MEHER BABA CENTER OF NO, CALIF INC.
NEWS
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2131 UNIVERSITY AVE., RM. 235 VOL. 24
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BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94704
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WINTER 1994
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Kumar and "Mister God" Amrit Irani is married to MeherBaba's nephew Dora andthey livem India near Meherazad. Amrit spoke to ourgroup in August of 1986, telling thiswonderful story:
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So my father was pushed out of that place before 7:00 in the morning.
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"Everybody knows about my father Kumar and his coming to Baba and how he brought us all to Baba. He was a revolutionary or, you could say, freedom fighter. It was a time when the British were in India and India wanted its freedom. My father got in volved in all that and he was taken to prison. He spent quite a lot of time there—almost five years, then he came home and his mother convinced him
to get married. He did, but he still wouldn't give up his activities, so he was taken again, for almost another five years. This story starts when he was in prison the second time.
My father wasn't an atheist, but he was an agnostic. He was angry at God because he saw how much the Indian people were suffering. So now, while he was in prison for so long, he started missing home. He could think of no way to get out, so one evening all of a sudden he said to himself, "OK, Let's try God." There was a window in his room, so he looked'out and said to the sky "Mister God, if you exist, help me to be out of this place by 7:00 tomorrow morn ing. If I'm out of here by 7:00 tomorrow morning, I'll believe there is a God. And if you do get me out, I'll serve out the rest of my sentence in any other way that you want."
He had a feeling that it might happen, so he started packing his things that night. So what happened? In the early morning, way before 7:00, there was a knock on the door and a guard said, "Please, hurry and leave. I got the orders for you to go last night, but I forgot to bring them to you, so please leave now, and hurry so I won't get in trouble!"
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He came home to his wife, his moth er and his son, now almost five years
old. They were very poor, but they bought a small piece of cheap land
near Dehra Dun and farmed it.
One day in 1950, he saw a tonga pull up the road, with an odd-looking group of people—Indians, Westerners, and a few Parsis. They were looking for land. Our neighbor's land was for sale, so my father helped them to make the deal. The people were friendly and my father liked them very much. He would work with them to fix the place up. He noticed they kept talking about "Baba"—how He wouldn't like this or that.
Now I'll go back a bit and tell you the story behind their buying this land. Baba had ordered his follow ers in northern India to look for a small piece of land so that He could stay there at the time of Kumba Mela. They took a long time finding the right piece of land, and Baba was very annoyed with
them, so He sent them a telegram saying "I want this land as soon as possible—within a few days. It should be exactly four and a half miles from a certain road. After four and a half miles, turn right
for another half-mile." That was my father's place. The time came for Baba to come. He decided not to
come to the land, but to stop at the railway station. My father asked if he could come too, and they said "Of course. We've been writing to Baba telling Him how you've been helping us." So he went. He saw this beautiful person and knew right away that it was Baba, yet he didn't believe in Him as God. Baba went into the waiting room and asked "Where
is that Kumar who has been helping you all this time?" One of the men called my father in and brought him to Baba.
©1994