Sad Guru Sai Nath Maharaj Ki Jai
Tonight the internet connection is not working, so was left with the best option that of Meditating on the grace of Sai Baba from the shawl, consecrated at Samadhi Temple and Dwarkamai and on the stone on which Sai Baba used to sit. Otherwise the mind was made for searching the cause of falling down of this blog, which was scoring well in google search suddenly was out of the google search engine, and rectify it. After an hour or so, the hunger from the stomach called out and searched for some food and ate it. As I was entering the room, the eyes fell on a book, which was lying there since months, called “Sai Baba of Shirdi a Unique Saint”, written by two authors M. V. Kamath and V. B. Kher. I was drawn towards the book and started reading it again, last time it was read might have been ten years before. The book at the start has quotes of Sai Baba as recorded by the contemporary devotees. Some will appear on the side panel of this blog and others in the other blog of devoted totally to the quotes and poems.
After reading the first incident in the book, which I had also read before in this book and a small book called “ The Incredible Sai Baba”, ‘The life and miracles of a modern-day saint’ by Author Osborne.
After reading the incident, cold shivers passed through the body and something felt affecting the brain making it totally silent for few moments and felt like putting up on the blog. So here it goes as it is presented on the “Sai Baba of Shirdi a Unique Saint”.
But it was not to his devotees alone that he was the source of succor. There is the strange story recounted by a Londoner Arthur Osborne, born in London, educated at Christ Church, Oxford who lived in India for several years and was deeply interested in spirituality and has written a small book entitled the Incredible Sai Baba.
In Calcutta, where Osborne lived for four years, he had an old lady as his neighbor, a Miss Dutton, had been a Nun in her younger days, but had been given absolutions to her vows by the Pope because he found that she could not, in all honesty, accept the rigors. While her application for release from her vows was pending, she was much too preoccupied with her internal conflicts to give much thoughts to her future. It was only that she was about to leave the convent that it dawned on her how hopeless her future was. She was practically penniless. She was well over middle age, without a profession and scarcely any new relative. The nearest to the relative was a nephew living in far-away Calcutta. The situation was daunting.
One day while sitting in her cell immersed in her deepest gloom, she suddenly felt the presence of a man in front of her. He was tall, barefoot and looked like a holy man. Miss Dutton’s surprise could well be imagined. There was no way a man could have got entry into her cell. In any event he did not look like a holy man in the West. As she told Osborne, he looked at her with compassion and told her: ‘Do not worry so much, Everything will be alright when you go to Calcutta.” Than Miss Dutton reported the holy man said: “Now won’t you give me a gift?” Miss Dutton told him she had no money with her. “Oh yes, you have,” said the holy man, “you have thirty five rupees in a box in the cupboard up there!"” Miss Dutton had completely forgotten about that little treasure, but taken aback by holy man’s prescience, she went to the cupboard, took out the money but, when she turned around, the holy man was nowhere to be seen! He had disappeared as unaccountably as he had come!
She never mentioned this incident to anybody. She left the convent and went to stay with her nephew who turned out to be a kind and loving nephew indeed. Her worries about her future had been taken care of.
Osborne wondered who this holy man—Miss Dotton had call him a fakir—could be, but felt instinctively that may be it was Sai Baba. To test out his hunch, he told Miss Dutton: “I will show you a picture of fakir”. He went back to his apartment and fetched the picture of Sai Baba to show to Miss Dutton. She took one good look at the picture and exclaimed with the unfeigned surprise: “Yes that is he! He had even the same white kerchief on his head!”
The point writes Osborne is that Miss Dutton had never heard of Sai Baba before!
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