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The Khadeshwar Baba had been standing on one leg for six years. He looked remarkably cheerful, though that might have been something to do with the amount of charas he’d been smoking over the last few days. He was covered head to foot in ash and naked except for a small ashy loincloth. One leg was in a sling and he was leaning on a kind of shelf suspended from a tree. “Come, I give you tika”, he beckoned, dipping his fingers into a bowl of ash, “blessings of Lord Shiva”. Smudging an ashy thumbprint on our foreheads he motioned us to sit down and told his disciple to pass us the chilam.

Smoking hashish is an obligatory function of the sadhu, or holy man - part of his ‘darshan’, his divine gift of communication with god; and for the three days of Shivaratri the Nepalese authorities who usually subscribe to the school of ‘zero tolerance’, turn a blind eye to all the bleary shenanigans going on down at the ancient golden temple of Pashupatinath. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come here from the rest of Nepal and the Indian subcontinent to celebrate the ‘birthday’ of that most wayward and contradictory divinity of the Hindu pantheon, Lord Shiva - the Great Destroyer-Creator, Boundary-Breaker, Intoxicated Ascetic, Priapic Hermit, Ecstatic Madman – and many will take the time out to share in the sadhus’ religious high, to try and get a glimpse of the god for themselves through an inspirational haze of hashish.

It seemed churlish not to accept Khadeshwar Baba’s invitation, though he almost fell off his perch laughing as we tried to get to grips with his little clay pipe. His disciple masterfully inhaled through cupped hands, head tilted to one side, keeping a small piece of cloth stretched over the hole at the bottom so the ash didn’t fall out. We followed his example and in the process drew a large crowd of onlookers and a photographer from the Kathmandu Post, who put us on the back page of his newspaper the next day under the caption ‘Western tourists taking a puff’.

Our Standing-on-one-leg Baba was a regular at Shivaratri in Kathmandu. He came here from Madhya Pradesh in northern India – fifty hours balancing in the aisle of a bus hurtling through the winding foothills of the Himalayas. Other sadhus, hundreds of them, had come too, flocking to Pashupatinath – one of the holiest of all Hindu temples - like migratory birds. These ‘naked philosophers’ with their wild dreadlocks and bloodshot eyes, their rudra beads and trademark tridents – the traditional weapon of Shiva – were known to Greeks who visited India as far back as 300 BC. They are part of an ancient ascetic tradition, spiritual seekers who have renounced sedentary society and material comfort, all vestiges of ‘normal’ life; who have severed themselves from home and family, and now move with the seasons from one festival to the next, living in hermitic isolation in between. Even if a sadhu accidentally meets with his mother, he is said not to recognise her. He is in the process of loosing the bonds that tie him to this world and keep him from the next; he is, in effect, one of the ‘living dead’.

Some of the Babas at the festival looked like they were already on the threshold of their next life. One or two were cadaverously thin. They sat propped up against the shrines that lined the pedestrian route down to the river like fallen leaves, as if one puff of wind might blow them away. Another, little older than a boy, was painfully swollen, his legs covered in running sores, the result, probably, of one self-inflicted penance too many.

But most, like our Khadeshwar Baba, were beautiful, commandingly self-assured, their bodies temples of energy, faces like noble, errant princes. They twisted themselves into eye-watering yogic knots partly, it must be said, for the bakshish donated by awed on-lookers; but partly to demonstrate a core of inner spiritual strength. There was a mesmeric, far-away look in their eyes, even when upside down or with their legs wrapped around their head, that was more than just the effect of fantastically dilated pupils. They radiated charisma like an electric current, so that even in a crowd you could tell from sheer dynamism when a sadhu was passing by.

Some of the sadhus were distinctly scary – like the Aghoris with their bells and boar tusks and magic mantras, who assaulted their amused but decorous Nepalese audience with a torrent of obscenities. They drank ostentatiously from human skulls and were rumoured to eat human flesh. More than anyone they were at home here in Pashupatinath, for the ancient temple complex is also a cremation ground, the haunt of witches and jackals and evil spirits and things that go bump in the night. Only by confronting these human fears head on, the Aghoris believe - only, specifically, by conquering one’s fear of death - can the soul find release.

Down at the cremation ghats, life – and death – continued as normal, irrespective of the tide of pilgrims swirling about them. The acrid-sweet smell of burning straw and flesh from funeral pyres merged with the smoke from a thousand smouldering sadhu camp-fires. Bereaved sons shaved their heads, their hair drifting down the muddy trickle that was the pre-monsoon Bagmati, like river-weed. An old woman was brought out from the hospice to spend her dying moments on a ritual slab with her feet in the sacred, flotsam-congested water.

The crowds continued to swell as more and more passed through the temple precincts after performing their puja at the central shrine. The object of their devotion was the linga, sacred aniconic image of Shiva, the phallic icon swollen with regenerative power, an object so ‘hot’ it must be constantly libated with cooling milk and water.

The sadhus worship the linga too, of course, but bring their devotions closer to home. Like Shiva, they are brimming with virility and testosterone yet they undertake to stay celibate, channelling their sexual energy for the higher destiny of rejoining its spiritual source. They go to extraordinary lengths – literally – to demonstrate the achievement of mind over matter.

Up at our gathering, a strange little Baba swathed in nylon leopard-print was causing quite a commotion. When he wiggled his hips there came a jingling sound from beneath his cloak, and roars of laughter from the crowd. Only when someone provided a generous bakshish did the Baba throw open his garment and reveal the origin of this celestial ringing. Hanging from his penis was a large padlock and a string of bells.

Sensing his moment, Khadeshwar Baba beamed mischievously. Looking furtively around for any signs of police – nudity is still a serious offence in Nepal, even during Shivaratri – he hopped out of his sling and dropped his loincloth. His disciple, deftly as a conjuror’s assistant, produced a stick around which the sadhu proceeded to wrap his lingam, which he then passed between his legs and held behind him like a strangled cobra. From the front he looked suddenly, disconcertingly, like a woman. But he wasn’t finished. Quick as a flash, his disciple jumped up on his back and stood on the stick. “Strong cock! Strong cock!” shouted young lads in the crowd.

Before I could put my eyes back in their sockets, Babaji had returned to his perch and was nonchalantly blessing people from his ash-bowl as if nothing had happened. “Isn’t that painful?” I asked in amazement. “It’s big problem”, he grinned, “Want to see my photo album?” How could I refuse? There were pictures of Babaji, stark naked, pulling a truck along a dusty road, the lingam-stick wedged behind him down the front bumper. Several years ago, a PR agent for an Indian car manufacturer had seen him doing this and recruited him for an advertising campaign. Babaji had gone to Italy where he pulled their latest model around the streets of Milan. With the money he’d been given he’d started to build a temple to Shiva in Madya Pradesh. Six more years on one leg – never sitting, never lying down, never standing on two feet - with a bit of lingam-training on the side, and he’d have earned enough tips to finish the temple.

Evening was drawing on and we were nearing the twilight zone, the night sacred to Shiva, between the waxing and waning moons, when time is arrested between past and future, when the mind is suspended in nomansland. The young bloods in the crowd, unused to smoking ganga, were growing restless, like jackals. One of them was scampering up and down the temple steps above us like a terrified monkey, hurling sticks at invisible demons. Every now and then he loosed an angry shower of rocks at us. Only Babaji and his disciple remained unfazed, laughing goodhumouredly at his antics while everyone else scurried for cover. It seemed time for us bideshis, with perhaps a tinge of penis envy, to call it a day and leave Pashupatinath to the stout of heart and strong of lingam to pass the night with Lord Shiva.

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