Soona Irani, known to all as Soonamasi, was born on 3 April 1884. Her parents had come from Kerman in Iran; her elder sister was Gulmai Irani and her brother was Dr. Minochershaw. She married Kaikhushru Beheram Irani, a Zoroastrian jeweler of Bombay known as Kaikhushru Masa, and their only daughter Khorshed was born in 1910. Masa was an early visitor to Upasni Maharaj at Sakori, and in August 1919 Soonamasi spent two weeks pleading with Gulmai until her sister agreed to go to Sakori, the step that brought Gulmai's whole family to Meher Baba.
In May 1922 at Sakori, Baba asked Soonamasi whether she would come and stay with him once he had arranged a place, and she gave him her hand in promise. Later that year in Bombay he walked unannounced into the family's kitchen and told her she could come to him at any time of the day. In 1923, ordered to remain in Ahmednagar, she refused to leave even after three telegrams said that Masa was gravely ill in Bombay. Baba told her that had she broken his order Masa would have died, and that by obeying she had saved him.
From 1924 Baba housed Mehera with Soonamasi's family in Bombay, and from 1925 Soonamasi lived with the women mandali in their secluded quarters at Meherabad and later at Toka and Nasik. When Baba asked whether she would always stay near Mehera, she assented at once. Masa, whose relatives had seized him in 1929 and forced him to sign his property over to them, came back to Nasik broken in health and died there on 18 January 1931 with Baba keeping watch beside him.
In the 1930s Soonamasi managed the women's ashram, though her muddled bazaar accounts gave the other women much to laugh about, and for years she kept watch at the gate of the women's compound. She travelled with Baba to Cannes in 1937 and with the women on the Blue Bus tours. Baba teased her by calling her a "barber" (an Indian insult meaning someone barbaric), nicknamed her "Sneezy" after the dwarf in the Snow White film, and called her the "Gatekeeper to Heaven."
When the New Life began in 1949, Baba sent Soonamasi and Khorshed to live in Bombay, where they remained for the rest of her life, visiting him whenever he allowed. Miserable at the separation, she was told by Baba in 1957 that by keeping her far away he kept her close. Baba had told her to take his name always so that she would remember him at her dying hour, and in her final years her lips moved with it continually. She died in her flat in Bombay on her birthday, 3 April 1973, calling out "Meher Baba!" at midnight.
