My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  Pradeep didn’t buy our communal house. Ever since she’d fallen ill with severe bronchitis and no one in the house took time off work to care for her, my mother had grown disillusioned with socialist communal living. The commune disbanded. Just a few weeks after she posted her letter to Bhagwan, we moved into a two-storey terraced house near Leeds cricket ground: 2 Lumley Mount. Our new house—the place where most of my early memories begin—was all right by me. Each afternoon the red setter who lived next door would bound over to let me squirt her with my water pistol. There were four short front steps I could sit and sulk on, after I threw my cowboy rifle on the ground then discovered it wouldn’t click when I pulled the trigger. There was a corner shop down at the bottom of the street; I would walk back up the hill munching crisps, trying to solve the puzzles on the back of the packet. In our few feet of front garden there was just enough space for a rosebush and a single lilac tree, which I annexed as my childhood throne.

  A week after we moved, in February 1979, my mother received a reply from Bhagwan. The air was cold but it was a bright, sunny day. She came out onto the front steps with the envelope in her hand. I sat above her in the lilac tree as she read the letter out loud.

  Beloved,

  Thank you for your letter to Bhagwan. Here is your new name, ‘Ma Prem Vismaya’, and mala. Also enclosed is a message from Bhagwan, with the translation of your name from the original Sanskrit.

  One day we would like to welcome you to Pune, in India, where currently the cold mornings mean we remember the West as we sit in meditation with the Master.

  His blessings,

  Love.

  Ma Prem Arup.

  There was another letter in the envelope, this one signed by Bhagwan.

  Beloved,

  When you have accepted existence as it is; when the song of a bird fills you with gratitude for the whole of life; when you have opened your heart to the whole of creation; then, slowly, slowly . . . the fragrance of sannyas will arise in you, and your love will fill the earth.

  Here is your new name:

  Ma Prem Vismaya

  (Mother) (Love) (Wonder)

  Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

  From a sannyasin commune in London—‘Kalptaru Rajneesh’, the biggest sannyasin centre in England—my mother had already ordered her mala, a necklace of rosewood beads with Bhagwan’s picture dangling in a clear plastic locket. After reading the letter she fetched her mala and placed it round her neck. She told me she wasn’t called Anne anymore; her new name was ‘Vismaya’ and it meant ‘Wonder’. I asked if I could still call her ‘Mum’, and she said, ‘Yes, love, of course you can.’

  Back then the three commitments of a sannyasin were to meditate daily, to wear the mala, and to wear clothes only in the colours of the sun. Because of the last vow, sannyasins were known as ‘the orange people’; after my mother ‘took sannyas’—they also called it ‘taking orange’—everyone who came to sit around on beanbags in our living room wore only orange. They wore orange dungarees, orange drawstring trousers, orange sandals, orange robes. When they arrived, my mum took me to play outside the living room, and they closed the door.

  My mother had quickly lost touch with her old groups of friends; they had all tried to dissuade her from this foolhardy step. (The Marxists thought co-opting Eastern philosophy was intellectual imperialism. The feminists were outraged that her consciousness had fallen so low that she was carrying a picture of a man around her neck. Her therapist acquaintances warned she was projecting her primary love-object in an unconscious bonding with an omnipotent fantasy and that was bound to end in catastrophic negative counter-transference. Her hippie friends thought it was a hassle to have to dye so many clothes.) Her own family were barely speaking to her.

  This new group of sannyasin friends, although a little crazy for her tastes, were now the only family she had. They all agreed that only sannyasins could really understand sannyasins; only other orange people could understand the pull to be with Bhagwan. Bhagwan had renamed my mum’s friend Barbara ‘Ma Prem Mohimo’. She and Pradeep had become an item; they wanted my mother and Sujan to get together, too. They left them alone together after encounter groups, naked and exhausted in our living room; they encouraged them to share a bath—but nothing happened. My mother, who in her intellectual circles always knew the right things to say, felt uncertain of herself, adrift in this sea of sannyasin spontaneity. Sujan seemed to have all the right qualities. He was a dancer, he could ‘live in the moment’, he had no responsibilities. She, on the other hand, lived in her head not her heart; she wasn’t liberated, but tethered by a three-year-old. And then, on an Easter residential group in Snowdonia in North Wales, a month after they first met, my mother passed Sujan a note. ‘If you like me, pick your nose,’ she wrote. Sujan folded the note, got up, and left the room. My mother’s heart sank. Then his head reappeared in the doorway. He slowly pushed his finger into his nostril, right up to the knuckle. That night they slept together under the stars.

  The morning after my mother returned from Wales, I woke up early to find the sun had already made its way into my attic room. Bright specks drifted like sparks in the line of light that slanted between my curtain and the floor. I had been lying in bed, wondering if the sparks had always been there, and if they had just woken up, like me, with the arrival of the light; or whether they rode on the light each morning all the way from the sun. My father would know for sure, I thought, but it might be worth asking my mum, too. So I got out of bed and walked across the room in my pyjamas, rubbing sleepy-dust from my eyes. I picked up my favourite toy: a big red metal fire engine with a moving ladder. Downstairs, I pulled at the handle to my mother’s room and tiptoed in. A crack of sunlight slipped in with me and leaned against the far wall. Sparks billowed in across the bed. I walked up to my mother, pulled back the covers, and hauled myself up. I found my face in a mess of thick, black hair. I slid back down. My mother’s hair was red. I reached up to pull at the hair, standing on my tiptoes to get a look at the other side of the head. It was a man. The front of his head was nearly as hairy as the back. Around his neck was a string of beads, dark brown wooden beads with lines on them like cut wood, that ran down over his chest and under the covers. As I pulled at his hair he groaned and shifted his arm from underneath him. I let go. His head dropped back onto the pillow. I held my fire engine out over him and began to bang it against his head.

  Sujan came back the next night, and the night after. On the third night he turned up with two cardboard boxes; after that he never seemed to leave. I began to ask my mother for longer and longer bedtime stories, knowing Sujan was waiting for her downstairs. Each morning as I slept she began to sneak breakfast boxes into my room, the lid of my own special Tupperware box squeezed tight over oranges, chocolates, and little toys—a toy soldier; a parachute that opened when you threw it into the air—to keep me busy before I climbed downstairs, got into her bed, and kicked Sujan as hard as I could under the covers until he left the room.

  That summer, at my fourth birthday party, Sujan-of-the-beads made me a huge cake in the shape of a rocket-ship. It had blue icing for re-entry shielding, chocolate buttons as portholes, and a candle for each rocket-jet. After eating the cake, my friends and I took off our clothes and ran naked around the house and garden. The day grew cloudy so we ran inside. When my mother saw us sitting naked in a circle in our living room she laughed, although she wouldn’t say why.

  The number of sannyasins in their circle of friends grew. By my fourth birthday, the Woolworth’s on the high street regularly sold out of orange dye. They collected gossip from people returning from Pune in India; they ordered books and tapes direct from the Ashram there. They began to work out what it was to be an English sannyasin. Every morning they did ‘Dynamic’, a meditation invented by Bhagwan to free the repressed Western mind; they jumped up and down, flapped their arms, and shouted ‘Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!’ Sometimes, for fun, I flailed my own arms wildly and ran among them. In the evenings, after I had g
one to bed, they held encounter groups in our living room: took off their clothes, sat in a circle, and did or said whatever they felt like doing, tried as hard as they could to be honest about themselves. At the weekends they strode proudly down the high street, broadcasting their new orange difference to the world.

  I believed this was the way things would always be. My mother and her friends, the larger people, dressed in orange and chatting over cups of tea in our living room; me, the smaller person, fed by them and dressed in all kinds of colours, who played out in the streets and kept watch from up in the lilac tree.

  A week after my fourth birthday, a woman with a deep tan and worn orange robes turned up at our door, straight off a plane from India. I was sitting on the floor by the sofa, playing with my music box. I let it wind down so I could listen as they clamoured to ask her about the Ashram. They asked her who was sleeping with who, who was freaking out, what were the latest fashions for mala beads. ‘What was it like?’ ‘Did you meet him?’ ‘Did he give you Darshan?’ ‘I’m nearly finished with the West . . .’ ‘I’m finished with it. It’s time for me to go.’

  Later that night, after everyone had left, my mother threw her I-Ching coins on the kitchen table. ‘Ch’ien—the way of Heaven,’ the Book of Changes told her. ‘Dragon appears in the field. It furthers one to see the great man. The journey east will bring great blessings.’ There was a moving line: she flicked on a few pages. ‘There is no game in the field. Go now.’

  So she did.

  She bought a ticket to Bombay, and left me with my father.

  3

  This is how John, my father, looked in the summer of 1968, when he and my mother first met. This is the ramshackle back garden of a less formal proto-commune in Sheffield. He’s standing at the back, just to the left of the centre. You can see his home-made T-shirt, homage to his favourite band: ‘Beef’ stitched in block capitals over a big felt heart. His long hair and wide-brimmed hat mask most of his face; the only feature you can see clearly from this distance is his big beard and long, thick moustache, with droopy ends like the boughs on a willow tree. It looks as if he may have planted his moustache there so that his mouth could take shelter when the weather turned bad. He’s like that, my father. His shelter is himself.

  My mother and father met one morning at Sheffield University. She had signed up to do one of his psychology experiments. Each first-year Psychology BSc student had to take part in three experiments: my father’s was her first. She watched flashing lights and did her best to press the right buttons as fast as she could. Occasionally she glanced at him; she thought he looked a bit like Peter Sellers. After that, they had little to do with one another. He was five years older, and kept to himself. She knew his reputation, though, as one of the wilder, freakier members of staff, who lived in a hippie commune—one of the first in Sheffield—and wore way-out clothes. She’d seen his distinctive wide-brimmed hat bobbing through the campus crowds.

  And then, one Saturday in June 1973, when my mother was twenty-three, John came round with a friend to help rewire her house. Picture them: my father, in his hat, his beard, his homemade Captain Beefheart T-shirt; my mother, with her ironed hair, flowing dress, and peasant shawl—catching each other’s eye. They went to a party that night, got stoned, and ended up in bed together. Then they fell in love.

  Even before I was conceived, my mother had been thinking about new ways to bring up children. Since leaving home she had been determined to create an alternative to the Catholic family that had so constricted her. By the time she decided to have a baby, she was convinced the nuclear family itself was at fault: an unwitting agent of capitalist consumerism, contrived to keep everyone in separate houses, separate from each other and from the community, requiring a whole panoply of separate consumer durables. My mother thought people should cook and clean and make homes together. Marriage was part of the bigger swindle; a patriarchal conspiracy to subjugate women, to keep them at home and working for free. Children were hostages to the system, innocents with no defence against the conditioning hammered into them by parents and schools. Through her therapy she was beginning to learn that so many of her problems had their tangled roots in childhood; she wanted something different for her children. She did not want them to be a victim to the same kind of love instilled in her by the Catholic Church, the love that enslaved her to the suffering of others.

  Still, she wanted a kid, and John seemed an ideal partner for this new venture. He was the nicest man she knew. Although they were not living together—they were both now living in Leeds, but in separate communal houses—they agreed to share me between them after I was born. As part of her feminist mission to reclaim women’s bodies from domination by the patriarchal system—‘Our Bodies, Our Selves’ was one of her political mantras—my mother wanted to put childbirth back into the hands of women. She chose to give birth to me at home. Two hours into labour, on the cusp of transition—the point at which the woman’s body takes over the birth process completely—she stopped gasping and turned to the midwife. ‘OK, that’s it,’ she said. ‘Stop. I’ve changed my mind. You can all go home now. It’s fine.’ Then her neck lolled back, and the wet dome of my head began to emerge from between her legs. As I came out, the midwife could see the umbilical cord was wrapped tight around my neck. As quickly as I was being born, I was being strangled. (‘You went dancing too much, love, while you were pregnant,’ the midwife teased my mother afterwards.) Because the cord was wrapped around twice the midwife couldn’t unhook it, so she took up a pair of scissors and cut the cord while I was still being born. ‘Your oxygen supply was cut too soon,’ my mother told me once. ‘You can blame all your problems on that, if you like.’

  There are black-and-white photos of my birth: exact records of the light which fell on us the moment I arrived. My mother’s feminist connections were thick: the photos were used to illustrate an article in Spare Rib, called ‘In the Beginning’. The writer encouraged every pregnant woman to make the personal into the political: to take charge of what they mean by family and home. ‘All a newly delivered woman actually needs is loving friends,’ she wrote. ‘They don’t have to be male and they don’t have to be relatives. Home can mean whatever a woman wants it to mean.’

  The photos in the article are credited to my father. This time there was a man there: he’s in the frame of the last photo himself. He must have used his favourite feature, the camera’s timer, because now we’re all in the picture. My mother is draped in a quilt, slumped back against a floral pillow. Her eyes are nearly closed. My father is leaning on her shoulder, looking both fascinated and weary. Years later he told me how it felt to be there at the birth of his son. ‘The thing is, you know, there’s two of you. Then you go into this room, and there’s a lot of blood and shouting, and all of a sudden there’s three of you. And that new person doesn’t go away,’ he said.

  When my mother was five months pregnant she decided she wanted John close to her, so he moved in. To record the progress of our experimental family, they went to a photo booth each week. My father has kept these photos; a chart of our family in the few months we were a nuclear unit. In the early pictures we’re all there: my mother, John, and me all crowded into the booth, perched on the small swivel stool. In the first few pictures my mother is looking down, straight at me. Before long I have grown some hair and opened my eyes, but very soon—around the time she met her first sannyasin—my mother’s gaze has moved up to meet the single eye of the camera. A few pages on, she’s already looking away: gazing up and to the left with wide eyes and a rapturous smile. My father looks relaxed here, more down to earth than my mother. His huge sideburns alternately meet or miss his untamed Zapata moustache. In some of the photos my father’s eyes are nearly closed. In one or two pictures you can see his hand at my ribs, tickling me to try to make me smile.

  In February 1976, when I was six months old, my mother fell in love with another man. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she slept with him; my father got the rest of her t
ime. Two months later she fell even more passionately in love with someone else; my father moved out. I stayed with my mother during the week and with my father at weekends. John would come to my mother’s house on Saturday morning, chat with my mum over a cup of tea, then take me back to his flat above a nursery in the Chapeltown area of Leeds. All day I would run around with John and the nursery kids in the playground, copying the older kids: learning jump-rope, playing hopscotch, sticking out my tongue trying to blow bubbles with chewing gum. I slept in the spare room at the back of the flat; on Saturday nights I would lie awake listening to the bass from the reggae dance hall behind the nursery as it shook the floor and rattled the window frames. On Sunday I lay on the kitchen floor, my legs kicking the air, with my felt-tip pens; I copied my drawings carefully from natural history books. I drew pictures of eagles—perched on tree stumps, drawn in yellow, brown, and gold—and turtles—always seen from above, always in blue and green and aquamarine. My dad stuck them on the fridge with magnets and took photographs.

  On Monday mornings my father would cycle to work at the Leeds Polytechnic with me on a little blue seat above the back wheel. I pointed with my mittens to the trees and cars and buildings, trying to tell him about the things I could see, but the wind filled my mouth and emptied my lungs. I spent the days on the climbing frame in the polytechnic nursery. In the afternoon we walked back along the river, him pushing the bicycle with one hand on the saddle. He steered it somehow, although he never touched the handlebars.