I was sitting in a rooftop restaurant the other day when the sound of yet another loudspeaker in the market place caught my attention.
Looking down I saw a woman pushing a cart upon which the music machine and loudspeaker sat.
It wasn’t a wedding procession (they are happening twice a day at the moment), it wasn’t a political rally or the arrival in town of a VIP, and it was in fact a Holy Roller.
On the ground in front of the cart, propelled, it seemed by the music itself, was a Holy Roller. A man, covered in dust rolling in the same way as kids play rely poly down a grassy slope, except this guy held two flags upright in his hands as he rolled.
Holy Rollers are not uncommon in India, but it’s the first time I have ever clapped eyes on one.
He had called into my brother Gopal’s chai shop on the edge of town so I got to hear his story.
It seems that the man comes from Kota, a town about four hundred kilometers to the south of Pushkar in the state of Rajasthan.
Some time ago, the man’s father had become sick. The family (as you do) had made all sorts of promises to God in the dark night of their despair via their Guru Baba Ram Dev. The father recovered.
Unlike most of us who forget our promises to God, this guy hasn’t. Since they are poor and unskilled, he offered instead his own body for the life of his father by promising to roll not once but FIVE TIMES from his village to the ashram of Baba Ram Dev, a distance of over five hundred kilometers. Gopal was glad to see him go.
“He was playing Baba Ram Dev music, bhainchord, and it is very powerful music. It made the one legged mad beggar start dancing!”
So infused was the beggar with the music of Baba RamDev that he danced for hours and during so, knocked over a stone temple of the kind that women build under trees, two stones with one lying across the top to form a roof.
Because the beggar happened to be Muslim, the women have taken umbrage and demanded that Gopal never give the guy a chai or a spare chapatti ever again.
The women want him moved on.
“Is God in that stone or in that man? Says Gopal. “Bhainchord, you can break a temple, you can break a house but my rule?
Never break a heart!”