Good Sadhu Babas should never be as you expect them to be and Rocket Baba is no exception. Though over 70, he has the body of a fit 30-year-old, his skin and eyes are clear and his voice just booms. He arrives at the house of his student, my rakhi brother Gopal, like an angry demi-God. He sits himself on the charpoy and we gather at his feet like children. Once he is suitably seated and in control, he orders chai and surveys the group at his feet. He takes the time to notice me, but I know he has already been briefed about me by my Gopal.

“ROCKET science is the only truth,” he announces firmly. He points his bony finger at my designer bag.

“Do you have a rocket in that woman’s bag of yours?”

By Rocket he means a chillum, the clay pipe used for communication with the Gods via smoking ganja. I have to admit that I don’t.

“Well then Madam you are nothing but a duplicate!”

Now I really like a Baba who will insult and challenge you immediately upon meeting and he reminds me of a mild version of my own Baba ji. A lot of people prefer to cleave to a white robed swami with a permanent expression of bliss on his or her face but I am a child of the Kaliyug and things just aren’t that blissful anymore.  So the bossy, warrior-type, take-no-crap kind of Baba is my Baba of choice. Anyway, compared to the Naga Sadhu I lived with, this guy is really quite mild.

“Jai Ho Baba ji,” is always the best response to outrageous Babas and I pull my ears to show my repentance for being a duplicate.

“Rocket is the oldest artefact in the world. It symbolises the only
one true eternal truth. Everything Goes Up In Smoke. Dust to dust,
ashes to ash!” Having my complete attention now, he begins to order me around.

“When you go back to Australia, I want you to bring me a weapon,” he instructs me. I point out that I am from New Zealand, but he waves my objection aside regally and continues by asking me about the traditional weapons of my people, the Maori. I mention a patu and he demands that I bring him one. So that he can assist people in releasing them from the endless chain of life and rebirth.

But not just any old tourist patu, he cautions me. A bloodstained patu, preferably with the blood of the British attached so he could also then sell the ghosts by the kilo!

It’s impossible to argue or to refuse a Baba of this stature but I tell him that I would probably have to dig up a grave to get what he wants! He is not bothered at all by that information and barks at me to bring the patu so he can add it to his collection of “Nirvana Passports.”  It’s this kind of cultural mix up that can really get into my head when I travel around India. They have their cultural practices and I have mine and sometimes they collide in interesting circumstances. Sometimes I can glide  along aware of the culture and be respectful of it and then one day I just come face to face with the brick wall of cultural differences.

Rocket Baba is a Tantric Sadhu and as such has lived in cremation grounds (cooking centres he calls them) and participated in Tantric rituals that would have most Maori rolling their eyes in fear. He remembers the British Rule of India. “We (He always speaks in the Royal We) were only a child at the time when we first began to travel.”

“We were catching a train to Calcutta and there was the train. The British carriages were all heavily guarded and protecting the British from we Indians was a carriage on either side full of army. The last carriage was for Indians.” His eyebrows are raised and his expression is still one of refined shock. He curses them and continues, “They treated us like dogs! No Indian was allowed one gun during that time. But the British had at least 10 soldiers guarding every British man here.”

He shows me the pistol he now carries in the glove box of his little red Suzuki van. Another Nirvana Passport, I remark. He say,  “Sometimes it’s just easier to put these people out of their misery.They get another lifetime. Hah! They get 860 million lifetimes!”

Since he is in the mood to tell a few stories and never shy to offer an opinion, I ask him for his opinion of Indira Gandhi and what it was like during The Emergency she imposed on India during the 70s.

“O, she was a ……(he uses a word with asinine purport) like everyone else! We were living in a jungle in Assam. Our camp was surrounded by human skulls, nobody bothered us.”

“You took the skulls from the ‘cooking centre’?”

“Yes, we could use them for chai or eating our food from, but mostly we hung them in trees around the place to warn people away.”

“Did people come?”

“Well of course they did, they came to be cured and I gave them Rocket Science.”

Rocket, according to Rocket Baba is the only pure truth. The whole thing has a ritual significance, but the essence is exactly as Rocket Baba says, an enactment of the understanding that everything goes up in smoke!

Briefly, he fills me on Rocket Science. All I need to do in order to become a state sponsored Rocket Star is to light a chillum in the arrivals hall of Auckland Airport. The powers that be will immediately take me to a lunatic asylum because I would have to be mad to do something like that. I spend three months in the loony bin, the state puts me on a mad person’s pension and then I am free, says Rocket Baba. Free to be a Rocket Star!

I don’t know how much experience Rocket Baba has had with our social welfare system but I am guessing not a lot. But Rocket Baba himself no longer smokes chillum; he is working with the Neem plant in a medicinal way and treating people. Neem is an indigenous tree in India that has powerful antiseptic and healing qualities and Rocket Baba has been refining treatments for years.

In the olden days of the Maori world I guess Rocket Baba would have been one of those ‘tohunga” or shamans we fed with a stick. So now I am really nervous to see him again without a patu in my hand! Or a ghost in my suitcase.

PHOTO CREDIT Alex Fernandes

Dianne Sharma-Winter is a freelance writer living between India and New Zealand. She writes on travel, culture and humour using India as her muse.