Swami Krishnapuri woke up in his ashram as usual. The bird that twitters at dawn assured him it was time. “Om Namah Shivay,” he murmured piously as usual, remembering the name of god with his first conscious breath. Then he opened his eyes and nothing was as usual.

“Om Namah Shivay, Om Namah Shivay, Om Namah Shivay,” he repeated on a note of anxiety, his heartbeat speeding up. His cell was absolutely dark. He turned his head wildly, seeking the window – a square of pearl light that always drew his eyes. Darkness. Was it still night? Was the bird-brain out of time with the world? He glanced towards the ticking clock. Darkness.

Now he was sitting up, feeling the bed, the wall, making sure he was at home. Then he raised his hands to his face, cautiously exploring up the coarse beard, over the cheeks, to his eye sockets. The eyelids closed instinctively. He felt delicately upward to his eyebrows. The eyeballs were there under the lids. He rubbed, then shook his head violently, strained the lids open again. Darkness.

With rising panic, he called his chela. The young disciple stumbled sleepily into the room.

“What is the time? Is it day?” The puzzled boy glanced at the clock and confirmed that it was time to get up.

“What happened, Guruji?” he asked his trembling master.

“I can’t see. I can’t see anything.”

The boy stepped closer and waved his hand in front of the sadhu’s beaky nose. No reaction.

The temple services took precedence over the vicissitudes of life. The boy drew water from the well for the ritual bath, set soap beside the bucket, hung his master’s clean loincloth and lungi on a branch and led him there. Swami Krishnapuri noted the fragrance of the soap, but when it slipped his grasp he felt a flutter of panic, scrabbling fingertips over flagstones to retrieve it. Bare toes spread, he found his way up the path to the temple, where his chela had filled the oil lamp and laid matches and incense beside it on the altar.

The rasp of a match was followed by a flare of heat, which he applied to the wick and then felt with his palm to be sure it was alight. Another rasp to kindle the incense sticks, a wave to extinguish the invisible flame, the reassuring whiff as he wafted them around in worship. Familiar Sanskrit cadences rolled from his lips, bringing a little comfort to his soul.

The anxious chela hovered at the entrance to lead him to his seat in the early sunshine, dappled warm and cool on his bare torso. A cup of tea brought more comfort, then the chela lit a cigarette and passed it to him. Inhaling deeply, eyes closed, sun on his skin, Swami Krishnapuri felt normal for the first time that morning. He seized upon a wild hope, that when he opened his eyes the visible world would be there: the domed temple, the compound wall keeping out the tangle of forest, the cookhouse whose roof-tiles swept low, blackened by escaping smoke, the beds of flowers to be picked as offerings.

Eyes firmly closed to keep the hope intact, he listened to the boy sweeping the courtyard, to puppies scuffling and squabbling in the neighbour’s garden and the rustle of withered banana fronds. He missed the soft bare feet of the tribal woman as she entered the yard, milk-pail casually balanced on her head. She glanced sharply at the holy man slumped in his chair. Why did he not return her wide smile as usual? Respectfully, she kept silence until she reached the cookhouse door, where the boy stood ready with a jug.

“What’s the matter with Guruji?” her country accent was tinged with concern.

“He’s gone blind.” The matter-of-fact tone of his chela startled the sadhu. The finality of it.

All morning he sat there, dragging his chair into the sun as the shadows shifted, aware of pious neighbours murmuring their daily devotions in the temple and the chink of small coins in the offering box. He returned their greetings but had no heart for the usual gossip and banter. Suddenly, a flock of pilgrims swept into the courtyard, doing the rounds of all the minor temples after their worship in the shrine at the source of the holy river Narmada. They milled excitedly around, exclaiming in unfamiliar accents. One woman approached the holy man.

“Narmaday Har, Guruji,” she began.

“Narmaday Har, mataji,” he replied, guessing from her tone that she was a mature woman and should be addressed as ‘mother’.

“I have a rash on my arm. Could you recommend any local herbal medicine?” she said, extending her arm towards him. He sent her on to a temple which specialized in local remedies, and the awkward moment passed. He was not yet ready to acknowledge his blindness.

At lunchtime, his chela drew up a small table and served a meal. The pungent spices awakened his appetite and he felt for a chapatti to scoop up the vegetables. Suddenly the chapatti was snatched from his hand by a furry paw, a second before the boy’s warning cry, “Bandar!”

“You had better eat inside, Guruji,” said the boy, picking up the tray of food. As he rose to his feet, chagrined, Krishnapuri understood the unspoken subtext: “I can’t be guarding you from monkeys all the time, or from crows or the neighbour’s puppies.”After a flavourless meal, the holy man lay down in defeated silence and surrendered to the oblivion of sleep.

Mid-afternoon, the chela brought tea. “Om Namah Shivay” came automatically to Krishnapuri’s lips and, as automatically, his eyes opened. To nothingness. To darkness.

Now the darkness entered his soul. He sat immobile in the yard all afternoon, responding reflexively to greetings. When his chela asked what he would like for supper, he said, “Anything,” and asked the boy to do the evening rituals for him. Too sunk in gloom to be irritated by the novice’s errors, he sat on, indifferent to the evening chill, until a wave of utter loneliness impelled him to rise and shuffle splay-toed across the yard, hands outstretched to fend off the low roof. Then he sat morosely listening to the vegetables sizzling in the wok until the aroma of onions drowned when water was added, and a soft bubbling of spicy liquid ensued.

Night brought no relief. After a day of physical inactivity, the sadhu’s mind raced sleeplessly, alert to all the sounds of the forest beyond the wall. Scuffles and squeaks, a sighing wind. What was that clumsy lumbering? A holy cow, turned loose to forage, or a bear? He imagined snakes pursuing their prey and resolved to stamp his feet when he passed their lurking places. At last, the susurration of cicadas lulled him into a doze, only to wake to the dawn-bird’s cry.

“Om Namah Shivay.” He lay rigid, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to replay the waking nightmare. “Om Namah Shivay! Om Namah Shivay!” He took a deep breath, deliberately relaxed his eyelids, then opened his eyes. Darkness.

Numbly, he got out of bed, roused the lad and went through the routine of temple services, tea and a cigarette in the sun. Then the whole day stretched drearily ahead of him. It was market day. A bevy of tribal women and girls padded by, on the road, with head-loads of vegetables and jungle produce to sell. Their laughter seemed to mock his desolation. A loudspeaker from the main temple blared out the hymn to the goddess Narmada:

OM jay jagatanandi!

Ho maia, jay anand karni!

Ho Rewa, jay mangal murti!

The words fell bitterly on his ears:

All hail to the Joy of the World!

O goddess, hail to the Creator of Happiness!

O Rewa, hail to You who give joy to mankind!

All the joy had drained from his life with the loss of his sight. The shock still vibrated through his being. Nothing in all the hard training of his Order had prepared him for this. The strict discipline of his guru, who kept him busy from four in the morning until midnight, with beatings for every mistake or misdemeanour, had left him tough, able to endure bodily suffering, but with his senses intact.

“Too much intact?” he wondered now, recalling how the sight of any shapely lass would provoke a raging lust. Only last week Mastersahib, the schoolteacher, had called, accompanied by his nubile daughter. Krishnapuri had sneaked covert glances at her while apparently engrossed in lofty discussion with her father, a part of his mind at play with the most unsublime sentiments. Could this blindness be retribution? Had he always been distracted by the senses from the inner life?

Now that sight was gone, the sounds and scents, the tastes and touches that had complemented his dearest sense had lost their savour. Inside, he felt hollow, with a darkness at least as dense as that outside him. The body was a shell, an interface between darkness and darkness, observed by a sullen mind. There was something amiss. He brooded for some time until the realization came to him: the immortal soul, the sacred spark which should unite him to his god, the cherished purpose of his life in holy orders, was missing.

Terrified by the pain in his master’s expression, the chela whispered, “Are you dying, Guruji? Should I send word to your father?”

“No.”

But the next day, when the boy asked again, he sighed and said yes, allowing him to count out money for the phone call. The boy ran to the bazaar and asked the payphone operator to put him through to his counterpart, near his master’s parents’ home in the city. “Please tell Gopal Mishraji that his son Swami Krishnapuri in Amarkantak is… very ill.”

“Very ill? Not dead?” came the reply, reacting to the hesitation.

“Not dead.”

The boy was away from the ashram for about half an hour, but the blind man was seized with panic until he returned, vulnerable to nameless dangers in the absence of his sighted chela. Swami Krishnapuri had spent nights in meditation in mountain caves in his youth, and even one moonless vigil in a ghost-haunted charnel ground, but this half hour alone stretched his nerves almost to breaking point. He felt he was losing his mind. The boy brought him tea and lit a cigarette, and the tension in his chest eased a little.

After travelling all night, his parents arrived. At first they were relieved to see him sitting in his accustomed place, not prostrate with fever as they had imagined. Guided by their voices, Krishnapuri walked towards them and stooped awkwardly to touch their feet, fumbling to locate them. Then he straightened up, to be clasped in his mother’s arms, and his tears mingled freely with hers.

Over tea that afternoon, the elderly Brahmin gave his considered diagnosis, “It’s witchcraft, my son. That’s what it is.”

“You must have an enemy,” added his mother, looking around fearfully as if to detect one in the shadows.

This supposition gave the parents much food for conversation, to which the chela eavesdropped shamelessly while weeding the flowerbed. Witchcraft was a fact of life in the tribal villages around: at least two sadhus had died unaccountably, in middle age, in the area. Had some casual beggar, angry at a rebuff, cursed Krishnapuriji with blindness? Had some guest at the ashram felt slighted? The afflicted man contributed little to the discussion, but that night he went over all the visitors who had stayed at the ashram in the past year. Only their own members were offered hospitality, by the rules of the Order, but they could never be refused. So ordinary orange-robed Naga Babas found temporary lodging, as did the black-clad administrator monks from Headquarters, or the sinister Aghora Babas, followers of the Left Hand Path, who acknowledge no restraints of morality or decency. Swami Krishnapuri examined his memories of the guests carefully, but could recall no instances of disharmony, no failure of hospitality to account for this calamity.

Had he failed in his priestly duties? He went over the habitual temple worship and the rituals for fast and feast days. Had he upset the sun or moon during an eclipse? When no explanation occurred to his tormented mind, he fell at last into exhausted sleep, disturbed by horrendous nightmares.

Swami Krishnnapuri’s parents stayed on the next day, visiting as many temples as possible, entreating the gods and goddesses to cure their son. The mother made promises: if you restore my son’s sight, I will offer this and that to you. When they saw that there was no improvement in their son’s condition and that he appeared to derive no comfort from their company, they left.

The blind man sat in silence, ignoring the sounds that had seemed so preternaturally sharp at first. His mind ceased wrestling with phantom sorcerers and relapsed into a murmured repetition of “Om Namah Shivay, Om Namah Shivay, Om Namah Shivay.” As he became calmed by the mantra, Lord Shiva came clearly into his mind. He remembered that, aeons in the past, Shiva had come to this area which had then been devastated by demons. He had conquered them, then settled peacefully to meditate on this very Maikal Mountain whose lower slopes touched the ashram wall. The mountain was barren and waterless rock when Shiva closed his eyes. As the god sat in strenuous meditation, sweat trickled down his body and formed a little stream which ran down the valley. Water attracted plants, birds and animals until, when the Lord Shiva opened his eyes again, the landscape was transformed. He saw the bounty of nature personified in a mischievous young girl, the water-spirit sprung from his body, his daughter Narmada.

The idea of Shiva’s eyes, voluntarily closed for long ages, and the transformation to which he opened them, brought obscure comfort to the blind man. The weight of despair lifted a little and it occurred to him to summon a neighbouring sadhu of his own Order to attempt an exorcism.

This time, when the chela left him alone, the anxiety was less intense. A tiny moth of hope fluttered in his heart, and when he recognised the voice of the Baba, who returned promptly with the boy, his answering “Narmaday Har!” resonated with welcome.

Over the customary tea and cigarettes, his visitor assured him that the dark forces – whatever they were – could be neutralized without identifying the source. The boy fetched a drum from the temple and they began with an invocation to Bholenath, the Pure Lord.

Om Namah Shivay, Om Namah Shivay,

Har Har Bhole, Namah Shivay!

The rhythmic kirtan, repeated with variations for several minutes, created a calm atmosphere. Sacred fire and incense purified the eight directions, followed by long prayers and incantations in Sanskrit, until at last the exorcist said quietly, “All will be well,” and took his leave.

The moth of hope in Krishnapuri’s heart folded its wings patiently and he slept soundly for the first time in a week. In the morning – nothing had changed. The darkness was as opaque as before. The sadhu went through the morning routine, now with more physical confidence, and sat in the yard sipping tea. As he lifted his face towards the sun, he saw a glimmer of pale gold light. He blinked. It was still there. He turned his head away. It was gone. He faced the sun. It was there.

Swami Krishnapuri faced his chela while he lit the cigarette but detected no flare of the match. Yet the moth of hope fluttered its wings. The man deliberately kept calm, aware of his breathing. With awe, he observed the world very slowly coming back into focus: the pale blue dome of the temple with the bright sky behind; tendrils of foliage on a nearby creeper, swaying in the breeze; the face of his chela, confused – incredulous – delighted.

In the space of a week, Swami Krishnapuri’s world, grown barren with familiarity and indifference, had transformed into beauty and significance. He closed his eyes and looked inside. Flooded with gratitude, his soul rekindled within him.