“What happened to Atma Ram Hira Lal Ji?” Bajrang asked after a few days. “Was his thirst quenched?”
“Hardly,” said Bajrang.
Atma Ram lingered in and around the clinic. In time, he adopted Baba as his Guru and became his ardent follower and sevak. A sevak is different from a servant. A servant works for wages and leaves when the work is done. A sevak lives close to the Guru, unpaid, useful, loyal, half-attendant and half-accomplice in life. He looked after the clinic too, and did small jobs, much as I did.
“He became my bhakt also,” Bajrang said, “so I know his story well. One day, perhaps, he may come to see me again.”
“What is he doing these days?” someone quipped.
“Oh, he is still with Baba,” Bajrang said, “learning the ropes.”
One day Baba showed them a taaveez. It was wrapped in old cloth, darkened with sweat, incense, ash, and handling. Baba told them it had been given to him by his own Guru, a Kalandar from Iraq, a man who had tamed a jinn.
“The jinn lies bound in this taaveez,” Baba said.
His Guru, Baba explained, came from an ancient lineage of Kalandars and had drawn from it a secret, unnameable power — power enough to defeat lesser prets and pisachs, those who visit in dreams, and those that had afflicted Atma Ram.
“I too,” Baba said, “will pass this knowledge and the power of the taaveez to someone worthwhile — someone who assists me while he learns.”
Atma Ram heard this as a promise. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was merely another rope in the invisible rigging of Baba’s world. But from that day, he remained there more completely than before: half-disciple, half-attendant, half-believer, and wholly caught in Baba’s orbit.
The Clinic Becomes Baba’s Place
What of Doctor Sahib and the surgeon?
The truth was not that they had run away.
Men like them do not run. They withdraw, which is a more respectable form of flight.
The surgeon went first. He joined a proper hospital where suffering had corridors, beds, theatre lists, blood reports, consent forms, anaesthesia notes, and a clean legal shape. There, pain could still be opened, inspected, repaired, sutured, and billed. Nobody asked him whether a dream had claws. Nobody expected him to decide whether a child was anaemic or possessed.
Doctor Sahib remained a little longer.
But by then the clinic had ceased to be a clinic. It had become Baba’s place. People no longer said, “We are going to the doctor.” They said, “We are going to Baba.”
The old signboard still hung there, but it had become a relic — like an anatomical chart in a room full of incense.
The crowd had increased. That much was undeniable. Baba and Atma Ram had become famous. The precinct had grown busy. People arrived in cycles: women with covered heads, men with tired eyes, boys pretending courage, old mothers with copper bowls, fathers who had spent more money than they admitted, and young wives who had already been told by everyone what was wrong with them.
But to Doctor Sahib, the clientele had lost character.
Earlier, people came with fever, cough, wounds, pain, swelling, fractures, childbirth trouble, loose motions, failing appetite, and that honest village sentence: “बस ठीक नहीं लग रहा.”
Now they came with dreams, vows, barren hopes, court cases, failed businesses, restless children, wandering husbands, evil eye, unpaid debts, and the ancient hunger to be told that their suffering had meaning.
“They are no longer patients,” Doctor Sahib said once. “They are petitioners.”
Baba flourished among them.
Atma Ram Hira Lal Ji, once afflicted and thirsty himself, now moved about like a junior custodian of mysteries. He knew where the incense was kept, who should be given water first, who should be made to wait, which woman needed silence, which boy was performing possession, and which old man had truly brought something dark back from sleep.
He was still learning the ropes, but there were now many ropes, and some of them were invisible.
Doctor Sahib’s Suffocation
Doctor Sahib began to suffocate.
It was not Baba’s success that troubled him. Success, after all, is a disease with many accepted treatments: jealousy, ridicule, resignation, or partnership. What troubled him was the enclosed nature of it — the narrowing of air.
The bhakts had filled the precinct with a single expectation. Everyone wanted the same type of wonder, the same kind of cure, the same shade of submission. Their faith had variety in costume but not in structure. They came from different lanes, castes, kitchens, fields, quarrels, and misfortunes, but by the time they sat before Baba, they had become one colour.
Doctor Sahib had once believed that Baba’s theism might ripen into atheism.
That would have been the grand movement, in his opinion — from jinn to mind, from taaveez to habit, from curse to chemistry, from possession to hunger, from miracle to method. A truly great Baba, he felt, should one morning have stood up and declared that there were no spirits at all, only frightened men, lonely women, bad digestion, weak nerves, unpaid debts, inherited fear, and the terrible electricity of suggestion.
But Baba had done the opposite.
He had taken the clinic and returned it to the older world.
The doctor found this both impressive and intolerable.
He could not deny that people were helped. That was the most irritating part. Some slept better. Some stopped trembling. Some reconciled. Some returned with offerings. Some called it grace. Some called it Baba’s power. Some merely came again and again because the place gave their suffering a shape.
But Doctor Sahib believed that healing without clarity could become another form of captivity.
Baba gave meaning. The doctor wanted release.
Baba gathered people inward. The doctor wanted to step outward.
Baba sat in the enclosed precinct of faith. The doctor wanted open ground.
The Refusal of the Expected Role
So Doctor Sahib did not argue.
He stepped out.
He freed himself from the expectation that he too must become religious in order to remain useful. He refused the role waiting for him: the respectable doctor who bows to the saint, the educated man who confirms the miracle by not laughing at it, the medical witness who gives scientific silence to supernatural claims.
He had no desire to become Baba’s rational ornament.
Nor did he wish to become Baba’s enemy. That too would have trapped him inside the same circle. To oppose a shrine is also to orbit it. To mock a miracle is still to admit its centrality.
Doctor Sahib wanted neither worship nor argument.
He wanted space.
Perhaps that is why he went to the river.
Perhaps that is why he met Tara.
Perhaps that is why Kedarnath, Yamunotri, the mule track, the cold stone, the thin air, the indifferent stars, and the sound of water became necessary to him.
In the clinic, everything demanded interpretation.
In the mountains, nothing did.
A rock did not need belief. A glacier did not require surrender. A river did not ask whether he was atheist, doctor, sinner, nephew, lover, fraud, or witness.
It simply flowed.
And for a man tired of rooms full of meanings, that was healing.
Tara and the Open Field
Doctor Sahib met the woman not at the destination, but on the way.
Bopa Rai used to say that important meetings seldom take place where people claim they are going. They take place on the incline, when the knees are tired, the lungs are honest, and the mind has lost its usual guard.
Tara had the alert face of someone who had not surrendered her mischief to age. She carried fatigue well. She laughed without asking permission. In the presence of priests, donors, pilgrims, and ancestral obligations, she had the offensive freshness of a person who still belonged partly to the weather.
Doctor Sahib noticed this.
Or rather, Bopa noticed it.
Doctor Sahib was a role. Bopa Rai was the creature underneath.
In the clinic he had been Doctor Sahib: expected to diagnose, certify, oppose, approve, explain, or remain silent. In the mountains he became Bopa again — lean, curious, irritated, amused, and available to the world.
Tara did not ask him what he believed.
This was a great relief.
She asked whether he could walk.
That was better.
Belief had trapped him in rooms. Walking took him out.
So they went upward: from the plains toward the river’s source, from the enclosed precinct toward open air, from the crowd of bhakts toward stone, pine, mule-bells, snow-water, and breath.
The river moved beside them like an argument that did not need words.
At lower altitudes, it still carried the memory of towns, ashes, ceremonies, offerings, and human insistence. Higher up, it became colder, quicker, less social. By the time it reached the rocks and ice, it had lost all interest in human explanation.
Bopa liked it more and more.
“This is the only honest theology,” he said once.
“What?” Tara asked.
“Gradient,” he said. “Water going where it must.”
She laughed and walked ahead.
Baba Below, River Above
Meanwhile, below, Baba’s Ashram prospered.
The clinic’s old medical smell disappeared under incense, clarified butter, damp flowers, and the smoke of lamps. Atma Ram became indispensable. Baba sat longer hours. The stories thickened. The taaveez acquired a history in every retelling. The Iraqi Kalandar became taller, older, stranger. The jinn became more obedient. The prets and pisachs became more numerous, though they seemed mostly to choose people who already had complicated families.
The place became famous.
People who would not have come for medicine came for healing.
People who distrusted tablets trusted ash.
People who disliked injections accepted threads.
People who could not describe their symptoms could describe their dreams.
Baba understood this. He listened in the language in which people suffered.
That was his genius.
Doctor Sahib understood it too, but understanding did not mean surrender. He knew that modern medicine often failed at the gate where suffering stopped being anatomical and became narrative. He knew that a prescription could lower fever but not always touch dread. He knew that a diagnosis could name the disease and still leave the man alone with his fear.
Baba entered that gap.
And yet, to Doctor Sahib, the gap had become a kingdom.
That was the problem.
Baba had not merely supplemented the clinic. He had swallowed it.
The patient had become a bhakt. The case had become a story. The prescription had become a blessing. The waiting room had become a court of faith. The doctor’s chair had become secondary furniture in someone else’s theatre.
So Bopa walked.
He walked until his irritation became breath.
He walked until the crowd dissolved into trees.
He walked until even his atheism became less of an argument and more of an open sky.
The Grand Atheistic Way
Bopa’s atheism was not dry.
It was not the atheism of a clerk crossing out gods from a register.
It was grander than that, and more inconvenient. He did not deny mystery; he objected to cheap mystery. He distrusted ready-made wonder, marketable holiness, and the conversion of human confusion into permanent dependence.
He wanted a mystery that did not ask for disciples.
The mountain gave him that.
The river gave him that.
The field gave him that.
The body, tired after walking, gave him that.
Tara, laughing at him when he became pompous, gave him that.
In Baba’s precinct, mystery had a queue, a method, a hierarchy, a rumour, a donation bowl, and a preferred vocabulary.
In the open, mystery had no face.
It was sunlight on stone. It was the sudden blue of distance. It was the mule’s breath in cold air. It was Tara’s hand on a wet rock. It was hunger at the right time. It was sleep earned by walking. It was the river beginning as a thread of meltwater without caring who had come to witness it.
Bopa thought: this is what Baba should have taught.
Not disbelief exactly.
Freedom.
Freedom from the compulsive need to make every pain sacred, every dream prophetic, every coincidence intentional, every illness moral, every recovery miraculous.
But perhaps Baba could not have taught that. Baba’s gift was enclosure. He gathered people, held them, named their fears, gave them ritual, gave them theatre, gave them a way to sit inside their suffering without being alone.
Bopa’s gift, if he had one, was escape.
Not escape from life.
Escape into it.
Return
When Bopa returned, the clinic was still Baba’s Ashram.
Atma Ram was still there, still learning the ropes.
Baba was more famous than before.
The surgeon had settled into hospital life.
The patients had become petitioners.
The petitioners had become bhakts.
The bhakts had become a crowd.
And the crowd, as crowds do, believed itself to be proof.
Bopa did not try to correct them.
He had returned with river-water in his bones and mountain air stored somewhere behind his ribs. He knew now that not every enclosure had to be broken from the inside. Some could simply be left. A man could step out of a room without disproving the room.
Baba had his precinct.
Atma Ram had his apprenticeship.
The surgeon had his hospital.
The bhakts had their healing.
And Bopa Rai had found, for a while at least, the open field.
He had freed himself from the expectation that he must become one more religious type in a place already crowded with devotional shadows. He had walked out of the enclosed space of certainty and into the uncertain weather of nature.
It did not make him peaceful.
Peace was too large a claim.
But it made him available again — to rivers, to women, to fatigue, to laughter, to the cold fact of stone, and to the possibility that the world did not need to be interpreted before it could be loved.