Forty Days Later — chapter 11

Forty Days Later

Exactly forty days after we began the Mahamrtyunjaya mantra, while I massaged Hari Puri’s fingers, his eyes opened. He looked at me blankly, as though he were trying to focus, and his lips quivered but no sound came out. Again he tried and I can still hear that difficult whisper that escaped from his mouth, “I am your little muchacho.”

He still had no expression but I flushed, my chest tightened, and a smile spread over my face as I thought , “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Again, he struggled to say something so I put my ear right up to his lips.

“I am back,” he said.

The news spread faster than email, and Amar Puri and Raghunath Puri were at Guru Ji’s bedside in minutes. Hari Puri, however, had spoken enough for one day, and he just lay there like a baby, his eyes rolling in their sockets, still trying to focus. He didn’t seem to know where he was. But he did.

While Kapil Puri Baba was in Jaipur, I had heard several conversations between him and Amar Puri but their language was fast and furious, so I hadn’t been able to grasp much. Bhairon Puri Baba’s name kept coming up and often, in the same sentence and in close proximity, was the word bahinchut or what we may translate as sister-fucker. The other word I remembered was tantric, which Kapil Puri seemed to dismiss, waving his hands in the air.