The Fire Remains

Go to Shirdi today and the Dhuni is still burning. On faith, patience, and a fire kept for you.

Go to Shirdi today, and the fire is still burning.

The Dhuni that Baba lit and tended and would not let go out has been kept burning ever since. People feed it, morning and night, as he did. And from its ash they still take Udi, folding it into little papers to carry home against the day they will need it, exactly as their great-grandparents did, from the same fire, for the same reasons.

Almost everything else has changed. Where there was a poor, dusty village there is now a great town, crowded with pilgrims from every corner of the country and beyond. Where there was a broken mosque with a fakir asleep on sackcloth, there are shrines and halls and the endless sound of many feet. Baba, who owned nothing and begged his bread, is honoured now on a scale that would have made him laugh, or weep, or perhaps both.

But go early, before the crowds thicken, and stand a while, and you can still feel the shape of the old story under the new grandeur.

Someone is hungry, and is being fed.

Someone has come a long way with a trouble folded up inside them, not knowing how to read it, hoping the fakir can.

Someone is frightened, and is holding a pinch of ash, and beginning, against all reason, to be less afraid.

Someone has arrived who did not exactly choose to come, who took the wrong train, or followed a stranger's chance remark, or felt a pull toward a place they had never meant to visit, and is standing now before the fire, wondering how on earth they got here.

The details are new. The thing itself is very old. It is the same thing that happened to Chand Patil on the road, and to the proud scholar who came to argue and stayed to write, and to simple Megha who loved without understanding, and to every soul the thread was ever thrown to.

Baba is not by the fire in his body any more. That much is plain. You will not see him stir the great pots, or walk to the Chavadi under the torches, or call the women "Mother" at their doors.

And yet the fire remains. And the ash still comforts. And the stories still find people, and change them, and become new stories. And the two things Baba asked of everyone who ever came to him are still, quietly, the only things he asks of anyone who turns toward him now.

Trust, when you cannot see.

Wait, without needing to know how it ends.

Faith. And patience. Hold on to those, and his own promise is that you will not be holding on alone, that the one who drew all those travellers across all those miles is drawing still, and carrying still, and looking toward you even now, from wherever it is that the fire is kept.

The boy under the neem tree never did explain himself.

He did not need to.

He simply became home, and a home, once it is truly that, does not stop being home because the years have passed and the one who made it so has slipped out of sight.

Sit with that a while.

The fire is lit for you.