Growing up with Meher Baba (Page 6 of 10)

I graduated from college in 1950 and Meher Baba came back to the United States in 1952. He had been here earlier, but I hadn’t met Him then. He came into New York and proceeded from there straight to Myrtle Beach. We were all planning our trip to the Center to be with Baba for a period of time. We were so excited about it! A whole gang of us from New York planned to go to the Center, and there were some difficult stories people had from that trip. You have to remember that, at that time, the prejudice against blacks was very strong, and we were going to Myrtle Beach with some black members from our group. I remember saying that I could drive so and so down, and someone said, “No you can’t. You don’t want to get them in trouble.” It wasn’t so much that I would get into trouble, but I being a white girl could get them killed. We had to think of those things then.

Murshida Ivy Duce loved hats, shown here wearing one.

Gradually we got there and once again we were busy with the details of Sahavas with Meher Baba. The Center was so beautiful. I remember a rose bush blooming as one went on to the Center, and there was also a lovely yucca plant across the bridge. We had a glorious week there, enjoying being with Him.

One day some of our companions decided to go for a swim in the ocean, and by doing this they learned a lesson. They went to the beach and found out later that was the day Baba called everyone in to have a nice talk. Of course, those who went to the beach missed it. By then we were learning our manners and we realized that if you wanted to see Him, you had better hang around. If you strayed, nobody was going to chase you down, and you usually missed something that you would have loved to see.

Learning to have the right attitude toward the Master was always a personal challenge. For example, on a later trip, a man friend said on the plane on the way to Myrtle Beach, “Well, this time I am not going to do anything but sit at the Master’s feet and soak it up. I’ve done all I am going to do on the other trips.” Well, guess who Baba picked to sort out the luggage and see that it was all delivered to some two hundred people? Two days later my friend arrived grey and bearded at the Center having had to do all that. Baba rarely had someone just sit at His feet. He always wanted everybody operating on all eight cylinders. In any event, that trip was a delight.

Mani, Mehera, Goher and Filis Frederick in 1952 at Myrtle Beach. Photo by Charmian Duce.

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.