Travels

I sprain my ankle just before I enter his compound, after jumping over a rock. My companions, two young guys who have just convinced me to take this short detour to meet their ‘black saint’, start and jump to my rescue. I am a guy, ha ha, I can’t show pain, but it hurts like hell. I hope this little accident is not me paying up for some bad karma. It is a pretty good coincidence though, is it not, just before meeting ‘our baba, the black saint of Changu Narayan’. This is how my companions convinced me to climb this hill when I was walking through their village five minutes ago .
“He not Nepalese, he from Calcutta, India, but he live here 40 years”, they tell me eagerly.
“Really?”
“Yes, you come meet him, no money. Visit, free, you chat with baba.” Of course, this makes me think that I will have to chip in some. Damn this suspiciousness; I can’t even get rid of it when I’m about to meet an Oriental spiritual master. “Baba no like money. American man give baba 5000 dollar to buy teeth. Baba build school for village (and indeed we walk past the small, brightly painted building). Baba still no teeth”. Well, at least I’m starting to believe I’m not being pulled into this for money. But I am starting to wonder whether spraining my ankle is punishment for these thoughts.
Near the saint’s kutthi (traditional little hut) towers a huge Shiva trident, a shrine to a few gods I don’t recognize (although one of them could be Hanuman), and an enormous 500-year old tree that seems to be a shrine to Ganesh: you can see the human-bodied elephant-headed god carved in the trunk, hanging from its branches, hiding in the gigantic shadow. First thing I notice when I enter the little hut is that my companions have not lied – Baba has no teeth. What he does have are jet black clothes, jet black matted hair and a bright, amused tinkle in his eyes. There is a semi-circle of visitors in front of baba, and I find a spot on one side, a little to the left and in front of the holy man. No shoes allowed, so we’re all barefoot and someone hasn’t washed their socks.
Baba’s gestures when he makes tea and passes a bong of grass around are like tiny prayers. Kali baba is an aghori baba, a yogi for whom formal ritual has no importance and for whom every little gesture or activity (even –say – going to the loo) is charged with spiritual meaning. He is all dressed in black because the aghori are worshippers of the goddess Kali, of Death as The Great Transformer. Some show their devotion by eating dead bodies. Kali baba is a vegetarian though, which I’m quite relieved to learn.
I am still waiting for something, some sign that this little old man with an impish face is a great spiritual master. What, no blessings buzzing around my head, no enlightenment descending over me, no all-pervading sense of inner peace, no visions of Hindu gods? Instead I become a centre of interest for everybody inside the hut: Where are you from? What language do you speak in Romania? What are you doing in Nepal? Do you like Nepal? It annoys me that answering all these questions I’ve been answering a million times since arriving in Nepal will cheat me out of my chance at answering my own question: is Kali baba for real or not? I manage to ask him some questions too and find out about his spiritual master (of whom there’s a photo on the wall), about his love for Nepal: ‘this country love me for 40 years’, his opinion about languages: ‘Romanian – mother language, English – mother language, French – mother language, all mother language’ (what is father language then?, I ask). ‘Sanskrit’, he replies interestingly. He shows me old dusty magazine pages with articles written about him; he behaves as if everything in the hut belongs to all of us present there. I have the feeling I could ask him for food and he would share just as he is sharing his tea and his marijuana. Not that I partake in the latter; it doesn’t really do anything for me, so am not interested. I actually leave when the smoke becomes more like fog inside the kutthi. I leave as I came, still without any visions of Hindu gods, nor sudden enlightenment, nor an all-pervading sense of inner peace, but with the same pain in my ankle. I also do not leave without guiltily (for some reason) dropping some money in the donation box he’s got on a pole in the centre of the hut. Not that he seems to care anyway.
I also do not leave without my question: is Kali baba for real or not? Just as I step out of the compound, I sprain my ankle again: the same ankle, in exactly the same place, just after jumping over the exact same rock as before. Only the pain is quite screamingly fiercer. This time, there’s nobody else to jump to my rescue. Or witness my embarrassment. So I swallow my scream and my pride and keep on limping towards the 17-century-old Changu Narayan, the most important Vishnu shrine in the whole of Nepal.