Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

I was so horrified that I was fascinated. I couldn’t leave even though I knew I was in mortal danger.

I watched, and then we left the river and we marched up some steps to get back to the town. Our car was parked quite a way away, because the streets were narrow and it was impossible to drive a car through them. I was surrounded instantly by beggars. I had deliberately dressed in my oldest clothes, but it didn’t matter, I was obviously an American, and therefore rich. The beggars were a collection such as I’ve never seen before in my life. I had seen beggars in Mexico – small children come up to you and beg, and you give them a few pesos and they go away. But in Benares there were dozens of filthy, horrible, maimed little children, on the verge of starvation. They maim them at birth so they’ll do well in their begging career. The men and women importuned in such a way that I felt as if a mob was menacing me. They yelled and shrieked and whined, and waved stumps in my face – the guide and I gave them what little money we had and managed to get out of there.

On the edge of this crowd, on the steps leading up from the Ganges, was an emaciated old man covered in dust and ashes. He wore nothing but a white loincloth. He was moving himself along the street, along the rough cobbles, on his knees. He wasn’t a cripple – he could walk if he wanted to. But he didn’t. And his knees were like a battlefield, scarred and bloody, and his skin was not only caked with dust but full of scabs. People were bowing down toward him when he crawled by.

I said, ‘Who – what’s that?’

The chauffeur said, ‘That’s a very holy man. He’s crawled that way from some village many hundreds of miles away, and he’s come to die in Benares, because to die in Benares is to be assured of liberation.’

I said, ‘What do you mean, liberation?’ I was astonished, and he looked at me with equal astonishment and said, ‘Why, liberation means to have your soul freed, to join the One.’

I smirked. This was the kind of nonsense that made me put those books aside. But it did astonish me that an ordinary chauffeur, a guide, should speak this way. So I looked at the holy man again. He had terrible bloodshot eyes. He couldn’t have been less than seventy, with short white hair, limbs just skin and bones. The crowd treated him with great respect – but I didn’t get it. He looked like he belonged on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. To me it was a man who had lost all dignity.

‘That’s enough of India for me,’ I said to myself. ‘I want to get out of here.’

We saw another holy man on the road, on the way back to the hotel. He was standing on one leg, staring up at the sun. That’s what he did in life, stood on one leg and stared at the sun.

The guide said he was a guru. I thought, these people are in a bad way to think a masochist like that is a guru. I’d heard about Western boys and girls who go out to India on their pilgrimages, to discover the East and throw off the chains of their middle-class backgrounds and fill up their knapsacks with drugs. That appalled me. Not only the drugs, but the appointment of India as a place for the ultimate spiritual pilgrimage. India has had a good publicity agent for the last twenty-five years, since the British finished raping the country and pulled out. The young Americans, I decided, looked at the masses of poor people on the streets – perhaps starvation gave the Indians a kind of faraway look – and the kids said, ‘How holy and beautiful these people are.’ All I’d seen so far in India was the result of centuries of oppression followed by a few decades of hypocrisy, and the people were either pretentious or half-starved, depending on whether they were rich or poor.

I went back to the hotel in Benares and scrubbed myself from head to toe, soaked in the bath in cold water with a powerful antiseptic, closed the shutters against the sun and the heat, and then lay down on my bed under my mosquito netting and just sweated. There was no air-conditioning, just an overhead fan that rattled away like – well, like a broken fan. India’s barely in the twentieth century.

I decided to leave the next day.

That night, when I slept, a strange thing happened to me. I dreamed of a dark-skinned bearded man who put his hand on my shoulder gently, and said, ‘Come along with me, Sonny.’

Yes, he called me Sonny. No one had called me that since I was a kid. I didn’t mind it at all. I didn’t even mind his hand on my shoulder, touching me, and usually I mind that a lot. This bearded man exuded an aura of pleasantness, and smiled at me in a way that gave me confidence in him, made me feel he liked me and understood me.

In my dream, I asked him where we were going. He said, ‘Nowhere. Are you ready for that?’

Then I woke up. The fan was still rattling away but the room was cool. It was dawn. Usually, you know, I can’t remember my dreams. But this one was quite clear and fresh. In fact, there was an amazing reality to it. And I knew right away who the bearded man was.

Was it Ernest?

My God, no. Ernest had a suntan but he wasn’t dark-skinned. No, it was a man I’d never met. But Helga had told me about him. It was a man named Sai Baba. His real name was Sathya Sai, but he was called Sai Baba by his disciples, and he lived near the city of Bangalore, in an ashram, a spiritual center where he taught.

Helga had said to me, ‘When I catch up with you in India, Howard, I’d like to take you to meet a man named Sai Baba. He’s a great man, a true guru. I went once to his ashram.’

I had said, ‘Well, we’ll see,’ but of course what I meant was, ‘Hell, no. Don’t insult my intelligence and waste my time.’

Then I dreamed about the man, and he said, ‘Come along with me.’

So I followed my instincts and decided to go.

Just like that? Immediately?

Those decisions have to be made immediately. If you think about them, juggle the pros and cons, you never act, or you run out of available time. I’d learned that lesson when I was designing airplanes and when I was flying. You had to follow your instincts if you wanted to achieve anything of significance or get somewhere in the fastest possible time.

I made my decision immediately. I packed my bag, sent Helga a cable telling her where I was headed, checked out of the hotel in Benares, took a limo to New Delhi and a plane down to Bangalore.

That’s in the state of Andra Pradesh, in southern India, and it’s dirt-poor down there – the Mississippi of India, if you like. The people are darker than up north. It’s hot, dusty, and dangerous. But I felt I had to go, and somehow I convinced myself that the health risks were minimal. I spent a night in Bangalore in the comfort of the Taj Hotel and then early the next morning I hired a car and driver to get down to Puttaparti, which is the nearest village to the ashram. That trip took nine or ten hours. It was like driving through the worst parts of Nevada in the heat of summer, except that in Nevada you had paved roads. This was a dirt track. It passed through a bunch of hovels that were full of the most wretched poverty you can imagine. All transport was by ox and cart, and the oxen were so thin that sometimes they had no strength to pull the cart.

Finally, when I thought I might collapse from fatigue, we got to the Chittravati River. The village of Puttaparti was on the other side. The river was barely a trickle – brown, sluggish, hardly moving – but the driver said he couldn’t drive across it, it would ruin the transmission of his car.

‘Then how am I going to get to Puttaparti?’ I asked.

‘Sahib,’ he said, ‘you will have to walk.’

I hired a boy to carry my luggage and I splashed across the river, through the brown muddy water, which at its deepest was about two feet. I felt like Moses.