THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

220 THE GOD-MANIndeed, built on one-time marshes it is placed where no city should naturally exist at all.Everywhere the enterprise and taste of Victorian England lay heavily upon its un-Eastern architecture, andthe city still retained evidence of Western efficiency not yet completely overcome by its own aboundingand disorderly life. As everyone knows, more than three quarters of a million of its inhabitants then hadnowhere at all to live but the streets. The old men lay sleeping on the pavements at mid-day, more thanhalf naked, scratching at their hairs. Mothers with bared breasts sat begging, training their toddlers to runafter passers-by for a coin. To pause in a street for a moment was an invitation to a crowd of beggars,young and old, diseased and able - but that, at least, is common in every Eastern city. The well-dressedyoung married couples paraded on the Bund, sometimes side by side, more often the women following theman; the wind and storm-blasted apartment buildings, the lush gardens, the fine mansions, the slums, thestreet traders offering everything from a shoe lace to a suite of furniture, and any kind of craft from clothesto watch repairs; and by the shore the sweet breeze from the sea. The atmosphere was charged with highhumidity, the main streets jammed with overloaded buses, large American cars and bullock carts. I had theimpression of being on a gigantic film-set with shooting in progress. It is not, however my intention todescribe Bombay as it was then, only to add that in its noisy sweating life an oasis was the Indian CricketClub.After a week we moved to Poona for the remaining fortnight, where we stayed at what was once anexclusively Western hotel, settling rapidly into decay, as was the city generally. Yet here, too, life wasoverflowing, the main streets full of beggars. One day a school came out on strike parading, shouting andsinging, forcing the traders to close their shops. The splendid botanic gardens, the once-splendidGovernor-General's palace, the great military camp and armament works still functioning in the oldtradition, also the race course, signs of the city's surviving importance.The devotees were generous as ever. Papa Jessawala visited us every day and took us to the sights. Wewere welcomed by Baba's brothers at the house where he lived as a boy and where he sat in suffering forso long after his inner eye had been opened. We saw his school and paid our respects at the shrine ofBabajan. With customary kindness Baba made a special visit to the city to enable us to greet him and to bein his presence. I saw the performance of The Importance of Being Earnest by the pupils of St Mary'sCollege, which would have done credit to any Western school. We were entertained in the homes of many