Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"First reason, weather and climate. Nine months of moderate temperatures," Vishad said, and put up another finger. "Two, lots of educational institutions—lots of graduates, lots of talent. And lastly"—finger three—"people are quiet and calmer, more relaxed. It is safer here. Delhi is aggressive. Mumbai is crowded and hot. This is the right place."

And the government of Karnataka, where Bangalore is situated, introduced tax incentives in the mid-1990s; this gave benefits to start-up companies and attracted foreign companies, too. Language was another factor. Because there is no single dominant language in a babel of contending tongues (Coorg, Konkan, Tulu, Kanada, Hindi, and others), English was widely spoken. The two men in my compartment said they spoke English at home, though theirs was almost an idiolect, or at least a variety of English that I did not find easy to understand, with the usual archaisms, of which "thrice" and "mountebank" and "redoubtable" were just a few.

I took the very large number of Christian churches in Bangalore (I counted nine without going out of my way) to be a reflection of the culture of the British residents, whose retiring here was the penultimate stop on their way to salvation. Some quiet streets survived, with many old trees at their margins—unusual in India, where road-widening is a government policy. So some of old Bangalore remained, but it was overwhelmed by new buildings and construction sites: gated communities, new hotels, a real estate boom, speculation in land and housing, and the sort of eternal work in progress that I saw in every Indian city I visited.

"This will be our new flyover..."

I saw the thing everywhere. It was always under construction—people sleeping under it, cows congregating near it for shade, slogans painted on it. And I had the feeling that when at last the flyover was finished, it would be inadequate.

On my way to International Tech Park at Whitefield, at one corner of Bangalore, my driver said, "You know Sai Baba? That is his ashram."

So instead of going to Tech Park, I went to the ashram.

Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba was born not far away, at Puttaparthy, on the train line to Chennai; and he set up his ashram here for the same reason all the rest of the companies did—the agreeable weather, the shady streets, the gentle nature of old Bangalore.

The ashram sat behind a big wall, but the security guards welcomed me with namastes. Love in Action was printed in big letters on the ashram's inner wall. A huge open-sided hall with a high roof housed the fresh-air platform where Swami held his daily darshan,

or spiritual meeting, with his followers. To comprehend the Swami's teachings you had only to look at his symbol, which was a circle containing the emblems of the world's great faiths: a cross representing Christianity, a crescent for Muslims, the Zoroastrian flame, and so on for Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Conflating all these faiths, Sai Baba had created a belief system that included almost everyone. But he seemed to reject the idea that he was leading a religion.

"'No religion, no prayer,' Swami says." This homily was from a volunteer caretaker wearing a badge with a Swami saying: Work is worship.

"Just follow your own religion. Love yourself."

The unmistakable image of the Swami I had seen in many taxis, many homes, on many desks and office walls: the kindly smile, the frizz of hair.

The caretaker was Narayan. "Swami says, 'Heart to heart. No preaching. Only serve humanity with true heart.'"

This sounded agreeable to me, so I decided to dismiss my taxi and look around the ashram. The Swami was not in residence. His art deco villa sat empty, in lovely gardens, behind a high fence.

I chatted with some devotees, but they were oblique and wouldn't lin ger or tell me their names ("Don't use my name, use Swami's"). They were emphatic in saying that Sai Baba had had no guru as a youth, though he did have a previous incarnation. And a new incarnation would appear in the near future—probably the year 2030.

Swami in recent pictures was smaller, slighter, older than his celebrated photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach—the essential Swami appealed to these people.

"He will leave his body at ninety-six," one devotee said. "And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Named Prema Sai. I wish to observe this."