The Wheel

Baba grinds wheat, then has the flour scattered at the village boundary — and the cholera turns back. The opening story of the Shri Sai Satcharitra, retold.

One morning, Baba began to grind wheat.

He carried a hand-mill into the mosque, spread a sack on the floor, and set the mill upon it. He rolled up his sleeves, took hold of the wooden handle, and began to turn it. Round, and round, and round. The grain cracked and whitened under the stone.

Nobody could think why.

Baba owned nothing. He begged his food each day, kept no store of grain, had no family to feed. Yet here he was in the morning heat, grinding wheat he did not need.

Word went round the village the way word does. A crowd gathered at the door to watch. At last four of the women could bear it no longer; they pushed forward, moved his hands gently aside, took the handle themselves, and ground the wheat while they sang his name.

For a moment his face darkened, as though he might be angry.

Then he smiled, and let them.

When the flour was ground, the women began to divide it between them, pleased to be carrying a little of Baba home. Baba stopped them.

"Take it," he said, "and scatter it along the edge of the village."

Good flour, thrown away on the boundary line. It made no sense. But by now the people of Shirdi had learned that Baba's instructions, however strange, were usually worth following. So they carried the flour out and scattered it along the border, as he had asked.

Later, the people of Shirdi said that the cholera which had been threatening the village that season never crossed the boundary. It had turned back, they said, at the line of scattered flour.

Perhaps it had.

That was the difficulty with Baba, from the very beginning. You could watch him with your own eyes, and still not be able to say what you had seen.