by Tim Guest
BELOVED . . . MOTHERHOOD GROUP IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.
I pressed my ear against the door. There was the faint sound of sobbing. I stood up on tiptoes to pull back the corner of the sign then pressed my nose against the glass. Rows of women, twenty or so, sat cross-legged or propped up with their arms, looking towards the row of windows with fir trees pushed up tight against the glass.
Under the windows, I recognized my mother. She was sitting out in front of the rest of the group. Another woman, her head bent forward so her long straw-coloured hair hung down onto the carpet, was shaking. My mother—her head still tilted, her face calm—said something; the woman sitting in front nodded her head then shook some more. I stepped back from the door and knocked loudly three times. After a moment I pushed my nose up against the glass and knocked again. Some of the women looked round. I stared at them until they looked back up to the front. I could see my mother look up, then look back down at the crying woman in front of her. I knocked once more, then lowered myself onto my heels and stepped back. I settled into the cavern under the coats piled high on the coat rack to wait for my mother to come.
Finally the door opened a crack. My mother slid her head around. ‘What is it, love?’ she said.
I’d had enough of waiting. I sulked. I hid the letter behind my back; I said nothing at all.
Because I spent most of my time outside them, I barely remember the Medina schoolrooms. In September 1982, after the blackboard-eraser incident, Sujan was put in charge of the school.
I had seen Sujan around. Sometimes he and I met on Sunday mornings in my mother’s bed. For the first few months I had also seen him working as a gardener shovelling compost and pushing a wheelbarrow around the Medina grounds. When he was transferred to the school, he taught the older kids’ class. I was in the younger class, and I yearned to be promoted to the senior classroom across the hall, until one morning I walked in to have a nose around and I saw what Sujan had written about me on the board: ‘Mary lent Yogesh a book, and Yogesh lost it’.
I didn’t trust these teachers. I particularly remember storming out of classrooms; that happened all the time. I remember one teacher took great offence at my tendency to leave the classroom without asking and my refusal to close the door behind me. He used to shout and scream when he got angry, and I’d steel myself in response, then raise my eyebrow and walk out anyway. When I left the room and he didn’t shout at all, I’d wait outside the room with my ear cocked. If no one said anything I’d come back a minute later to slam the door as hard as I could. I felt I learned more from reading my books than from the stupid games we played. While they were making pots and drawing with finger-paints and singing ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes’, I read books about galaxies and stars, poring over the pictures of constellations and nebulae. All gold is formed in supernovas, I read once; every piece of gold, including my mother’s mala rim, was formed long ago in an exploding star. That seemed too good to share with anyone.
As the children of the commune, our role was to run free, to be uninhibited, to say yes, to look beautiful, innocent, uncorrupted. For our hair to billow out in the wind as we ran. But some of us were not always like that.
Brushing my hair, folding my clothes, taking care of myself—all the things I used to do with my mother—now made me feel sad. I began to avoid doing them. Behind the sofa I read Where the Wild Things Are; it seemed a similar transformation was happening to me. The walls faded, a jungle emerged instead from the horizon. Like Max in the book, I grew horns—or the sannyasin equivalent. Sannyasins said a great big ‘Yes’ to everything—yes to laughter, yes to singing, yes to work, yes to sharing, yes to surrender. I began to say ‘No’. As far as I remember, no one was happy about it. I took off my shoes and ran wild. I stopped turning up in the schoolrooms, or I would turn up and sulk when asked to do things. When the adults said things and I didn’t listen, or I lost something that they wanted, they would all say the same thing—‘Hellooo? Earth to Yogesh?’—pretending I was an astronaut in orbit, outside the pull of gravity and difficult to reach. Sometimes as they said it, they’d tap my head. ‘Come in, Yogesh, do you read me?’
I began to run everywhere on tiptoes. I refused to care for myself. My nails grew long; my hair was unkempt. When I wet the bed, I pretended I hadn’t. When I was discovered, I refused to change the sheets. I refused to dance, refused to sing, refused to celebrate, refused to finish what I started; refused to go on a surprise outing because it meant I would have to spend 20p I didn’t want to spend. Refused to stop whipping my way systematically through the crowds of daffodils that lined the forest in front of the Kids’ Hut. I refused everyone, not just the adults. I refused to smoke. Refused to play kiss-chase. Refused to spin the bottle. Refused to respect plants. Refused to leave my shoes at the door, refused to leave my mind at the gate. Refused to love everyone unconditionally. Refused to suffer.
On the back page of the April 1982 Rajneesh Buddhafield European Newsletter—the last ever issue—there is a hand-drawn board game, called ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’: it’s Snakes and Ladders Medina style. (‘If two players land on the same square, have a hug!’) The snakes trace the pitfalls of adult commune life—‘Avoiding a lover: back 20 spaces’; ‘Doing your own thing: miss a turn’; ‘Said “No!” to Main Office: down to 40’; ‘Mistake Sex for Samadhi: back to the start’. The ladders, too, record the hopes of these early Medina sannyasins. ‘Haircut and Beard Trim! Up 5 squares’; ‘Surrender to the commune—go right up to 95’; ‘Plant a tree for Bhagwan: up 60 spaces!’ In the top corner is a cartoon by Swami Yatri, the freestyle sannyasin cartoonist, whose sketches could often be seen in the Medina brochures, and on sannyasin T-shirts sold in commune boutiques across Europe. This cartoon has Bhagwan on an armchair in the clouds, the two birds of sannyas in flight over his head, Vivek seated by his side, both of them gazing up at the moon.
Yatri did another sketch in that last issue of the Buddhafield Newsletter, for a cut-out-and-send donation slip. Sannyasins could use it to send money to support the building of Rajneeshpuram, the Buddhafield in the USA. In the cartoon, Yatri’s mustachioed Bhagwan caricature—now sporting a ten-gallon cowboy hat underneath his halo—strolled up into the first panel, pushing a wheelbarrow over earth made entirely from the letters ‘O’, ‘R’, ‘E’, ‘G’, ‘O’, and ‘N’. In the next panel he has dug up an ‘E’, a ‘G’, and an ‘O’, and chucked them in his wheelbarrow. In the final panel our cartoon guru plants a sapling tree in the gap. By now, at least among sannyasins, the truth about Bhagwan’s permanent relocation to Oregon was official. A new sannyasin city was arising like an orange oasis from the Oregon dust, midwived by the love and commitment of a hundred thousand sannyasins worldwide. We were all supposed to do our bit to make this model city happen.
Above the cartoon, the text explained.
The seed of a new world is being planted at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, USA. Out of the fertile soil of our new farming community will grow a world in which human beings will be wiser, happier and richer in their understanding of how beautiful life can be. It will be a world that reflects the vision of the spiritual master, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
In a unique experiment, 64,000 acres of mountainous desert will be transformed into an oasis of greenery. The creation of orchards, forests and fields on a barren and neglected landscape will stand as an example to a hungry world fast outgrowing its available resources.
We are inviting you to share in this adventure with us. Donate a tree and dedicate it to someone you love. Help to provide the context and climate in which a new world will be brought into being.
A donation of $100.00 will provide for the purchase and planting, and the care and cultivation of a tree for Rajneeshpuram. Send your donation now and put your name to a lifetime of growth and greenery.
The slogan across the top of the cartoon encouraged us all to join in: PLANT A TREE FOR BHAGWAN SHREE!
Sharna had us chanting that slogan the next morning,
in the playroom downstairs in the Kids’ Hut. ‘Plant a Tree for Bhagwan Shree!’ we sang. ‘Plant a Tree for Bhagwan Shree!’, waving our sponsor-sheets in time to the beat of his palm against the guitar. The chant grew faster and faster, until all the syllables jumbled and we ran from the room cheering, to persuade as many adults as we could to sponsor us at least £1 for a three-legged race around the Medina grounds.
I have a photo of this first three-legged race. By the looks of things, in the dash for the finish line the race descended more or less into a free-for-all. In the years that followed there were many three-legged races; I remember a good-natured furore after each one, about the adults paired with the younger kids who just picked them up and carried them the whole way. At the head of the pack, in this race, you can see Sujan, wearing a tight pink top, partnered with Mudita, one of the older girls. I am nowhere to be seen.
For the kid who raised the most sponsorship money, there was a Plant-A-Tree T-shirt as a prize. Majid and I raised ours together. We went around the commune hopefully, collecting our cash in one of the plastic change-bags Sharna had handed round, but neither of us won the T-shirt. I never even ran in the race, but I doubt I gave the money back to Sharna. More than likely I kept the change-bag under my bed, to buy extra chocolate bars in the boutique.
Maybe we all spent the money ourselves, on Kit Kat bars and mint creme eggs, down at Muti, ‘The Provider’. Perhaps that explains why, when we first went to the Ranch a year later, there were hardly any trees.
7
Summer came to Medina Rajneesh, and we took off our shoes. We ran in our bare feet, sticking to the grass where we could, tiptoeing and wincing at first on the paths and over the courtyard until our feet hardened and we found we could run across the gravel. Swallows and house martins came to make their homes in the roofs of the Main House and the outbuildings. Every time a new nest arrived we ran to see their round mud domes like low fruit-bowls plastered under the eaves. One of the adults told us these birds had flown all the way from Africa. When the clouds gathered low and the rain came, the house martins would fly at head-height chasing greenfly all over the front lawn. We would run back and forth on the lawn, our arms out, chasing the house martins in their turn.
Sometimes we stopped and stared across the long ditch that ran across the bottom of the front lawn, which marked out the end of the Medina grounds. The ditch was called a ‘ha-ha’, Champak told me. I assumed this to be a burst of sarcastic inspiration, but inconceivably it turned out he was right. The rest of the Medina boundaries were demarked by a white cord tied to pegs and hammered into the earth every two metres. Although we thought nothing of lifting this cord to head deeper into the woods, we hardly ever crossed the ha-ha to the open field on the other side. Among the white sheep and green grass we felt so easy to spot in our maroon that we barely dared to dash across, touch the ground, and dash back again. If Mr Upton spotted us on his land, we knew, he was allowed to shoot us on sight.
Mr Upton was the farmer who owned all the land around Medina. I pictured him wearing a top hat and monocle like the man in the centre of the Kids’ Hut Monopoly board (which, I knew, had something to do with owning land; that was why some of the teachers didn’t like us playing it) although none of us had ever seen him.
When my mother and Sujan went to sign the deeds for Herringswell Manor, Mr Upton had believed he was selling his old family home to a progressive school. He had no idea we were the infamous ‘orange people’. When we all arrived in our malas and maroon, he was furious. He discovered, though, that he had retained the shooting rights to the property; so one evening in early January a group of local landowners came striding across the front lawn with shotguns. Sharna gathered us all into the Main Hall. We asked him why; he told us not to argue. As the shooting party hunted pheasants across the Medina grounds, we sat by the fire and listened. To me the shooting sounded strangely quiet, like the crackle of distant fireworks.
The hunting party never came back, but we were still convinced that if we stepped over the ha-ha or the boundary cord, Mr Upton would shoot us without a second thought. As time went by we weren’t averse to moving the cord a little, though, to give us extra forest to play in and to explore.
Apart from Mr Upton’s top-hatted shadow we kids were innocent of any tensions with the outside world; except occasionally at Peterborough Ice Rink. There, after we piled out of the minibus and strapped on tight our rented skates, the older girls would hold our hands and we would snake our maroon way in a line across the ice. Inevitably, from the rink-side café, someone would shout out: ‘Oy! Moonies!’
On these weekly outings, we sampled the choicest attractions from the nearby Suffolk towns. Rollerbury, the roller-skating rink in Bury St Edmunds. Peterborough Ice Rink. Mildenhall swimming pool. Mildenhall! Swimming in lanes marked out by floating plastic string! Saveloys! On the way back to the van we would sneak off from the supervising adult to buy battered sausages at the fish-and-chip shop, stuffing ourselves with the meat we were forbidden in the commune dining halls. As we bounced through Herringswell on our way back to the commune, we’d press our faces against the minibus’s side windows and stare at the local village green—a red telephone box, a triangle of grass, birds in the single tree; low bungalows, faces watching from behind each curtain.
Occasionally we would team up with the adults on the rubbish rota, which meant throwing a hundred black plastic sacks into an open-backed lorry, then throwing them off again at the other end. (Sometimes we also collected the rubbish sacks from the black plastic bins outside the buildings. Each one had ‘No Hot Ashes’ written across the top. ‘No hot Ashas!’ we’d joke. ‘That’s OK. Asha’s not hot anyway!’) On the way back from the rubbish tip we stopped at one of these Herringswell houses, to visit an old couple who liked the sannyasins. He would sit in his chair with the curtains closed and watch the races, while she smiled and fetched us slice after slice of chocolate cake. Once the word got out about her cakes, we argued in the Kids’ Hut every Tuesday about whose turn it was to go on the rubbish run.
That was all we saw of the outside world. When we drove back to Medina from our trips, we always looked forward to the road through the fields near Medina, which rose up and down like a roller coaster. We shouted encouragement to the driver to hit the speed, put the pedal to the metal, to go as fast as he could over the rolling bumps so we could feel our stomachs lift into the air. At the end of the bumpy B-road the last thing we saw was the blue and white tin-plate sign that pointed the way to ‘← Herringswell Manor’, and the new, hand-painted, varnished wood sign, hammered into the ground in front, that pointed to ‘Medina Rajneesh, Neo-Sannyas Commune’.
There were two vans for our outings: a minibus and the Commer van. The Commer van was more fun. It had no seats; the driver just piled up cushions and blankets in the back. I remember one trip in the Commer van particularly well. We were heading to the weir to slide down the concrete waterfall, then to a picnic on the beach. I fought for a place in the van, then curled up by the wheel-arch and drifted off to sleep. I awoke sharply to find everything looked different. We’ve been moved to another van, I thought, until across the bus Viragini reared up, her head covered in ripe bananas, and began to wail. We were in the same van, I noticed, only everything was upside down. We crawled out to find the van had been hit by a tractor. We had rolled into a ditch.
We were taken by ambulance to Ipswich Hospital, where the doctor announced Viragini had broken her collarbone. I still remember playing stick-in-the-mud in the park opposite, listening to Majid telling us all how Ipswich Hospital was where he was born, when a car-full of panicked mothers—mine among them—rolled into the hospital car park.
My mother called out and I ran towards her, only to catch my foot on a low railing and bang my knee down hard on the concrete path. I picked myself up and limped on. When I reached her she swept me up and carried me back across the grass.
Through my tears, I asked her where we were going.
‘To th
e hospital,’ she said.
‘But I’ve just been there.’
‘I know, love,’ she said. ‘You’ve got delayed shock. You must have hurt your knee in the crash.’
‘Mum,’ I said. ‘I just banged my knee. You saw it.’
‘It’s a delayed injury,’ she said. ‘We need to get you looked at.’
‘But . . . I’ve seen a Lego man I want.’ She didn’t listen. By the time the doctor declared me fit for the second time—at my mother’s insistence he even put a little bandage on my knee—it was evening. The sun had set; all the shops were shut.
That night, in a long-planned celebration, the Main Hall resounded with singing and Sufi dancing. At the peak of the evening my mother and Poonam—overjoyed we were safe and sound—called Rani, her sister, Soma, and me into the head office, and gave us our first taste of lemon sorbet and champagne.
Our favourite destination on our outings was the weir, a large area of heath land five miles or so from Medina. At first the adults took us there in the two minivans, but we discovered it wasn’t too far to walk; so every week or so in summer we would get together on our own and set off: down the spiral wall of the gravel drive, out the gates, left at the Manor stables, along the thin roads, between lines of fir trees and fields of billowing white plastic that looked like out-of-season snow.
The road came to a T-junction; instead of turning left or right we carried straight on, up the long dirt track that marked the beginning of the heath. In the early summer the stretches of heather on either side of the dirt track burst into purple bloom. We would play hide and seek among the low heather, our faces pressed to the ground. Then we chased imaginary adders, because Asha said she had seen one once. We would fan out among the ferns, some of us bashing the ground with sticks, and whenever anything moved we would poke around under the bushes screaming ‘Snake! Adder!’ I saw a thin green snake once, although Sharna said it was a grass snake and not poisonous at all. Luckily no one heard him, so about a week later I started to claim I had seen an adder, too. No one believed me, although I couldn’t see how they knew.
