Norina, Nadine, Adi Sr., Ghani and Jal Kerawalla attended the talk, and Jal asked pointed questions, which the Colonel could not answer well.1
Yet despite all the Colonel's best efforts, how could this opposition detrimentally affect Baba's work? Even the Colonel's hostility was part of Baba's work and actually accelerated it further! After the Colonel's visit to Bangalore, Ghani published a pamphlet titled The Spiritual Hoax of Lt. Colonel M. S. Irani, in which he defended Baba and answered all the Colonel's erroneous statements and mendacious accusations.
In his lecture, Colonel Irani at one point had stated that he had been to Sakori to see Upasni Maharaj, and had been told to read his books which he found to be "irrelevant matter." In reply to this, Ghani bitingly wrote: "As for the Lt. Colonel not seeing anything enlightening in the books of Upasni Maharaj, we quote the words of a sage who said: 'Works like this [of a Perfect Being] are as a mirror: If an ass looks in, you cannot expect an angel to look out; and when a head and a book come into collision and one sounds hollow, it is not always the book!' "
In reply to Ghani's publication, the Colonel financed his own rebuttal in the form of a bigger booklet, grandiosely titled Meher Baba, The Greatest Hoax of the 20th Century, or How an Irani Youth Bloomed Into a World Teacher. Written by the same attorney Venkatapathaiya, the booklet used such hateful language to describe Meher Baba's teaching as: "... the most nauseating, immoral and disgusting rubbish," and stated, "Meher Baba gets his spiritual heritage from the filth-eating, anus-worshiping and virgin-loving saint Upasni Maharaj!" Venkatapathaiya concluded his booklet with this prayer: "May these spurious specimens soon disappear into obscurity and cease to menace mankind!"
Such was the Avatar's humiliation!
From Thursday, 1 February 1940, Baba began a partial fast of having only one meal a day. That day, he also began giving private interviews once again, this time in a constructed hut in the Links compound. Precisely on the 1st, the young swami Bhabananda returned to Bangalore, as instructed, after his pilgrimage to Rameshwaram. He narrated his experiences to Baba, who was happy he had carried out his instructions faithfully. The next day, Baba sent him to Pandharpur (a sacred shrine to Krishna), then to Upasni Maharaj at Sakori, to Narayan Maharaj at Kedgaon and to the shrines of Hazrat Babajan in Poona and Sai Baba in Shirdi.
Footnotes
- 1.The Colonel delivered a second talk the following day at the city Y.M.C.A. at which Adi Sr. distributed the Reign of Truth pamphlet.