This God man or preferably a devout Sadhu or a lonely soul in quest of his naked self, (the thing that he is), the one I ‘m gonna talk about, is through his earthly tenure, leaving behind his mortal body, a month or so before, at the age of 70 (earthly time).

I, in all honesty, don’t intend this piece of writing to be an obituary nor a eulogy, nothing of the sort. It just so happened that he popped out of my memory box one morning just like that, like a cuckoo coming out of a clock, and that brought back his fleeting words and image across my mental screen for a moment (I hate living my memory anyway) and that drove my fingers across the keyboard resulting in the stuff that unfolds below.

I walked into him twice by chance, so to say, on an evening walk, just like someone you cross path with, and, on one occasion, we sat down under a huge tropical tree on its tentacle-like roots spreading around. He started off by looking far below at the murmuring river about existence that inexorably led a discussion on Birth, Death and In-Between. His views dyed in the religion, or rather, the PATH he walked on all his life were frequently punctuated by my cynical remarks as I, too, had been an hard nut to crack. He picked out fault in me and I on him. But before I give an insight into him, it may be of interest to look at the various components that went into constituting and shaping his total personality or the way he was.

He recounted intriguing tales about his journey from Calcutta to Kathmandu, a voyage largely on foot and public transport on and off. He’d go around singing and playing a stringed instrument he carried with him to raise money for food and to pay for journey on wheel. He put before me the picture 60 years back in time when he was barely a boy of nine. He had run away from home and had ended up in some sort of Hindu communion (ashram) where he served the holy master for a year, and then, on command of his Master he had left Calcutta for good to dedicate rest of his life at the feet of Pashupati Nath (Shiva) temple. He had acquiesced to his Master’s command and left for this unknown journey in an endless religious pursuit at the age of 10.

From then on he spent some 15 grueling years by the crematory sites fighting elements, watching the burning pyre of dead men and women, sometime sitting through nights over nights in winter, spent another 12 years in dark cave confinement in far off mountains fallen in meditation, and then some 20 years in Pashupati Nath Temple sitting before smoldering, smoky log in ash smeared naked body. To me, the only fascinating point in him was to dig out the fact about what change, if any, this half-a-century long tribulation brought about in him.

But again, this is the tales of his life that he recounted to me. How am I supposed to know what he told me was true or false. I had absolutely no way to determine the veracity of it. The first time my eyes had fallen on him I found him wearing a knee-length saffron shirt with Hindu sacred words printed all over it. He had asked me to accompany him to his holy hovel- several of them built in a row along the river bank for devout Sadhus and Saints to live in communion with God. A hundred or so meter walk from under the tree climbing down the stone-paved steps to his holy hovel helped me pick out some unholy things about him. He had developed acute respiratory infection that gave severe asthma attack just as he climbed the steps into his hovel. He was gasping for breath fumbling in his pocket for his inhaler. “Is it a payback for your half-a-century long devotion to Shiva”, I made a nasty remark only to feel a pang of guilt for having done so, later.

His lips expanded into a crooked smile tinged with pain, a serene, saintly smile, though. He appeared to have read my intention of playing the devil’s advocate. He was still gasping for air, but lot more stable, though. After a while, he spoke in a soft, serene, solemn voice, like a ripened, wise man, “When you take pain as a gift it ceases to afflict you, but most of us struggle to fight it down or fight it off and the end result is more suffering and more pain. The last thing I want in this earthly sojourn is to die in pain. I will go with a smile playing around my lips.”

His response, calm, cool and collected, perhaps self-consoling, yet it didn’t deter me from firing another question at him. His breathing was normal by now, sitting in a lotus posture on a strip of carpet placed over straw mat and myself on bended knee on mat by the wall of hovel. I picked him up on two points that he had made. One – How can bodily pain possibly be a gift? Two – How does he know in what manner and state he would breathe his last, smiling, relaxed or tense? And, what use is a smile on dead lips?

The Sadhu poured hot water from his electric kettle into two flimsy plastic glasses, put tea, and sugar, shook it with a spoon and handed a glass to me.

“The way you look at your bodily pain is what aggravates what you call “pain”. Because you look at the pain and the image associated with the word “pain” which is stored in your memory.The problem is that you can’t escape or transcend your mind, and thus, not free to take it naturally as they come. You look at it the way you have been conditioned to look at it. You are no different from a robot doing things that it is programmed for. You look at your pain vis-a-vis the pleasure you have had which is accumulated in your memory.Your body is in pain and your mind evoking all pleasures from memory to offset pain and to get away from it.The pleasure only worsens your pain. It fuels the fire. If you can isolate your pain from the shadow of pleasure and live it in its entirety and totality, it is far less painful”, the Sadhu said with a sardonic smile of sort.

“Hmm, I see the point, I nodded. He picked up on it again, “No creatures, human or non-human, love pain. I don’t love it too. I don’t hate it either. You got to find a place for yourself somewhere between love and hate. You got to live your pain in its entirety and totality and not with a pinch of pleasure. But your mind wouldn’t allow you to do so. Your mind is your worst enemy.” I kept quiet, contemplating in silence.

“Yeah, but, how can someone possibly put a stop on his mind while living in pain?”, I put it to him quietly, in a muffled voice, rather solemnly. The Sadhu took a deep draught of his tea, put the glass away, stared at me with his glinting beady eyes and smiled. I could see no trace of pain on his reddish, luminous face, his lock of greying hairs unkempt, though. He spoke, (pointing the index finger of his left hand to his body) “This is my body. I “think” this is my body. If I take this “thinking” out, this is just a body that I, you, and everyone, will leave behind for burial or to send it up in flames. It is knowledge that all of us know and yet we can’t get over our claim for this body, don’t we? You cannot isolate your body from yourself as long as your mind is the meddler. Once your mind falls silent and stops meddling, the lid of your inner power blows off and the power surges upward into your mind that allows you to convert your pain into a gift”, he said.

Before another word escape my lips, a gaunt face man in his mid-30s putting on thick glasses crept in the hovel, walked up to the Sadhu, fell to his knee, arched over and put his head down to his feet. The man rose to his feet leaving a religious journal at the feet of the Sadhu, and walked out. Not a word was spoken.

“Scrape his living by editing the journal. I have asked some business people to put ads on it. The journal serves only one purpose. It helps him to stay afloat. Rest is all crap”, the Sadhu muttered.

And, you said that you would go with smile playing around your lips! How can someone be sure of it?, I picked on where we had left off.

“If I go before you, you are there to see it for yourself, call me a liar or a man of word. But if you go before me, then there’s no point. You can’t, if you are merely a mortal body that you are in love with, but if you can transcend your mortal body, and you believe in it, then it is there”, he said with a teasing smile still hanging around his pink, withered lips.

“Bullshit”, I muttered under breath. “May be it is the path that you walked all along shaped your thought pattern to think that way, I mean, your belief and faith have blinded you to reason or the reality of things”, I challenged.

His eyes rolled around the wall of his hovel and stopped on the image of a short, naked old man with overhanging belly, clad in deer’s skin. Pointing a finger to the image, he spoke, “He set my feet on this path.” And then, he turned around to me, “You are not totally wrong nor are you wholly right. No path, no matter religious or otherwise, can lead you to know the true nature of things. You need to walk all by yourself to reach the state from where you can see and understand things as they are.” He went on, “As with the path, I have no regret having walked this far. A dirty man needs soap to clean him down. The soap will definitely give him cleanliness but not purity. He has to purge himself with tremendous amount of discipline and an inner power to resist all temptations that come in his way. Religion is like soap. You need it to clean yourself. Use religious soap or non-religious soap; it doesn’t matter as long as you use a soap to clean yourself down before going for purity. The end goal is purity or total awareness, if you like.”

“And how on earth does leaving a smile on dead lips serve any purpose?”, I asked rather cynically. “The time space between your birth and death on earthly plane is the most important chapter in the book of any creature’s life. You are born naturally and you die naturally, like any other creature, but you forget to live naturally. They say, I was born with a spec of smile on lips. I want to retain that smile at time of death and leave it after. My state of being before departure will determine the course of my further journey. Or else, I would wallow in the mud and could never bail myself out of it”, the Sadhu said.

I took a quick look at my watch. It was time for me to walk back home. As I got back to my feet to take leave of him, he spoke few parting words, “You and I stand at the threshold desperate to go inside and bathe in the fountain of purity and purge ourselves of dirt. I am being held back by my path and belief that brought me this far and is now an obstruction and you by arrogance, the size of a mustard seed. We cannot go inside unless we are spotlessly clean and totally naked, all by ourselves. You can’t take anything inside, not religion either”, he said. I looked up at him. He was oozing smiles.

On hearing about his death I took an evening stroll around his hovel. The boy who was assigned to look after him told me that he’d gone to fetch water in the early hours of morning from nearby tap and returned only to find the Sadhu was gone. He was in lotus posture sitting on the strip of the carpet with his back leaning against mud wall of his hovel. His lips were expanded in smile like a saint who has realized God.