My Brother Eruch (Page 3 of 3)

She promised him that he would be there, and Eruch departed for Pune. At Bindra House that night, he asked me, “Would you like to come with me on a picnic tomorrow at the site of the world’s largest dam?” Still just a boy at the time, this idea was appealing to me, and this is where I came into and became a witness to the rest of the story.
That next morning, packed lunch in hand, the two of us caught an early bus to Bhor. When we reached the hut, we found the man waiting for us. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“My elder brother sent me,” Eruch told him. “He wishes to give you some help in your predicament.”

“I can’t accept a loan,” the man said. “I wouldn’t be able to pay it back.”

“There is no question of repayment. This is a gift of love from my elder brother. Please accept it, and he will be obliged to you.
“But there is a condition,” Eruch went on. “I have to wash your feet and bow down to you. Please allow me to do this, so that I may give you this gift.”

Very reluctantly the man agreed. Eruch washed his feet, bowed down before him, and gave him the packet which contained quite a substantial sum.

The man was rendered stunned and speechless by this whole turn of events. Immediately Eruch turned to me and said, “The work is done. Let’s go now.”

But before we had gone more than a few steps back down the road, the man came running after us. “Who are you?” he said. “Who has given me this gift?”

“It is from my elder brother,” Eruch answered. “It is an expression of love for you and your family. Don’t ask any more about it.”

“But did you know,” the man went on, “that if you had sought for me tomorrow you would not have found me here? And do you know why not? Do you know what I was planning to do?”

“What is that?”

“This very day I was planning to kill myself, to commit suicide by jumping over the dam wall. I had reached such desperate straits, such a dead end in my life, that there seemed to be no other way out for me. It is thanks to you that I am living on past this day.”

“Don’t give your thanks to me,” Eruch said. “Give your thanks to God. Great is His mercy and compassion. All praise to Him!”

With this, Eruch and I left quickly and hurried back along the road to the dam. There, as Eruch had promised, I got to enjoy a pleasant picnic and outing; and that evening we caught the bus back to Pune.

The beauty of this story is that it shows not only Meher Baba’s unfathomable compassion for who but God could have arranged in such an indirect and understated way to bring a gift like this in the very nick of time into the hands of a man who so desperately needed it, but at the same time it depicts Eruch’s extraordinary obedience and intuitive responsiveness to his wish and will. What an unobstructed channel he was for the flow of Meher Baba’s divine life! Indeed, as Meher Baba himself said, Eruch was “matchless.” But all this was the effect of Meher Baba’s work with him. As Meherwan so beautifully said at the beginning of his story, “what would most please Eruch would be if, when we commemorate him, what we remember is the painstaking years of effort that Baba spent in training Eruch, so as to bring him up to the standard of what we see today.

“In my 70 years association with Eruch, there was hardly a chance to be close to Eruch, since he was all the while so close to Baba. So attuned was Eruch to Baba’s ways that he actually lived his life as if living out Baba’s wishes and commands. Eruch was so focused on Baba that his life was truly and totally his.”