"No, Baba, I know that."

Then He said, "You will not sit in the hotel for five days. You will come here and sit with Me every day for five days until the plane goes . . . Now, what will your office think?"

"Well, Baba, they couldn't understand why I was coming for such a short time and they did tell me if I wanted to stay longer, just to cable them."

Baba said, "You make sure you do that."

(The people in my office thought I was eloping with a Maharajah. I never told them.)

I have lost a lot of what happened in that initial hour, really. I think the conversation was along the lines of what Baba usually asked people, you know: Did you sleep well? Are you getting enough to eat? Do you feel alright? etc. My brain had gone into neutral, and all I could do was to sit there and look at Him. I was sitting at Baba's feet. When 4:30 finally came, He said, "Now, come closer to My feet, or you'll get crushed in this rush." Then they opened the doors and the mob came tearing in. On either side of the hall there were windows and there were people diving throough them. I saw one woman bearing down on me. She got to me, planted her hand on top of my head, used me for a pivot and swung over me so she could get around behind Baba and sit behind His chair. And there were kids who got lost in the crowd who were being passed over heads back to their parents. Baba loved it! He sat there and He slapped his knees . . . He enjoyed it immensely. (In later years, whenever I heard people talking about decorum, I thought of that scene.) Eventually everybody got sort of settled down. It was very informal, low-key gathering. Baba said He wasn’t going to give any discourses. The point was just to sit there in His company for that brief time. He was not coming out of seclusion, He was inviting us in.

While we were sitting there, He asked me if I knew why St. Francis loved Jesus more than Peter had. I said, "No, Baba." He said, "It was because Francis never met Jesus and therefore his love and his longing were that much greater." You know how it made me feel after the last five years of being jealous of all those people, right? What a sweet thing to say!

There were people there who were singing and putting on skits, and there was a young woman from Bombay who was going to sing Baba a song about Mira. Baba asked me if I knew who Mira was. I didn't (Baba frequently talked about Mira to people, telling different parts of her story.) This was the only serious time in the whole five days that I was there. He looked at me and He said, "Mira was a princess; she gave up everything. She gave up a throne, her whole life, all her money to spend her life wandering and telling people about her Lord Krishna. She never put anyone or anything between herself and Krishna." I got the point: "I am your Krishna; be careful about this."

Then He asked me if I'd read any of His books. I said yes, I had read Avatar, God to Man and Man to God, and somebody had found me a copy of the original Discourses. Then He said, "Have you read God Speaks?

I had to be honest about it so I said, "I tried it and got to page 64, but I didn't understand a word."

He laughed, "Never mind, it's not important. Don't bother."