Old Men And Babas

Near my house in the Bengali quarter, an old East Bengali Brahman schoolteacher lived alone in a small room. "His family didn't want him," my neighbor told me, her story thoroughly unsubstantiated. The room was dark and only four feet in height, and the old man would crouch inside, making his food, his voice eerily projecting from his little cave. Unlike the old kasivasi women in the area, the old saffron-clad man was seldom teased, though he seemed to have all the ingredients: no apparent family, an eccentric manner, frequent requests for raw foodstuffs, and a funny voice. Two doors down from this man lived another former Bengali schoolteacher, in his seventies, with his family. Unlike the saffron man they called Baba, the children of neighbors made fun of this man for his frequent and pathetic complaining. In hearing Baba, however, kids and passersby drew on a more complex hermeneutic of generosity: Baba seemed to be a sannyasi, and his voice was many things to different people—beneficent, guileful, hypocritical, transgressive, or enlightening—but seldom meaningless or strange.

The old man in the little room was not attached to any sampradaya , any particular ascetic order. In the late 1960S, Surajit Sinha and Baidyanath Saraswati studied the sannyasis of Varanasi and calculated that the number of ascetics residing

more or less permanently in the city in monastic institutions called maths was 1,284. About 300 ascetics were not attached to a math, but maintained ties to a sampradaya while living on their own. Sinha and Saraswati suggested that of the total population of the city during their study in the 1970s, 1 in 240 persons was an ascetic.^[21] This ratio did not include the considerable numbers of sadhus (holy men) of various sorts who arrived and stayed in the city seasonally; nor did it include individuals like this old Baba, who did not belong to any religious order but dressed the part, participated with friends in any of a number of the myriad devotional, educational, and recreational opportunities of Kashi, wandered the lanes of the city, and worked the foreign "hippies" for a living.

The last task was one of Baba's more challenging but remunerative. He spent time on Dasashwamedh Ghat, the busiest and the most central of the ghats, striking up conversations with the many young foreigners who arrived each day in the city. Varanasi remained one of the principal stops on another latter-day touristic, that of "Asia on a shoestring" budget travelers, for whom the city's yogis, musicians, and cremations—along with Goa's beaches, Mother Teresa's Calcutta homes for the dying, Dharamsala's Tibetans and treks, and Kathmandu's evergreen psychedelic scene—reworked the colonial grand tour Cohn has described. Within the narrative of the budget tour, Varanasi was a microcosm of India, particularly in being a "love it or hate it" kind of place, the mother lode of the negative currency of the young traveler, "the hassles." An inveterate teacher and relatively fluent English speaker, Baba delighted in introducing interested young tourists hassle-free into the mysteries of Hinduism. The challenge was to make the foreigners, who tended to take Baba along with the river, the cremation fires, and the cows as a found object, and who got nervous at the hint of a quid pro quo, lighten their own material burden a bit without losing their feeling of control.

Banarsis heard the voices of sannyasis with some ambivalence, either as the wheedling of charlatans or the blessing of the god-realized, or both. The former hearing dominated; Banarsis, who contend with sannyasis on a daily basis, were apt to be jaded. Like old widows, old babas were part of a topography. But the interstitial location of their voices redeemed them. Sannyasis and other sadhus and babas who lived throughout the Hindu neighborhoods of the pakka mahal had voices that were hearable as benign and on occasion positively transformative: those of latter-day rishis. One could make fun of Baba on Dasashwamedh, with his hippies, but in the neighborhood he was neither a figure of derision or pity. And the hearing of his voice drew upon more famous, and archetypal, voices, of renowned old holy men in the city or the state whose voices were distinguished by their radically unusual tenor. Some of these men blessed through swears, sexual language, and curses; some spoke on rare occasions only; some never spoke.

On Assi Ghat, a few feet from where the woman from Nagwa would come to sing by the Sangameswar Temple, was a small Saivite math, a place for sannyasis headed by Ramu Baba. Like most strangely voiced babas, Ramu Baba was said to be superannuated by the men from the community who frequented the math's

nightly arati , the worship service, in the small shrine adjoining his room. He was eighty, ninety, one hundred, or more. Ramu Baba remained in his room all day in meditation. He came out publicly once a day, in the evening after the arati , to give these men a darshan, a viewing of him. He would say nothing; he never spoke. His nazar , his gaze, seemed all the more powerful. His eyes burnt into you; they seemed to know all that needed to be known about you. They were joking, thoughtful, deadly serious. Ramu Baba was an archetype of the silent voice, of the jivanmukta , the realized in life.

Samne Ghat was on the Ganga bank just south of Nagwa and east of the sprawling BHU campus. At that time, it was the staging point for the passenger ferries across the river to Ramnagar during the monsoons; the rest of the year, a pontoon bridge linked the city to Ramnagar via the ghat. Since the mid-1990s, a bridge has been built spanning the river; its pylons were, according to a persistent but usually humorous rumor, build on the bodies of children collected by the state through its lakarsunghva agents. In the late 1980s, one took a ferry, or hired a small boat. A Banarsi friend once cryptically told me that halfway between Ramnagar and Samne Ghat, on the water, I would meet someone "for your project." Later, after I had met the Beriya Baba, I returned and asked the friend why he thought to mention him to me. I got an answer similar to the one Bijay gave me about Mashima; contemplating my project, this man for the first time decided that the Baba might be mad.

I went down to Samne Ghat, that first day. Across the water I saw a small wooden houseboat. "Who lives there?" I asked the tea shop regulars presiding over the coming and going of boats.

"That's Beriya Baba.'
"Who is he?"
"He's an old baba."
"How old?"
"I don't know . . . about eighty?"
"Can I visit him?"
"He doesn't ever want to be bothered. He'll just curse you."

But one of the boatmen agreed to take me across. On the way, he told me to be extremely respectful.

"Make sure you greet him very politely [pranam karna ]. He's very old."
"How old?"
"Oh, at least a hundred."

"Where does his name come from?" I asked. "From a ber (plum or jujube) tree," said the boatman. "He uses it for his worship." Another friend later said that Beriya Baba used to live up a tree, and had vowed never set foot on the ground. That was why he now lived on a boat, neither on one shore nor the other. The image of King Ajara's former sannyasi body in the Kathasaritsagara story, hanging from a tree, came to mind. Several superannuated babas were famed for their

never having touched the ground in recent memory. The most famous was Devraha Baba, at 140 the oldest of them all. Devraha Baba lived in small stilted huts, and when he was transported was lifted into the car or boat by which he was transported. Both babas structured their practice as radically disjunctive from the material world through their literal embodiment as luftmenschen.

The Plum-Tree Baba was sitting crouched in the small enclosed deck that doubled as bedroom and kitchen. He was naked except for a sweater. "Pranam , Maharaj," I perhaps too obsequiously intoned, trained less by the boatman's admonition than by my frequent watching of the tv serial Mahabharata in which all old rishis as well as kings were so addressed. "Sister-fucker," Baba immediately replied. He showered a variety of curses down upon me, and then began a discourse on proper dharma, punctuated by references to sex and illustrated by frequent obscene gestures: his continually simulating sex with his fingers and his panting out "thrust, withdraw, thrust, withdraw." For Beriya Baba, material reality without God was bestial, just eating and having sex.

If people don't sing bhajans , if they don't keep their mind on God, they are no better than a dog or a bitch. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. The government—the police and the inspectors—are just hungry animals. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. They rape everyone's daughters. They like to fuck their own daughters. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. All the government wants is cunt, is ass. Sister fuckers. Ass fuckers. Split everyone's ass right open by the fucking inspectors. Thrust withdraw thrust withdraw. Just dogs. Bitches.

Somewhat taken aback by the force of Baba's discourse, I nervously changed the subject. "How old are you, Baba?""120 years." I looked at him; he didn't seem a day over 80. Perhaps sensing my questioning gaze, he downplayed his age. "But that's nothing, Devraha Baba is 140!"

Young at 120, Baba resumed his lesson, describing citizens as policemen's daughters, seeking incestuous liaisons with power. I left some money as my gift, and Baba gave the boatman and me some sweets as prasad, the materialization of his grace, in return. We returned to shore. I asked the tea shop crowd why Baba swore so much. "Well, to keep people away," one man answered. But some had other ideas. Baba used insults to tell us: You are a bhogi , a seeker after pleasure. I am a yogi. So you should not come here. And you should give up acting like animals if you want to discover God.

But why; I persisted, if Baba is indeed a jivanmukta , one liberated in this life, is he so obsessed with sex? The men in the shop concurred in their answer: "It's because you are the bhogi that Baba is goaded to challenge your right to be on his boat. He is a mirror of yourself." Baba combined one of the great ascetic archetypes of the city, the aghori baba, the transgressive ascetic who curses, drinks, lives and meditates in the inhuman and impure space of the cremation ghat and eats the ashes from cremations.^[22] Like an aghori, Beriya Baba cursed to bless. His

words were transformative, cutting through the fondness for pleasure that deafens one to reality. Like the anger of the rishis, the curses of the babas give .

I left Samne Ghat, and went home to Nandanagar colony where I was then still living. I mentioned meeting Beriya Baba to Mrs. Sharma; she doubted that he was 120 or that his words were of any spiritual import. He was a fake, "not the same thing as Devraha Baba," she concluded. Beriya Baba was not always heard as a spiritual cynosure. But though he was considered a charlatan by quite a few, his interstitial role cut off any connection to a familial body and its associated critical hearing. One did not say of any of the many babas, big or small time, in the city: "He has no one." Old men were heard differently in the interstice. And every local fake pointed to true ones. Beriya Baba might not be 120, but Devraha Baba's 140 years were seldom challenged.