Comment: Some months after this discourse, I was discussing with my long-standing friend and confidante, V.K. Narasimhan, the editor of Sanathana Sarathi, who passed away in March 2000 after long sufferings. While he was alive I had to keep quite about many things he told me so as to protect him from unscrupulous elements at the ashram, he had jealous enemies there and his personal security could have been at considerable risk. I now consider it my duty in conscience and towards the public to reveal his confidences to me, which became more and more of a burden.

Narasimhan had disliked the discourse about the ghostly visitation of Easwaramma, considering it a rambling and unlikely concoction. I asked him why Sai Baba had allowed publication of such possibly compromising details, that three boys sleep in his bedroom. At that time I was still a convinced devotee - though troubled by many inconsistencies and unanswered questions about him - and I had heard reports that Sai Baba was a homosexual, but I had consistently ignored and even ridiculed them, but I knew that a former close devotee, Tal Brooke, had written a book accusing Sai Baba of pedophilia, though I had never read it.

I was still completely unable to believe that Sai Baba had any sexual relations whatever, and had some years earlier tried to convince a Belgian professor - Dr. Gabriel Spillers - that his strong opinion that Sai Baba had homosexual relations could not possible be true! I asked VKN about the boys who slept in Sai Baba's room and he was clearly uncomfortable, saying said it was a tradition (I assumed it was a boon granted by a spiritual master, to be allowed to massage his feet and legs etc. so I never thought to ask him what exactly was not abnormal as it is in the West). He did say that homosexuality was not considered as abnormal in India as it is in the West (or words to that effect). Odd that homosexuality is against the law in India, but long since legal and even protected by law in the West! VKN was elderly and his experience of the West was largely from pre-war years. Like VKN, I thought the claimed unnatural events would strongly reduce the credibility of Sathya Sai Baba to the world at large, as no doubt it does.

I asked VKN the age of the boys. I recall he gave their age as about 18 to 20 years old, and he asked me whether this fact would cause any problems in the West, was there anything wrong in it. I said that it most certainly would cause a major stir if the boys had been under age. He looked quite crestfallen and sat silent for some time, as if unable to find words, a most unusual state of affairs for him, as anyone who met him privately knows well!