Eruch caught the old man outside the station as he was about to board a tonga and handed him the journal. When the old man saw Meher Baba's picture in it, and Eruch revealed Baba's identity to him, he exploded in anger. He loudly abused Eruch for having kept it a secret all this time. Eruch tried to explain the Master's reasons for not seeing anyone and traveling incognito, saying, "You are so blessed to have journeyed with him for an hour when hundreds of his followers thirst for his darshan, which he does not allow even for a moment."
But the man would not listen, and cursed Eruch and his entire "younger generation." The man explained how restless he had felt in the other compartment, and that was why he kept returning to theirs, somehow irresistibly drawn to be near Baba after having longed for his darshan for so many years.
Eruch ran back to catch the train, and the old man ran after him. Eruch jumped on board. The man saw Baba leaning out of the window, without his dark glasses and hat, as if waiting for him. The old man bowed his head to him, and Baba placed his hand on his head in blessing as the train pulled away.
At the next junction, Baba stopped in Sholapur to contact two advanced souls. Ghuliappa Swami was an 80-year-old yogi of the fifth plane. Salik-like, though Ghuliappa Swami dressed and behaved as a man, he referred to himself "in the first person singular feminine, as if he were a woman."1
Mullah Baba was another very old mast, who was extremely dirty and unkempt, with long fingernails. He had sat in one place for fifteen years and was never known to have moved from that spot. He was renowned and revered by the people of Sholapur.
After one day in Sholapur, Baba returned to Meherabad on 6 January 1942. Later that day, Baba remarked about the war and India:
The greatest lesson that this war has taught to all of us is the futility of false values in life, such as wealth, property, [possessions], et cetera, which have no consideration or value at all when life itself is at stake. People with immense wealth, owning valuable properties which they have amassed and built up after years of thought, calculation, labor, and so forth, have to leave it all in an instant when life itself is in danger, as during air-raids or direct enemy attack.
Footnotes
- 1.William Donkin, The Wayfarers (Sufism Reoriented, 1969), p. 357.