by Tim Guest
My mother’s lover Nutan was a puppeteer. In his bamboo hut the walls were entirely covered by puppets. There were people, giraffes, crocodiles, zebras, demons, and a monkey. They all had thin string attached to their legs, arms, and head. The morning after I’d walked off to school on my own, Rajhansa, who had still been asleep when I returned, told my mum the arrangement wasn’t working. My mother helped me pack up my stuff; we both moved into Nutan’s hut.
That evening my mother told me we only had one week left in India. On the way back from school the next day, I told Viruchana I wanted to see Bhagwan for myself. There were certain areas of the Ashram clearly marked ‘Residents Only’, but although my mother worked there and I went to the Ashram school, my mother told me we weren’t Ashram residents and weren’t allowed to go past these signs. Viruchana had discovered, though, that it was easy to get in and out if you were a kid, as long as it looked like you knew what you were doing. The guards, he told me, hardly ever asked to see your pass. I knew there were gates set into a wooden fence; when we reached these gates I’d always turned back. That day we slipped on past the gates and kept on walking into the grounds of Lao Tzu. The sounds of hammering and sawing faded behind us. I expected one of the men to shout after us, but none did and soon there were bushes and trees behind us. I knew we couldn’t be seen.
Viruchana didn’t want to go any farther, but I wanted to see if I could find Bhagwan’s house. I said I’d meet him back at the gate. I went on, up some stairs. At the top of the first flight I walked out into a long, low hall without walls, just arched columns and a ceiling. Out through the arches I could see the trees and huts and apartment blocks stretched out into the distance. Although it was late afternoon, the sky seemed to be growing dim. The dust in the air left a chalk-taste in my throat. I could hear the sound of running water. One corner of the hall was sectioned off with cloth, a cubicle of raw pink cotton drifting in the wind. Behind the curtains I could hear a band practising. It was a song I had not heard before; but I could tell it was what we called ‘Bhagwan music’: ‘Disappearing into you . . . Oh, Bhagwan . . . Disappearing into you . . .’ I wanted to ask for a go on the drums, but realized I wasn’t supposed to be here, so I walked on along the tiled floor. I heard a peacock cry. At the other end of the hall, I went down some stairs. I came out onto a garden, fenced in by trees and bushes, with a lawn of cut grass. In the centre of the garden a small waterfall sprang into a pool. Under the surface, fish glinted orange and yellow. Bunches of ferns arced out in sprays over the water.
I stopped still. A woman—her arms outstretched, her long white dress stroking the grass around her bare feet—was standing by the edge of the pool. In front of her, seated on a wooden chair on the grass, in long grey and white robes with wide sleeves that draped down over the arms of the chair, was Bhagwan. I knew it was him. He had the same eyes, the same face, the same long beard as all his huge photos. I noticed that his feet were bare. In the same easy gesture he made those few mornings I had been to see him speak, Bhagwan raised his arm towards me. The woman looked round and walked towards me. She was smiling. Behind her, Bhagwan smiled, too, nodding to me. I turned and ran back up the stairs. I expected the woman to say something; all I heard was the peacock cry again.
I found Viruchana back by the Lao Tzu gates. I told him I had seen Bhagwan; he didn’t believe me. Eventually I gave up trying to persuade him. We went to find my mum.
The night before we left, I finally persuaded Nutan to show me one of his puppets. He took a giraffe figure off the wall and made it dance around the room; he smiled at my mother the whole time. I preferred playing in the dust outside Nutan’s hut where I found a thick stream of ants—they were huge; in my memory the ants seem as big as my hands. I poked them with a stick. The next morning, as we packed up to leave, Nutan finally gave in to my longing stares and made me a present of a puppet. I chose the biggest, a huge wire and paper elephant that stomped and rolled and raised its trunk when you jerked its wooden cross. Nutan looked at my mother as he lifted it down from the wall. I shouted my thanks. As my mother packed our bags I went to make the elephant stomp on the huge ants outside.
And then it was time to go home.
Viruchana came to see us off. As we said goodbye and got into our taxi, he gave me a present, too; a black Parker silver-tipped fountain pen in a little plastic fold-up case. He had asked his mum if he could come with us; she had said no. So I clutched the pen and waved out the back window of the taxi until he was out of sight. When we got into the airport, though, I realized I had left his pen on the back seat.
Although I was bitten by hundreds of mosquitoes, and although I was always eating fruit I bought at the side of the road, I did not get sick in India. But sitting in the glass cube that was the airport departure lounge, I doubled over with stomach pain. My mother said it was something beginning with ‘c’—cramps or crabs, I couldn’t tell. I had this picture of a few small crabs scuttling around inside me, like the red ones I’d seen shuffling sideways on the Blackpool sand. My mother said the feeling would pass. It didn’t. On the plane I sucked on the green boiled sweet the stewardess gave me. I was sick the whole way home.
In the spring of 1981, not long after my mother and I returned to Oak Village in England, the senior Ashram dentist was sent from Pune to London to acquire for Bhagwan a dentist’s chair. The chair—bright red leather, with blue and chrome fittings—was duly purchased, lightly scraped, and painted with grey and red enamel (to avoid a 120 per cent Indian import tax on new goods), then shipped back to the Ashram and installed in a wing of Lao Tzu, newly built for this purpose. Later, Bhagwan would have the chair shipped to Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, USA; for now, as well as his daily discourses in Buddha Hall to thousands of his sannyasins, Bhagwan began to speak some evenings from his artificially weathered dental throne to an audience of four sannyasins—including a dentist and a dental nurse, all of whom he nicknamed either Swami or Ma Bharti, the same surname as his father. As he spoke, Bhagwan inhaled nitrous oxide from a canister by his chair. Like all his other words, these laughing-gas monologues were transcribed by devoted sannyasins, later published (with no mention of the anaesthetic gas) as Books I Have Loved, billed on the back cover as ‘The very last words of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh before He went into silence for an indefinite period.’
‘I don’t think anybody has spoken in a dentist’s chair,’ he chuckles. ‘I feel privileged. I see Buddha envious of me.’ Books I Have Loved is a gem, the private indulgence of a high-as-a-kite guru; at once charming and hilarious, full of aggrandized pleasantry and sweet theatrical emotion. Bhagwan weeps tears of joy at the memory of a favourite author, then tears of sadness at forgetting to mention them sooner. Time and again he tells the disciple taking the dictation to put this or that book, which he has neglected until now, right at the top of the list. A third of the way through, when he mentions the first book written by a woman—The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky (whom Bhagwan nicknames ‘Blah-Blah Blavatsky’, because of her wordy style)—he introduces her with these words: ‘I have been thinking again and again to bring in a woman but the men were crowding at the door. Very ungentlemanly!’
Midway through discussing the forty-second book, a spiritual text by Narada, a Hindu Brahmin, which begins ‘Now the enquiry into love . . .’, Bhagwan goes into a digression about love. ‘To enquire into love,’ he says, ‘is the greatest exploration, the greatest enquiry. Everything else falls short, even atomic energy. You can be a scientist even of the calibre of Albert Einstein, but you don’t know what real enquiry is unless you love. And not only love, but love plus awareness . . . or in scientific terms, love as levitation, against gravity.’ Amidst all the gentle veneration, this single sudden exclamation stands out. ‘Levitate!’ he urges us. ‘Arise! Leave gravitation for the graves!’
That was what Bhagwan’s sannyasins wanted. In his communes around the world, sannyasins gathered together to abandon weight, to surrender themselves to levity. Or rather, that’s what th
e adults were hoping for. The children of Bhagwan’s communes needed other things. We needed comfort. We needed a place to stash our Lego. We needed our home. Shorter as we were, closer to the earth, we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, escape gravity. We felt things we weren’t supposed to feel. We never seemed to make it off the ground.
5
We were back in England, and it was cold. Oak Village, England’s biggest sannyasin centre, was a two-storey Victorian terraced house with nine people living in three mediumsized bedrooms. Kalptaru, the meditation centre where my mother had met Somendra a few months before, was just down the road.
Oak Village had a downstairs kitchen, a small L-shaped garden, and a living room partitioned into two with wooden shutters. I took up residence, with Poonam’s two daughters, Rani and Soma—both a few years older than me—in the shuttered-off part of the living room. My mother shared the main section of the living room with a black-haired woman called Adheera. When we returned from India Sujan moved to London to be with my mum; to her dismay, he was sent by Poonam to live and work in another flat in Cricklewood, three miles and two bus journeys away.
Because Kalptaru was expanding, they needed money. New therapy groups and training courses were started each week. My mother’s role was to make money running many of these groups, and she often took me along.
Kalptaru took up half of the top floor of a huge warehouse building. The sannyasins occupied one half of the top floor; the other half was used as a practice area for a young Mod band. Some mornings we shared the lift with them. At one end were the sannyasins, in their maroon robes, orange cords, sandals, crinkled dresses, and bead necklaces. At the other end were the band; sunglasses, grey three-button suits, white shirts with thin black ties and razor lapels, a cigarette hanging carelessly at the corner of each of their mouths. They pulled the doors back with a screech of metal; they always waited politely for us to get out first. Once I hung around to watch them shift their instruments. They smiled as I hopped in and out of their way. On their cases, stencilled in white, was the name of their band: THE JAM.
Many of the other London sannyasin mothers took their kids to Kalptaru Meditation Centre. We loved the place. Kalptaru’s big reception and huge meditation halls were our adventure playground. We’d climb upstairs, sneak through the offices, and jump through the trapdoor in the roof of the main meditation hall—sometimes narrowly missing a Swami in the lotus position—to land on the pile of pillows we’d lined up under the trapdoor. Although the ceilings were high and we fell a long way, the pillows—and our soft toys, which we added on top—were just enough to cushion the fall. When someone at reception noticed us running upstairs to the offices, then running out of the group rooms and upstairs to the offices again without having come back down, they’d stop us. We’d play instead among the books and tapes in the reception, battling the receptionist’s desperate attempts to keep us quiet during the silent periods of the groups. We knew what went on in that hall, the huge carpeted group room lined with green cushions (green, specified by Bhagwan as the colour of meditation). We’d all seen the groups and the meditations, either here or in the places we’d lived before. The rooms were always hot, usually wet. People often wore blindfolds—a strip of cloth or a kidney shape of cotton attached with elastic. They would jump, whoop, laugh, scream, and cry, beat cushions with contorted faces—then suddenly those same people would be sitting in silence. These meditations looked crazy, but they were carefully structured, devised by Bhagwan to free the repressed Western mind. Specially made tapes with Bhagwan’s voice and soft, lilting pan pipes and guitars marked out the stages. Our favourite was the ‘Mandala’, similar to Kundalini except the adults started by running on the spot for fifteen minutes. We had fun the next day spotting who had been doing the ‘knees-up’ by their bow-legged stagger.
Back then, to us kids, the rest of the meditations all looked the same. Everyone in those rooms was always either jumping around and screaming, or sprawled on the floor in silence. We preferred the noisy bits. When the meditation was over, all the orange- and pink- and maroon-clad men and women filed out to collect their shoes. We would run in and do our own version. ‘Let’s do a meditation!’ one of the kids would suggest. ‘Yeah!’ we’d all shout in reply. Then we’d grab some of the blindfolds from the shelves, put them on (we had to wrap the elastic round twice to keep them from slipping), and whirl round as fast as we could until we fell over. While the dizziness lasted, we ran around screaming and hitting each other with cushions. We learned that if someone hit you too hard and you got pissed off, you could angle the cushion just right and hit them with the zip.
I knew there were other sannyasin centres around England. As news of Bhagwan spread more widely across the UK, my mother started to travel around the country to hold groups in other centres. She’d go away for long weekends; sometimes for a week, leaving me with Poonam’s two daughters, Rani and Soma, for company. When she came back, she still slept in the next room, but I missed her. So on one occasion I asked if I could come along. That Easter she took me to Prempantha, a sannyasin centre on a Devon farm.
My memories of Prempantha are of the other kids and the curtains. They were a bright canary yellow. The spring mornings were cold, but all the windows were open. In my mind these long translucent curtains billowed out into every corridor and hallway. Everything we did—all the running, pushing, fighting, sliding, and playing—we did in a cold breeze among those bright folds.
My mother was in a Satori group, which meant she was not allowed to talk for seven days. These groups were common. I had already seen people in the Reception room at Kalptaru, smiling at each other and pointing to the badges safety-pinned to their orange sweaters: in silence. Before we arrived my mother carefully explained that she wouldn’t be able to talk to me at all for the rest of the week. It was Easter, so while our mothers sat silently in rows and stared at the wall, we hunted chocolate eggs in the garden. Then we discovered a hayloft with a gap just the right size to jump out of. None of the other kids wanted to make the leap, but after jumping through the Kalptaru meditation hall trapdoor I knew about falls like these.
On the third afternoon, though, when all the chocolate eggs had been found and with my mum still not speaking to me, I decided I’d had enough. I walked through the courtyard, kicked the ducks out of my way, left by the farm’s front gates, and headed down the lane. I knew we had come this way when we arrived, so I kept on walking. I walked down a rolling hill, between thorny hedges that looked over muddy farmland, then round a corner. I came to another hill, which looked a lot like the last one. Then, a little farther down the lane, I arrived at the hill again. There was the same tractor, parked by the same gate. As I strolled past the tractor for the third time, the farmer swung down from his high seat and asked me if I was all right. I didn’t say anything. He could see I was wearing orange, though, so he lifted me up on the back of his tractor, took me back up the hill, and dropped me at the Prempantha gate. I found the other kids chasing ducks by the hayloft. No one ever knew I had been gone.
There were smaller centres, too. One weekend my mother took me to another, colder version of Kalptaru, in Edinburgh. While she ran her group downstairs, I bedded down in the attic room. With Bindu, another commune kid, I watched Tron, the film about a man who falls into a computer game. Afterwards I programmed Bindu’s Sinclair ZX Spectrum to type ‘Hello mum! Hello mum!’ in all seven colours—blue, red, magenta, cyan, yellow, black, white—one after another, until multicoloured words filled up the whole screen.
Back at Oak Village, around the kitchen table, there were meetings, meetings, meetings. The word ‘meeting’ began to dominate their conversation. One morning I saw Poonam trace the rain down the kitchen window with her finger. ‘It’s meeting outside,’ she said.
Their plan was to develop Kalptaru, the meditation centre, then leave my mother in charge so Poonam could return to the Ashram in Pune, with her kids, to be close to her husband, Teertha, and to Bhagwan. Every two weeks they
gathered round the kitchen table to scrutinize the pages of the Rajneesh Buddhafield European Newsletter—the ten-page sannyasin broadsheet, typeset at Kalptaru and churned out at a printing press not far from Oak Village—for glimpses, hints, tastes of the sense of ecstasy and belonging they had felt at the Ashram. When my mother got hold of a copy, she always turned first to the ‘We Have Heard: Unofficial News from Poona’ column on page four—‘The theatre group, weaving and jewellery are being disbanded and the mala shop will only be making malas . . . It’s 100°F and no one in the Ashram seems to be able to sleep . . . Iced red wine is now being served in Vrindivan.’ She would read these items and hope out loud that she would one day be able to move us back to India for good.
When we kids pushed our way into the kitchen during one of their meetings we were usually asked, politely, to leave. I didn’t take to this kindly. Despite being asked to close them, I began leaving doors open behind me. When Poonam shouted extra loud after me to shut the door, I would come back a minute later and slam it as hard as I could.
Every now and then one of the adults would come in to clear out our room and find old bowls of cornflakes stacked three high under our beds. Sometimes in the evenings we wandered the streets around Oak Village. There were other kids from nearby council estates, who would tell you your bike had a flat tyre just so they could steal the tin whistle strapped onto your wheel-rack. Two streets down there was a smashed-up ice cream van. Broken glass lay in piles like diamonds by the kerb.
