Sai Baba the Master

December 23, 2005

Indeed this spiritual identity extends to all realized saints. Any

devotion or disrespect shown to one of them amounts to doing the same to

all others and to all their spiritual descendants.

We have a parallel anecdote in Islamic lore. God, after having created

Man, commanded the angels to pay homage to him (Man). Many of them did so;

for they know that in rendering obeisance to man they were obeying God’s

order. Secondly it constitutes acceptance of the fact that God can make any

of His creatures as great as He wants to, by His mere will. Some angels of

course did not obey the Lord on the ground that Man was an inferior

creature being made of clay, while they themselves were superior residents

of heaven, and they were made of fire. These angels had to pay for

disobeying Lord’s command. The homage paid to Upasani, if it is true

homage, does not imply disregard for Sai Baba. Quite the contrary!

Merwan was the second son of Sheriarji, a devout Parsi. Sheriarji was a

great seeker after Truth who wandered as recluse for eight years in Persia

and for ten years in India. Having learnt in a dream that he was not

destined to get what he wanted, he yielded to the persuasion of his sister

and married Shirin Banu in 1879. His second son, Merwan was born in Pune on

25th of February 1894. Strangely enough, even as a boy Merwan was found

sitting alone for hours in the Tower of Silence where the Zoroastrains

leave their dead to be consumed by birds. At school he was an active boy,

interested in sports and a keen lover of poetry and music and a good

conversationalist.

One day in May 1913, Merwan was riding his bicycle when an old Moslem

woman saint named Babajan beckoned to him and when he approached her, she

embraced him and kissed him on the forehead, between the eyes.

Hazarat Babajan, as she was called, was a great Sufi saint. She fled from

her home in Baluchistan to avoid marriage and led the life of a wandering

ascetic in search of God. After some time, she met her master who made her

perfect. She lived in the Punjab till about 1908 when she moved on to

Bombay. In the fullness of her realization she used to say that she was God

for which some orthodox soldiers of the Baluchi regiment buried her alive

as a heretic. Some years later the same soldiers found her very much alive

by the side of a road in Pune. They bowed to her in amazement. This

incident spread her fame far and wide.

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