Living with Dadaji proved to be as difficult as he had predicted. Now, I can see that I took up so much of his space, his time and his emotional energy. He would often say in exasperation, “Would you RELAX!” When he had had more than enough his door curtain would be pulled closed and I was forbidden to enter, usually for days. The family would give me aggrieved looks as they came and went from his darkened and closed off room. Angry roars would bring someone running. I would spin off into hurt and anger and fear and stay frozen, unable to bear what was happening. I could never figure out what had made him act that way. On the other hand, in their wise way, the older family members would move in very close to him, pressing and massaging his legs, feet, arms and head. They would soothe him like he was a sick child. I knew nothing about nurturing so I stood in harsh judgement of his ‘babyish’ behaviour and I would yell at him and attack his curtain with insults. Then Kaliben would take me by the arm, hold my hand and tell me to shush and go upstairs to the roof and leave him alone. He would be shouting at me by then. Couldn’t everybody see he was wrong and I was right?

I have always had a problem with authority. I had acted in an unprecedented manner when I had given Mahendranath authority over me. I had given him the right to do to me anything he saw fit to do. Nonetheless I obviously squirmed and rankled and burned. I began to fantasize about killing him in violent ways. I couldn’t stop it. I would drown him, knife him and shoot him with a machine gun. These fantasies disturbed me greatly because consciously I adored him. One day while I was copying his writing into my notebook I was also thinking about my violent reactions and wondering what was going on with me. I looked down and saw I had written ‘neurosis”. There was nothing else to do but confess. I expected fury. Instead he laughed and said, “This is why I love you. You tell the truth.” I was relieved, but I wondered if he really knew my dark heart.

Many many sadhus are ex-military or ex-police. It meant that these men were often fastidious, methodical and competent. Dadaji was all of these things. His room contained little, but everything had somehow been altered by his hand. He kept his tools in tins which were decorated with orange paint and had strange faces created out of cut paper glued to the outside. Anything that broke, he would repair. His ancient and rotten tape player was always needing to be taken apart. Little screws and parts and pieces would be carefully placed in a lid to be cleaned, filed and replaced. If a tape broke he took the cassette apart and very meticulously restuck the tape back together with sticky tape cut to size with a little blade. It was rewound and the cassette put back together with its tiny screws. He loved his music and even though the quality was worse than the early transistor radios, he could be transported by Greig or just as easily, some new disco group or Indian film music. He was always looking for new sounds. Every afternoon, equipment permitting, we would sit and listen to a few selected pieces of very varied music. His feelings about music were as unpredictable and as strongly held as his feelings about ideas and people.

He sewed all his own cold weather kufnis (robes, actually ’shroud’) His orange sheets were hemmed by his hand and he delighted in making marvelous nightcaps in fanciful but simple shapes. His stitching was perfect, even and almost invisible. It intrigued and offended me too. I had made my living by sewing and had often done large handstitched projects, but I couldn’t come close to his skill. He started to sew things for me, a set of orange cotton sheets, a red heavy cotton robe with an orange circle over the heart. During one of our loud angry fights, I sat and stitched around a large piece of cloth, emulating as best I could his invisibly small stitches. I refused to eat or even look up until the entire project was finished. “There! Anything you can do, so can I!”

Orange or geru (orange ochre earth) is the sadhu’s main colour, but black, red, yellow and white also occur. Naths often wear black but Dadaji liked orange and for occasions, a touch of lemon yellow. Every few weeks he would re-dye all his cloth and robes and sheets with powdered orange dye. It seemed to soothe his temper and it was fun. The bright dye water covered the floor outside his room. Playing in water was a relief in the heat. I gave him a beautiful length of cloth, rather garish, gold and yellow stripes, obviously Muslim in style and taste. I had bought it in the wonderful bazaar in Peshawar in western Pakistan. He was as delighted by its utterly inappropriate quality as by its beauty.

Giving gifts to Dadaji was a trial. I went to Ahmedabad with Uma and spent hours looking for an alarm clock for him. I knew he needed one. His old clock could no longer be fixed and I hoped to even out some of my perceived debt to him. I bought a large round clock, with big numbers and a loud alarm. The next day he was furious with the clock. I had bought the cheapest I could find, I had been mean and pennypinching and the clock had bad vibes. Since none of this was true except possibly the bad vibes, I didn’t feel any anger at his reaction. I was a little annoyed when I saw it later, smashed up, on the trash heap behind the house. Eventually I realized that he either destroyed or gave away most gifts he received. The gold cloth was a rare exception. I believe he always kept it in his trunk. He had a way of divining the quality of intention in any gift, and the cloth was one of the few things I gave him that was spontaneous and lacking in subtext.

He told me about his time in Thailand in the ’50s. He had fixed up a cave as his hermitage on Snake Mountain. He was able to accomplish furious amounts of meditation in that remote place. He had a great gift, talent and fascination for meditation. He became well known. One day the King and Queen of Thailand came to visit and they gave him a cup, a bowl and a plate of solid gold. After they left he took the precious objects and hammered and smashed them with a rock into the crevasses in the mountain cave. Symbolically the gold went back to its origin as a vein running through the earth. Shortly afterwards his meditation was abruptly interrupted by a visit from God Indra and his rag tag crew of buddies who came to visit in a vision of godly mischief and humour.

This is Dadaji’s ditty of the Five Kleshas.
“The five pain-bearing obstructions,
The root cause of trouble and strife,
Ignorance, Ego, Attachment,
Repulsion and Clinging to Life.”

The five kleshas never stop impeding our enjoyment of life and our development. Dadaji never stopped confronting kleshas as they arose in him. We both dealt with ego in a very odd way, by bragging, self-aggrandizing through our personal mythologies and mocking the achievements of others. You will have to figure that one out for yourself. We were very clever with this method.

Ignorance is simply not thinking clearly for oneself. Allowing myself to express a limiting viewpoint, a sentimental cliche, a self delusion got me into lots of trouble. My trite liberal beliefs, inherited and unexamined, would cause him to become dangerously angry. I made a remark about vegetarianism and non-killing. He gave me a dark and disgusted look and went out and killed a neighbours piglet that had been rampaging through the garden. He just smashed it with a big rock and left it there. I was silent, stunned, but a whole block of rules broke off the frozen iceberg of my belief system and floated away.

Attachment and repulsion are the two sides of the same seesaw. As a hippie I had little repulsion to the usual things. I was undaunted by dirt, germs, bad water, lepers or Indian 3rd class train toilets. I could sleep in any dirty place and wear rags without a care or a damn. I needed to dive deep to find my level of repulsion and it was surprising when I found it. The cult of Aghoris is dedicated to working with this klesha. The very name means that nothing is, in and of itself, repulsive. Fear, preference, overwhelming desire, refusal, rejection are all plays of attraction and repulsion. Ideally I try to bring all these things into a balanced and minor manifestation at the fulcrum between extremes.

Clinging to life or clinging to anything too strongly leads to tearing and splitting of the will and the heart. It is a hard lesson and I will never know how successful the work has been until I face my own death. I am learning to relax in the face of threat and danger. It has proven to be the best possible reaction because it is surprising and unsettles even packs of dogs and marauding monkeys. Surprise changes the situation quickily and hopefully a better outcome is experienced by all. “Songs of the Dakini” about buddhist sadvini and Queen of Tibet, Yeshe Tsogyal, taught me this. Keith Dowman translates these songs in “Skydancer”.

I was away at the time of Dadaji’s 75th birthday. I have no idea why he decided to commit suicide. When I returned everybody, including Dadaji, were abuzz with the extraordinary tale. He told me this;
“I was sick of life. You can live too long you know! I decided to leave this sordid world. I made sure of my success by killing myself in two ways at once. I took a large amount of rat poison and then I slit my wrists. It seemed I was unconscious for a long time because I had quite an adventure in that in-between life and death place. [often called the bardo.] It is always twilight and grey there. I walked a while until I ran into a group of sadhus sitting together in a circle. They were gambling. They had been gambling for a very, very long time. Behind them a bright road led somewhere. I asked the sadhus why they were just sitting there and not walking the road. They barely looked up and gave a collective shrug. I left them and started towards the road. There I found Kaliben. [The grandmother had recently died and we all mourned her passing.] She and I had a final conversation.”
This little bird of a woman who had never been further than a few miles down the road, who couldn’t read or write, who knew nothing but domestic life set in a pattern a thousand years ago, this singing bird, always caged by cultural rules was the woman Dadaji called his guru. They blessed each other and went their separated ways. Apparently the rat poison counteracted the bleeding and the bleeding counteracted the poison, if you can believe that! So he came back alive and felt rather jolly and pleased with himself.

Years later Dadaji fell down the cement stairs leading to the roof. He broke his hip and was rushed to the hospital. I was told that he spent the entire night breathing like a steam engine and he was dead by morning. It was said he had killed himself by yogic means, unwilling to be a burden on the family. Later as I travelled among the naths of India I learned the true reason for his self caused death. Naths never want to die of natural causes, depleted of energy and all played out. Death must be faced with energy and power. The spirit travels like a shooting star to free itself from earth’s limitations. It is customary for naths of any standing and power to have themselves buried alive in a small crypt. When this is done correctly the nath remains both here and there and is effective in both realms, manifest and powerful. I met some of these “living dead” during my travels and I have no doubt of the effectiveness of their tradition. I have been in a large room in a very ancient nath ashram filled with 52 living dead graves of nath leaders, each one having picked the time to go down into their tombs.

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