The matter of dusting the carpet came up again. Baba had a particular complaint that whenever he walked up and down in the hall, the fine dust entered his sensitive sinuses.
He asked Pendu, "Are the carpets being dusted daily? Who looks after it?"
For almost an hour, Baba was in a petulant mood about the dust.
Since Sidhu and Bhau were responsible for the hall being swept and dusted, Baba rebuked them soundly and demanded that they show him how the carpet was dusted. Sidhu, with the help of several of the laborers, gave a demonstration of how it was done. Baba was not satisfied, which made Pendu flare up. Then he had the carpet taken out again and thoroughly shaken as he watched through a closed window.
Francis Brabazon was watching this and could not figure out why all the fuss.
Baba explained, "Why have I devoted almost an hour to this dust? Were I really to have minded so small and trivial an affair, there would be no difference between myself and an ordinary human being. It is for my work that I stick to such small matters and go deep into them. All this outer discussion relating to dusting the carpet is only apparent and, in fact, has to do with my inner work."
Baba directed the mandali to leave and attend to their duties and, unbeknownst to them, from a distance he watched them for a long while. He saw Bhau carrying a bucket of water to the tent.
He beckoned him and asked, "What are you doing?"
"Cleaning and fixing up the pandal," Bhau said.
"Have I given you the duty of supervising the work or working as a laborer yourself?" Baba demanded. "If you go on working side by side with them, neither will they respect you nor do as you say, and the work will suffer. How did you attain an M.A. in administration? You know nothing about control and authority!"
While taking tea before leaving for Meherazad, Baba asked for bananas, and although there were a dozen ripe bananas on hand, Sidhu brought him some unripe fruit by mistake. The misunderstanding was corrected, but it prompted Baba to remark:
"Sixty years after my body drops, people in the thousands will come here and will collect even the very dust of this Meherabad because I have trod on it. They will pay me homage and reverence. I should ask you all to take a dust bath instead of a water bath! But it has not entered your head yet that God Himself is moving among you and you are in his living presence!"