It is something quite new for both the people of the East and the West. What Baba is doing in this age is unprecedented and unparalleled. If any of the past Avatars had done such work, history has not recorded it."1
One day in Niranjanpur Don voiced these thoughts to Baba: "Your work with the masts is so important, fascinating and significant, yet there is no record of it. If an account were compiled and written down, it would be most useful and interesting to future generations." Baba conveyed that he would think about it.
Two days later he came to the gardener's hut where Don, Nilu, and Vishnu were resting.
Baba remarked to Don, "Your suggestion about a book on masts is excellent. Why don't you write it?"
Don had not expected this. "Me? I'm no writer. I've never written a book. I'm not fit to write it."
But Baba assured him, "You are the only proper person to write it. I will help you."
Thus, Don was encouraged, and the book The Wayfarers was born. Baba began giving him explanations, detailing the various types of masts and explaining about them in general. Don wrote studiously and with devoted labor and attention to detail, collaborating with those who went on the mast tours with Baba. Years later, Don related about the book:
So I did it [ The Wayfarers ], my aim being only to try to make a faithful record of Baba's work with masts and others — his external and visible work, that is. His real inner work he would just not tell us about — but then why should he?2
As Age noted, "Baba's mast work forms a singularly important part of his work in this advent. By contacting masts, Baba has shown the world that the Lord of the universe is also the slave of his true lovers, whom he allows to share in his work. And the statements of these intoxicated 'witnesses' to his Glory, recorded in The Wayfarers , are testaments to the reality of Meher Baba's Avatarhood."
In Mahabaleshwar , Baidul was the manager of the mast ashram during the first two weeks of its functioning, and thereafter Kaka and Pappa Jessawala managed it together. Once, when Baidul was managing matters, an amusing confrontation took place between Kaka and him. Kaka brought a mast one day and, without asking Baidul's permission, took a gunny sack to make the mast comfortable.
Footnotes
- 1.On one occasion, Baba mentioned that Ram, while in exile for fourteen years, did much work with masts in the jungles. Such God-intoxicated persons as masts always exist on earth, especially in the East, and during Avataric advents they are contacted by him.
- 2.Typed note from W. Donkin to Bhau, 1969.