Mehera-Meher Volume 2 by David Fenster (Pages 55-57)
Source: Tina Holmes
Life in India was arduous, for the older Western lovers especially, and that summer, Meherabad was sweltering. For meals, they sat on their stools under the sun-baked tin shed. Their simple food was placed on long benches, and the strong, hot wind often blew dust, dry grass, and leaves onto their plates.
Occasionally, they went with Baba to films at the Sarosh Cinema. Besides The Wizard of Oz, they saw the Gabriel Pascal film, Pygmalion (starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, from a G. B. Shaw play).* Sometimes they performed their own skits for Baba upstairs in the dormitory, or under the tin shed.
[*George Bernard Shaw’s adaptation of his play won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. (The film was later remade as My Fair Lady.) Gabriel Pascal met Baba in 1934 and became a devoted follower.]
“Mani wrote the story for one skit we did for Baba,” Irene recalled. “In it, we were playing cards. I was the Queen of Hearts. Rano was the King of Hearts.” Mani was the King of Clubs, and she was at war with the King of Hearts. Mansari was a Joker. Rano made stiff, cardboard playing-card costumes, with a back and front, and cardboard curls for hair.
“We were like robots, so mechanical. We had to speak Urdu. We didn’t know what we were saying.”
Later, Irene learned the Persian script from Mansari; but during rehearsals, Irene got laryngitis. She stopped talking for three days before the play (an amazing achievement for someone as loquacious as Irene!) and recovered just enough to speak her lines.
“Irene had no sense of humor when she came to India,” Mani noted, as Irene was a solid, Swiss, no-nonsense sort of person. “When she left India, she was much different.”
In one skit, Mani and Katie played a poor American husband and wife. The wife comes into the living room and finds her husband dead-drunk asleep, having fallen into the baby crib. Viloo had come for the performance and was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes.Ϯ
[Ϯ In one skit, Kitty played the part of a music teacher. As she walked to the piano with her books under her arms, they all fell on the floor. In the second play, she was an English maid, and while carrying the tea tray from the kitchen to the living room, the tray fell out of her hand. Baba and the audience believed it was part of the act and started laughing and clapping. Another humorous skit they performed for Baba took place in an insane asylum with the women taking the roles of different “loony” inmates.]
Mehera also did a skit for Baba, based on the dance she had done at school to benefit the orphans of World War I. “We were Sikhs and wore pale pink and blue saris,” Irene said. “We carried small lanterns and did a little dance for Baba.”
And then there was Walu: “It was very difficult to get Walu to do something, to change,“ Mani noted. Nevertheless, Mani taught Walu a song with an ektar, a one-stringed instrument, that they concocted out of an empty jam tin and a piece of bamboo.
“Walu was hard to train [though she had a sweet voice]. To start with, she had no confidence in herself that she could do it. We had to push and persuade her. At last she agreed.”
Walu came onstage, dressed as a wandering sanyasi in a robe, dhoti, turban, and a false mustache. She stopped in front of Baba with her tin-can instrument, and then sat down to begin her song. The song, titled Gopichand Raja, was about a king named Gopichand, who leaves the world and becomes a seeker.
[In 1938, the masts and mad at Meherabad had enacted a play about this king.]
As Walu began the first line of the song, her mustache became loose and fell into the tin can. All chuckled, as Walu fumbled to retrieve it, but Baba gestured, “It’s okay, continue. Leave it.”
Walu did not crack a smile. Solemnly, she continued singing. Finishing the song, Walu turned and walked out, but Baba called to her, “Your mustache is still in the tin pot! You’d better take it out now.”
“Baba found it so funny and amusing,” Mehera said. “’That was the best part,’ he remarked later.”
For a costume competition, Mani wore a huge tophat that covered her head completely, up to her shoulders. Two slits were cut in the hat for eyes, and her arms were folded in front to form a face.
Several years later (in 1948), when a few of the women were staying at Meherazad with Baba, there was another contest at Meherabad under the tin shed. Those at Meherazad brought their costumes with them. “Norina, naturally, was a duchess,” said Mani. She looked so elegant, so chic in a long, silk dress with hundreds of buttons down the back.”
Before the contest, Norina was going out of her mind, as Elizabeth was not doing anything to prepare a costume. She spent all her free time blithely typing away at her portable typewriter.
“Elizabeth, what is it you’re going to wear?” Norina asked finally. “There’s only two days left.”
Elizabeth just ignored her, and Norina told Mani and the others, “Say something to Elizabeth. It’s for Baba! She’s not doing anything!” They did, but Elizabeth assured them that it was all right.
“The morning we went to Meherabad,” said Mani, “after all the work was done, Elizabeth came to the east room and borrowed a pair of scissors from us. She had brought a white sheet off her bed and a pillowcase. In the pillowcase, she cut two holes for the eyes and covered her head with it. In the center of the sheet, she cut a slit just long enough to pass over her head and rest on her shoulders – and became Casper the Ghost.”
[Mani added: “In the ashram, you didn’t throw things away. We kept the sheet [Eilzabeth had cut] and sewed it back together.”]
Norina was really mad. “Why didn’t you tell me!” she demanded.
Baba called Norina and Elizabeth “twins,” but there was a vast difference in their temperaments. Elizabeth was calm and deliberate and took her time over things. Norina was quick, quick, quick about everything.
“Baba wants all – your weaknesses and strengths,” Mani continued. “Norina was such an elegant, beautiful lady. She was very happy when her title [princess] was used to serve any work for Baba’s cause [otherwise, she would not have kept it]. She had so much charm, so much fire.
“Whenever Baba came to the women’s side, no matter where we were, Norina would run to him, tuck her arm in his, and whisper something in his ear, some joke or something between them. Baba would chuckle; they would laugh together. It was beautiful to watch. Everything would sparkle. Norina always addressed Baba as ‘Darling’, & Elizabeth addressed him as ‘Baba dear’.”
“Norina was like a queen, so generous,” Adi Sr. noted. “Once, when we were travelling by train with Baba in the West, we had been to the dining car, but Baba wouldn’t allow us to order much. I was still feeling hungry. Norina asked if I still felt hungry, to which I admitted I did. She insisted on taking me back to the dining car and told Baba also.
“Elizabeth spent money also, but not as generously as Norina. Elizabeth would give, but in her own way. She was more practical.”
Margaret related, “It was wonderful to be with Baba, but it was life at two extremes. We had to relax and conform, to a certain extent, to other people’s faults. That was hard [at Meherabad]. All of us had different temperaments, but that was on the surface. Underneath, everyone was there for Baba. It was a beautiful relationship.
“For his work, Baba used what people had [their innate natures], but he also broke these down. For instance, he used Norina’s special position in Europe.” This was seen especially in Cannes, before the beginning of World War II – after which the European aristocracy would never be the same.
When it was time for old habits and ways of life to go, or when something became too excessive, Baba tore it down. For instance, Norina was always telling the women about the fabulous haute couture dressmakers of Europe from whom she purchased her exclusive outfits. Once when everyone was called by Baba, he turned to Norina and asked, “Why don’t you dress as well as Margaret?”
Margaret, who could not have cared less about her wardrobe, was wearing a pale-blue housecoat that she had bought off-the-rack.
“Norina,” said Margaret wryly, “for once in her life, was dumb.”
“You have to want what Baba wants,” Mani said, “and sure enough, in the end, he will give you what you wanted. You may not want it then, but that is when you will get it.
“Once, when the Westerners were here, something had happened, and Baba was telling us what was what. He said, ‘Look, you have either to want only what I want, or you have to want only what you want. You cannot have both’.
“In little things, Baba wouldn’t say no. Having once given the slightest hint, if we did not stick to what he wanted, we learned after a while that we should have. To be sensitive to his pleasure is the whole thing. What he wanted, what he was saying – you can only be sensitive to what he was saying, as you grow insensitive to your own wishes. As you grow deaf to your own desires, you can hear his pleasure, his wishes, more.
“Actually, when Baba says, ‘Remember me.’ It only means, ‘Forget yourself a little more.’ Give him a little more room and yourself a little less. Of course, Baba is Baba. Even if you give him just a little room, he is going to push the rest of it out. ‘You are going to be cramped,’ Baba would say. ‘All I need is a little corner in your heart.’