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Sai Baba Man of Miracles – Howard Murphet

It was in those days of cramped sitting space that he began taking his followers to sit on the sands of the Chitravati. This today is a river of sand, three or four hundred yards broad near the village, and dry except in the rainy seasons. In the early 1940s it was much the same, except that most of the time there was a narrow stream of water running through the sands. Here the young Sai would sit with his crowd of followers. Here on the sands he would lead them in bhajan singing, advise them on their personal problems, teach them the way to live, and build up their faith by various miraculous phenomena.

On the crest of a rocky knoll on the left bank of the river, about half a mile from the village, grows a solitary tamarind tree. In those early years it acquired the name of Kalpatoru, or wish-fulfilling tree.

This was because Sai Baba used to take his devotees - or at least those who could climb - up to this tree and ask them what fruit they would like to pick from it.  When they named the fruit it would be seen immediately hanging from a branch of the tree. Apples, pears, mangoes, oranges, figs and other varieties of fruit, out of season, and some not ever grown in the district, were plucked from the wild tamarind tree.