ChaptersChapter 38Page 4,949

Chapter 38: Guruprasad Garden, 1963

1963Page 4,949 of 5,444
Jashan Vaswani was called to Guruprasad on 8 April and Baba spoke with him for three-quarters of an hour. He returned the following day with a reply from his uncle, Dada Vaswani.
As mentioned, Baidul was staying with his wife Soltoon and daughter Dowla's family in Poona. But on 10 April, he suffered a stroke. Baba went to their home that morning to comfort Baidul and had him admitted to Dr. Grant's Ruby Hall Clinic near Guruprasad. As a result of the stroke, Baidul became paralyzed on the left side of his body. A few weeks later, on 29 April, he was shifted to Meherabad to recover under Don's care. Since Aloba was also fluent in Persian, he was given Baidul's duty of correspondence with those in Iran on Baba's behalf.
On the second Sunday of darshan, 14 April 1963, several persons assembled in the morning in Baba's room. It was Easter Sunday and Rustom and Freny Dadachanji's seventeenth wedding anniversary. Baba met them first. They garlanded him and he embraced them three times. The men were called at eight o'clock, an hour earlier that day, and the women one hour later.
Baba was sitting in a chair engrossed in his work when the lovers arrived; his fingers were dancing and the atmosphere was tense. He never once glanced at those seated before him.
All were sitting quietly when Baba suddenly gestured, "The burden on me has increased since yesterday. It is very great."
At 8:20 A.M., Baba asked Hoshang Bharucha the time. In the fifteen minutes that followed, he kept repeating this same question to different lovers. Then he began asking them, as usual, if they had slept well that night, when had they arrived in Poona, at what place they were staying, et cetera.
Quoting a couplet of Hafiz, Baba remarked, "If you want the Beloved, remember Him always. Forget everything else. There is no need to be physically near the Beloved. Just remember Him with love."
Baba asked Dr. Deshmukh to recite a few shlokas from the Gita , and when he finished, he explained, "I have descended from the Paratpar-Parabrahma [the Beyond, Beyond] state and come down to your level. In that state, there is no binding; there is absolute Freedom, absolute Existence.
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