by Tim Guest
‘OK.’ I said goodbye, but I didn’t put down the phone. I dialled a nine, just to hear the clicks and watch the dial go round. Then I heard a voice again on the phone line.
‘Muuuum?’ The voice was muffled, as if spoken to someone else near the phone. ‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ The pleading voice rose into a whine. ‘Can I sleep with you? Can I? Pleeeease? Muuuuummmm . . .’
It was my mother’s voice.
I slammed the receiver down, hard enough to ring the bell inside. I stared at the dial until the sound had faded into silence.
Now, on my daily travels—as I crunched over the gravel, slid down corridors and hallways, ran across the grass—I carried a cold, heavy lump around with me, this new secret knowledge heavy in my heart. My mother did not want me. Heavy—but at least it was mine. No one could take it from me. I began to imagine this new sorrow as something priceless inside me, as valuable as it was weighty and cold: like a frozen meteorite, invaluable to science.
After that day my mother and I saw less and less of each other. She would sometimes catch hold of me in the hallways and ask me how I was; I smiled to keep her happy, then wormed my way out of her arms to go and read a book or play with the other kids. I never asked to stay in her room again.
In the last issue of the RBEN, issue 14, April 1982, there is an interview with Prakash, the first Medina schoolteacher. ‘I look at these kids and the freedom they have,’ he says. ‘It’s so beautiful. It takes me back to how closeted and imprisoned I was as a child. Today they were having a sex education class, and they were really embarrassed about it. I just talked to them about my sexuality, and they were there, open and listening.
‘I really love being with kids. Part of it is that I grew up really quickly and missed out on that childish stage, and the kids give me that space where I can be a child again.’
To teach thirty kids, they needed to get the school registered with Her Majesty’s Schools Inspectorate. My mother dug out her educational psychologist PhD certificate, and one morning Prakash told us we needed to be extra well-behaved and to stay in the schoolrooms today. The inspectors were coming. After that things were more organized; it seemed harder to just slip off and do your own thing. Two of the older kids went to outside schools, where they occasionally got beaten up—but they also had Saturdays off.
In May 1983 Her Majesty’s Inspectors came to examine the Medina school. After some deliberation they decided it was a boarding school; they wrote recommending certain changes. Ma Satyam, who ran the school, wrote to the Department of Education and Science pointing out that many of the children’s parents lived on the property. On 30 December 1983 a letter arrived conceding the point, and the registration of the Medina Rajneesh School was confirmed. In the first issue of The Rajneesh Times, Ma Anand Poonam spoke with glee about how different Medina was to ‘preconceived notions’. ‘We do not fit into existing concepts because we are something unique, individual. This makes things a bit difficult for bureaucrats.’
Bhagwan’s attitude to the practicalities of schooling was simple: teach the important subjects, English and maths. On no account, he said, were we to be taught the useless subjects, especially politics or history—a fact which had to be hidden from the inspectors. For the rest of the time, Bhagwan said, the children should be allowed to play and to learn from each other and the adults around them. (‘The curriculum’, the RBEN article explains, ‘is a natural balance between the traditional three R’s: Riting, Reading and ’Rithmetic, and Bhagwan’s three L’s: Life, Love and Laughter.’) His attitude to education in general was more sophisticated; he said it should encompass not just facts and knowledge but also life. A good education, he said, should give a solid grounding in wisdom and in love. ‘The educational system should teach you the art of living,’ Bhagwan once declared. ‘It should teach you the art of loving, it should teach you the art of meditation, it should teach you finally the art of dying gloriously.’
The policy of the Medina school, explained to all the kids on the day they arrived, was that, except for the essential skills, we were never to be forced to learn anything. English and mathematics were compulsory; all other lessons were optional. If we wished, we could spend the other school hours in other departments: in the design studio, helping with the Letraset; in the garage, fixing cars; in the computer offices, next to the high shelves packed with books and tapes, trying to make concentric circles on the screen look like a spaceship’s hyper-drive; or—because no one followed us up to check—sliding in our socks along the freshly buffed first-floor landing of the Main House. I tried all these things. In practice, though, I almost always took myself away to the same place: behind the sofa on the landing halfway up the stairs in the Main Hall of the Main House.
I would run across the gravel up to the Main House, through the back door, into the dark green of the corridors lined with green glazed tiles (the cement between the tiles placed at the perfect width for spinning the wheels of a matchbox car as you ran). Just inside the door on the left was the Medina switchboard. Sometimes I hung out in the doorway, watching whoever was on switchboard duty—an adult, or sometimes an older kid—put calls through with the flip of a switch. Usually I dropped into the kitchens, farther along the corridor, to make myself a Marmite sandwich. I couldn’t cut the bread straight so I always made the slices four inches thick just in case, cutting the bread as fast as I could—‘Hey, Speedy Gonzales,’ someone would shout to me over the Eurythmics or the Pointer Sisters, ‘where you going? That another doorstop sandwich you got there? You gonna keep doors open with that?’ Then I’d run up to the stairs in the Main Hall. Halfway up the carpeted stairs, making sure no one was looking, I’d swing over the back of the sofa with my book in one hand and the doorstop sandwich in the other. There, in the gap between the sofa and the bay window, I’d settle for the rest of the day. I heard people talking as they walked past, but no one ever looked over the back of that sofa to find out I was there. I read Willard Price adventure books, science fiction novels, short stories: I spent half my time in tropical countries, and the other half on Mars.
Because the school hours at Medina were never strictly observed, sometimes our tuition consisted of playing stick-in-the-mud on the front lawn or British Bulldog out on the grass in front of the Kids’ Hut. I quickly discovered that you could get away with saying you were going to fetch something and spending the rest of the day playing on the upper floors of the Main House, or deep in the forest, or out on the front lawn. The other kids, too, began to navigate their way around this new landscape; on their own, or in groups of three or four: across the lawns, between the trees, along the gravel paths, through the rooms and corridors of the Main House, and out into the sun. Our parents were saving the world, but saving the world took time. While they danced, rolled their heads, swayed their arms, flailed their malas, beat cushions, broke down their social conditioning, and set themselves free, we filled our lives as best we could with the things we found around us.
While the adults were in their meetings there were trees to climb, games to play, meditation groups to interrupt, visitors to embezzle, meetings to eavesdrop on, drinks cabinets to raid. There were afternoons free—whole days free if you felt like it. You could wander, stick in hand, or book in hand, in and out of huts and rooms and Portakabins; watching people work, typing programs into a computer by hand, dropping by the design studio to help them with the Letraset. If you were hungry there were the kitchens with gargantuan rotating toast racks, in which Majid and I would put toast again and again until every slice turned black. The little tape recorder in the corner under the window always played disco, the volume turned right up. In the back pantry bread and chocolate were mixed into rum truffles to sell in the boutique—the rum, despite our protests, always poured in by somebody else. Outside there were circles of mushrooms, and a forest of trees which every January were covered in a film of sticky cobweb that was impossible to explain. There were extracurricular activities—a shop to shoplift from,
younger kids to lie to, older kids to learn from, to copy, to have lie to you.
By spring I knew where everything was. Next to the Kids’ Hut was the design studio, where ten or so sannyasins typed, answered phones, pored over diagrams and contact sheets, and a cassette player pumped out background music: Grace Jones’s ‘Nightclubbing’, or ‘Satsang’ music with lilting flutes and gently strummed guitars from Bhagwan’s silent meditations. The other way from the Kids’ Hut, down past the garages, was the carpentry cabin, where we sometimes helped out by over-eagerly applying wood-glue. At any time of day or night, ‘Fingers’ Prabodham, a curly-haired guy with a moustache and wiry arms, would be smoking roll-ups as he pushed wood through a circular saw. ‘Fingers’ had lost three fingers in a carpentry accident; if we pestered him long enough, he would wriggle the stumps in our face to make us gasp.
The Main House was a five-storey, thirty-bedroom mock-Tudor mansion with whitewashed walls and black-painted timber. On bright summer days the wide eaves laid sharp diagonal shadows over lead-crossed windows. In the gravel courtyard by the back door were the laundries, a hot square room where Swamis and Mas pulled wet clothes with tongs out of industrial washing machines. There was a tub for every colour—pink, maroon, orange, and purple. Once the clothes had been dried on wooden racks, they would be folded and put on rows of white wire shelves. Each person had their own neatly labelled pile; every resident sewed name tags in their clothes before they put anything to be washed. My mum had already sewed in my labels, so every few days I would run in here and pick up my clothes to take back to the Kids’ Hut. On the shelves were also stacks of metal Dylon tins. We’d sneak into the laundries and palm handfuls of these to hurl across the lawns: heavy, round metal tins, an inch across, with the names of all the colours we saw every day: Tangerine, Primrose, Mandarin, Nasturtium, Coral, Cerise, Scarlet, Golden Glow, Sahara Sun, Pagoda Red.
Across the courtyard from the laundries was the boutique, ‘Muti’ (‘The Provider’), which opened up that spring. Muti sold orange and maroon clothes, sannyasin jewellery (necklaces with two birds against the sun, fancy silver mala beads), packets of crisps, and, in a rack below the counter, chocolate bars; where, we later discovered, the Swami or Ma at the till couldn’t always see you slip a mint creme egg into your pocket.
There was also the bar, ‘Omar Khayyam’. Early in that first year of Medina an edict came over from Bhagwan’s new Ranch in the USA: no more dope was to be smoked in sannyasin communes. All the dope was collected and flushed down the toilet. Some were less happy about this new ‘surrendering’ than others—but subsequently the crowds in Omar Khayyam grew. In the evenings many of the adults would gather there; Suresh, who had lived in the fold-up bed in the Oak Village books and tapes room, was the bartender. My mother often smoked her roll-ups on a curved bar sofa, with her arm around Poonam or Sujan or Adheera, the sannyasins I knew from before. Each working resident was given a glass of wine or half a pint of beer a day. The rest of the drinks had to be paid for from personal funds or from the £5 per week allowance given to each adult sannyasin. We kids sometimes bought crisps here, but we only got £1 a week, which worked out at only five packets, so we usually tried to nick someone else’s.
Past the bar was the Main Hall, the centre of Medina life, filled with chairs and coffee tables—all hand-made that year in the carpentry workshop. The whole of the Main Hall was lined with oak panelling, recently painted over by sannyasin artisans with stencils: red birds landing on flowers, purple grapevines climbing to the ceiling.
Out in the grounds and the forests, there were the places only the kids liked to explore. In a clearing near the Main House car park was our oak tree, which we used as a base for hide and seek. We held climbing races on the oak; the winner—usually Gulab—was the one who trod most on the other kids to reach the top.
At the bottom of the aisle of cherry trees there was an arch in a stone wall. Through it was the old swimming pool, half-covered with boards, which only ever filled with sunlight, broken turquoise tiles, leaves, and rain. The swimming pool was ‘out of bounds’, but if you held out your arms you could balance all the way along one edge, and who would ever know?
We all knew who Bhagwan was. We’d seen his photos everywhere, for years. Some of us had sat cross-legged, restless, for a morning or two in Buddha Hall; we’d all watched a video or two downstairs in the Kids’ Hut. (I thought I even remembered seeing him once in person—although I was no longer sure if it had been a dream, and told no one.) We knew about Bhagwan because, on a podium by the bay windows in the Main House meditation room, his personal padded swivel-chair was kept empty in case he ever came to visit. His chair was supposed to remind us of his presence whenever we entered the room. We were told never to touch it; we didn’t. Even the most intrepid of us never dared to go near Bhagwan’s chair. We were the children of the Buddhafield; but Buddha wasn’t around.
Bhagwan’s absence was all we knew about him. Because Bhagwan said that the best way to honour the child was to let them be, the adult sannyasins taught us nothing about him. They also taught us nothing about the world around us. So we began to do what we could to find out for ourselves about the world outside the commune walls. There were two US airbases within thirty miles of Medina; we learned to identify the planes that flew over from our ‘fighter-jet’ Top Trump playing cards. My favourite plane was the Blackbird—‘Lockheed SR71-A’, which the Top Trump card said was the latest high-tech US spy-plane. Far above the grounds of Medina we could sometimes pick out these Blackbirds; we thought we recognized their sharp nose and distinctive wide fins, matte-black planes cutting a thin line as far up into the sky as you could get. I had read about them: they flew so high that the air thinned out almost to nothing, until the sky above them was black and below all you could see was blue. Through their cameras the pilots could see everything. They could read newspapers over your shoulder, one of the kids said, although none of us read newspapers. Sometimes I wondered whether they had been sent over to look down on us at Medina, their spy-cameras zooming in on us down through the blue. Every now and then I looked up and gave the pilots a wave.
Some evenings, if we were lucky, we would gather in a room off the upstairs landing of the Main House or in the playroom downstairs in the Kids’ Hut, to watch a pirate video. We watched Superman III, Return of the Jedi, Flashdance. One night they showed Alien; the younger kids were told we had to stay upstairs for that one. All the next day Gulab, Rupda, and the rest of the older kids were shoving their hands under their T-shirts, waving them around and squealing. Furious at being left out, we campaigned to be allowed to watch all the films too. So when they showed Jaws one evening, we were there; and from then on, on every trip to the Mildenhall swimming pool, we all tried to keep an eye on the underwater vents in case a shark swam up through a long pipe from the sea. Then, near the end of the summer, we saw E.T. The picture quality was terrible. The colours were bright and garish; as E.T. raised a glowing finger he would sometimes roll off one side of the screen, only to reappear on the other. But the little wrinkly creature from another world had us entranced. E.T. had an old face and mischievous eyes, secret powers and a home somewhere far away; in our minds, the boundaries between E.T. and Bhagwan began to blur. From then on, as a few precious and much-stolen T-shirts proclaimed, he was our ‘favourite Extra Terrestrial’. E.T. posters proliferated throughout the Kids’ Hut. We had ‘I Love E.T.!’ badges, E.T. pencil cases, and one bendy E.T. figurine, stolen from one kid to another so often that finally no one remembered whose it was. We turned off the lights and shone flashlights through our fingers, to make them glow bright red.
E.T. gave us the hope that Bhagwan gave to our mothers and their friends. For me, E.T. made it possible to hope for Purva. In the movie, orchestrated by E.T.’s secret mind-powers, Eliot the hero gets a kiss from the prettiest girl in the class; I thought it might still be possible for Purva to give me a real kiss. If E.T. couldn’t make it happen, perhaps Bhagwan would use his powers to arr
ange it? I wanted to write a letter to ask. I needed my mum’s help with letters, and by now I was too shy to tell anyone about my latest crush. Instead I persuaded my mum to bring back E.T. toys from her trips—a badge, a lunchbox, a comic book. When she left the room I laid out the toys as an offering on Purva’s bed. I hoped she knew it was me. Sometimes I found another toy already left there, by Will or Champak. I would take those toys and keep them for myself.
For a while some of the kids tried to find out each others’ original names. Majid’s, it turned out, was ‘Barnaby Birch’, like the silver trees with peeling bark down towards the old lake. He was teased mercilessly by some of the older kids—‘B-b-b-Barnaby B-b-b-Birch!’—until I could see he regretted telling anyone. Some of the other kids, like me, still had their English names. We realized we might be next in line to be teased; we also agreed that it would be fun to see what names Bhagwan would pick for us. We discussed it, and a few of us decided to write off to get Indian names.
A few weeks later I was slumped on a beanbag in the Kids’ Hut playroom with my legs outstretched, focused on a book and trying not to be distracted by the kids running into each other with huge cushions clasped to their chests, when Sharna handed me a crisp white envelope. I tore it open. The letter was typed on thick, cream paper; Bhagwan’s wide signature was scrawled like a rose-garden across the bottom.
Beloved Tim,
Here is your new name.
Swami Prem Yogesh
(Love) (One of the names of God.)
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Clutching the envelope in my hand, I ran out the door and into the sunlight. Tiptoeing across the gravel in front of the garages, then onto the grass, I ran down towards Hadiqua’a to tell my mother. There was no one in the hall so I ran in without slowing down, straight on up the carpeted corridor. At my mother’s group-room I stepped over the pile of shoes and paused. There was a sign stuck over the door’s round window:
