SWAMI.(The Talk of the Town)

Ever since Kofi Annan took on the role of Secretary-General of the United Nations, ten years ago, the opening day of the General Assembly has been accompanied by an interfaith prayer service at St. Bartholomew's Church, on Park Avenue. And every year that service has commenced with a demonstration of respiratory virtuosity by Swami Bua.

Swami Bua is a hundred and seventeen years old, or, at least, is said to be. He has many enthusiasms--swimming, boxing, breathing through the eyes--but the one that recommends him to the U.N. each fall is the conch. He can (supposedly) blow on a conch shell for eight straight days: one note, one breath, a hundred and ninety-four hours. It is a feat of circular breathing that would make Rahsaan Roland Kirk blush.

Swamiji ("-ji" is the honorific) lives on the eleventh floor of a postwar tower on West Fifty-eighth Street. His apartment is the one with the sign on the door that reads, "To Ring Well Please Press Well the Bottom Bell." It contains a studio, where he teaches two yoga classes each weekday. At dawn, last Tuesday, on the morning of the service, he was seated in the studio, dressed in orange robes and socks, and black shoes with Velcro straps. He had a flowing white beard and a smudge of ash on his forehead which identifies him as a follower of Shiva. His face brought to mind both the knob on an old walking stick and an ancient Yosemite Sam.

He greeted a guest by holding out two Italian herbal lozenges and exclaiming, gruffly, "How's your father?" This query later proved less startling than it at first seemed; he asked it of others, none of whom, of course, asked it of him. The walls were hung with photographs of a youthful, loinclothed Swami Bua--in his eighties, maybe--and when the guest pointed them out the Swami shouted, "Looking good!" Indeed. Each declaration ended with a burst of impish laughter. "I have no glass," he said, pointing to his eyes. "I am glassless man! Heh heh heh."

The guest had been instructed to take Swamiji by taxi to St. Bart's, where he was to issue the service's call to prayer by blowing on his conch. A ...