His love-efforts have preserved for posterity the spirit of the Beloved's divine game.
On 19 September, Baba remarked, "A moment of one's life spent in the company of a Sadguru is more valuable than hundreds of years of tapa-japa (repeating God's name with beads). Or as Vivekananda said, 'To light a chillum [clay pipe] for a Sadguru is better than millions of years of meditation.' "
Meanwhile during this period, the women mandali were still living in the Post Office building which Baba had had enclosed with a wall of bamboo screens forming a private compound. Baba told the women to play cricket inside the compound and he would sometimes join them.
Daulatmai's younger brother Colonel Merwan Sohrab Irani was a physician in the Indian Medical Corps and the highest ranking Indian officer in the British army during the First World War. After Daulatmai's husband's death, Colonel Irani had assumed responsibility for Daulatmai and her daughter, whom he dearly loved, and looked after the family's material affairs. But the Colonel had been worried about Daulatmai's contact with Upasni Maharaj and then Meher Baba, whom he feared would take advantage of his sister's devotion. When Daulatmai and Mehera moved to Meherabad the Colonel was disturbed that his sister and her daughter were living with a "guru" in what seemed to be a desolate wilderness. Although the Colonel was successful professionally, he had hopes that Daulatmai and her daughter would stay with him in Poona, giving him the family life he lacked. He was bitterly disappointed, when Daulatmai refused, and he concluded that Baba had duped his sister and swindled her out of her money and property.
The Colonel became a fierce opponent of Meher Baba, using his power and influence to try to undermine Baba's work. It was the Colonel who was responsible for publishing fictitious and misleading stories about Baba in the Parsi newspapers, which at first created suspicion among the Zoroastrian communities about Meher Baba's claim to be a God-realized Master.1
On Monday, 20 September 1926 at 7:30 in the morning, the Colonel, along with Dinshah Kapadia, a professor of mathematics at Deccan College, and his relative J. Kapadia, arrived at Meherabad. Rustom cordially led the gentlemen on a tour of the ashram, unaware that the Colonel was his wife Freiny's maternal uncle. Rustom had heard that the Colonel had actively denounced Baba for years and had written slanderous articles against him.
Footnotes
- 1.Baily served in Aden alongside Colonel Irani, who had been instrumental in releasing Baily from the military prison in Aden, when Baily was court-martialed for embezzlement in 1917 and imprisoned until 1919. Later, in Poona, the Colonel asked Baily to provide ammunition in the campaign to discredit Meher Baba, but Baily, in spite of great need, found himself unable to provide any corroboration of the complaints the Colonel was aiming at Baba.