The Mahatma - Part One

The nine hour bus journey between Bombay and Khapoli was uneventful and he slept most of the way, opening his eyes only when the conductor shook him by the shoulder. 'Khapoli,' said the conductor tersely. The name of his destination was all that was needed to render Datta wide awake, and he hastily collected the plastic bag containing his belongings and shuffled out of the bus.

It was past midnight. A streetlight was out of question in this backwater village, but the sky littered with stars and a solitary moon contributed a faint visibility, in which he could barely make out the contours of the deserted road jutting through a sea of fields, rich with crops swaying in the breeze. Trees, arising here and there, cloaked in a veil of all-pervasive darkness, appeared like eerie ghosts.

After walking for twenty minutes Datta found himself in the environs of a cluster of huts. The village dogs were the first to greet him. Barking vociferously, they converged from all sides. Petrified that he was about to be torn to pieces by these unruly creatures, Datta shouted, 'is there anybody awake in this village? Save me from these mongrels.'

No one answered. Datta tried again. 'Help me someone,' he shouted, 'help, help…'

'Who is it?' a sleepy voice answered in the darkness.

'A visitor from the city.'

A drowsy looking man, in his early twenties, wearing a loincloth around his waist and clutching a lantern in one hand shuffled towards Datta. 'Hush! You mongrels,' he shouted at the dogs silencing them immediately. 'Who are you?' he asked, looking at Datta.

'A friend of Balkrishan. Can you direct me to his house?'

'Are you talking about the Balkrishan who used to work in Bombay?'

'Yes.'

'He does not stay here any longer. He sold his land and left the village with his family two years ago.'

'What?' Datta uttered. 'I had no idea.'

Three or four villagers came holding lanterns in their hand. 'Who is he?' one of them asked.

'What does he want?' asked another.

'Someone looking for Balkrishan,' said the young man.

'Are you a sanyasi?' asked an elderly villager.

The query caught Datta by surprise. He was anything but a sanyasi. Suddenly he realized that the flowing cotton robe he was wearing did make him seem like a sanyasi. Thinking fast, he said 'yes, many years ago Balkrishan had invited me to come here and perform puja for the welfare of the village.' Not quite sure if his ploy was working on the villagers, he added tentatively, 'as I was passing through this area, I thought I should drop in and fulfill Balkrishan's desire.'

The elderly man stepped forward and said, 'mahatmaji, I am the village mukhia. It is by God's grace that you have arrived here. On behalf of all the villagers I plead you to spend few days with us.' He bent down to touch Datta's feet. Other villagers following the old man's cue did the same.

Datta could barely conceal his relief, and in a grave voice befitting a sanyasi, he said, 'if you so desire, I am prepared to bless this village by remaining here for a few days.'

In no time a wooden charpoy was installed in the center of the village for the mahatma to sit. Women washed his feet with warm water to make him feel relaxed. He was given sweetened water to drink and hastily cooked porridge to eat.
Not only was this extravagant devotion surprising to Datta, it was also amusing. It being in his interest to keep the gullible villagers deluded and accept their hospitality for a few days if not for weeks, he was most profligate in showering blessings on everyone. In the end he was successful in putting up a good enough act of a genuine mahatma.

The villagers decided that the Ganpati temple, the only concrete structure in the village, was the right place for the august mahatma to reside. Datta was led to the Ganpati temple, located about 100 yards away from the center of the village. Under the awning of its verandah, a wooden charpoy, bedecked with mattress, bed sheet and pillow was installed for the mahatma to repose. After another round of obeisance, the villagers left.

As Datta lay on the bed, he contemplated on the vagaries of destiny, during the day he had been a worthless scavenger and a thief, but at night he was finding himself transmogrified into a revered mahatma. 'God, your ways are beyond comprehension of a mere mortal like me', he murmured to himself.

*

Mr. Mehta opened the door to find Datta, the local scavenger standing outside. 'Namaskar sahib,' said Datta, 'I heard that you were looking for me.'

'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Mehta, 'water is flowing back in my bathroom commode.'

'The gutter outside must be clogged sahib,' said Datta knowingly.

They went to the gutter, located on the street outside the house. A nauseating stench suffused the air as Datta removed the manhole cover. Mr. Mehta withdrew by few steps to escape the stench. Covering his nose with a handkerchief, he uttered, 'so what is it!'

'The gutter is clogged sahib,' said Datta peering into the vile gooey substance that filled the gutter.

'Clear it!' said Mr. Mehta brusquely.

Datta smiled obsequiously. 'Sahib it is very hard work.'

'I know, I know, it will not take you more than five minutes to clear this manhole.'

'Sahib, I will get sick clearing this thing, you must pay me ten rupee for this work.'

'Clear it first, we can talk about money later,' pompously said Mr. Mehta before marching back into his house.

Using a shovel Datta began extricating lumps of black substance, which he dumped into a broken plastic bucket. With every shovelful that he unearthed, came a new dose of vile stench but that hardly affected Datta, who had scavenging in his blood. Born in a family of scavengers cleaning toilets and clearing gutters had been his fate since he was barely out of his childhood. Now in his middle age, he had worked through so many rotting gutters that no stench, howsoever vile, could bother him.

When the bucket was filled with the black mass, he carried it on his head to a nearby dumping ground and emptied it before returning to the gutter to begin anew the process of filling the bucket up. Only this time he encountered something completely unexpected. As he was pulling another shovelful from the gutter a bright metallic glint in the black mass caught his eye. He placed the shovel down and pulled the metallic object out with his hand.

Even though it was coated in muck, Datta realized in no time that he was holding a necklace, possibly made out of gold. He looked around suspiciously to see if anyone's prying eyes had caught him with his find. There was no one around. Datta hastily hid the necklace in his clothes and carried on as usual with the work of clearing the gutter. But his mind was now obsessed with the necklace. He could not cease to wonder how much his treasure was worth.

Maybe someone would give him 500 or even 1000 rupees for the necklace. He gasped at the amount. Was it possible that the necklace was worth that much? He decided to take another look at it and surreptitiously pulled it out of his pocket. Holding it in the palm of his left hand he rubbed it with the fingers of his right hand to make the metal shine brighter. Ah it was definitely gold; the dull yellowish glint reassured him. What a lucky day this was turning out to be!

'What is it you have in your hand?' a harsh voice sounded.

'Its no…nothing,' Datta stammered, taken aback by Mr. Mehta's sudden appearance.

'You are hiding something, show it to me.'

'It is just a bauble I found in the gutter,' pleaded Datta, clutching the necklace firmly in his hand.

'Show it to me,' shouted Mr. Mehta.

But Datta didn't want to handover the necklace to Mr. Mehta. 'It is my necklace,' obstinately he uttered, 'I found it.'

'If you don't hand it over I will have to call the police.'

It was the first time in his life that a piece of gold had come into his possession, and Datta was adamant not to let go of it easily. Before Mr. Mehta could realize what was happening, Datta was on his feet and scampering down the street. The cries of 'stop thief' that issued from Mr. Mehta's mouth only availed to make Datta run even faster and in no time he was out of the colony.

He still clutched the necklace in his hand. But the necklace would hardly amount to anything once he was in jail. He had no doubt at all that Mr. Mehta would have reported the matter to the police by now. Maybe the police were already looking for him. With his clothes caked with slush from the gutter he had already left a trail of smell that would easily lead the police to him. It was only a question of days if not hours before he was apprehended and sent to jail. He decided that leaving Bombay was his best option.

He remembered his friend Balkrishan, who had once been a scavenger like him. Five years ago, Balkrishan had left Bombay and retired to a village called Khapoli along with his wife to eke out a living as a farmer from a small plot of ancestral land. Before departing from Bombay, he had told Datta that if ever a need arose, he could count on him. Now the need had arisen. Datta made up his mind to flee to Khapoli and spend few weeks with Balkrishan.

He rushed to his house, a hovel in a nearby slum, where he quickly washed himself and changed into a flowing cotton robe, which a temple priest, whose gutter he had once cleaned, had given him out of kindness. In a small box concealed on the rafter of his house, he had around 70 rupee small notes and coins. He emptied the entire amount in his pocket, hoping it would suffice for the fare to Khapoli. And in another hour he was in a bus bound for south Maharashtra.

*

Next day he woke to the pleasant sound of birds singing in the fields and went to the small river flowing behind the temple for his ablutions. When he returned to the temple, villagers were waiting for him. They had brought with them incense sticks, sweets and other puja materials. The mukhia said, 'mahatmaji, will you be conducting the morning aarti now?'
Datta had not given any thought to conducting a morning aarti but he recovered quickly and said, 'of course, I always start my day with puja.'

In Bombay, he occasionally used to visit temples, so he had a sort of elementary knowledge about the way an aarti was conducted. In the end he was able to put up a show good enough to impress the gullible villagers. After puja he sat down for breakfast, which some village women had brought for him. Feeling ravenously hungry, he almost pounced on the food consisting of warm poha and curd sweetened with jaggery.

'Mahatmaji, I thank you on behalf of the village for allowing us to take care of your needs,' the old mukhia said.

'Ganpati is the sole mover in the material world,' Datta said nonchalantly, his mouth full of food, 'if my feet have brought me here then the credit for that goes to Ganpati. He wanted me to be among honest souls so he brought me here.'

The mukhia folded his hands in supplication and implored, 'Mahatmaji, we villagers rarely get a chance to meet a divine person like you. Please give us a pravachan.'

It was not difficult for Datta to fulfill this request. Even though a scavenger, he always had a gift for words. He finished his food and then gave a short speech full of banalities about the munificence and greatness of Ganpati. The villagers listened with rapt attention. At the end of is speech Datta rose and said, 'I want all of you to repeat after me the maha-mantra which I will now recite:

Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama hare hare.
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna hare hare.'

This was the only hymn that he knew, having learned it from some hippies in Bombay. The villagers got up and repeated the maha-mantra as they heard it.

'Mahatmaji, the priest of this temple died six months ago,' said the mukhiya. Since then our temple has been without any priest. Will you be the priest here? We are poor folks but we shall share with you all we have.'

'Please condescend to be the priest of this poor village,' an old woman pleaded.

'We need a holy man like you to make our lives worth living,' another villager droned.

Datta had no intention of making a life long career of being a Mahatma to these ignorant peasants. He felt sure that if he lived here for more than one or two months, he would die of boredom. Even cleaning gutters in Bombay was a better job than being a mahatma to these threadbare rustics. There was no chance of his staying here permanently. After a few weeks he would positively be off for Bombay.

'I am a humble vassal of Ganpati', he said philosophically. 'If it is his will that I should spend rest of my life here, then I will remain here. But if he desires to send me elsewhere then I will have to obey him.'

When the villagers left to work in their fields, Datta remained behind, sitting on the charpoy, and musing about the great turnaround his life had taken. Him a revered mahatma! How ludicrous? How unbelievable? How surprised his friends in Bombay would be if they saw him in this mahatma's avatar? How about the uppity Mr. Mehta? He laughed. He pulled out the necklace from his pocket and gazed at it with affection. There was hardly any doubt in his mind that he had done the right thing in escaping with the necklace.

After sometime he started on a peregrination through the narrow mud paths that crisscrossed the rice, paddy and vegetable fields. The air carried the fresh and natural smell of fields laden with ripening crop, among which fluttered birds and butterflies of myriad hues. The farmers working in the fields greeted him with folded hands. He returned their greetings and at times waited to exchange few words before moving onwards. An hour's walk brought him to the residential area of the village, where he had arrived yesterday in the middle of the night.

In the broad daylight he could see all that had remained shielded in the night's cloak of darkness. The houses, little more than hovels, were made out of dried mud, grass and bamboo. In the center of the village was a well, from which village women were drawing water by the means of a bucket tied to a long jute rope. Teenage girls were drying pats of cow dung- to be used as fuel. Children with dust caked to their bodies scurried about playfully. Few old women sat under the shade of a mango grove, situated beside the well, chatting with each other and keeping watch on the playing children.

'Pranam Mahatmaji, it is good of you to grace our humble household,' a woman smiled, displaying all her rotten teeth.
'I was passing by,' said Datta.

'You must remain for a while and bless our children', another woman said.

A young girl hurried off to a hut and fetched a coir mat, which was spread on the ground below a tree. Datta sat on the mat; the women congregated around him and started introducing their children and grandchildren to him. He touched each child on his head and droned some meaningless words. One woman brought her frail child who appeared to be quite sick; he had been vomiting since morning, the mother said.

'Isn't there a doctor in this village?' asked Datta.

'How can we poor village people afford to have a doctor, mahatmaji?' the child's mother lamented.

'Who needs a doctor when someone as divine as you is with us,' another woman opined.

Datta had no desire to take on himself the responsibility for curing a sick child. What if the child died? 'My advice is you take this child to a doctor. He is very sick,' he said. The child's mother started sobbing and seeing his mother cry the child too began to wail. 'There is no need to cry,' Datta said. 'A doctor will cure him in no time.'

'The nearest doctor is in the town, thirty kilometers away. It is not easy to reach there,' an old woman said.

'Please invoke an incantation to cure my child,' the mother pleaded, 'I beseech you.'

The persistence of the sick child's mother forced Datta to at least pretend to do something. He pulled out a thread from the hem of his garment and chanting some meaningless mantras he tied the thread on the sick child's arm. 'Make him drink boiled water mixed with jaggery and salt frequently throughout the day,' he said to the mother, 'he should be fine by evening.' He had heard from someone that a concoction of boiled water, jaggery and salt was an effective cure for vomiting.

When he returned to the temple at noon, some villagers were waiting for him with his lunch. He had his fill and then lay down on the bed for a siesta. In the evening, just before sunset, there was another round of prayers at the Ganpati temple at which most of the villagers were present. The woman, whose sick child he had attended to, was at the prayer. She came forward after the prayer was over and touched his feet. With a beaming smile she exulted, 'mahatmaji as you had foretold, my son is fine now.'

'I knew he would be alright', Datta said happily, 'Ganpati wanted him to get well.'

The Mahatma - Part Two