats before the darshan starts."

In half an hour we have bought our mattresses, plastic buckets and grass mats. When people said this is like camping out with God, they weren’t kidding.

With a sense of flailing resistance, I realize that the "Abode of Great Peace" is far more stark than I had ever imagined. My attachment to minimal comforts becomes painfully vivid as an old familiar pouting mood of years ago begins to creep into my consciousness. I laugh at this situation and at the contrast with our final thirty days in the Marco Polo Hotel in Singapore. It’s ludicrous comparison. A few days ago we were eating sumptuous meals, chauffeured everywhere, lulled by air conditioned splendor; and enjoyed the fresh orchid and small Cadbury chocolate bar placed by chambermaids on the hotel room pillows each night. We’ve become slightly decadent in a very short time whereas at walk-up cell in the strangling heat is not what I’d expectantly pictured in my mind during the past few days. How self-centered I’ve become.

No time to sulk. Darshan starts in a few minutes and there are several thousand waiting for the blessing of seeing Sai Baba. Does that mean that He is actually here or do they hold darshan even if He is at the Brindavan ashram near Bangalore? We change clothes and quickly run down the stairs two steps at a time in our white baggy pajama pants and loose kurta shirts and thongs. We pass more "Silence" signs on the walls and hurry across the courtyard, under trees from which immense flocks of black crows raucously ignore the signs’ order. "Splat!" A white blob lands on my shoulder. A crow has just welcomed me to Puttaparthi.

On arrival at the Mandir courtyard my heart threatens to burst through its ribcage. Will He be here? In typical Indian fashion, the women are separated from the men in their own courtyard on the opposite side of the Mandir. After leaving my thongs at the gate I file into the sunny courtyard with the thousand women and place my new square mat on the hot sand. I sit silent and cross-legged, observing the crowd while waiting for Sai Baba to appear. Smelling a floral perfume, I glance around the notice that several of the women are wearing cream-colored jasmine garlands, caught in the middle with a bobby pin, and fastened to the top of their braid at the back of the head.

We sit in dozens of straight rows, packed together and overlapping. In front of me is a sea of shiny blue-black heads, each with a single fat braid down the back. Most of the women are Indian, in an assortment of saris, simple to opulent, yet there are still dozens of Westerners. By counting the rows of devotees and the number in each row, I count approximately eight hundred men present at darshan and about a thousand women, for a total of eighteen hundred people. About two percent are Westerners. The Indians carefully scrutinize the Western women who wear caftans, beach gowns, a few carefully wrapped saris, slacks with knee-length overblouses and long skirts in a variety of colors. Every woman wears the required shawl so as not to distract another human with even a hint of bosomy curve or spreading hip. On the other side of the Mandir, a crowd of men, equal in size to ours, sits patiently waiting in the oppressive heat for the Avatar. On both sides there are people in wheelchairs, several lying on stretchers and people who have come on crutches. There are babies in the arms of weary mothers and perspiring toddlers whimpering from the unrelieved solar rays of Andhra Pradesh State. Our attention is suddenly drawn to a stunning group of late arrivals - tribe of bald Indian women on pilgrimage, wearing faded ragged gauze like costumes. Though they are obviously desperately poor, they radiate a magnetic inner beauty and carry themselves like royalty.

The crowd emits a mood of silent expectancy as individuals jostle carefully, seeking a more comfortable cross-legged position. We peer toward the dark, open doorway of the Mandir for any clue that Baba is inside. A group of visiting white-uniformed junior high school boys sit in the cool shade of the Mandir veranda. In their cross-legged positions they suddenly become rigidly upright and lean forward as a body as Sai Baba emerges from the Mandir.

There He is at last, looking exactly like His pictures, in red-orange silk robe, barefoot, with a wide black Afro hairstyle. My heart melts. Immediately I feel that He is God and that I have known Him forever and have been with Him in other lifetimes. Like most of the people of South India, He is dark with wide nose and lips, small, exquisitely-shaped hands and feet, and an overall frame of about five feet. The small size of His actual physical body is a shock, yet He has a huge presence and seems much taller than He actually is. His expression is serene and composed as he accepts some of the nuts on a tray offered to Him by one of the schoolboys. He blesses objects which the boys hold up for Him and looks at them with obvious tenderness. He rolls up his sleeves and makes a gesture of rotation with His hand and immediately materializes some candy for the boys in the front row. From where I sit, I can see that the candy is even wrapped in shiny paper!

Baba then takes letters of petition from the boys and signs an autograph for one. He seems very kindly and affectionate with the visiting students, without any overt display of sentiment. They, like the entire audience of devotees, nearly swoon in His presence. Since the birds in overhead trees have stopped chirping, I notice that the silence is almost palpable. The ardent reaction of toddlers and children to Sai Baba is deeply touching to me. Every eye follows His slightest movement. He is simultaneously humble and majestic. How I wish that Scott and my sister and brothers could see Him now.

It has been several weeks since I have had any of the mysterious migraine-like headaches which began so suddenly several months ago. Now all pain and tension of past months fall away from me like a heavy blanket. Every muscle of my face eases into a broad smile. My heart leaps.

Sai Baba leaves the porch and walks directly toward us. Though we’ve just arrived, I’ve somehow drawn the great good fortune of sitting in the second row and notice that the moment He comes directly in front of me I’m holding my breath, still smiling. What’s going to happen? He looks straight at me for a long, welcoming moment, causing heads to turn toward me, then He walks along the rows of adoring women. As He passes by them several of the women dive for His feet and miss, despite the strict prohibitions against grabbing Sai Baba or reaching out for Him. They scoop up the fine sand on which He has walked. He gently shakes His head and says "Tsk, tsk." They strain to control themselves and some weep to be so near to Him. Someone next to me tells me that because so many people are taking handfuls of souvenir sand upon which the Lord has walked, it is costing the ashram a fortune to replace it every few weeks.

It is about 105 degrees F. now and the heat is so merciless that I feel as if I might faint face forward on the sand, like a statue falling on its nose. Sai Baba stops and turns His head, looking back in our direction. He raises his hand, swirls it and smiles as a great liquid breeze arises, bending the trees and shrubs in its force. Palms sway and a nearby red hibiscus bush swoops towards the earth. The temperature drops about 35 degrees. He glances at the crowd and smiles again at having provided some relief from the heat. To myself I think "That’s a miracle, making a breeze on command like that. Did everybody see that? Don’t you people realize what’s happening here?! Sai Baba just materialized candy and now He’s making vibhuti and rubbing the ash on the eyelids of a sick infant. These are significant phenomena. His sleeves are rolled up, so He can’t be tricking us by hiding objects in them."

I feel a great gratitude for being here. No — just for being, for existing. We take the same spirit with us everywhere so there’s no need to come to Puttaparthi in order to sense and appreciate our being. In glancing around I see that no one else seems especially excited, except me, at what is transpiring. By the end of the hour’s darshan I have seen Him create several piles of holy ash, the breeze, wrapped candy and answers to questions before the questioners had even finished formulating their thoughts - and in several languages. My own questions are how a spiritual aspirant can know if he is progressing. Further, is it necessary or even advisable to know our own stage or level of development? Does God automatically take care of our development? That would be the case if there’s no free will.

Reluctantly we watch Him disappear into the Mandir for His interviews with about fifteen people whom He has selected, who have come from all over the world to seek His help and advice. The crowd sighs happily and joyfully begins singing bhajans in response to the leading voice inside the Mandir. The swell of sweet, light voices from inside the prayer hall is transporting in a different way than the darshan has been. It touches me so to share this experience with devoted people from so many different countries that I fight back tears of thankfulness and wonder why it is that I am even here and what it all means.

After eating in separate canteens as is the custom, Jim and I meet to discuss our joy at all we have experienced. We are weary from heat and travel, but the trip has been worth it. In fact, it would have been worth coming to Puttaparthi just to participate in one darshan. We still marvel that there are tens of millions of Sai Baba followers around the world and most Americans, like ourselves until quite recently, have never heard of Baba.

Back in our cell, the unpainted, hard bare concrete floor is a practical matter that reminds us clearly that this is not, after all, heaven. At least as far as our Western bodies are concerned. Silently I recite to myself that "I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions." Mosquitoes dive-bomb our bodies all night and a mouse rattles and scrapes a paper sack of fruit on the floor next to my head. By morning we are stiff, hot, tired and annoyed by our rodent roommate. This hamlet could really use a shop that rents cots, chairs and tables.

I try to talk Jim out of staying for the rest of the week as planned, confident that I’ll succeed in persuading him since he’s the one who is usually the most attached to creature comforts. "Let’s just stay two more days," I suggest. "My body can’t take this concrete floor after a day of sitting cross-legged on that blistering sand and pressed into that crowd." Surprisingly, his response is negative. "Let’s see how it goes. Oddly enough, I like it here. This austerity will be good for you."

"Good for me?! This is the first austerity you’ve exposed to in a year! I’ve had plenty of it on a constant basis. What about those hundreds of ants, lizards, cockroaches and birds invading our Singapore house? What about having to take three baths a day after perspiration has puddled every pair of shoes I own? What about sleeping on boards in China and sleeping in freezing tents in the Himalayas? What about having to eat fish eyes, rubbery duck feet, weeds and roots? How about living through a typhoid epidemic and a cholera epidemic? Have you forgotten how our hotel in Singapore caught on fire on New Year’s Eve and how we had to run down seventeen double flights of stairs in our nightclothes and trench coats? And don’t forget my having been attacked by armless, legless leper beggars in Bombay, who hung onto my skirt with their teeth."

"That’s easy for you to say. You’re the one who’s soft. You sat in an air-conditioned office with a team of secretaries and expediters all year while I battled the equatorial heat, the bureaucracy, the Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay languages and endured the long lines in the markets for us, while I was working, too," I remind Jim.

I realize, ruefully, that I’m shouting, in response to Jim’s baiting and that all the suppressed tensions and challenges we’ve successfully met over the past year have flooded over me in my fatigue. I’m acting like a soldier-returnee who has suddenly slipped into post-traumatic stress syndrome. Of course Asia is far, far more than these things about which I have just ranted. It is rich, endearing, exhilarating. But now I’m exhausted, have been raving at my beloved husband like a maniac and only want a simple clean bed and uninterrupted sleep for about three days. Jim and I never fight or argue, so I am mortified and humiliated at how I must have hurt him. Brain-numbing jet-lag overtakes me. It looks as if my desire for a long, long recuperative sleep may not be fulfilled for several days.

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