Remembering God’s Sister

August 19 of this year marked the twenty-fourth death anniversary of Mani Irani, Meher Baba’s sister and disciple. As I set upon a journey to write something about her passing, I was bereft of words because if there was anyone whose death couldn’t define her, it was Mani. Mani Aunty, as I called her, was the epitome of life, life at its best as Meher Baba asked us to live. Life at its brightest, a life in praise of being with the Avatar night and day, exhibiting the spark of the good fortune that was and is to be with Him.

The most famous story about Mani is about when she found Baba in a great mood up on a ladder in Toka, India while playing with her friend Myna. Suddenly, Baba asked them to ask anything of Him. Surprised, the friend asked to marry a handsome man and have a grand wedding. When it came to Mani she said, “To be with you, always.” “Granted,” Baba said. And that is what defined Mani: her sole ambition to be with Baba at all times.

As a young child, twenty-four years younger than her God brother, her only motivation to be good, to do her homework, and to be obedient came from the fact that she could see Baba during her summer vacations. And oh, her joy when He ‘turned the key’ and called her to be with Him forever. Thence followed a life of sixty-four years with the Beloved. Her roles were as many as her talents: disciple, sister, entertainer, writer, companion and caretaker for Mehera, Chairman of Avatar Meher Baba Trust and an available elder to the extended Baba family.

In the end, Mani had a malignant abdominal tumor. She united with her Beloved in her room in Meherazad facing Mehera’s bed, with women Mandali around her holding Baba’s picture and saying His name. Heather Nadel recalls Mani’s last day greeting pilgrims at Meherazad in February of 1996. “She held forth to a porch full of people and they performed for her, a wonderful giving and receiving of His love. Afterwards many remarked that Mani was more joyous and radiant than they had ever seen her.”* Heather also recalls that right after her passing, “her face assumed an expression of joy and triumph…a luminous smile seemed to deepen until you could not look at her without feeling her happiness.”**

After being taken to the Samadhi on a stretcher that was used for Mehera, Mani’s body was cremated at Lower Meherabad. During the cremation, two sadhus passing by approached Eruch. They had observed the smoke of the pyre; it was not the black smoke of an ordinary person’s pyre but the gray blue smoke of the pyre of a saint. They had come to pay homage.

Time has not diminished the spark that was Mani; it is still alive, vivid and radiant. Ever ignited in her lifetime of love, its embers now warm in all our hearts that are inspired to fold the tinder of our own love—and gently blow.

*The Joyous Path, Heather Nadel, pg. 1056
**The Joyous Path, Heather Nadel, pg. 1061