d. 1931 · Pune
The mother under the neem tree
A Pashtun noblewoman who fled a marriage for the love of God, she wandered for decades through Persia, Arabia, and India as a Sufi dervish, and settled at last under a neem tree in a Pune lane — where she remained, in sun and rain, for the last decades of her long life, revered by Muslims and Hindus alike as a saint drowned in the divine.
Her state was that of the God-intoxicated: she spoke of the divine with the intimacy of possession, blessed all who came, and dissolved religious boundaries simply by ignoring them. Her tomb stands where her tree stood, in the middle of the street that would not move her.
From her way, this message endures: the love of God outranks every convention, and sanctity asks permission of no institution. Her life belongs in this umbrella as proof that the Sathguru-principle blows where it will — through any land, any faith, any form, including a woman under a tree.
