The explosive swami
By Manohar Malgonkar

SO now I know. A mystery has been solved, a miracle explained, or at least accounted for, because miracles defy explanations — if they can be explained they cease to be miracles.

But first I must fill you in with the background.

I happen to be a Hindu even though of a despised and blacklisted caste, Brahmin, a non-practicing one. I don’t go to temples nor is there a pooja-room in my own house.

But Ikeep a small marble image of Ganpati, the elephant god, among the books in my study. It makes a nice decoration. Then again, the elephant god is also the God of happiness and good living and learning. So an appropriate image for a man who makes his living by the pen — even if he happens to be a non-believer.

Living by the pen. In my case it is no more than a metaphor, for I do my writing on a qwerty keyboard, but then by coincidence, a pen also happens to be an imporant prop in the events I am describing.

It is a Mont Blanc, bought in Berlin years and years ago to splurge all my leftover dollars from a miserly P-form allotment before catching the flight back to India. But an instrument to coddle, and because I didn’t want it to clog, I always kept a supply of Waterman’s ink handy.

I am a tidy person, and as a rule keep my ink in a separate cupboard along with other stationery — erasers, stapler refills, typewriter ribbons and the like. And I can’t for the life of me now remember how the ink bottle could have remained in the cubbyhole of my Ganpati statue.

For that’s where I discovered it one morning when I had occasion to fill my fountain pen, and I was both peeved and surprised to see that it was empty. I could have sworn that it was at least half-full when I had last used it.

At the time I had put it down to forgetfulness on my part, but the truth came like a flash even as I was uncapping my last remaining bottle of Waterman’s ink.

For weeks and weeks, the papers had been full of reports, and I had even seen the phenomenon mentioned on TV broadcasts. It was now a whole month after the elephant god festival but people were still writing to the papers about it. The Ganesha images had been thirstily drinking milk, or, if milk was not handy, anything liquid that was on offer.

So, with nothing drinkable on offer, my Ganpati had to slake his thirst by quaffing Waterman’s blue-black ink that had somehow been left in his cubby-hole. I am fairly convinced of this because, on close examination, I discovered that the pronounced bulge of his stomach had acquired a bluish tinge which I don’t think it had before.

If only I had known. I would not have begruduged my Ganpati a few spoons of milk during the days of his festival — milk or Coorg honey or the best Kolhapur molasses.

But ink! Anyhow, since that time, I have been careful not to leave anything fluid in the Ganpati’s shelf — ink, eyedrops, lighter fluid, or machine oil — particularly during the five days of the elephant god festival. But then, after that year, 1995, my Ganpati has not had anything to drink, and nor, to be sure, have there been any reports of any Ganpati anywhere showing signs of thirst.

So the mystery had remained. Why 1995? What was so special about the elephant festival of 1995. As I said. Now we know. I see from a newspaper report that the BBC has prepared a TV series called Mysteries of Sciences and one of the mysteries it has pinned down is the strange behaviour of Ganpati images during 1995.

Chandraswamy told the BBC that he did it. That, it was at his behest that Ganpati images began to slurp milk or whatever else was proferred by the spoonful.

Chandra who?

O.K. The chubby, self-styled holy man who looks as though he has been dressed up for his role by a theatrical costumier, may have dropped out of public memory. There was a time, in the late 80s and early 90s when he was rarely out of the headlines, in roles as varied as those of a professional stage actor’s in their day-to-day changes. One day he was escaping from the agents of the law by taking shelter in a private nursing home and the next flying off on a trip to dig up evidence of financial frauds; he was the friend, confidant, faith healer and spiritual advisor to the Sultan of Brunei as to Adnan Khashoggi; he was in and out of prison, seen to be holding on to a prison guard for strength, and then being carried on a stretcher in a stupefied state, to bounce back full-strength as though nothing had happened: flamboyant, loud, uncouth, he had close friends on both sides of the political divide in India; he was a crony of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, but he was also close enough to the BJP to volunteer to go to the Kaymen islands and dig up evidence against their political opponents of having fabricated evidence to incriminate a rival. On his return from this Sherlock Holmes mission, he positively stunned his backers by announcing: Anu-bum laya hoon.

"I’ve brought back an atom bomb!"

For weeks they waited on him hand and foot, gung-ho at the prospect of nailing down a political swindle. It took them weeks to realise that they had fallen for the Swamy’s bombast. According to Arun Shourie, that anu bum was a long number on a scrap of paper — whether of secret bank account or of a private telephone, or just magicked by the Swamy out of nothing, never became clear.

After that the Swami’s decline was both rapid and sensational: arrest, interrogations, court appearances, jail, and a long, long struggle to be set free on bail. Bombast and cockiness gave place to meekness and a dazed look; the circle of admirers thinned and society ladies no longer queued up for his birthday bashes; TV pictures showed a flabby man being marched in for court hearings, sometimes lying prone and comatose on a stretcher.

Then a prolonged period of obscurity, welcome at first, but increasingly unbearable to someone who throve in the media’s glare. So is this latest pronouncement, that it was he who caused the phenomenon of 1995 when, during the days of the elephant god festival, Ganpati images everywhere lapped up milk, a bletant ploy at self-promotion? "He has cunningly stepped in to claim all credit for the event", comments Bombay’s Afternoon Despatch &Courier.

Anyone who believes that claim will believe anything. The irony is that the world is full of believers. We, in India, have long-dead godmen who give darshan to their devotees riding on a pet dog, or living ones who magic jewellery out of thin air; or an unlettered lady said to be a hundred years old who can confer the boon of male progeny upon infertile mothers.

At that, even our brand of believers cannot match the fervour of their American brethren. Here no one had courted death because some swamy or the other told them to, as they frequently do in America. Why, only last year 39 otherwise sane men and women who belonged to the cult of the Heaven’s Gate did just that because their leader urged them to do so. The guru was calledMarshall Heriff Applewhite, and he convinced his followers that they would all be whisked off to another planet in an UFO that had been sent to rescue them — that their suicide was actually their device for survival.

Still, for our own operatic swamy, what a fall! To seek to squeeze free publicity from a three-year-old aberration — make capital out of a few spoonfuls of milk when once he had dealt in anu bums!