He was a quiet and gentle man, whether or not he was in Meher Baba’s presence. I met Meherjee Karkaria in 1961 when he drove me from the Napier Hotel in Poona out to Guruprasad to meet Meher Baba for the first time. What strikes me now about him is how he did not try to interfere in the meeting, to stand between, to tell me what to do, but rather he left all that to Baba, standing back but totally alert to Baba.

Years later he told me the only time he felt Baba’s presence was when he was away from him. When he was with him, Meherjee was too conscious of Baba and what he might want.

I came to love him dearly. Well, wouldn’t you adore the person who took you to meet Meher Baba? He took such good care of me then and many times later when I traveled to India and almost always stopped to see him in Pune. We would have dinner and it was my pleasure to bring him a bottle of Johnny Walker Black. He told me that Baba had said he could have “two fingers” of whiskey a day, and no more. I saw him at a couple of Amartithis and made a point of spending time with him then. He came a couple of times to the Meher Spiritual Center and it was then I saw how much he missed Meher Baba, and how he missed the way the Center had been when Baba was there.

I went back to India after he died and it just wasn’t the same. One of my best friends was no longer there.