Was it Him?

My last trip to India was in 1997. And the only reason that I went was to warn a close friend (who was visiting Baba at the time) that she might have stage 4 breast cancer, and that she probably needed immediate chemotherapy.

I left for India within a very short interval after speaking with the Sloan-Kettering oncologist who had shared this information with me. My primary motivation was not to have Swami’s darshan, but to get my friend to a hospital.

I was told that Baba was in Brindavan, His ashram in Bangalore. As soon as I arrived, I was informed by a long-time resident that my friend had actually gone to a hospital in London, so I decided to stay and have Swami’s darshan.

I soon met another old friend at the ashram whose name is also Richard. This Richard and I spent a good deal of time together (people would jokingly say, “Here come the Richards.”)

One day, the two of us were sitting on the periphery of the main hall during darshan. Baba stopped close by and materialized something for a young man that I could not see. However, it struck me as somehow significant that Baba would actually stop right in front us.

I said to my friend, “I wonder what He materialized?” to which he replied, “Oh, it was a Shirdi Sai Baba ring.” I knew that my friend did not have better visibility than I did, so rather confused, I said, “How could you possibly know? You can’t see it any clearer than I can, can you?” He just shrugged and said, “That’s what He always makes.” My friend is a professional writer who had spent a lot of time spread over a couple of decades in India with Swami—the cumulative total was about 5 years. He was therefore well aware of the wide variety of objects that Baba was known to materialize. But I was determined to see for myself. When darshan ended, I walked over to where the young man was sitting but he was surrounded by hordes of other devotees, making it impossible for me to catch a glimpse of the object. . For the moment, I gave up.

Later that day, I noticed the same young man showing the object to people outside the accommodation area, and I approached him.  He still seemed a bit stunned, but graciously held out his hand to me. On his finger was a ring with an image of Shirdi Sai Baba sitting in his famous pose: His right leg over His left knee. This had particular significance for me, since Shirdi Sai had spent a lot of time with my mother after my father passed away (see the January 1994 issue of Sai Sarathi, “The Avatar of Love”). Remembering what He had done for my mom, I had the impulse to take the ring (with it still on the fellow’s finger) and touch it between my eyebrows that he graciously allowed me to do. As I did, I quite distinctly witnessed a flash of light. Not knowing what to make of that, I simply thanked and congratulated the young man, and headed out of the ashram.

As I crossed the street, a sadhu [mendicant], dressed in a white tunic and using a walking stick, approached me and said, “Buy me some rice?” He looked just like Shirdi Sai Baba but I dismissed the idea, thinking that a lot of beggars probably dressed like this outside Swami’s ashram. Normally I am observant of the rule to not feed beggars outside the ashram, but this fellow resembled Shirdi Baba so much that I just could not say no.

Silently, the sadhu followed me to a little shop where I ordered a bag of rice. I was taken aback by the modesty of his “demands”, and was equally struck by his equanimity. Not saying a single word, he simply stood by the end of the counter, several feet away from me, and patiently waited. Five minutes went by, then 10 minutes. After almost 15 minutes, I started to get annoyed, and actually looked toward the sadhu to apologize, but he was completely unflustered, and just gently nodded as if to say, “I’m quite willing to spend all eternity in this spot if necessary.”

In the meantime, word spread, and other beggars (who were not quite as evolved as my sadhu) started congregating all around. I recall one fellow who, feeling slighted, actually sat down right behind me, pounded his hands on the ground, and demanded “What about me?”

Eventually, the store clerk handed me a bag of rice that I gave to my friend; he politely took the bag and quickly disappeared.

I honestly didn’t think much of the incident at the time. But when I finally met up with my friend, the other Richard, I told him that he was right about the young man’s materialized object being a Shirdi Sai Baba ring. He looked at me in perplexed fashion and asked me what I was talking about. I reminded him of his certainty, right after the materialization, that it was this type of ring. But Richard laughed, saying, “What are you talking about? How could I possibly know that?”

Astonished, I mentally replayed the whole incident – the moment Swami stopped right in front of us, the flash of light, Richard denying ever having said what the ring was—and I suddenly realized that it was all a leela [divine play]. And so perhaps the sadhu really was Shirdi Baba—he looked just like Him, from His face & build, to the walking stick and slight stoop. And if it was Him, why had it been important for me to see Shirdi Baba that day?

To this day, I still do not know if it was really Him but I tend to think it was. It seems unusual that a beggar would ask for only a simple bag of rice. And perhaps most persuasively for me: whenever I recall this incident, it is one of my most powerful meditations.

~Richard Margolin, New York, USA