Since he did not want to leave Baba and return to his home after the Meher Ashram school disbanded, he now stayed with the men mandali.
Baba issued strict orders about the group's stay and food at Meherabad. At Upper Meherabad, Pendu began construction of a bathroom, a tin shed and a kitchen for Baba opposite the Water Tank. Kalingad, who was a good mechanic, fixed up an old bus and would carry the construction materials from Ahmednagar.
An order from the British government came at this time to pull down the Post Office building near the railway tracks. Baba sent word from Nasik that they should try their best to have the order rescinded. The mandali approached various officials, but their efforts proved fruitless. They were told that the authorities themselves would do it unless they pulled the building down, as it was too near the railway tracks to comply with current safety regulations.
Rather than let outsiders do the work haphazardly, the mandali tore down the building themselves. As he often did due to lack of funds, Baba told them to utilize some of the building materials from the Post Office for the new construction.1 Baba sometimes even directed them to demolish a perfectly good building in order to use the materials in some other work he wanted done.
Up until this time, there was no arrangement for pumping water to Meherabad Hill from the well below. Water was brought up daily by bullock cart. Through the influence of Khansaheb, Pendu obtained the requisite permission from the government to lay a pipeline under the railway track to the hill.
While these activities were going on at Meherabad, preparations were speeded up by Baba for his next visit to the West. In Nasik, along with the abundant correspondence to attend to, Baba had a lot of other work to oversee and had virtually no time to rest. He had to take care of the numerous details in the lives of both his men and women mandali. He watched over his mandali in order to turn them to dust by grinding down their age-old egos. They were staying with him only to turn into dust. They had learned to bear his taunts and insults, yet Baba would assail their minds all the more to complete the grinding process.
For the permanent men and women mandali, living with Baba was like walking on the edge of a razor-sharp sword.
Footnotes
- 1.After the Post Office was dismantled by the mandali, the stones were used to reconstruct the walls of the Crypt-Cabin at Upper Meherabad, the structure that eventually became Meher Baba's Tomb.