Come Later Lad

Let us find out who I am? Which means where do I stand? What is the position that I start?
- Sri M

"All of a sudden, a middle aged man who was supposedly normal and was sitting beside us, stood up and started behaving strangely. He swung his body in a circular motion and began to utter ‘huum huum’just like the people on the other side. Then he stopped, turned to me and said mockingly, “You! You! You found me out, you tried to burn me but I won’t go.”Jumping to the front, he ran towards the door of the enclosure where the tomb was. There he hit his head on the door step and shrieked, “Okay, I will go. That boy found me. Bibi, I will go. Don’t burn me. I am burning.”With that, he again let out a hideous howl and fainted.

For the first time, I was filled with fear and loathing. It was too much for my grandmother. “Saabjaan,”she whispered to her brother, “Let’s get out of here now.”We walked out of the place with my grandmother holding my hand tightly as if she was afraid something might snatch me away. Coming out, we saw another strange sight.

A naked old man with grey hair and a black scrawny beard, was racing through the sands and approaching the place where we stood. He was smiling to himself, sometimes breaking into peals of laughter and gesticulating at the sky with his hands. His head kept turning up and down in a jerky motion and his body was covered in sand. White sand on a dark body!

Anyone would have mistaken him for one of the possessed but for the fact that a number of people both men and women were walking behind him respectfully with folded hands, trying to keep pace with him. He went past us, stopped abruptly, came back to where we were and halted right in front of me. For a minute, his face turned serious, almost grave. Blood shot eyes searched my face. Then he laughed again as if I looked funny and said in Tamil, “Seri seri po po apparaon wa da”(okay, go now, come later lad) and was off again. I was not frightened this time for some reason. Of course, I took him to be a mad man. I did not know then that the line between madness and religious ecstasy was extremely thin.

My mother’s uncle told me later that he was called Kaladi Mastan and was a man of great powers. He was inebriated by the love of God and was not fully conscious of the outside world. “Some holy men are like that,”he said, as if that explained everything, but I understood nothing. “But why is he naked?”I asked. “I don’t know,”said my uncle. “Every now and then someone wraps a new dhoti around his waist and within minutes he gives it away to some poor beggar and is naked once more.”

That I understood. I hated wearing clothes especially in summer and would have loved to give away my clothes to a poor beggar and walk around free and naked. But I knew I could not do that for I was expected to be civilized and proper. The words he had uttered, “Okay, come later lad,”came true years later."

-- Sri M, from The Autobiography of A Himalayan Yogi