In January 2007, I traveled to Mumbai, India, in order to meet with Yogi Amrit Desai and a small group of people who were taking a 'lineage tour' of various places in India that are of seminal importance to the history of Kripalu Yoga. Kripalu's yogic pedigree traces its roots back to the second century CE, when an historical figure named Lord Lakulish founded the Pashupats sect of yoga from which Kripalu Yoga is derived. Lord Lakulish is revered as an incarnation of Lord Shiva, and credited with systematically formalizing the earthly practice of yoga. Our itinerary included a trip to the temple in Kayavarohan, which is dedicated to Lord Shiva and houses an extraordinary likeness of the yogic body Lord Shiva appeared in as Lord Lakulish.

Though our first destination would be a visit and stay at a temple under construction that was located outside a small village called Malav, located in the Gujarat District of southwestern India. One of the significances of the temple in Malav is that it was being built over the entombed remains of Shrii Kripalvanandji, Yogi Desai’s guru and the namesake of Kripalu Yoga. It was widely felt in India, as well as among devoted yoga practitioners throughout the world, that Shrii Kripalvanandji in his lifetime achieved a rarified state of yoga mastery called nirvana yoga (absolute liberation), and following his death, or mahasamadhi, many viewed and experienced him as a saint possessing and dispensing eternal metaphysical attributes (miracles).

After a weekend in Mumbai to acclimate, we flew to the city of Baroda and then boarded a chartered bus that would take us to the village of Malav. Except for Yogi Desai and his son, Malay, none of the rest of us in the entourage were Indian and only a few had previously been to India. Of the Westerners, I was the only one who knew Yogi Desai from before the end of his tenure as the spiritual director of The Kripalu Center thirteen years earlier.

As most of us were encountering one another for the first time, the atmosphere in the bus was informal, relaxed and chatty as we eagerly exchanged stories about what brought each of us here. After about an hour into the trip Yogi Desai, who was sitting in the front of the bus, stood up and went into the cab to talk with the driver. He came out smiling gleefully, and then announced that we were going to be taking a little detour in order to visit the village where he spent the first ten years of his life. Eyes twinkling, he went on to tell us, "Those of you who only know me and how I live in America are going to be very surprised to see where and how I grew up."

Well, except for his son, that was all of us. Though in the course of doing research for writing this book, I’d looked through some of Yogi Desai's archival materials and photos. So I knew that when Amrit Desai was growing up in this small village called Pratapurra there were about 250 residents. Photos of the village, including ones taken of Amrit Desai as a boy with his mother, father and siblings, had to be at least six decades old.

I presumed that like with most places in this day and age, Pratappura would have changed dramatically over that amount of time and be rendered unrecognizable. I began to get my first inclination that I might be wrong when the bus driver announced that we were there and simply pulled off onto the side of the highway to let us disembark. There were no signs on the highway marking our arrival in Pratappura, nor was there a road from the highway leading into the village.

Our bus was modern and air-conditioned and the first thing we noticed as walked out of the bus was a palpable wave of heat engulf us. I recalled that the average mean daily temperature in Gujarat was nearly one hundred degrees. I felt relieved that we’d come here in the ‘cool’ part of the year.

Our group variously walked, scuttled, and slid down a scree of rocks, pebbles, and fine gravel that safely raised the highway up and away from the surrounding landscape. (The predominant driving style in vast, overcrowded India is as fast as possible and with horn blaring.) Yogi Desai led us along a dirt path through brush into a clearing that was filled with flat plates and round bowls hardening in the sun on the earth. The plates and bowls were made from a mixture of clay and cow dung and served as the chief export and source of income for the village.

An elderly woman sitting in the shade of a lean-to made of stone with a tin roof, who appeared to be waiting patiently for the plates to dry and harden, greeted us with a mirthful grin. Yogi Desai returned her greeting by bowing his head, raising his hands in prayer position, and offering, "J’ai Bhagwan." A salutation that literally means, "I recognize and honor the divine in you".

We each repeated the gesture as we passed, and the woman grew giddier and giddier, rocking and laughing in place.

We then entered the village – a variety of fifty or so small- and medium-sized makeshift shelters circumnavigated by an unpaved dirt pathway. Cows and oxen meandered freely. The present state of the village was not just similar to the pictures I’d seen from sixty years earlier -- except for a few motor scooters it was exactly the same.

Children literally shot out from their homes and schoolrooms and swarmed us. They yelped, giggled, danced, laughed and made us their playthings. I’ve traveled and lived before in places where people were 'deprived' of TV and other electronic distractions, so I was somewhat prepared for the onslaught of raw unfiltered energy. Though the level of kinesis exuded by these children was something special. The girls, dressed in brightly colored pastel saris and with their faces painted and pierced, and the dark skinned boys wearing bright white school-uniform shirts and swirling around us like dervishes, made it feel as though we were being abducted by a colorful tribe of mystically charged mini-people.

Yogi Desai good-naturedly and patiently allowed them to do their thing, and then explained to them in Gujarati what it was he and us were doing here. He then told them with words and hand gestures that they could flank us quietly and follow us around on our tour of the village if they wanted. Most were too excited and restive to accept such an invitation and bolted, but several of them did as he asked and that’s how we proceeded into the village.

It was remarkable to me that a dozen or so camera carrying light-skinned foreigners could walk into a self-contained hamlet like this unannounced, unexpected, and not receive a single suspicious or even circumspect glance. In fact, eye contact invariably triggered a mirthful grin or welcoming smile, as though there was a button in the villagers' eye-pupils that made their lips automatically soften and widen when you looked at them. The impromptu smiles and grins were more than welcoming; they were contagious and uplifting.

Immediately, our own circumspect feelings and logy pace picked up and became more spirited, liberated. Behind Yogi Desai and the Indian children, we nearly pranced into the center of the village.

The provisional-looking structures that served as permanent homes for the villagers did not provide much shelter from the elements, or privacy. Windows and entranceways were not covered. In passing during daytime, one could look through from one end of the homes to the other, as well as see everything in between. Elderly people lying on cots in their homes fanned themselves with one hand and with the other waved out to us nonchalantly.

When we came to a stone structure with a tin roof and a small makeshift wooden porch attached to it that displayed various daily sundries, Yogi Desai told us that this is how his father had made a living for his family. "We rarely exchanged money. People would come in with what they had, trade it for flour or sugar, which we would then trade for milk, and so on." Then he looked up at a roll of shiny cardboard tags hanging from the top of the porch and flickering in the sunlight. "Only back then we didn’t have lotteries."

In a book published by the Kripalu Yoga Fellowship in 1982, The Life of Yogi Amrit Desai, Yogi Desai described growing up in Pratappura in the following way: "Every morning I would awaken on my cot to the sound of my father's hookah (water-pipe) bubbling and gurgling as he waited for the family's bath water to heat. I could hear the crackle of the fire, and the sweet smell of the fire's smoke filled the room. My mother would grind flour at this time. There were two round stones, with a hole in the center into which she would constantly feed the grain. She would turn the upper stone by a handle to grind the grain into flour. The whole time she was preparing the grain, she would sing bhajans, or devotional hymns. I would awaken to her sweet voice, the sound of the turning stones, and the songs of birds." [All the quotes in the remainder of this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, will be from The Life of Yogi Amrit Desai.]

Though he was a man of modest means, Yogi Desai’s father, Chimanlal, was literate as well as a devout Hindu. In the evenings he would read to his wife and children stories from the Mahabharata or Ramayana -- lush, epic tales of the adventures, loves, misadventures, wars and fractious personal interactions among India's exotic pantheon of Gods, Goddesses, Demigods, and Androgens. "Our young imaginations were tremendous," Amrit recalled, "and the entire scene of every story would come alive in my mind more vividly than a movie. Every day, no matter what I was doing, I was always dreaming of where the story would go next. We were all eager to hear the continuation of these fantastic epics."

No matter how richly young Amrit Desai’s imagination was being fertilized, I think it’s safe to say that he could not have dreamt at the time that one day he’d live a parallel reality on another side of the world, and then return home for a show and tell with some of the people who were a part of that epic drama with him.