Come, Sai

Chand Patil loses his mare and finds a faqir who draws fire and water from the ground — and how Baba got his name at the Khandoba temple.

Chand Patil had lost his mare.

For two months he had searched, the roads, the field-paths, the villages, the banks of the stream. Nothing. At last he gave up and started home, the empty saddle over his shoulder because there was nothing else to carry.

On the way he passed a fakir sitting under a mango tree, a short stick under his arm, a clay pipe in his hand.

The fakir looked at him, and then at the saddle.

"Why are you carrying that," he asked, "with no horse under it?"

Chand Patil told him. Two months. A good mare, gone.

The fakir smiled, as though the whole thing were much simpler than Chand Patil had made it. "Go and look by the stream," he said.

It was absurd. Chand Patil had searched for two months; he had surely passed that stream a dozen times. But something in the fakir's voice made argument feel foolish. He went.

The mare was there.

He stood and looked at her a long moment, then led her back to the tree, his head full of questions. How could this stranger have known?

The fakir did not seem to think it was anything at all. He offered Chand Patil a smoke. But there was no fire to light the pipe, and no water to prepare it.

So the fakir took his tongs and pressed them into the ground, and a live coal came up out of the dry earth. He struck the ground again, and water rose where he had struck.

He lit the pipe, drew on it, and passed it across, calm as if coal and water came out of the ground every day, for anyone who cared to ask.

Chand Patil did not know what to say. Who was this man? How did he know where a lost mare stood, and call fire and water out of the earth, and still sit there so quietly, as though it were the least interesting thing in the world?

He begged the fakir to come home with him. To his surprise, the fakir agreed, and stayed a while as his guest.

Some time later there was a wedding in the family, and the party set out for Shirdi. The fakir went with them. No one quite knew why. He simply came.

The wedding was held. And when it was over, and the guests were climbing down from the carts near the temple of Khandoba, the young fakir climbed down too, and did not climb back on.

A man named Mhalsapati was standing there. He served at the temple; he had spent his life among holy things, and perhaps that is why he saw what the others in the wedding party had missed. He looked at the young stranger's face.

And then, warmly, as though he had been waiting for him, he spoke.

"Ya, Sai."

Come, Sai.

An ordinary word of welcome, nothing more. But the name settled on the young fakir and stayed. Sai. And soon, out of affection and reverence, people were calling him Sai Baba.

When the wedding was over the others went home. Baba did not.

He had no house. He owned almost nothing. He had no family beside him. And still he stayed, and slowly, quietly, people began to gather around him, the way they had once gathered around a boy beneath a neem tree, without quite knowing why.

Why did he stay? No one could have told you. He had simply chosen this poor, dusty village out of all the places in the world.

And he would not leave it again.