babaji

The Beginning. Chapter from Like Two Rivers

The Beginning

Kheerganga. Parvati Valley. May. 1968.

Lukas is walking barefoot across the steep meadow, away from the log cabin. The first bright spring morning makes the short grass shine. It gleams in his rock crystal prayer beads. Babaji is sitting at a distance, cross-legged and erect on a smooth, flat rock that the sun has dried of night dew. Around him, he has laid out to dry: two dark khaki, woollen shawls and three, white cotton loincloths. He washed them in the holy spring, Kheerganga. When Lukas comes closer, he can see that the sadhu is polishing the copper snake bracelet with ruby eyes. His two strings of gnarly wooden beads are stretched out, dark and damp, on top of the shawls. The air is filled with the scent of wet wool and wood.

This is everything the sadhu owns.

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Seeking Sage

“So…he is a character in your novel?” she asks as we walk up towards his tiny house. A familiar anticipatory silence unfurls itself softly along the mountain path.

“He is the inspiration,” I say quietly and think about the enormous and old Himalayan cedar that shades his slate roof. I often imagine when he is no more, he will exist as this majestic tree and I will continue to visit, to rest my back against the sturdy and immortal trunk, inhale its fragrance and close my eyes. “For more than thirty years I lost contact with him, he was by my side all along, but I only realized it when I found him again,” I attempt to explain.

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