Transcript (in black) of the handwritten notes (scan shown below). My comments in purple:-
"Thus Ramu told of a gateman who had beaten up people who were caught staling sandals etc. really brutally. He was known for this. A small fellow had a brush with him one day (in 1979 or so) and had knifed him several times, killing him. He had run to Sai and thrown himself at the Lotus Feet. Sai had forgiven him, sent him away for 9 days and told him that there would be no charges. The case was mysteriously dropped... very irregular in India! The gateman had been usurping power generally, becoming a threat to others inside the ashram - so perhaps the incident was somehow provoked/ engineered?
Comment: The notorious gateman was killed, but it occurred in early 1986 when I was present at the ashram.(See here) He was called Kumar and had been there since Sai Baba fetched him from among shepherds or bandits in the hills nearby many years before. That he was sent away for 9 days seems to be a detail taken from an incident when a former head of the ashram, Chiranjia Rao, was called to Sai Baba and told a man was coming to murder him and that he should go away until called back. The killer, I was told at the time by a Hindi-speaking friend, was a Shiva priest. Another account of the same incident claimed it was a kitchen cook who had been with Sai Baba for ages who killed the gateman Kumar with a kitchen knife in the grounds of the 'samadhi' to his parents in Puttaparthi. Such are the various versions which do the rounds and are never confirmed or denied. The incident was covered up as few present had any idea that anything at all had happened, for I asked some of those I knew.
Finally, it is far from being 'very irregular' to drop murder investigations in India, as constant reports in the India press have borne witness to. That was doubtless Ramnath trying to make Sai Baba seem more mysteriously in control.
Event/leela
When Indira Gandhi, having been snubbed by Baba, sent the police to search his apartment at delhi, he welcomed them saying "You have come to look for gold?" And he pointed out the window. "There..." and they saw a mountain of gold outside in the park. They apologized, excused themselves as they were only doing their duty and fell at His feet. He made vibuthi all around.
Comment: It is known that Indira Gandhi sought Sai Baba's advice during the Emergency and he advised her to hold elections, which it so happened that she did, to the surprise of all (and she won it). See evidence from V.K. Narasimhan However, the incident as described by V. Ramnath is certainly concocted by a heated imagination eager to praise Sai Baba's miraculous omniscience and omnipotence. Such stories are never officially stated or confirmed, so they proceed through the Sai movement like Chinese whispers, ending up in the kind of unlikely state as in the above report. The movement thrives on such fantastic tales and rumours, there was - and even after his death there still is - an insatiable appetite to hear more leelas and 'insider' stories.
6/13/95 M darsan. (i.e. morning)
Left after seeing Narasimhan/Marit. Driven by Rahim from Babu's, a real scrounger- Don't want him again. Arrived mid-afternoon. Ramu came home earlish.
Also heard from U.S. Daniel that a man in Sai's ashram who wished to run things properly and knew what was being done wrong, had been approached by Swami in the canteen and told in a whisper "God lets his cows shit wherever they want"!
(meaning, perhaps, he doesn't stop anyone making the mess they wish of themselves)
Thus he has said the ashram is a mini-world -
Comment: This was just one of numerous times we heard that people had complained about the administrations of the ashram - the unfairness and discrimination etc. - not least foreign groups. Sai Baba would sometime give assurances that he was in the process of changing the staff or this or that, but absolutely nothing ever happened. Some claim that the 1993 murders incident in which six devotees were killed was at least in part a result of battles for supremacy between vested interests within the ashram.
