The naked-swami seemingly asleep in lotus-position atop the Nanga-parbat..

........and suddenly disturbed by the ghoulish nightmare about central-heating.
_____________________________________________________________






My favorite Uncle who was quite fair-skinned to begin with , and looked an angraiz when the angraiz strutted about in a sea of black and blackened faces in the then quite civilized Madras & Bombay.He would have been much better off staying over there and cash on his great Gregory Peck double-image, or maybe he was really even better looking than Greg..because I had not seen Greg. off-screen.

Anyway this Uncle who was not only my favorite Uncle but I was his most favorite nephew as well.

But My Uncle was destined to prove that a man cannot live by good-looks alone..He must also be where his good-looks would mean something to the world and when he becomes a Vilayat-palat, the locals blackened, browned, and well-done in the sun would prostrate themselves..for to his way of thinking merely the natives running helterskelter to make room for him when he showed up simply wasn't enough. He wanted to be treated like the local Asstt. Commissioner...a godhead!

To come to the point of this run-away story, he became one the the hippies in U.S..not the genuine Mia Farrow or Beatle type or Wood-Stock type but the kind who loves his management job with all the perks but is mad at the world because he is not getting a raise or is being by-passed to favor the one with the blond hair & blue eyes. My Uncle was feeling increasingly Desi those days and like Salman Rushdie a sudden pang of homelessness he felt for a country he had despised so much that when he had boarded the HMS Batori in 1953 he had spat a thick glob blob of phlegm onto the dockyard, as the boat started inching westward.

Well I should mention that he had married a gori in those lazy hazy crazy days of the 60's and was a weekend living-room hippie. (just like our Faiz-sahib was a commie when he was unemployed..and Faiz was unemployed because he was thought to be a commie, but Faiz had become a commie in the first place because he was denied a job because his father had died ,not just penniless but had saddled Faiz with a huge debt..so the girl abandoned Faiz & Faiz had no choice but to pick up the hammer & scythe and level the playing field single handedly ....sorry for this aside)

Same with my favorite Uncle..his eyes welled up with the emotion which had never peered through his eyes nose and throat after expectorating that healthy glob blob of spit-phlegm onto the the dockyard. Now he knew that minus the blond hair & blue eyes he was a Desi, in fact a Kalloo in goraa-land. Nostalgia was setting in, relatives now from afar, as when viewed from the wrong end of a telescope, looked beautiful kind and caring & it was then that he started appreciating the achaar & mangoes which an occasional drop-in would deliver to him, sent by his Desi friends & relatives.

The pangs increased and amidst such nostalgic convulsions he announced that he wants to go to India..part of it was the Mia Farrow Nepal factor, part was because the goaree was head over heels in love with India (She knew nothing or didn't give much thought about India ,Pakistan or Muslims) . She was suddenly fascinated & was deep in love with India because an Indian had proposed to her. That was reason enough to love everything Indian...strange & weird indeed are the reasons of women. All of a sudden Rajaah Swamis Snakes Magicians etc etc were important words in her vocabulary and a defining part of her life. She attended Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Seminars and wanted to go to India to meet a real Swami....
__________________________________

My Uncle tells me that they visited the usual circuit of Jaisalmir & Jaipur, the arm-chair hippie route in action, and finally they managed to locate an abandoned & crumbling Mandir. They were told about this place because the goree was very adamant to go & visit a genuine swami. What they did not know was, that she having inquired so much in the city about such kind of Swami that someone had decided to act out the role. They paid big bucks to see a real Indian Swami.

only the goree did not know of the "arrangement".

He sat there in his magnificent lotus-position..and goree & uncle were instructed with all the rituals. Like the character in th Razor's Edge, the goaree when she saw that the Swami has half-opened his eyes & instructed her to remove all her bangles & cash & throw them away, that web-of-matter..the maya-jaal, towards the desert sand which the little urchins, crow like, were waiting to pick up and seemingly running away...

and then the Swami burped..I mean a real real burp..goree auntee almost fell off the craggy cliff..shaken,regained her posture and in a trembling whining voice asked if she could ask THE question....

The Swami asked her to repeat this question 3 times & each time he burped & burped & burped...and waved & wafted his breath towards my Uncle & Aunt..& my goree aunt was impressed..here was the real spicy onion garlic swami..not that sanitized version in US.

The question she had asked the Maharaaj was the perennial unanswered one "Swami jee! what is the meaning of life?"

The Swami gazed at her in astonishment..as if telling her "such a simple question" & "what a stupid woman"..but then he let his facial muscles relax..looked to his right as if about to reveal a secret...peered to his left as if suspicious of something..then bade goree auntie to approach his lordship...She promptly
did.

Then he intently looked at her, from his lotus position he raised one of his thighs at a right angle and tilited as if about to fall on side; goree thought he must be readying to levitate fly in the air.....

But the the Swami let out such a loud & stinking fart that the goree auntee were wonder struck & almost hypnotized..never mind that her nasal passages were now full of genuine garam masaalaa.

The crows quiet on the nearby tree startled & Cawing hysterically flew away to a far off tree.