HELP IN THE KITCHEN

 
Sometimes Baba would ask the Western women to help me in the kitchen. We had no servants, and there was a lot of preparatory work that needed to be done for each meal.

So Baba would send all those who were free to help me. Usually it was Nadine Tolstoy, Margaret Craske, Rano Gayley, Irene Billo and also Mansari who would come. Often there were big baskets of spinach that needed to have the leaves plucked from the stalks and the bad parts sorted out, and then the leaves had to be cleaned.

So the five of them would have to do all this at one time. Invariably, squabbles would arise on whether to only use the leaves or to cook the stalks too, and how best to chop the onions, and the like.

So, my task of supervising often turned into preventing arguments. I would have to take one person or another away from the group and give her a different task.

The more women Baba sent, the more headache for me! No one agreed on anything.

Ashram life was such that once Baba told us that it was harder for Him to run an ashram full of women than the World War!