194. gurus
siveness of an all-embracing community, as well as for those Westerners who are
moving in the other direction, namely, away from the cold isolation and competi-
tiveness of an individualistic society.
In the meantime, Maharajji had returned to his house, its approaches guarded by
volunteers who politely but firmly turned back the more curious and intrepid of his
disciples. Behind the high walls surrounding his mansion, Maharajji reclined on a
wicker chair in his rose garden, attending to his correspondence and affairs of the
trust that manages the satsang’s far-flung activities with exemplary efficiency. A
dozen of his intimate disciples—the specially special ones—sat around him at a re-
spectful distance. They watched Maharajji work, savoring the great privilege of his
nearness, grateful for being allowed to participate, however vicariously, in his ac-
tivities. Maharajji’s every movement—whether the opening of a letter, the adjust-
ment of his reading glasses, or a gentle burp as he meditatively stroked his beard—
seemed to be greeted by silent hosannas. They followed him, again at a respectful
distance, to the guesthouse where Maharajji was to give a special darshan to seventy-
odd mostly foreign members of the cult. The darshan itself did not take too much
time. Maharajji approached them with folded hands raised in greeting and sat down
on a sofa placed in the middle of the guesthouse lawn, with rows of chairs arranged
in a semicircle around it. Without any preliminaries, he looked steadily for a couple
of minutes at one section of his small audience, then regally turned his face and
stared unblinkingly at another section—a virtuoso use of look and silence. The
transformation of the disciples’ faces as their eyes looked into his was remarkable.
The eyes glazed over as they drank in his visage. Visibly, their brows smoothened
out, their jaw muscles slackened, and a beatific expression slowly spread on the faces.
The whole transformation was startingly similar to the nursing infant when he takes
the breast into his mouth and the milk begins to spread its soothing warmth, gener-
ating those good feelings that gradually obliterate all the earlier unease, the tension,
and the plain anxiousness. The darshan ended around noon. Keeping a few paces be-
hind him, all of us followed Maharajji to the venue of his next engagement, the
blessing of the food at the langar—the community kitchen. “Kitchen,” of course,
is a euphemism for a sprawling complex of large rooms and open spaces where
eighty thousand meals were being prepared for lunch and where hundreds of vol-
unteer cooks and helpers—men and women—were carrying out their assigned
tasks with a military precision. Thick masur dal steamed and gurgled in a row of
burnished copper vats, each one the height of a man; the cloying sweet smell of
jaggery-flavored rice wafted out of oval cauldrons; flat, pancake-shaped breads—
the rotis—were being taken out of clay ovens dug deep into the earth, and then