Varanasi and Homi Baba
Each time I had been to , I had become lost in the maze of narrow winding streets only to emerge at the same spot: an ancient whose boughs hung out over the sacred . I do not know how I got there. It felt like I was drawn despite myself.
It was a quiet, peaceful place in the midst of a city of noise, crowds, and turmoil, a place of reflection and meditation, a spot removed from the demands of contemporary life. Whenever I reached that spot, I would sit beneath the tree for hours to gaze along the miles of riverbank lined with palaces and temples and its sporadic maelstroms of activity. Below me, a woman would pray to the river and the sun, a man would bathe, plunging deep into the water, and children would dive and swim.
Occasionally the pounding tock tock of oars against a hull would indicate a passing boat. But the most persistent sound was the chirping of birds in the trees, sometimes interrupted by the chittering of monkeys. Here for me the veil of time was transparent: by only squinting my eyes I could easily glimpse into the ages past, a view that felt unchanged for millennium upon millennium.
Just behind the tree was a small stone shrine, and in it sat a man, bearded and dressed in saffron robes. He was always perfectly still, completely silent, praying. He was called Homi Baba. He had been a businessman who, more than forty years before, had made a vow to his God to spend the rest of his life sitting in this one spot in prayer and to never utter another word. He was fulfilling his vow.
Each time I found myself there, meditating beneath the tree next to his shrine, we made eye contact. Each time, without words or gestures, I felt welcome. Over the years, as I returned to my sacred tree (I gradually learned to find it by choice), I sensed a special love emanating from this man. Contact with him, even without discourse, held lessons as profound as any philosophy.
When I last visited Varanasi and rose in the dark to sit beneath the tree before sunrise, as I always do, Homi Baba was gone. He had died the year before. In his place in the little stone shrine, sitting in the same position and gazing out into the river, was a carved cement statue in his likeness, placed there by another foreigner, a Swiss woman I had never met. In all the times I had visited him, I had never seen anyone else with him. But she, like me, had been inspired by this quiet, sacred spot and the gentle, silent man whose very presence spoke with such eloquence.
My travels in India over fifty years are chronicled in my new memoir, , available for preorder in the UK and US.
