Chandrabai Borker

Chandrabai Borkar was a devout woman from Bombay who visited Shirdi and was close to Baba.

Chandrabai Borkar of Vile Parle, Bombay, was the wife of Ramachandra Borkar, an engineer. She first came to Shirdi around 1898, twenty years before the Mahasamadhi, when the Masjid was still a crumbling building. She remembered Baba sitting under the neem tree, sleeping on a plank hung from the roof by strips of cloth, and lighting the lamps with water when the shopkeepers refused him oil.

Baba was very kind to her. Every day he gave her udi with his own hand, and he gave her a tooth of his own as a keepsake, which she kept in an amulet all her life. Around 1909, while she was serving Baba in Shirdi, he told her to go to Pandharpur, where her husband was building a bridge, and said he would go with her. When she arrived, her husband had already resigned and left for Bombay. Stranded with two companions and almost no money, she reached Kurduwadi station, where a fakir appeared, told her to go to Daund, and gave her three train tickets.

At the same time, at Daund, a fakir came up to her husband, called her his "mother", and told him which carriage she would be in. The family was reunited, and Chandrabai always said that Baba himself had travelled with her, just as he had promised. She worshipped Baba for more than forty years.