OK just write a bit about him for the website they said, easier said then done.
I’ve known him all my life, what with being his younger brother, I was his 3rd birthday present, (I shouldn’t think he was very impressed with that!). We shared a lot of things, invariably had at least one shared Christmas gift, and of course we shared childhood diseases such as chicken pox and the like. Of course we fought like cat and dog at times but we always had each others back..
He had a strange talent of cheating the grim reaper,our mother would always regale us with the story of him being stillborn and left for dead for half an hour before he was revived when he got into a scrape, I watched him fall off a cliff when he was about 11 of 12 and of course he must have landed on his head as his only injury was a pulled muscle in his neck so no damage there then!! He had various scrapes which would normally put someone in hospital that he would just dust himself off and walk away from. We were raised in a steel town in the north east and so when he left school he took a job in the steelworks, he hated the job, money was short and he had to be ‘encouraged’ to put in a bit of overtime, on one Saturday morning doing a bit of overtime he got his left hand caught in the machinery, a rolling press, and was dragged in right up to his shoulder, crushed his middle finger knuckle, broke a few bones in his hand, damaged some ligaments and tore the skin on the back of his hand as he tried to pull himself from the press, those who knew him may remember the scarring on his hand.
It was about this time when he had yet another argument with the parents and moved out of the house, took a bedsit in the town centre, he took me round to see it once, what an absolute dump it was! He had some trouble there and the next thing I knew he had moved to London. We had rare contact after that, but he did keep in contact, however rarely with our parents, he would just land on the doorstep every couple of years or so, on his beloved motorbike, tell us of his life in the big smoke, but he would invariably upset someone and leave having caused a bit of friction in the family, almost always under a cloud.
I have no idea what age he was when he found his way, his calling, his purpose in life, call it what you like but he would tell you himself he was a nobody going nowhere until a stranger set him on the path to becoming BAPU, I am unsure as to whether he was given the name or chose it himself but he had a talent for reading people, his encyclopedic knowledge of astrological events (self taught I believe), he was open minded to many religions and beliefs and the energy of the cosmos, the properties of certain shapes to focus the energy, he was open minded about a lot of things but always analysed things with his logical thinking. He had no filter, he’d shoot from the hip which put him in a bad light sometimes so you either loved him or hated him but he was honest to the point of bluntness.
Just after his passing whilst chatting with a friend of his about his demeanour his friend said that was down to his autism and the penny dropped with me, we didn’t have such a thing as autism back in the 60s or at least he was never diagnosed as such but yes, stillborn, starved of oxygen when he was born of course he was autistic we just didn’t see it!