National Highway

A family was driving towards Noida when their son wanted to take a leak. He got out of the car, turned away from the road, faced the Yamuna and relieved himself. A few minutes later, he fell ill and started behaving abnormally. His horrified family tried everything they could; finally they took him to Syed Mansoor Nizami, alias Pir Haji Kashani Baba, in Nizamuddin, who instantly divined that a spirit had possessed the boy.

The Baba sat the boy down before him and addressed the spirit. “O Spirit, why did you enter the body of this boy?”

When a spirit enters a person, it is the spirit who speaks, and this one said the boy had urinated upon it on the banks of the Yamuna.

“It is perfectly understandable,” said the Baba. “Anyone you pee on would be angry at you.”

Pir Haji Kashani Baba then proceeded to exorcise the spirit with the help of a broom made of peacock feathers. The boy was soon restored to his senses.

The Baba has been exorcising spirits for decades and, according to him, the most common reason why they possess human beings is the scent of perfume or the flowers that women wear. “When women go on family picnics to India Gate, they don’t realise that the trees in a place like that are at least 200 years old,” he says, “Evil spirits hang from the branches of old trees and are attracted by perfume.”

Committing suicide amounts to deciding one’s fate and not letting Allah do so, he says, and thus the spirits of those who kill themselves never reach either heaven or hell, and are condemned to linger on earth forever. These are the evil spirits, the shaitani atma, that possess people.

Pir Haji Kashani Baba can change your business fortunes, get you married, prevent your divorce, make you conceive (and grant you a boy at that), save your children from the evil eye, help them perform better in school, and bless them for life. And exorcise spirits. He can do this because he has what most of us don’t — the power of ruhaniyat. “Ruhaniyat is the power of Allah,” he says, “It comes from the will of Allah. Allah’s wish is that you follow him, perform namaz regularl

y, read the Quran Sharief. If your karma is good, Allah may bless you with ruhaniyat.” Once acquired, though, ruhaniyat is like a ball of fire. If not used carefully, it can ruin its owner. “Ruhaniyat is to be felt, ruhaniyat is aatishi, ruhaniyat is the power of Allah. Should Allah want, he can turn day into night and night into day.”

“I am more like a doctor or engineer, you know, who uses specialised knowledge,” he says, adding, however, that he doesn’t have much respect for scientists. “They don’t believe in Allah.”

There are many Sufis in Nizamuddin who claim to have such powers and who distribute amulets and pray for you. But Pir Haji Kashani Baba is different for unlike many others he has a two-story establishment all to himself. Its hoardings apart, it looks rather ordinary, much like any of the other shops cramping the mausoleum of Hazrat Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, the famous 12th century Sufi saint. The Baba’s shop, like his visiting card, advertises: “Spritual Treatment for the solution of any kind of problem, Business and Marriage Purpose, Effect of Bad Air, Jadu Tona”. He also has a website (www.sufisainthazratnizamuddinaulia.com) which is currently down, because he’s planning renovations with more extensive information about ruhaniyat. Requests are received by post or e-mail, but he prefers most to be faxed. A letter lying near him lists the names of all the members of a joint family that is consulting him, with flowchart-like lines indicating who is doing jadu tona on whom. Since his fame spread across the world, all sorts of people write to him: white, black and brown. A request from the Netherlands includes a family photograph. “This is my family,” it says on the back. “Help me save it.” The divorce successfully prevented, the entire family flew down to Delhi to pay obeisance at the Nizamuddin Dargah.

For all his emphasis on following the path of Allah, the Baba is quick to say that all religions are equal. “I serve humanity, not religion.” The people who come to him are largely Hindu and Sikh; when people’s miseries are not alleviated by their own religions, they step away from them and into the plural domain of the Sufi tradition. Those complaining from ‘Effect of Bad Air’ or ‘Jadu Tona’ may also be suffering from mental disorders.

On the ground floor at the Baba’s is the waiting area. Remove your shoes outside and wait. If there is no attendant, a seemingly disembodied voice will command you to come upstairs. You obey and enter a plush, air-conditioned room; you may not notice the CCTV camera with which the Baba anticipates his visitors or the microphone over which he announces whose turn is next. There are several phones, mobiles, a fax machine, and if you don’t drink tea, there’s always Pepsi. But the traditions of centuries are in no conflict with modernity: “The outward appearance is immaterial. Ruhaniyat is in the heart and the mind.”

A prominent signboard in the Baba’s office says, “Ask one question only in a visit.” He clarifies that once people have requested him to solve the problem they came with, they start asking solutions for “irrelevant matters like stomach aches or servants who have run away.”

So how much does he charge? He points to the donation box. “I don’t need people or their money . They need me,” he says grandly. “Fakirs are the shehenshahs of Time.”

The one thing ruhaniyat can’t do is stop wars “because they happen of Allah’s will. They happen because man has been running after the shaitaan.” The one thing he won’t use ruhaniyat for is winning you an election. “A politician himself once told me that a politician is born after 100 politicians die.” It was to keep away from politics that he refused to participate in peace processions in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. And he says he won’t entertain requests to use ruhaniyat to hurt another person.

Often you may not find him in his Nizamuddin office, for he travels the world over. People send him air tickets and sponsor his stay. All he does is use the power of ruhaniyat to fulfil their wishes. Lest you think this claim is a lie, he shows you his passport, five old ones stuck together. In the last month-and-a-half, he’s visited 11 countries. Don’t his followers in Delhi suffer when he is away? “What to do, Allah takes me all over the world.” This includes his office in T exas, a photograph of which adorns his booklet about the Nizamuddin tradition and his place in it. He draws his lineage from Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s sister, and he is also the president of the Chishtia Nizamia Mission, which takes care of the s hrine and spreads the saint’s message to the world.

The Baba is the 31st in his line and his interest in ruhaniyat was sparked when, at age 10, he saw his father save a man’s life by blessing him. Pir Haji Kashani Baba’s two elder sons, however, run a cd manufacturing business, and his third is training to be a software engineer. Doesn’t he feel sad that the tradition of ruhaniyat in his family could come to an end? “Why? Just as people come to Hazrat Nizamuddin’s dargah with their wishes, so they will come to mine.”

[First published in Tehelka. Photo credit: Abhinandita D. Mathur/Tehelka.]