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Faith accompli
Book review: God in our midst
is a soulful tribute to Sathya Sai Baba

V.S. Jayaschandran

On Easter 1994 Dr Hiramalini Seshadri, a rheumatologist in Chennai, witnessed yet another faith building phenomenon. As devotees of Sathya Sai Baba were singing a bhajan, holy ash appeared on a glass-cased picture of Christ and formed a cross. Someone pulled out a camera and took a photograph before a doctor from Austria flew it home without a speck of ash falling off the glass.

On another occasion Hiramalini's husband Dr Seshadri, a psychiatrist, nearly had a heartbreak. Sugar candy had materialised from Baba's photograph, and their little daughter who went around distributing it to everyone at the prayer meeting got no candy in the end. Seshadri stood in fervent prayer insisting that Baba produce just one more piece for the child. "And as he stared at the picture in prayerful supplication, he actually saw to his great joy one piece of sugar candy jump out of the picture," writes Hiramalini in her book God In Our Midst, which extols Baba as the full avatar of God after Lord Krishna.

Reading God In Our Midst is like coursing through a divine Disneyland, an amazement park offering spiritual goose bumps at every turn. Flood waters recede, wild beasts calm down, dead men rise at Baba's command such epiphanic episodes are sprinkled with ecstatic exclamations. Sceptical eyebrows arching into interrogation marks are out of place here since the book is a celebration of unquestioning faith.

Faith and doubt are locked in a perpetual tussle in many human hearts, one trying to wrestle the other down like sumo giants swaying in the ring. Faith draws its strength from the still small voice whispering that the impossible is true, doubt gets its calories from science asserting that it never can be. Blessed are those who have the courage to take sides and survive the last temptation of faith or doubt in their minds.

Hiramalini takes sides whole-heartedly with prayerful eyes closed, even though she is a foster child of science and is the first Indian woman to be elected to the British Society for Rheumatology. Faith that shines through her book is a steady flame in a storm: her mind is too intense to let doubt tease it as she narrates how Baba enters uninvited, using miracles as his visiting cards, and takes charge of lives. Some of the miracles in the book are first-hand and far less fantastic than the Sai lore she retells. Of the latter kind, we have the experience of an airline pilot who taunted a stewardess to send an SOS to her  Baba when their plane plunged out of control. "No sooner did the stewardess shout for  Baba than He appeared in the sky outside the cockpitÑand remained there for about 20 minutes," writes Hiramalini. "The stewardess captured this Kodak moment of a lifetime on film." A picture of  Baba in the clouds appears in the book.

It is the first-hand experiences that make the book credible, and they are stunning enough. They radiate honesty, and cushion the shock of spectacular stories retold. Most reassuring is her account of the last days of her father, IAS officer K.C. Sankaranarayanan, who had just the kind of death he wished for after tasting  Baba's benevolence. The intimacy and force of direct experience can dispel incredulity.

Yet, God In Our Midst is not about miracles; it is about love and liberation that  Baba yearns to grant all life, plant and animal; as he says, eventually even the worm will turn God. The book has an evangelic tenor and the words flow from a soul in rapture. It energises the believer while baffling those who walk the no-man's land between faith and doubt.
 

God In Our Midst; by Dr Hiramalini Seshadri; Amra Publishers; pp 216; price Rs 175.