Somewhere between 10 million and 50 million people worship Sai Baba as God incarnate, and they stream into Puttaparthi from six continents, sleeping in one of the ashram's 10,000 beds or at one of the town's many guesthouses. Meanwhile, the growing number of ex-devotees who decry their former master as a sexual harasser, a fraud and even a pedophile has hardly put a dent in his following, though their voices are getting louder.

"Sai Baba was my God -- who dares to refuse God? He was free to do whatever he wanted to do with me; he had my trust, my faith, my love and my friendship; he had me in totality," says Iranian-American former follower Said Khorramshahgol. What Sai Baba chose to do with him, Khorramshahgol says, was to repeatedly call him into private interviews and order him to drop his pants and massage his penis. Other former devotees contend Sai Baba did even more. No matter -- in this part of the world, faith is absolute. Believers don't refuse God, and they don't question him.

On Puttaparthi's outskirts, a Hindu temple has a statue of Sai Baba among its pantheon of deities, standing right next to Krishna. In the town, every conceivable surface is adorned with pictures of Sai Baba wearing an orange robe and a benign smile. There's a photo of him garlanded with fake pink flowers in my hotel room and a giant portrait behind the reception desk. Each afternoon, a speaker across from my bed pipes in music praising the guru. When I buy a pen to take notes, it has Sai Baba's smiling face on it.

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Days at the ashram revolve around an event known as "darshan," when Sai Baba walks through an open-air, pastel-colored hall (called a mandir) and shows his precious self to the assembled multitudes. It takes place once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and people line up for hours beforehand. Everyone is desperate to get in first, because sitting near the front means that Sai Baba might say a few words to you, accept a letter or even invite you into his special chamber for a private interview. Private interviews are the raison d'être of life in Puttaparthi. They're where Sai Baba does most of his famous materializations -- ostensibly conjuring up objects like rings, watches and necklaces from the air as gifts for the faithful.

The afternoon I went to darshan, I spent 45 minutes waiting in a line outside and 45 more minutes sitting cross-legged amid thousands of other worshipers on the marble floor of the mandir. There were almost as many foreigners in the hall, which can seat about 15,000 people, as there were Indians. Dozens of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, which was decorated with gold leaf. At the foot of the mandir was a stage, with a door leading into the guru's private interview room.

Just when the boredom was growing interminable, recorded music started up and a charge went through the crowd as necks craned for a glimpse of Sai Baba, a slightly frail figure wearing his customary floor-length robe and fluffy nimbus of black hair. He gave a little Princess Di wave as he walked from the women's side to the men's side (everything at the ashram is strictly segregated by sex) and then back again, taking some of the letters that were fervently offered to him as he passed. All around me women's eyes were shining, and some of the women rocked back and forth ecstatically. Sai Baba then exited the way he'd entered, and it was over -- in less than 10 minutes. An angelic-looking retired woman from Denmark told me she'd been doing this every day, twice a day, for three months.

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