Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

31

DURING THOSE YEARS in Las Vegas I had been involved in a lot of reading. And before that too. Not long after my last visit to Ernest Hemingway, I began reading other things besides novels. I’d always read casually for diversion, but then for the first time in my life I began to read in order to learn. And I don’t mean to learn engineering or anything like that. I got curious about Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I had found very little satisfaction finally in the way I’d grown up, with all the things all American kids are supposed to be proud of being able to do, to repair things and to build things, and to make money. These had become, for me, dry, mechanical operations with no deeper value than practicality. They didn’t answer any of the questions that were looming larger and larger for me.

I was no longer looking for a great teacher or a guru. I didn’t believe in that any more. After my disappointing encounters with men of great reputation, I sort of put this down as a childish notion. In fact, I had concluded that any man whose name was a household word was either corrupted or had the seeds of corruption in him. I felt, for example, that any man who would allow himself to be put in a position like Ernest, where he was so publicized and lionized, was being false to himself. How could he be wise?

I decided that if there were any wise men in this world, their names were totally unknown to me and to you, and to anyone who was reading the newspapers or even reading books.

I read about Bertrand Russell and the peace marches. He seemed an impressive man. I tried to read some of his works and, I confess, they were a little over my head, except for the mathematics. But when I read of him marching down the streets in London, I thought, hell, this is show biz.

Then what should I seek? Should I just look inside myself? I didn’t dare. I didn’t really respect myself as much as I once had, or thought I had. And if I looked too deep, I was afraid of what I’d find.

I considered myself well into middle age at that time – on the cusp of being old, mostly because of the physical damage I had suffered in those various accidents and partly because of the mental pounding I was taking, the constant attacks by these businessmen who were out to strip me of all they could. And partly, I suppose, because when you reach your early forties, you start to feel you’re not young any more, but you don’t want to face it. Then when you get to your fifties, you’ve learned to face it. Unless you’re an idiot, you have no choice. At first it’s a bit of a shock. In the end, however, it’s a good thing – in Asia, you know, they have a proverb: ‘Whom the gods curse, they keep young.’

My first reaction was to say to myself, ‘Well, soon I’ll be an old man and I’d better start thinking like an old man.’

I don’t mean I wanted to jump into my wheelchair. I meant I wanted to assess my life and latch on to some sort of self-understanding – the beginning of it, at least. It seemed absurd to me to have lived some fifty-odd years and have no answers to questions. It wasn’t enough to have more money than anyone else in the world. Most rich people I knew were awful human beings, angry and paranoid and grasping. They can tell you how to steal a company or invest money safely, or what a van Gogh is worth at Sotheby’s, or where you can buy the best bench-made shoes, but they know damn little else. They certainly can’t tell you the meaning of life, except in terms of gross national product and stock splits.

I thought, if anything, a man growing old should have some answers. I didn’t have a goddamn one. I hardly knew the questions any more. That was terrible. I knew that lions ate donkeys and I knew that wasn’t enough to know.

With Helga as my tutor, I began to read more difficult books. I started to read Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I tackled the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-gita, and Lao-Tse, and some Zen, and I tried the teachings of Buddha. I was put off by the imprecision of the language, the vague terms that were used, speaking of the Self and the One and the Absolute. These were the sort of terms I couldn’t come to grips with. At the time I put the books away in disgust. I don’t want to be irreligious, but a lot of it seemed crap. I’ve always disliked organized religion, and while this Eastern stuff wasn’t organized, it had all the trappings of the junk the church was pouring down everybody’s gullet day after day. All the churches, not just the Catholics, except that these happened to be Asian religious terms.

A period of time passed while I drove myself crazy with the TWA situation and then the SST scheme. I began to claw my way out of it, and I was still just as restless and dissatisfied and it occurred to me that there might, after all, be something to this Eastern philosophy because so many millions of people had learned from it, and it certainly had a following among intelligent people in the United States and Europe, by people you couldn’t help but respect.

Someone in Japan had done a private survey on Hughes Aircraft, They sent me a copy of it in Japanese, which I had translated. And shortly thereafter, in the late summer of 1970, I was invited to Japan by a consortium of industrialists. I decided to go.

These Japanese industrialists needed a billion or so dollars capital for expansion and it seemed to me like a good opportunity to get into new fields that were beginning to interest me. I was in contact with the Mitsubishi people, Sony, Matsushita, the one or two others in the electronics and television industries out there. They were starting to develop computers. I knew that was the future. I just didn’t know who to trust to build them right.

My business trip to Japan came to nothing, because the government there was, and still is, anti-foreign, and didn’t want to allow foreign capital to come in with any measure of control – and I of course would not invest any significant capital without obtaining a significant measure of control. They should have known that, but, amazingly, they didn’t.

I wanted Helga to come out with me, but she couldn’t. She was having problems with her teenage daughter who had got involved with drugs. She said she’d tried to meet me in Kyoto, or maybe later in India.

I asked her, ‘What makes you think I’m going to India?’

She said, ‘Go to India, Howard. It’s different from anything you know. Go, and you won’t regret it.’

‘But I hate the sight of horrible poverty.’

‘We all do,’ Helga said. ‘Still, it doesn’t hurt to see what you hate. You can always walk away from it.’

I had a little time to wander about Japan. I couldn’t break the habits of a lifetime and I missed several appointments, ducked out, for which some of those grim Japanese bigwigs couldn’t forgive me – I’d made them lose face. I didn’t care. I went down to Kyoto, where they have a shrine, and took a walk in the gardens, watched the deer, sat on the steps of the monastery and looked at the monks in their yellow robes. I found it a beautiful country, but a toy country for a man of my size. None of the beds fit. I had to sleep on the floor on a mat with one of those wooden pillows. It gave me a crook in my neck that took weeks to go away. And I found Tokyo a disgusting city – totally polluted, overcrowded, a cheap, honky-tonk atmosphere. I wanted none of that.

So as soon as the business was over, I left. And I stopped in India on my way home.

Did you make the stop in India because of Helga?

Probably. I’ve never been totally sure. I wired my itinerary to Helga in Europe and asked her to meet me out there. Maybe it was written in the book of life and I had to go.

It certainly had nothing to do with business. In fact I had no specific aim in mind when I went there. I had a few names and addresses that Helga had given me, and I thought that since I was out in that part of the world, I might as well take a look around.

As far as my business associates back in the States were concerned, it was the same old game I had always played, which was that I had vanished, and nobody knew where. I was hiding out somewhere, probably Mexico or France, with some starlet, and that was that. When I went to Cuba to see Ernest, nobody knew I went, and when I went to Zihuatanejo with Helga on those trips, my people were close-mouthed at all times about anything and everything that concerned me.

And so I flew from Tokyo to India. I stayed in New Delhi briefly, but only because the plane landed there. It didn’t interest me. Delhi struck me as just another filthy city with a lot of jerry-built modern buildings.

I went to Calcutta, and quickly left. There was a cholera epidemic, and I found out that this was an annual event. People were dying in the streets. It was hard to tell the dead from the living, mind you – these poor scrawny kids, women and children, living in a patch of gutter, sharing it with their sacred cows. Calcutta disgusted me even more than Tokyo, because there was such an extraordinary contrast between the few rich Indians and the fat tourists and the teeming masses. You can believe me, it took all my courage to walk through the streets. You know how I feel about filth and contamination. This was like plunging in a cesspool.

In that case, why did you do it?

Curiosity overcame my repugnance. They must have thought I was some apparition from outer space, because I walked through those streets wearing white gloves and spraying my throat with a special spray from time to time. I would have worn a surgical mask, but I knew it would have drawn a crowd.

I became a vegetarian during my stay there, too, because I thought there was less chance of getting poisoned from their vegetables than their meat.

After the experience in Calcutta I almost left the country. I said to myself, ‘This country has nothing to offer except a few beautiful temples, poverty, filth, and superstition. I’m not learning anything, I’m just confirming my prejudices.’

But I decided it would be foolish, having come so far, to flee so quickly, and that’s when I took a better look at the addresses Helga had given me. I remembered she had shown me a book about the holy city of Benares, where all the fakirs and babas worshipped by the banks of the Ganges. It had great meaning for the Indians, and it was on my way back to New Delhi. I wanted to please Helga, to show her that I was more broad-minded than she thought I was, and open to new experience. I hired an air-conditioned car and chauffeur and went to Benares – now they call it Varanasi, but then it was Benares. The chauffeur was a student, bright and friendly. He acted as a guide for me.

It’s almost always been my habit to get up pretty early in the morning, so it was no problem for me when he wanted to get down to the river, the Ganges, at five o’clock in the morning, just when the action started.

That’s a sight I’ll never forget. I had read about Benares and it had a certain legendary quality for me, but you never believe that things will be as exotic as they really are. I visited the temples. I saw the burning ghats along the river, where they were cremating the bodies of their dead. The Ganges was just a stream of mud and crap. But it’s holy. Boy, if that’s holy! The people had come down to the river just as soon as the sun was up, before they had to go to work, and they were bathing in this brown soup, this slop, and drinking it.

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.

It was evening by now, and dark. I was exhausted and I didn’t really know where I was. I mean I was so worn out that I was disoriented. But I found the ashram, on the edge of the village, checked in, so to speak, asked for a single room, had to argue my way into getting one, succeeded by paying out a few extra rupees – money talks, even in a spiritual center, at least to the poor people who work there – and finally stretched my bones out on a narrow little cot in a room that was about the size of a prison cell. Someone who spoke English said to me, ‘Darshan is at six.’ I didn’t know what darshan was and I couldn’t have cared less. I finished my supply of butter cookies that I’d bought at the airport in New Delhi and went to sleep.

When they woke me it wasn’t light yet. I didn’t wear a watch in those days but I’ve always been able to tell the time by the position of the sun, or just by instinct. I guessed that it was five o’clock in the morning. I was still disoriented, because I got up like a zombie, splashed some water in my face, put on a shirt and loose trousers, and let myself be herded out with everyone else into this big dusty square. Then I sank down into a heap.

Close to two hundred people were sitting out there with me, almost all of them Indians, with maybe half a dozen westerners. Everyone was silent. They were meditating, or, if they were like me, they were half-asleep and sitting in a kind of pre-dawn daze. It grew light, and I don’t know how long we all sat there, or where I found the patience to do it, but I did.

Did you meditate at all?

I’m going to tell you the truth, even though it sounds awful. I meditated, in my way, about my problems in the TWA lawsuit, and how to slide out of that fine the court had levied on me, because the interest was being added to the fine every day and piling up like a dungheap. Treble damages, I kept thinking. Treble damages! Those bastards! I had to squirm out of those treble damages. I sat there for about two hours, trying to figure a way.

I didn’t know then what meditation was all about. I learned later.

When it grew light I could see that there was a little Indian temple on the far side of this square, and we all sat facing it. When I say temple, that doesn’t quite fit: it was a modest place, probably as big as a three-bedroom ranch house, and decorated with figures of various deities like Shiva and Krishna and such other bigwigs in the Indian lineup of gods. I found out later that Sai Baba lived in a back room. That was his home. The ashram was his home. He’d been born in a shack in Puttaparti and that shack became the ashram, it sort of grew up around the shack, until finally his disciples tore down the shack, or it collapsed one rainy season, and they built the temple for him and he took a room in the back as his living quarters.

I didn’t see him come out, I just heard a murmur all around me, maybe two hours later, and I raised my head and there he was, right in front of us. He had a lot of curly dark hair with some gray in it – almost an Afro. His face was a little pudgy, and he had big brown eyes and a sweet smile. He wore an orange cotton robe and old sandals where you could see, if you had a sharp eye, that the straps had been repaired. He was a moderately large man, although not tall, and not at all skinny like the holy men I’d seen up north in Benares. I’d have to guess he was in his middle forties – I never did ask him his age. My main impression of him was his sweetness. I’m going to use a word you never heard come from my mouth: his goodness.

He wandered around in front of us, like he didn’t quite know where to settle, and finally he picked a place in the dust to curl up. He made a speech. He had an ordinary voice, not too loud, and of course he spoke in Hindi. So I dozed off.

I woke up when someone kicked me, or, let’s say, nudged me firmly in the butt with his foot. I opened my eyes and sat up. It was Sai Baba who had done it. He was barefoot. He was standing in front of me, smiling.

He said to me, in English, ‘I’m glad you came.’

I said, ‘I dreamed about you.’

‘We’ll talk later,’ he said. ‘Another day.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’

I looked around me. It was late in the morning, maybe eleven o’clock. The point is, a number of hours had passed while I slept and while Sai Baba talked in Hindi.

When he walked away from me and I walked back to my room with the rest of the people -darshan was over, I realized – I found myself thinking about what he had said. Not the brief conversation we’d had when he came up and booted me in the bottom, but the words he’d spoken to all those two hundred people while I slept. I could remember them. And you’ve got to understand: he spoke in Hindi. But I remembered in English.

What did he say?

He talked about what he called ‘the middle path.’ He talked about what he called ‘the seven internal foes of humankind.’ They were Lust, Anger, Greed, Attachment, Conceit, Hatred, and Control. ‘These nocturnal birds infest the tree of life and foul the heart where they build their nests.’ He also said, ‘What is required in life is an awareness of the vicious game that the mind plays. It presents before the attention one source after another of temporary pleasure. It doesn’t allow any interval for you to weigh the pros and cons. When hunger for food is appeased, it holds before the eye the attraction of, for example, a new movie that everyone is talking about. Then it reminds the ear of the charm of building something, and then it makes the organs crave for the release of sexual tension, and then it requires us to get in touch with and chastise someone who hasn’t behaved in a way that we expected him to behave. The yearning for comfort, for ownership, for various satisfactions, becomes subtly all-powerful. The burden of desires gradually becomes too heavy and man becomes dispirited and sad.’

I knew instantly what he meant. I knew that it was true. I understood that it wasn’t original, that such things had been preached for centuries by various religious and spiritual leaders worldwide. That made no difference to me. He had said it. And he had said it at the right time and in the right tone of voice to the right person. He was talking to me. He was talking about me.

Of course he brought in a few Indian names and concepts like Dharma and Avatar and Krishna and the divine Atma, but I was able to filter them out and keep to the meat of the message.

I wandered around the rest of the day, found a primus stove, and managed to cook myself a little meal. Then came evening darshan. I went outside, curled up, and listened again. This time I stayed awake, and of course I couldn’t understand a word. But Sai Baba’s voice was friendly and soothing and for the most part I thought of what he had said that morning.

That went on for several days. During that time he also pulled a few tricks. He was a kind of magician, or sleight-of-hand artist. He would come up to some of the people, right after darshan, and pluck things out of the air. Not rabbits from a hat, although he did on one occasion produce a red silk handkerchief that he gave to a young Indian, and on another occasion he produced a ring with some semi-precious stone in it that he gave to a middle-aged German woman. Most of the time, what he produced, or manifested – ‘manifested’ is the word his followers used – was a powdery substance called vibhuti. It was supposed to be sacred ash. You could eat it, or rub it on your body. It was meant to be purifying.

Did you ever meet him and talk to him personally?

Not for a few days. Then, after evening darshan, he beckoned to me. He did this often, with various of his devotees, but I had been told that you had to hang out there a long time and have a certain seniority before your moment came. However, I had been there less than a week when he gave me the nod. I was pleased, and a little nervous. I followed him into the temple.

I knew by now that Sai Baba was a poor man, didn’t want worldly goods other than what he needed to live in simple comfort. Some of his better-off Indian and Western followers gave him money, but he put almost all of that into the physical upkeep of the ashram or the construction of a little hospital he was setting up there, or he fed and clothed beggars and found little jobs for them at the construction site. For himself he kept just what he needed to eat and buy a new robe now and then. He was a very clean-looking man. He smelled of spices. I liked that.

So I wasn’t surprised by the sparseness of the furnishings inside the temple. Sai Baba sat on a cane floor mat in the lotus position, in front of me. He offered me a stiffbacked cane chair – no way I could ever have got into the lotus position like he did. He knew that. I sat down. He made the sign of welcome by placing his palms together, smiled at me, and said, ‘Is there anything you would like to ask me?’ ‘Yes. Why do you go through all that hocus-pocus,’ I said, ‘with the manifesting of ash and jewelry?’

His smile grew broader. ‘You think that’s hocus-pocus?’

‘What else?’

‘What’s wrong with a little hocus-pocus?’ he asked. ‘Does it harm anyone?’

I laughed. ‘I guess not. Maybe you need to do it to impress a certain kind of person. Means to an end. I can understand that.’

Still smiling, he reached out to my ear and pulled a handful of dark ash, what they called vibhuti, out of it, or out of the air, or out of his sleeve; who knows. ‘Here,’ he said. He pressed it into my palm. ‘You keep this handful of “means to an end.” Eat it, or anoint yourself with it, or throw it away. Do whatever you like with it.’

I laughed again, mumbled a kind of thank-you and put it in my pants pocket.

‘Now may I ask you a question, sir?’ Sai Baba said.

‘Absolutely.’

‘In the years left to you, if you knew beyond doubt that you wouldn’t fail, what is the one thing that you would do?’

I was stunned into silence. I knew right away he had asked me the most intelligent question that you could ask any human being beyond the age of puberty. All the inessentials fell away. TWA, the various lawsuits, the default judgment, the SST, Las Vegas as the port of entry, Hughes Aircraft, Toolco – none of them rose to the mark. Not even life with Helga.

‘You don’t have to answer now,’ Sai Baba said. He rose to his feet – not all that easily, I realized, because he was a bit overweight. I got up too. He made the sign of farewell by placing his palms together. I did the same. He had never asked me my name. He’d never asked who I was or what I did. He’d only asked that one question. At the door to the temple, as I was about to step outside into the hot evening, he placed a sweaty hand on my shoulder, and he said softly, ‘Don’t forget.’

I went to one more darshan before I left Puttaparti, but I realized that for the moment there was little more I could gain by being there. I also realized I didn’t have to say goodbye to Sai Baba. He didn’t expect it.

I hired another porter, waded across the Chittravati River in the other direction, found someone to drive me to Bangalore, and flew to New Delhi. There was a message from Helga waiting for me at my hotel. She said she was coming to India to spend a week with me, and if I left New Delhi I should leave a message for her where I’d be. She was due to arrive on Swissair from Geneva the following day.

I took a long hot bath to wash off the dirt of southern India, then a long cool shower to refresh myself, and then I sent for the maid to pick up my dirty clothes. Just before I handed my things to her I remembered what I had in the pocket of my old pants. I had all that vibhuti Sai Baba had ‘manifested’ and given to me. I poured it out into an ash tray before I stuffed the pants into the plastic laundry bag.

I decided to meditate for a while. By then I’d learned that meditation was a process to clear your mind, not to analyze what you thought were your problems, and you accomplished this by sitting still and silently saying a meaningless short word, which they called a mantra, over and over again. That way your mind became a blank receptacle, and if you were ready, good things entered in it. In the least, you were refreshed. It was like a fast, where you eat nothing and cleanse your guts – in meditation you cleansed your mind.

Then I remembered the vibhuti. What was I going to do with it? I could throw it out, but that troubled me, because he’d given it to me just before he’d asked me that big question. I could take it back with me to Nevada, but what was I supposed to do with it there? Put it in an urn and worship it? That seemed ridiculous. Or I could use it. How should I use it? I wasn’t going to eat it; it was ash, and I might choke to death. The other thing I’d seen people do was rub it all over their bodies. I hesitated, because if I did that, I’d be dirty again. But what the hell, I thought, I could take another bath when I finished meditating. I had nothing else to do until Helga arrived.

I smeared the vibhuti all over my chest and forehead. It had a soft, powdery texture, not harsh at all. It smelled slightly of spice. Then I sat down in a chair to meditate.

What happened next is hard to explain. You probably won’t believe it. Part of this is clear to me, but part is vague. Kind of shadowy.

I dimly remember leaving the hotel. I remember renting a chauffeured car. I hardly remember the journey at all. I must have slept on the way. I remember arriving again in Benares, where I spent the night, what was left of the night, I’m not sure. I had no luggage – I found that out later. I don’t remember going down to the river, but it’s clear that I must have done so, probably under my own steam – the car and driver definitely didn’t take me – because I remember arriving there, by the Ganges, probably before dawn. I remember the darkness and the smells of incense, mud, and burning wood.

I sat down in the dirt by the river. Before that, as I told you, I couldn’t get into the lotus position, but now I did it, or at least a fair approximation of it. My legs were crossed in front of me, and my hands were in what I’d have to describe as a cupped position, also in front of me.

I wore only my undershorts. They were white Jockey shorts. I didn’t have another blessed thing on my body. No shirt, no socks and shoes, no pants, no hat. Just my white undershorts.

Do you see the picture I’m painting for you? I was thin, almost scrawny. I had long hair, even longer than it is now. It fell almost to my shoulders. I had a beard. And all my hair, of course, was gray, a pale shade of gray. I was not a thing of beauty.

I looked like a beggar. I was sitting there by the Ganges, in a trance, in beggar’s clothes and in a beggar’s position.

Now, as I may have told you, the riverside was full of beggars. They didn’t do very well except when an occasional tourist gave them a dollar – they could eat for a day or two on a dollar – in the hope that they’d go away. I, on the other hand, was sitting there cross-legged in my Jockey shorts, with my hands forming a little cup in front of me. I didn’t importune anyone, I didn’t clutch at them, I didn’t even ask. I just sat there, meditating. And I was deluged with money. With dollars, with rupees, with English pounds, with yen, with marks and francs. People couldn’t pass by without giving me something. Indians, Asians, Europeans – everyone gave.

You see, money just gravitates to some people, whether they’re accumulating TWA stock or sitting by the side of a muddy river in India. They’re money magnets, and money is like metal shavings. I’m one of those people. I can’t help it.

The coins and bills spilled over my cupped hands into a pile in the dust of the street. No one, not even the other beggars, dared take it from me. They must have thought I was a holy man come from afar, God knows where. I was thin enough, my hair was scraggly enough, my undershorts could have been taken for a loincloth, and I had the vibhuti rubbed into my chest and forehead. Anyone who stole from me would come back in the next life as a cockroach with backache.

I don’t know how much time passed. I only know I was there and doing very well indeed.

I know this because suddenly Helga said, ‘Howard! My God! Are you all right? What are you doing?’

She stood there in front of me wearing a lovely white silk dress from Chanel.

She had flown into New Delhi, gone to the hotel, found out I wasn’t there, checked around and quickly learned that a car and driver had taken me to Benares. She hired another car.

I wasn’t in any of the good hotels in Benares, but someone – she never knew who it was – said, ‘Madam, I have seen the man you describe. He is down by the river near such-and-such a temple.’

So she came down with a guide and found me. She helped me to my feet and took me back to the hotel. I had tears in my eyes. I don’t know why.

We took all the money with us in a sack. And outside of town, on the drive back to New Delhi, we passed a hospital for the poor. Helga took the sack inside and gave it one of the nursing nuns at the desk. It was a considerable amount of money – the driver had to help Helga carry it. I had done really well.