I am Harmony. Radhe Shyam

With an impish grin on His face, He threw apples, oranges, and candies into the laps of the ladies and children sitting directly in front of Him. There was constant hustle, noise, and activity swirling around Babaji, and yet an atmosphere of peace and serenity. I remembered the many "little miracles" of my European trip on my way to India and I chuckled to myself as I inwardly asked, "Is this God on earth?"

      After a few minutes, the mustachioed Indian devotee standing at Shri Babaji's left came to me and said Babaji had told him to take me to see "Swamiji," who could answer my questions in English. I wondered if Babaji had been reading my mind, as people said He did. We picked our way through the crowded temple to the far corner where Swami Fakiranand⁷, a 70-year-old devotee who administered Babaji's ashram at Haidakhan, sat selling English and Hindi literature about Babaji. We talked for a few minutes about Babaji as the present physical manifestation of the scriptural Lord Shiva; then Swamiji was called away to a meeting. I stood up in that corner farthest from Babaji and watched the scene, so foreign to anything that even my Foreign Service travels had prepared me for.

      Soon I saw Babaji beckoning for someone to come to Him. The man next to me said Babaji was telling me to come, so I walked back through the crowd, feeling that four hundred pairs of eyes were on me. As I knelt before Babaji, He opened a cardboard box and took out two big round pieces of sugar-and-milk candy and placed them in my right hand. I sat at His feet, eating the candy and looking up into His face. He was full of kindness and love, beyond anything I recollect having seen in any person's face and form; He seemed to literally radiate that love, like a measurable energy force. Suddenly, Babaji moved to get up; He leaned forward, put both His hands on my back and raised Himself to His feet, then hurried along the path through the crowd and out of the temple area. It was time for lunch. Margaret and her American and European friends came to tell me that Babaji had honored me greatly in His welcome and that I had been greatly blessed. I had no experience of how Babaji greeted other newcomers, but my mind and body held the 'charge' of His blessing for a long time. Even through the great confusion of entering into a culture that was very strange to me, I felt that I had been pulled to Babaji by His will and in His time.

      In typical ashram fashion, we sat cross-legged on the floor of the temple for our noon meal, about a hundred people at each sitting. Plates made of broad leaves sewn together were placed before each person and devotees served us, from steaming buckets, with rice, lentils, vegetables, fried bread (chapatis), a sweet, and tea in stain­less steel 'glasses.' The food we ate had been offered first to Babaji and blessed by Him. This blessed food is called prasad: all the meals served to Babaji's devotees, wherever He went, were blessed and served as prasad. We ate with our right hands. As I ate, Shri Babaji came back into the temple, stood before me, and asked my name.

      After prasad, there was a period for rest and household activities before Babaji's late afternoon darshan - the time in which a saint sits with devotees to share his or her radiance, advice and uplifting energy - and the evening aarati (a sung worship service). Margaret and I went to a guesthouse and napped and bathed before starting back to Babaji's ashram.

      Vrindaban is the town where Lord Krishna, a great manifestation of The Divine as Lord Vishnu, and the central character of the Indian epic, The Mahabharata, lived as a child with his cow-herding tribe. Scriptural tradition places Lord Krishna's time in Vrindaban about 6700 years ago, but many historians guess the time to be much closer to the birth of Christ. Recent archaeological finds push the date back toward the traditional dates. Under any circumstances, Vrindaban is an old town and its narrow, winding, crowded streets, even though paved now with asphalt, provide the many religious pilgrims and tourists with a setting more conducive to spiritual search than the bustling, aggressive commercial cities of India. Vrindaban is still famous for its milk and milk products and there are many street-side stalls and shops where delicious hot milk or milky tea, called chai, is served, and we could buy milk-and-sugar sweets to offer to Shri Babaji. Outside the many temples, street vendors offered flower gar­lands at a rupee or so each, to be offered to The Divine during the evening worship services. The streets were full of activity - shoppers, vendors, strollers, rickshaws, bicycles, horse-drawn carts, ox carts, a few cars, many cows, some pigs and piglets. As the afternoon came to a close, Vrindaban's thousand temples offered up the sounds of bells and gongs and chanting and the sweet scent of incense.

      Babaji's ashram also filled and again people waited in long lines to touch His feet with reverence and offer their gifts and them­selves, while Om Namah Shivaya⁸ was sung to many tunes. That evening, after aarati, when I placed a flower garland on Babaji's knees and knelt before Him, He put the garland around my neck. On my way back to my place, I stopped in a darkened area behind and to the left of Babaji to talk with an Indian devotee. I happened to look away from the devotee to look at Babaji: I saw He had turned just at that second to look over His left shoulder at me, and before I could even smile at Him, I was aware of an orange flying past a column and over the outstretched hands of three or four devotees - a left-handed, sideways shot that hit me square in the chest, as if to say, "Who else but God could make a shot like that?" Babaji laughed and turned back to the devotees in front of Him.

      For two days Margaret and I were caught up in the excitement and joy of being with Babaji. We were up at 3:30 a.m. to bathe and make our way to the temple before 5 for the first activity of the day. Hours were spent in the temple, singing and chanting and being bathed in the waves of love, peace and joy emanating from Babaji and His devotees. We talked with devotees from many parts of India, Europe and North America, hearing tales of their experiences with Babaji.

      After two days, Margaret and I went back to Delhi to tend to my business with the Ministry of External Affairs; then we drove back to Vrindaban. We arrived at the temple late in the evening; the service was over, the temple nearly empty and scantily lit. We feared we had missed Babaji, who was about to leave for Bombay. But Babaji appeared out of the dark shadows in the temple and, through interpreters, told Margaret and me to join Swamiji and a party of mostly Western devotees who were going to the ashram in Haidakhan that night.

      We rode through the night on the narrow-gauge train to Haldwani, at the edge of the plains where the foothills of the Himalayas begin to rise. Pedal rickshaws carried us, two by two, with baggage behind, through busy shopping streets to the modest shop of Trilok Singh, a grain and vegetable dealer and strong devotee of Babaji, from which place most of the last 'legs' of people's trips to Haidakhan depart. On this occasion, there was a jeep to take Swamiji and some of his party to the end of the road up the river valley, to what is known as "the dam site."

      As the jeep wound its way through the hills overlooking the river, I was amazed at the beauty of the area. Most of the hills are covered with trees - lots of pine - and, here and there, families had cleared, over the years, terraces along the hillside which were, at that season, richly green with corn, wheat, or vegetables. On the edges of some of the fields were stone houses with red tin roofs and barns, outside of which oxen and buffaloes stood or lay. Overhead, eagles flew; a family of monkeys fled through the trees as the jeep rolled by. Down in the wide, stony valley a chastened river flowed quietly in one or more channels down a largely dry bed; the river's time to howl is from July through September, when the monsoon turns the quiet stream into a raging demon and cuts off easy access between the Haidakhan valley and the plains.

      In the mid-70's, the Indian Government decided to build a dam near the mouth of 'Babaji's' Gautam Ganga (the river which flows through Babaji's ashram at Haidakhan) in order to supply water to plains cities and farms. A road was built to the dam site, which greatly benefited the farmers of the valley. But despite work crews at the site every year and a dedication speech by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the dam has never gotten under way. Nor is it likely to, since engineers note that the rock at the site is too crumbly, too likely to shift, to support a dam; and the monsoon erosion would fill the reservoir with mud within ten or fifteen years, anyway. But the project has supplied needed jobs in the valley, brought buses to the mouth of the valley, and created tea shops where travelers to and from Haidakhan and other villages can sit while they wait for the infrequent buses.

      Our jeep stopped at the dam site and we got out to walk the remaining three or four miles up the riverbed to Haidakhan. Village men carried our baggage for ten rupees (about one dollar) - a price then set and enforced by Babaji to provide villagers with a fair in­come and to keep villagers from