The Last Days

The broken brick, the nine coins, and Baba's passing on Vijayadashami, 1918 — the last days at Shirdi, retold.

Baba had a companion almost no one thought about, a plain brick.

It had been with him for as long as anyone could remember. He rested his hand on it, leaned against it, sat with it through his long silent hours. It was so much a part of him that no one really saw it any more.

Then one day, while Baba was out, a boy sweeping the mosque picked it up, and it slipped from his hands, and broke in two on the floor.

When Baba came back and saw the pieces, he wept.

It startled everyone. A broken brick, why should it grieve a man who had given away fortunes without a backward glance, who taught that everything comes to ash? But Baba's tears were not really for the clay. It is not the brick that has broken, he said. It is my fate. This was my life-long companion; with it I meditated on the Self; it was as dear to me as my own life. It has left me today.

The people pushed the thought away. But something had shifted, and the wiser among them felt it. Baba had begun, quietly, to turn toward the end.

Around this time there was the matter of Tatya.

Tatya, Baijabai's son, one of the two men who had slept beside Baba in the mosque all those years, feet to the middle, waking one another in the night, Tatya fell seriously ill. And Baba let it be known, in the sideways way he let hard things be known, that Tatya's time had come; that by the reckoning of such things, Tatya was meant to die.

But Tatya did not die.

Baba fell ill instead.

Those who loved him believed they understood what they were seeing, though it broke their hearts to see it. Baba had loved this man since before Shirdi knew his name. And rather than let Tatya be taken, so they believed, he had, in some way past all explaining, drawn the death onto himself, stepped into the place where the blow was going to fall and taken it, so that the friend who had slept at his side would be spared.

To them it was the last of all his substitutions. All his life, they said, he had taken on other people's burdens, their fevers, their fears, their poison, their debts. Now he had taken the last burden there is, in the place of a man he loved.

He grew weaker. The fever would not leave him. He, who had fed the whole village, stopped eating. And still the people came, and still he received them, gentle to the last, giving his ash, speaking his comfort, letting no one feel turned away even as his own strength drained out of him.

There was a woman named Laxmibai, who had served him quietly for years, bringing him food, asking nothing. In his last days Baba called her, and put money into her hands, nine coins, given deliberately, first five and then four, one gift at the very end to one faithful servant.

People have thought about those nine coins ever since, because Baba did nothing without meaning. Nine, they say, for the nine ways a heart can love God, the listening, the singing, the remembering, the serving, the surrendering, and the rest. As if to say, at the end, with a few coins in a poor woman's palm: this is what I came to give you. Nothing else. Hold on to me though you cannot see. Wait, though you do not know how the story ends. That was always all of it.

The day came, a festival day, the day people keep for the crossing of a boundary, the going-beyond.

It was fitting, though no one felt like noticing it then.

His breathing grew shallow. His people gathered close, not able to believe it even as it happened, the way you cannot believe the sun is setting even while you watch it go. He leaned against the body of one who loved him. He said a few last quiet words, and asked to be taken home.

And then, gently, without a struggle, the way a fire settles into its embers at the end of a long night, Baba left his body.

The boy from under the neem tree, the fakir of the broken mosque, the father of a whole village, Baba was gone.

The fire in the mosque burned on.

But the hands that had tended it were still.