Before anyone called him Baba, he was a boy who appeared under a neem tree in Shirdi and wanted nothing at all.
Before anyone called him Baba, he was only a boy.
A strange boy. He appeared one day beneath a neem tree at the edge of Shirdi, and no one could say where he had come from. He looked about sixteen. He had no parents anyone knew of, no village, no story. He simply arrived, and sat.
He sat through the heat of the afternoon, when everyone else went looking for shade. He sat through the cold of the night. People passed the tree in the morning and saw him there; they passed again in the evening and he had not moved, as though he had grown out of the ground like the tree itself.
He begged from no one. He looked for no company. He seemed to want nothing at all, and that, more than anything, is what unsettled the village.
"Who is he?" people asked each other. "Whose son? Where has he come from?"
Some were curious. Some were frightened. A few decided he must be mad, what young man sits alone under a tree, wanting nothing, saying nothing? But others found they simply liked being near him. They would invent small reasons to pass the neem tree, and then find they did not want to leave.
He was young, and yet there was something in his face that did not seem young at all. One old woman remembered him for the rest of her life. He was only a boy, she would say, but when you looked at him, you had the strange feeling that he had been alive a very long time.
At last the village decided to learn the truth about him. And in the way such things were settled then, the answer came through a man believed to speak for the local god. Dig, he said. Dig by the neem tree.
So they dug.
Under a flat stone they found a hollow chamber in the earth, bricks laid in order, the marks of someone who, long ago, had lived there, or sat there in prayer. Surely now they had his secret.
They turned to the boy.
He did not give them what they wanted. This was his guru's place, he told them - his teacher's, and holy. He asked them to look after it, and to leave it alone.
And that was all.
The chamber only deepened the mystery instead of ending it. Whose teacher had sat beneath that tree? The boy said no more.
Then one day he was gone. No word, no farewell. The tree was still there. The village went on. But the boy had left the way he came, and no one knew where.
Years passed. Children grew. The seasons turned over Shirdi again and again, and the boy became a thing the older people half-remembered, a beautiful young fakir who had once sat beneath a neem tree and seemed to belong to some other world.
And then, one ordinary day, a wedding procession came down the road toward the village.
Walking among the travellers was a young fakir.
No one in that procession knew that the boy from beneath the neem tree had come back.
And no one knew that this time, he had come to stay.