A Very Fortunate Bird

The following is an excerpt from 82 Family Letters by Mani. This was written in the fall of 1963. At the time the weather was changeable, the garden full of beauty, and several birds got to enjoy Baba’s grace.

Meherazad, 26th September–3rd October, 1963.

Dearest Family,

I was determined not to begin the letter with a remark on the weather, but found it difficult to dodge past a topic that has been looming largely in our small talk – not because we’ve been short of subjects for conversation, but because we have had the novel experience of being short of sunshine. Some real hard rains we had prayed for and got, but the long spells of chilly drizzle was not on our list of silent prayers. At such times it was as if the sky had a perpetual cold, its swollen and puffy clouds constantly streaming, its wheezy breath blowing down the back of our necks. On the other hand, now when we get snatches of really sunny days (which means as a rule that it’s hot) we wish for more rain. I don’t know who it was that wrote: ‘As a rule a man’s a fool; when it’s hot he wants it cool; when it’s cool he wants it hot; always wanting what is not’…….

The year has grown some twelve weeks older since our return from Poona. After the first refreshing plunge into Meherazad’s quiet life we cease to gasp in renewed wonder at all the little things that make Meherazad what it is, but we can never completely take its blessings for granted. In the moonlight, when the jasmine bushes look like leafy nets that have caught a shower of fallen stars, we still gaze fascinated. And when at dawn these fragrant little flowers cover the garden paths like white carpets, we still find time to stand and stare.

Of course there is the other side to Nature’s coin, and competing with the profusion of the jasmine are the midges and the mosquitoes that seem immune to all our attempts to outwit them; and when on an evening we hear the sound of vigorous slaps and claps, it is no cause for concern – one or the other of us is up in arms against these humming horrors. However, pleasing form of life has also been on the increase, and it is already difficult for us to tell the babies apart from the parents – I’m talking of course of the birds: the bulbuls, sunbirds, mynahs and others; while Mrs. Swift is in the process of hatching her family in her little mud bowl of a nest outside our cottage wall.

When some restless or curious fledgling would drop out of its nest, we would put it back in its frantic mother’s care. We played the role of anxious aunties when they ventured on their first non-stop flight from one tree to another; for, not all of them are little Lindbergs, and more than once we’ve picked up a bewildered and bedraggled young bird from one of the water tanks in the garden.

Whenever this happens, after the bird is thoroughly dried by the log fire until its feathers are fluffy and it has regained its aplomb and lung power, before setting it free we invariably take it to Baba. The Beloved gently caresses its sleek head, and sometimes blesses it with a kiss. That is as far as we see of the blessing – how can we fathom its unseen depths? How can we understand the silent miracle of His presence that wipes out hordes of sanskaras, the alchemy of His touch that turns the consciousness of a bird or animal into that of a human being in its next life? As Kabir has said: ‘One moment, half a moment, even half of a half moment spent in the company of a Perfect Master, cuts away crores of one’s sanskaras.’

If the Perfect Ones of the past have explained this for us, beloved Baba also has done so on rare occasions. For instance when we were in Agra, during our Bus Tour in 1938, one morning we found a bird lying in the grounds, a woodpecker that had been badly injured by the sling-shot of some boy. We brought it in, dressed the wound and bandaged it. Baba held it in His lap, caressed it, fed it. For all our nursing the bird did not survive long, and just before the end it struggled out of its box towards where Baba was sitting and dropped dead at His feet. Baba picked it up, and then said (in gestures of course), “You can have no idea how fortunate this bird is – it will now incarnate in the form of a human being.”

We reflect how the receiver of this immeasurable blessing was unaware and unconscious of it – and it is the same indeed with all of us, who can never know the magnitude of our good fortune in having Him in our midst. God’s blessings spring from the compassion of His all-knowing Heart, and so they come to us in silence, or in disguise. After all, the greatest Blessing for mankind is the One in disguise – the Infinite in finite form, the Avatar!