My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  When my mother left for India, my father took me to see the National Toy Train Museum in York as consolation. I liked it so much that I begged him to take me to New York that afternoon. We didn’t make the trip. Months passed; my mother did not return. In each of her letters she told us she was staying a little longer. Without a mother to brace my fall, I finally decided to take refuge in gravity. The polytechnic nursery had a much larger climbing frame than the one at Leeds University, where my mother worked. Even before she left for India, I’d had practice falling off—I’d gained a stripe through my eyebrow, and a permanent dimple on my chin. Now I managed to hit one of the lower bars of the climbing frame on my way down and knock out my bottom two front teeth. At a charity fair in the local church a photographer took a picture of me. (I wondered why: I wasn’t doing anything except holding my balloon.) The photo appeared in the Leeds Evening Post. In the photo the balloon snakes up on a long string above my fist. The picture caption reads: up, up and away with my beautiful balloon dreams . . . At the top of the picture, in big, bold type, is the heading: dreams take flight. John sent a copy out to my mother in India. She opened the letter on the covered veranda she had rented from a friend. Despite the fact that Sujan was by her side, hammock-bound and recovering from hepatitis, when my mother saw the photo of me holding my balloon and with missing teeth she decided to come home.

  John took me to meet her at Leeds train station. It was November, four months since we had last been together. When she walked out of the crowd in her orange robes and saw me, she burst into tears. After we hugged, I kept asking her why she was crying. ‘I’m happy to be with you,’ she told me.

  ‘But—,’ I said, ‘people only cry when they fall down.’

  Later I asked her what presents she’d brought back. She said she had a toy gun that shot sparks out of the end. I clapped. But, she added, the airline had lost her luggage so it might take a while. It didn’t matter; Mum was home.

  In my favourite pop-up book, a child dropped an acorn under the kitchen table; overnight, the acorn sprouted into a huge oak tree that twisted its thick trunk up through every room. In the same way, after my mother came back from India, I watched Bhagwan erupt wildly through our house. She put photos of him up in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bathroom, on the slanted wall above my bed. Now, when I opened my eyes each morning, the first thing I saw was Bhagwan. I still played with the local kids in the street, but over that winter, in our games of ‘Superhero’, I began to play ‘Bhagwan’ along with ‘Zorro’ and ‘Spiderman’. Most of my clothes had already turned orange in the wash. I wanted a mala, too. In December 1979, with my mum’s help, I wrote my own letter to the Ashram. ‘Dear Bhagwan,’ the letter said. ‘I want a mala please. I am four. Love Tim. P.S. I want to keep my name please.’

  I had a new birthday, my mother told me (although I carefully established that my old birthday celebrations would continue as before), and a new star sign: Sagittarius to go with my existing Cancer. Somehow, Mum got hold of a baby mala, replete with little sandalwood beads and its own mini-locket and picture of Bhagwan. I wore it proudly in the street, my new orange costume the envy of all the kids in the neighbourhood. Georgie, my best friend, asked his mum if he could take sannyas, too; she said no. He was sad, though. So out in the street one Saturday, when no one was looking, I pretended to be Bhagwan, waved my plastic sword, and gave Georgie sannyas anyway.

  ‘Dear Tim,’ Bhagwan wrote in reply. ‘I give you sannyas because I love you.’

  In March 1980, three months after my reply from Bhagwan, my mother went to her doctor and asked to be sterilized. Her doctor refused. She’d had a healthy pregnancy, he said. She had a healthy child. She was only thirty. But this opposition from a male GP only strengthened my mother’s resolve. It was, after all, her body and her self. The general advice at the Ashram was that sterilization would keep the flow of sexual energy unimpeded; it would also free up the women’s energy from caring for children, ready to help spread the good news about Bhagwan and build a Buddhafield in India.

  In the weeks after the operation, my mother found herself unable to stop crying. She realized that maybe part of her had wanted a stable family after all. Now that was impossible, and it felt like a huge loss. She felt the operation had drawn a line between her and a normal life.

  Sujan comforted her. She wiped away her tears. The Ashram had opened up her heart, and she had fallen in love with Bhagwan. Her son would not be an only child; we would be part of a new and bigger family. We would move to India for good.

  While at the Ashram in Pune my mother had taken one of the famous ‘No Limits’ encounter groups run by Swami Anand Somendra, one of Bhagwan’s leading sannyasin group leaders. As a rule of thumb, the longer the beard, the more important the Swami; Somendra’s beard was long, in fact it was sometimes forked so it looked like two beards. At the end of the group Somendra told her she had ‘the light of awareness’. He said that she had come farther in one lifetime than anyone he had ever seen, and that she would definitely become enlightened. This was news to my mother, who thought she was hopeless at the enlightenment game. It moved her to the top of the class; her friends all clamoured to know what the light of awareness felt like.

  In September 1980 Somendra flew from India to hold a group at Kalptaru, the Rajneesh meditation centre at the top of a warehouse building in North London. It was an important event; every British sannyasin who could make it went to hear him speak. At the beginning of the session Somendra called my mother out of the crowd. ‘Is Vismaya here? Come on up,’ he said. He asked her to be one of his ‘mediums’. While Somendra spoke into his microphone, my mother moved and whirled in Sufi configurations, here and there touching people who would inevitably collapse into ecstasy. The mediums were much envied among other sannyasin women; to my mother it was a stellar promotion. Afterwards Somendra invited my mother to assist in a few other groups; she began to travel, leaving me in Leeds with Sujan or my father, for weekends or sometimes even a week at a time. A month later, over a group dinner in Holland, Somendra told my mother he had been keeping an eye on her, she had good energy. He said she was the perfect person to help a woman called poonam expand the London sannyas centre—Kalptaru Rajneesh—into something much larger.

  My mother flew back to England to meet Poonam. She had seen poonam around at the Ashram in India; that morning, over their breakfast at a sannyasin household in Oak Village, North London, my mother recognized Poonam again. She was the woman who had run the Sufi dancing group my mother had nearly disrupted with her Marxist friends two years before. That morning they laughed about it. Poonam wanted to train someone up as quickly as possible, she said, so she would be free to return, with her two daughters, to be close to her husband, Teertha—a major therapist at the Ashram—and Bhagwan. Poonam told my mother she would be great, perfect, and she should come to live with her in London to start the work. My mother’s plan had been to save enough money to move with Sujan and me to India for good; but this was an extraordinary opportunity to be directly involved in Bhagwan’s work. Poonam asked if she could move to London to start next week. My mother panicked, then said yes. On Bonfire Night 1980 she came back up to Leeds and told us she was leaving.

  I didn’t want to abdicate my lilac tree—from where, with my Zorro sword, mask, and mala, I ruled 2 Lumley Mount; in fact I ruled the whole cobbled street, right down to Georgie’s house on Beechwood Terrace. But, even more, I didn’t want to lose my mother. She moved to London; six weeks later I followed her down.

  Within a week of our London arrival, Bhagwan wrote to Poonam. My mother was to be sent back to the Ashram in Pune to be trained to run the British sannyasin commune Kalptaru Rajneesh. To save time my mother forged a signature on my passport photos. At the passport office, they discovered the forgery right away. Contrary to my mother’s views about the oppressive nature of state institutions responsible for border control, though, they were quite nice about it. They made her a cup of tea and told her not to do it aga
in. A week later we were on a plane to India.

  4

  The ride from Bombay to Pune was long and bumpy. Through the windshield every half-mile or so shapes loomed, picked out in our taxi’s headlights: broken-down trucks painted with Hindu deities in bright greens, yellows, and oranges. To me they looked like dead or resting dragons.

  We arrived at night. My mother carried me through the Ashram gates in her arms. By a notice board just inside, she bumped into Dwara, an old friend of hers from Leeds. Dwara said she had a spare bed in her dormitory. They found a mattress for me, dragged it over next to my mother’s bed, and we fell asleep. We woke up covered in mosquito bites; in the night I had wrestled off our makeshift mosquito net. I wanted cornflakes; my mother found me a bowl of curd and honey. I wanted to see the tigers and the monkeys; my mother took me to see Bhagwan.

  Since his enlightenment in 1953 at the age of twenty-one, Bhagwan had suffered increasingly from asthma and other allergies. By 1981, in the bright, low, orange light of the Pune morning, there were women outside the Ashram gates stationed to sniff everyone’s hair and armpits for any trace of perfume—for the sake of his allergies—or body odour, for the sake of general cleanliness. (For those who were turned away, scent-free soap and shampoo were available in the Ashram shop.) Inside the auditorium, everyone had to sit absolutely still and silent. Laughter was the only noise allowed. There was a sign by the entrance: BELOVEDS: IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO LEAVE BEFORE THE DISCOURSE IS OVER. The guards who knelt on either side of Bhagwan had instructions to remove anyone who coughed for more than ten seconds.

  My mother was in silent raptures. I couldn’t sit still.

  In the late 1970s many sannyasin couples asked Bhagwan if he thought they should have children. Bhagwan’s response was always the same. If they were in any doubt, they should not have children; they should look first to their own spiritual growth. In June 1978 (as recorded in Cypress in the Courtyard, the ‘Darshan Diary’ for that summer) one sannyasin woman, Ma Anata, told Bhagwan, ‘I’m pregnant. It’s very difficult because I feel I cannot be a mother for many reasons. I feel I am not listening to you.’

  ‘No, you are listening,’ Bhagwan replied, ‘and you will become ready for being a good mother also. But this time if you are not, abortion is good. One should be perfectly ready to be a mother—only then give birth to a child. It is a great responsibility. One should not simply go on reproducing, because then there is no love.

  ‘If you are going to give birth to a child, before you give birth to the child, you must give birth to your being a mother. Otherwise who is going to take care of the child? You may be able to nurse the child but that is not the point of being a mother.

  ‘It is the greatest creative work in the world—to be a mother. Man has always felt jealous of women because he cannot become a mother. So if you are not feeling it is the time, don’t force it; get an abortion. The soul can find some other womb. There is no problem, so don’t feel guilty about it. And next time when you are ready, mm? Good.’

  Questions about pregnancies, sterilization, and abortions were so common, and Bhagwan’s answers so frequently repeated, that by 1980 Bhagwan indicated the subject was not to be brought up in Darshan at all. At the Ashram medical centre, abortions and sterilizations were routine. Many male sannyasins, keen to do their part for the commune, had vasectomies. Parents were told by the Ashram administration that if they brought their children to Pune, they would be unable to live within the walls of the Ashram itself. Drawn to the Buddhafield, many sannyasin mothers agonized over whether to commit to their bliss or to their kids; many chose Bhagwan over their babies. As one, Satya Bharti, wrote about her decision to leave her children with their father so she could move to live at the Ashram in India: ‘It was hard, but it seemed inevitable. How could I wish for them, as I did most of all, happiness, freedom and continual growth, if I didn’t allow myself to have it? How can you share with others what you yourself don’t have?’ Later, having left her kids, Satya Bharti describes how she felt at the Ashram. ‘The pain is incredible. I relive scores of past-life experiences, all of them connected with this same feeling of loss; my children dead, dying, killed, taken away from me in one way or another. A loss that’s irretrievable, a pain that’s unending.’ Satya Bharti went to Bhagwan to ask his advice about her children. He told her, ‘Why are you worrying about them? Everything is perfect with them. Everything is happening as it should. They’re not your responsibility now; I’m taking care of them.’ Satya Bharti left ‘feeling as though a weight had dropped’. (Later her daughter wrote a letter inviting her to visit. ‘If you don’t come, that’s it, you’re not my mother any more,’ she wrote. Satya Bharti stayed at the Ashram.)

  Bhagwan—who would later boast that not a single child was born in Rajneeshpuram, his sannyasin city in Oregon, USA, between 1981 and 1985—declared very early on that the very people who would make good parents were the least likely to have children. They would have no need, he said, because they would have freed themselves from the hidden motivations for using children to avoid certain aspects of themselves. Still, once children had chosen to enter this world, he said, the most important thing was not to be violent to the spirit of the child. This was especially important for those kids who had chosen to be born to sannyasins: it required a very advanced soul to make that decision.

  The first time my mother visited the Ashram, she approached the main reception—signposted ‘the Gateless Gate’—about the possibility of bringing me to live there, too. ‘Not yet,’ they told her. ‘When we move to the new commune, then there will be room.’ On her second visit, because she was a worker and being trained to run the British Buddhafield, the Ashram Mammas granted me a coveted place at the Ashram school.

  That’s us in the photo. I’m the one sucking my thumb, my head peering out from behind the sleeve of the standing kid’s T-shirt. I’m five years old. Barely visible behind me is Viruchana, my best friend at the Ashram school.

  I didn’t know Viruchana’s real name then; I still don’t know it now. We met by the old rusty car in one corner of the playground, on my second morning. A troupe of monkeys had been screeching in the trees above for hours. The monkeys resisted all our encouragement to come down, until we finally got bored and ignored them. At last they leaped down to screech and whirl in the dust. We laughed. Sharna, the teacher, told us not to open our mouths, because, to monkeys, showing your teeth was a sign of aggression. Viruchana and I looked at each other, took deep breaths, turned as one, and opened our mouths to bare our teeth and shriek at the monkeys as loudly as we could. Then, before the monkeys could get us, we ran inside the school hut. We left Sharna with the problem of scaring the monkeys away.

  Each morning, when our mothers went to Buddha Hall to hear Bhagwan speak—we never went ourselves because neither of us could resist the urge to cough or wriggle—we made our own way to the school, half a mile from the Ashram. Viruchana lived in an apartment block on my route; he had been there for months. He knew all the tricks. He taught me to say ‘Chullo!’ to shoo away the beggars, ‘Bus, baba!’ to ask the rickshaw drivers to stop. He showed me how to jump out of our shared rickshaw just before the last corner, so we could spend our rickshaw fare by the side of the road instead. We bought freshly squeezed orange juice, or a melon, or a paper cone of mango pulp with fresh buffalo cream.

  After school, walking slowly through the baking heat and the smell of petrol, the two of us made our way back to the Ashram. At the shop, a hut just inside the gates, we swapped six paise for a Coke bottle full of liquorice pellets. We wandered through the Ashram’s six acres, among the sounds of hammering and sawing that seemed to come from everywhere. We waved at the adults who smiled or said hello, and passed the bottle between us, taking swigs of liquorice in turn. I remember being entranced by the colours that were everywhere, like the semi-precious stones I remembered from the books my father bought me back in Leeds. Topaz, ruby, amethyst, aquamarine, amber, and tiger’s eye, the deep brown that f
lashed yellow when you turned it against the light.

  When we got really hungry we made our way to Vrindivan, the Ashram canteens. We discovered that at the workers’ canteen you didn’t have to pay and, once we had persuaded them our mothers were workers, they fed us for free. We’d pick up a metal tray and walk along the self-service counters, lean up on our tiptoes to pick out some rice, salad, bread, put them in different sections of the tray, then carry it all, balanced carefully, out to one of the outside tables, under the vines that hung down from wooden frames all around. After we’d eaten we might go back to the long rows of tea urns, great silver cylinders like fat rocket-ships, and pour ourselves a cup of lemongrass or lemon verbena tea, or open the taps and watch the tea run out into the overflowing silver drip-trays until someone chased us away.

  We would always make sure we used the toilets at the canteen. Every other toilet in the Ashram just had a water-jet in the bowl—the adults called them bum-wipers, and I could never see how they were supposed to get you clean at all—whereas (and this was a secret only a few of the kids knew) the stall at one end labelled ‘handicapped’ was always well stocked with rolls of real toilet paper.

  Bhagwan always insisted that sannyasin children should not be taught anything about his or his sannyasins’ beliefs. We were to discover the world for ourselves. ‘If you really want to give to the child,’ he said, ‘this is the only gift possible: don’t interfere. It is difficult. Great fear grips the parents—who knows what will happen to the child? Take the risk. Let the child go alone, into the unknown, the uncharted.’ That was what we did. To pass the time until our mothers finished work, Viruchana and I would wander among the Ashram sannyasins, among the low white huts and the deep pits braced with planks where more huts were being built. We’d steal a pack of beedie cigarettes and chew them in a ditch, or bet our last rupees between us on who, by peering into the windows of all the Ashram buildings, could find the biggest photo of Bhagwan.