Growing up with Meher Baba (Page 5 of 10)

Now I’ll finish my tale of first meeting Meher Baba in 1948 in India. During our stay, one day we went to breakfast, and while we were sitting there a message came from Baba. He said that day we were not allowed to talk about serious subjects. No politics, no religion, no Sufism, no nothing. Just fun and play — that was it. So we sat down to breakfast, and around the end of the meal our brains slipped a cog and we got off on some worldly subject. I remember that we had barely opened our mouths when again Dr. Goher came flying around the corner and said, “Baba says you have forgotten your promises!” It blew my mind because there was nothing in my thoughts and actions that He didn’t know. Finally we were called in to see Him and we told jokes that day. It was awful telling a joke because you always had the feeling He knew the ending before you got there. So we found ourselves stumbling faster and faster, trying to get the words out, to beat Him to the punch line, so to speak; and He laughed very quietly and seemed to enjoy our jokes. He always asked for more jokes. It was great fun.

Murshida Ada Martin was Inayat Khan’s first American student. He renamed her Rabia and later appointed her his successor. She became convinced that Meher Baba was a true spiritual master. Later her successor Murshida Ivy Duce brought the Sufi Order under Meher Baba’s direction. He reoriented Sufism.

On the last night, I remember Him asking us to sing. I sang “Summertime” for Him, and then He asked Mother and me to sing a duet. We stared at each other. Mother had studied singing and sang beautifully, but I had never had any training and we had never sung duets before, so we didn’t know what to sing. There was only one song that we had sung while riding in the car, and that was called “I Got Spurs That Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.” So the two of us with much trepidation stood there and sang “I got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle, as I go ridin’ merrily along...” After that, He said good night to us and we said goodbye, and we didn’t see Him the next morning when we left.

Inayat Khan brought the Sufi message to the western world. He was a skilled veena player and toured the United States attracting spiritual students.

So much happened during that visit; it was such a wonderful time of the year and it was so wonderful to be there. We went the next day to Bombay. Baba had said we had to be out of India by the sixteenth of January. This wasn’t very easy. It was a bad time in India then as the Partition had taken place. Hindus and Muslims were at each other’s throats. Meherjee’s wife was in downtown Bombay one day and they took her Muslim driver out of the car and killed him in front of her.

It was a very dangerous and exciting time. You couldn’t wire out or confirm reservations, but eventually we managed to get our flight arranged on BOAC up to Karachi, which would get us in around dinnertime. And, if we caught the midnight flight out of Karachi going over to Bahrain, we would be on Baba’s timetable for leaving India.

But when we arrived in Karachi, the man at the ticket counter said there were no tickets in our name. Mother and I were frightened because when we had arrived in Karachi on the way into India, we went to the hotel and they said they had no reservations for us, even though we had confirmed reservations. They did not want to give us a room for the night, and they wouldn’t give anyone flying with us rooms either. I remember that we called a friend to come to dinner and she brought her husband to the hotel. We had not seen her since her marriage, and we didn’t know the gentleman. When we all got up to leave the table, the manager came rushing up to announce that he had taken care of everybody — all had hotel rooms and everything was set. He took us to our rooms and then it dawned on us that they had seen this woman’s husband eating with us. He was Lord Grafftey-Smith, who was, at that time, the High Commissioner of Pakistan for the British. Seeing him go into the dining room with us, the hotel decided they had better take care of us, or else. So things were arranged in strange ways.

When we arrived in Karachi, I had some flowers that Baba lovers in Bombay had given to me as we departed, and I was holding these two big bouquets as I stood at the ticket window of the man who distributed the BOAC tickets. Sometime during the conversation I remember him saying that he loved these flowers and how beautiful they were. So I said, “My goodness, would you like to have them?” He said, “I couldn’t do that,” and I told him they wouldn’t last all the way to Bahrain and it would give me pleasure if he took them. So, the next thing I knew, I had two tickets on the flight out of Karachi.

You would think, given all of our time with Meher Baba, that there would have been an enormous amount of communications between Him and us. But the fact was that Baba, when Mother and I saw Him, was in seclusion before we got there, and starting right after we left He went back into seclusion. He interrupted His seclusion for our visit, so we did not have a lot of communication with Him right away. You must remember also that there was a period where Baba asked us not to write to Him at all and He actually asked us if we would be willing to not write any more letters, anywhere.

I was in college and I didn’t write to Mother and she didn’t write to me, although we spoke on the phone once in a while. I believe Mother wrote to Him now and then concerning business and questions about the Sufi Order, but I was away in college and I was someone who would normally not have written to Baba anyway.

There was one period when He asked us to keep silence for an entire month if we could do so. So we did, and it was really very interesting, especially if you were not accustomed to people being in silence. Imagine living in New York City, wandering around, taking taxicabs and subways, and shopping in stores, and so on, carrying little pieces of paper with addresses on them to show the taxi drivers. There was the challenge of talking to the girls at the department store and communicating what we wanted to buy. We would say we were having a problem speaking, and therefore they assumed we had laryngitis. And they usually hollered at us because they thought that if you couldn’t talk, you couldn’t hear. It was sometimes a very funny scene. But we did try to keep silence for an entire month, living in the city.

Other times Baba asked us to fast. One time He asked us to repeat the name of God, I think it was a thousand times a day for a long period of time. I remember getting hand-clickers to click off repetitions because it was the only way to keep track. Sometimes you would have a chance to get together with other Baba people but you have to remember that there weren’t very many of us then. A lot of people had come to see Baba, but there weren’t very many who were in constant contact with Him or close to each other; not like it is now.

It was also about that time that Baba entered the New Life phase of His work. He went off with his caravan traveling through India, virtually with nothing. So it is not surprising that there was very little communication then. Later on, the Family Letters began to catch us up with some of the hardships they had gone through and some wonderful stories as well. But at the time we sat there knowing nothing of what was going on, just knowing that we loved them and loved Him. And also, I guess, gradually getting our own convictions sorted out and getting our lives in as much order as we could, carrying out the worldly business that we had to do.