T A B L E_T A L K

Has the place you grew up in changed significantly? Discuss your neighborhood in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

A pan-Italian feast -- in Geneva
By David Downie
Chez Roberto's culinary delights -- and Swiss soul
(04/01/98)

The craziest road race of all
By Craig Bromberg
Deep dunes,wild wadis and grenade-wielding rebels enliven the Paris-Dakar Rally
(03/31/98)

Introduction to Beijing
By Carrie Kirby
A resident's primer on the city's daily pleasures
(03/30/98)

Longboard surfing women
By Lisa Palac
Bonding with a brave new breed
(03/27/98)

Passages
By Marie Winn
A wildlife adventure in Central Park
(03/26/98)

Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives

T H E_sadhu_F R O M_ T E X A S_____

In Santa Fe, Varanasi or
the Whole Foods Market --
when East meets West,
strange mutations occur.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY ANNE CUSHMAN
I first met Charan Das in 1985, in Santa Fe, N.M., when he knocked on the door of my adobe cabin one cold November night. The churned mud of my driveway was frozen into icy ruts, but he was barefoot; he wore only a swath of brown cotton around his waist and a brown wool shawl. A sharp wind fluttered his matted dreadlocks.

"We just met your roommate at Jemez Hot Springs," he said. "She said we could stay at your house for a few days."

I was 22 years old and believed in opening the door to mystery. "Of course." I peered past him into the dark. "How many of you are there?"

He gave me a radiant, gap-toothed smile. "Just this one," he said.

Over almond tea in front of the wood stove, Charan Das explained that he was a sadhu, one of India's millions of wandering yogis, who live on alms as they travel from village to village in pursuit of God-realization. In a previous incarnation, though, he had been a Texas college student who had gone to India to research Indian spiritual sects. Now he had come back to the States for the first time in 10 years, to visit his somewhat alarmed family and make a pilgrimage to the sacred sites of the Southwest.

He referred to himself in the plural, he explained, as an ego-deflating spiritual practice. "Our we," he said, "includes you, too."

"Should I refer to you as 'they'?" I asked.

"They is fine with us," he said, and began to giggle.

Over the next few days, Charan Das told me stories about sadhus. They live without possessions, he told me, entirely dependent on the generosity of strangers. They never stay anywhere longer than a few days to avoid becoming attached to places and people, and to spread spiritual teachings as widely as possible. To remind themselves of life's impermanence, they meditate in cremation grounds and smear themselves with the ashes from the funeral pyres. To break their attachment to the physical body, they often vow themselves to seven-year cycles of extreme ascetic practices -- such as holding one arm up in the air until it atrophies to a withered twig, or dangling upright in a sling from a tree branch instead of lying down to sleep.

"Would you like to hang a sling from our rafters?" I asked him.

"No, we'll be happy on the couch," he said.

He covered my kitchen table with snapshots of throngs of naked babas plunging into the Ganges to wash away their karma in the sacred river. "Come to India," he told me. "We'll be your guide."

"But how can I find you, if you're always wandering?"

"Oh, we only wander half the year," he said, cheerfully. "The other half, we have a lady friend in the holy city of Benares."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Ten years later, I finally made it to Benares (better known in the West as Varanasi). I had become an editor at Yoga Journal; I was researching a guidebook to ashrams, meditation centers and pilgrimage sites in India. Synchronicity seems to be the only law that is enforced in India; so I wasn't altogether surprised, my second day in Varanasi, when I spotted Charan Das sipping chai in the rooftop cafe of the Hotel Ganges View. His dreadlocks had turned gray, and a new pair of wire-framed spectacles perched unsteadily on his nose.

"We knew you would get here!" he said, as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted a few hours ago. "Would you like some chai?"

From our hotel roof we had a sweeping view of the city -- already ancient at the time of the Buddha -- stretching downstream around an elbow-shaped bend in the silky gray Ganges. Varanasi is the hometown of Shiva, the god of destruction, and a city sacred to death. Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi ensures liberation for the soul -- on your deathbed there, Shiva himself will whisper a mantra in your ear that ensures your safe passage to the other side. The banks of the Ganges are lined with hostels where people come from all over India to die. The funeral fires have not stopped burning for several thousand years.

On the dirt road below meandered an intermittent stream of traffic: a herd of water buffalo lumbering to the river to drink; a band of pilgrims with six-foot staffs on their shoulders, weighted at both ends with bundles of cooking supplies and offerings for the temples; mangy, purposefully trotting dogs; a sadhu with orange robes and a pitchfork-sized trident, his forehead striped with the three horizontal bars that mark a follower of Shiva.

I told Charan Das that I was in India researching a spiritual guidebook and would appreciate his insights.

"We were working on a spiritual guidebook, too!" he said in delight. "That's why we originally came to India 20 years ago."

Somewhat alarmed, I asked him what had happened to his project.

"Our notes were all locked up in a friend's house in Benares," he said. "A whole trunkful of them, on hundreds of ashrams all over India. But the friend died many years ago. The trunk was moved, and we're not sure where."

He began to laugh -- a zany, low-pitched chortle that went on long after my own laughter had stopped -- and I knew that for him, a spiritual guidebook had long since lost all relevance. My publisher would have been alarmed, I'm sure, at how uplifted that perspective made me feel.

Charan Das invited me to meet him that evening at the Hanuman Temple, where he and his guru, Kathia Baba, were staying. Hanuman is the monkey god; the temple courtyard was strewn with peanut shells and swarming with bold-eyed, leering monkeys, covetously eyeing my day pack. I found Charan Das and Kathia Baba seated cross-legged on a caved-in sofa in a back room, sharing a fat, cigar-shaped chilam (a pipe containing a mixture of tobacco and marijuana, a plant considered by sadhus to be sacred to Shiva) with a handful of Indian and Western devotees.

"This is Anne," Charan Das told Kathia Baba. "We stayed with her in New Mexico 10 years ago."

"For this evening, you are not Anne," Kathia Baba told me, clasping my hands and beaming. He was a stocky Indian man with a short-cropped beard, dressed in a white kurta and mala beads, with an expression of almost shockingly innocent pleasure, as if perpetually unpacking a Christmas stocking. "For this evening you will be called Annapurna, the goddess of plenty."

"And this," said Charan Das, gesturing toward a muscular blond woman in a green sari, "is Maya. She is from the Pleiades."

"You're a long way from home," I said.

"Earth will never seem familiar to a soul from another star system," she said in a strong German accent. "But Benares is more like home than Germany." She reached out and took the chilam from Kathia Baba.

"She is telling me so many things I have never heard of," said Kathia Baba reverently.

The chilam went round and round. Charan Das told me who really killed JFK. Maya told me that she was a "walk-in," a soul from the Pleiades who had stepped into an earthling's body in midlife to help save the planet from destruction. Kathia Baba told me about meditating in a cave in the Himalayas, where he went into a trance and lived without food or water for six months.

Charan Das told me that the FBI had genetically engineered the AIDS virus as a plot against homosexuals. Maya told me that it was possible that I was from the Pleiades, also. Kathia Baba told me that Charan Das intended to bring him to America and drive him across the country in a VW van. "He is telling me about the Rainbow Family," Kathia Baba said. "It is truly a wonderful thing."

Finally, unsteadily, I stood up to go. From a cotton pouch slung around his bare shoulder, Charan Das produced an address book, tattered as an ancient Sanskrit manuscript.

"If we ever come to California," he said, "we will give you a call."

N E X T+P A G E+| All the holy men and their girlfriends

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -