When I arrived home in Australia after being with Avatar Meher Baba for five days in May 1965 I became reclusive and generally a little melancholic for my Beloved’s contact and tended to shut myself off from all social contact.
After about a month I felt I should write to Francis in India and thank him for looking after us, Helen and myself, for the week we were in Poona, as Beloved Baba had deputed him to do so.
In writing to him, amongst other things, I told him ‘Our journey back to Australia was a swift and sure one – too sure. The arrival in Sydney was traumatic, a feeling of being alienated in a foreign land assailed us, foreign in the sense that we were amongst people we could not communicate with and whom could not communicate among themselves. For a moment I experienced the fear a child has in a crowd when all the faces seem alien and hostile.’
His most loving answer back to me from ‘Guruprasad’ was not only most telling but told me of his first abnegation of himself before his Beloved.
He wrote, ‘I know pretty well your feeling of landing in a strange land – but in my case it was not so much amidst a hostile people as amidst unsubstantial forms with harsh voices.’