by Tim Guest
‘Yes!’ my mother told me. ‘Right. You ready? Here’s the next one.’ She lowered her voice. All the other women leaned in close. ‘What is another?’
I frowned. ‘What?’
My mother repeated the question: ‘What is another?’
‘Another?’ I echoed. She nodded. ‘Another is—’ I looked up hopefully. ‘Another is—another.’ There was no cheering.
‘Think about it, Yog.’ (She called me Yog, to rhyme with ‘rogue’, which I liked.) ‘What is another?’
‘Another is . . .’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘Another is—the same?’
No one clapped.
‘If something is another,’ my mother said, ‘is it the same?’
‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. Then, when there was no response, ‘No.’
‘Right. So if it’s another, and it’s not the same, it’s . . .’
‘Different?’ I said. Again there was no response. This, I thought, was definitely a stupid game.
‘Ye-es,’ my mother said slowly, ‘and if something’s different, what is it?’
I put my hand in my pocket and fingered the Lego spaceman. ‘If something’s different, it’s—different.’
‘And if something’s different,’ my mother said, ‘it’s not the same, is it? Is it, love?’
I shook my head.
‘So if it’s not the same,’ she went on, ‘what is it?’
‘It’s . . . not the same?’ I said. My mother nodded slowly. ‘Not the same,’ I continued. ‘Different. Special.’
‘And what’s another word for special?’
I thought hard. There was a word I had learned recently, that should have meant ‘more ordinary’, but in fact meant ‘not ordinary at all’. ‘Extra-ordinary?’ I said. My mother shook her head very slightly. ‘Different?’ I went on. ‘Special? Unique?’
All the women burst into applause. I flushed. ‘See?’ my mother said, to everyone present. ‘The kids just get it.’
I have since found out what these questions were. They were Zen Koans, ancient questions translated from the Chinese or Sanskrit and probably jazzed up by Bhagwan. My guess is that I caught my mother and her friends in a break from a Satori group, described in the Medina brochure for September 1983 to December 1984 as ‘an opportunity to experience directly the response to the question, “Who am I?”’
That spring we held a huge ‘olde worlde’ fair at Medina Rajneesh. Sharna helped some of the kids erect a maypole in the lawn by the row of cherry trees. There was a rented marquee, a huge white sail billowing over the lawn behind the Kids’ Hut; there were punnets of strawberries, fizzy apple juice, and stalls of every description: tarot cards, fortune tellers, kiss-a-grams, apple-bobbing, a very popular dunk-the-teacher stand. Majid and I planned to set up an argument tent. ‘Why not?’ the adults grinned. ‘You’re both experts at arguing.’ ‘No, we’re not!’ we’d shout with glee, then run off to try the same line on somebody else. ‘That’s not arguing, that’s contradiction!’ one of the adults countered. Majid and I looked at each other. We had no idea what he was talking about. We shrugged and headed for the marquee to tug at the supporting ropes and to steal strawberries from the stacks of boxes under the tea table, then off to the front lawn to stake out a mole hole and see if we could spot a mole this time.
The front lawn was always littered with mole holes. Chinmaya, the bobble-hatted Medina head gardener, kept us up to date on their battles to rid the lawn of moles. Very early on, he told us, the Medina gardeners swapped their natural holistic mole repellent for rat poison. When the poison didn’t work, they finally installed a series of lethal-looking machines in the holes—designed, so we thought, to zap the moles whenever they came up for air. Nonetheless, the moles kept coming. We imagined them underground, living together like we did. We played our games directly above their own communal homes.
Often, on warm afternoons, we would pause in a game of football on the front lawn to watch the adults come out to do their group-dynamic exercises in the sun. The groups looked fun. The adults would climb onto each other’s shoulders in a pyramid, then roar like lions before all falling off. They would form a ring and hold a mock-bullfight. They would stand stock-still, without moving, for hours.
At certain times of the year, at lunchtimes and in the evenings, we saw people from the Satori groups wandering around with IN SILENCE badges pinned to their maroon breasts. We called it ‘Satori Season’. We’d follow them around, badger them, pull faces—anything to get them to talk.
At times, when we’d sneaked in to grab cushions, or crawled between the trees round the back of the group rooms and raised ourselves up on tiptoes to peek through the windows, we’d seen what happened in the group-rooms themselves. Everyone was fully clothed. People would sometimes be dancing, sometimes flailing and screaming. Occasionally a Ma or Swami would be crying and beating a cushion with snot and drool and tears dripping down their face. More often, the group leader would be talking quietly, gazing into the eyes of a man or woman who would be quietly sobbing.
One morning Sharna called us all into the Main Hall for a surprise. Sixty adults from one of the groups filed in opposite. He told us that this group needed an exercise in surrender, and we were each going to get two slaves for the morning. He said that until noon our slaves would have to do everything we commanded. We cheered and filed across the room to pick out the ones we liked. First, I made my two carry me on their shoulders to the sweetshop and buy me the most expensive biscuits. Then we walked out onto the front lawn; Majid and I held jousting matches using our slaves as mounts. Just before twelve the obvious thought came to us both at exactly the same time. We turned to our slaves and demanded they give us their wallets. The slaves couldn’t say anything—they were still wearing their IN SILENCE badges. But they looked at each other, tapped their watches as if it were already noon, and ran away.
After the usual information that evening in the announcements—Disco keep-fit had moved to eight-thirty in the meditation room—Sharna asked Rupda to come up to the front. We’d seen her earlier, playing on the swings with her slaves; we’d scoffed at her naivety. She hadn’t got her slaves to buy her anything. Now Sharna praised her. Apparently, the only order she had given was for her slaves to enjoy themselves. Majid and I looked at each other and mimed sticking our fingers down our throats.
To us kids, the regular Medina celebrations looked just the same as the groups, except that the groups took place in Hadiqua’a and the celebrations took place in the Main Hall; we were allowed to push our way through these crazy celebration crowds. We got a much closer look. People would roll their eyes, sing, kneel, or curl up on the floor, smiling with their eyes closed. Everyone got as blissed-out as possible. Sometimes tears streamed down their faces. Dancing meant waving your head in a figure-of-eight, arms raised, malas flailing out at chest-height, about ready to take the eye out of any kid pushing past through the crowd. I knew that kind of dancing; we all did. We groaned and rolled our eyes whenever we saw someone waving in this manner. Later that year when we were first allowed to have our own discos—no over eighteens allowed—we put hand-lettered signs of our own on the door: ‘no spiritual dancing’. Anyone who raised their arms too high above their heads was swiftly given the boot.
There were annual bashes, too, which were always advertised with crazy curlicued cartoons in the glossy Medina brochures: Hallowe’en, Bhagwan’s Birthday, Guru Purnima Day, New Year’s Eve, May Day Ball. (These adverts were so slick that the only time Bhagwan’s secretary Sheela visited Medina, she told the assembled throng that our brochures were ‘too much like Vogue magazine and not right for Bhagwan’s message at all.’) On these annual occasions some of the adults would hold a fancy-dress cabaret on a carpet rolled out in the Main Hall: men with handkerchiefs tied on their heads, women with glittery feather boas wrapped around their malas, kicking their legs out to music-hall classics: ‘My old man said follow the van . . .’ and ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’.
> To us, the celebrations all looked the same—a confusion of maroon, heat, balloons, red velvet, make-up, and crowds. The hall would become packed full of sweaty people. Hundreds of adults danced, sang, boogied, disco-danced, got on down to a sannyasin band. At these annual celebrations, a hundred or so visitors mingled with the residents. To separate us from the visitors the commune kids got special beads for our malas: red showed we were residents; orange that we were allowed up after eleven. (About once a week, when my mala broke, I would try to persuade the adult who restrung it to slip one of these orange beads on this time, because I was now old enough; they never believed me.) If you were young—six years old, say, going on seven—what you did was stand on the Main Hall stairs for a minute, looking down on the crowd to get your bearings, then plunge into the crowd. You raised your forearms on either side of your face to guard against the flailing malas. You would push your way through on tiptoes—craning for a glimpse of another kid or, even better, your mother somewhere through a gap in the crowd.
The music in these crowds was always Bhagwan music, the old Sufi songs followed by new standards written by sannyasin musicians. The Bhagwan music was so much a part of it all: sung at music groups, celebrations, birthdays, meditations, cabarets, in Ashram buildings and commune hallways, in the kitchens, dormitories; out on the lawn late at night, before fireworks lit up the sky. So much so that, even though the kids rarely joined in the singing, I still remember the melodies and the words—‘Only you . . .’; ‘In your grace, Bhagwan . . .’; ‘Looking inside . . . Looking inside . . . I wake up to you . . . I wake up to your love . . .’ In the early days the songs were folksy, but later, as the 1980s progressed, they all began to sound more and more like the Pointer Sisters. Everywhere these songs were sung, sannyasins swayed to the music. Their hands caressed the air; their heads rolled in the familiar loop; their malas swung out into a rattling figure-of-eight. When the music stopped, as we sometimes managed to stay awake to see, everyone stood around with their eyes closed, still slowly swaying, or collapsed on the floor not caring who they lay over or against.
In these celebrations, sometimes a group of visitors lined up to take sannyas. Swamis and Mas would line the stairs; we kids would sit and peer down through gaps in the banisters. The hall was packed with dancing, leaping maroon, frenetic drums, arms flailing, malas tucked into shirts or over one arm to avoid possible injury. Everyone sang along to a Bhagwan song: ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! There is a paradise on earth!’
By the side of the stairs in the main hall, moon-faced Adheera—who I always thought looked like a wise old orang-utan—would hang a mala around the lowered neck of a new sannyasin, place her thumb on the person’s forehead, and smile a blissful smile. When neither Poonam nor Adheera was available, my mother would conduct these initiation Darshans. To the same accompaniment of music and singing and whirly dancing, my mother would read aloud the new sannyasin’s letter from Bhagwan, then lower a mala around the bowed head. When she pressed her thumb into the centre of their foreheads, as she had been told to do, the new disciples would break into a blissful smile, or more occasionally begin to twitch and jerk in ecstatic convulsions.
At one of these evening celebrations we had a costume show. A line of thirty kids, dressed in costumes coloured solely orange and maroon, shuffled side by side up the wide carpeted stairs then sashayed down in twos and threes, the loudest costumes and the prettiest kids getting the best applause. Mallika—we called her ‘Eek’, as in, ‘Eek! A mouse!’—won; she was a short, bright pumpkin wrapped in wire and orange tissue paper. I remember playing hide and seek with her that evening, her paper costume abandoned downstairs in the hall, my clothes-peg rubber-band rifle propped up on the stairs. We slid ourselves behind a dresser on the top floor, pressed against each other, and giggled.
I had intended to make myself a robot costume. I asked the kitchens to save me the biggest cardboard box for a chest-plate. I collected cardboard tubes from the design studio to slip over my arms. One of the girls gave me her silver deely-bobbers to use as antennae. One afternoon though, with the tubes and boxes laid out in the younger kids’ classroom, I kicked away the boxes and left the room.
‘You never finish anything, Yogesh,’ the teacher called out as I left. ‘You have to learn to finish things. You’ll never get through life if you don’t finish anything.’ I wanted to tell her: around here if you left things half-finished, some other kid would mess them up. When you came back they would be broken or gone.
That was true, but there was also more to it. I cared about the robot. I was doing for the robot what all the people I cared about had done for me.
9
Sometime in 1982 my father came to live in Medina Rajneesh. He remembers arriving in June, but recently my aunt, his younger sister, sent me two photos of a visit she made to Medina while my father was there. The date is still handwritten on the back: ‘Herringswell, May 1982’—five months after I left him in California to live at Medina.
The six of us (including my aunt, behind the camera) are gathered on the grass, at the bottom of the small lawn in the triangle between the Guest House and the Kids’ Hut. My aunt’s husband is standing at the back. We’re flanked by their two children, my cousins. All three visitors in the picture—the children and their father—look uncomfortable. The grey of their clothes seems plain in comparison to my father and me in our brochure-perfect maroon.
By the time the second photo was taken my father’s knee must have been tired because I’m standing up. I know the sound he would have made as he lifted me off—‘Haa-roomph!’—and placed me on the ground. (He may have tickled me as he did so, to try to make me smile; but if he had, the look on my face implies I would have wriggled away. So maybe he didn’t try.)
The second photo is just John, Philip, and me. Philip is standing off to the left of the frame. He’s leaning towards us, but only because my father’s arm reaches behind my head to rest on his shoulder. His feet, visibly itching to take him elsewhere, are planted as far from us as possible. I’m standing in between but my eyes are still tightly shut and my whole body is twisted away. With an exaggerated frown of concentration I am sucking hard on what looks like an ice-lolly. I don’t want to be here; I’m pretending it’s because of the pressing business of eating this stick of frozen orange. I’m six years old. In the way of things, it was already years since my father’s absence broke my heart.
My father didn’t stay at Medina long. When I think of him there, I have just two particular memories.
In the first I see him in long-shot, in the circle of hedges behind the Kids’ Hut at the bottom of the row of cherry trees. This spring and every spring after, cherry blossoms fell in drifts onto this gravel path, and the grass and flowerbeds on either side. There always seemed to me to be more petals on the floor than could ever have fitted on the trees. I ran through the petals to meet him. When I got there, he smiled. He asked me where I had got the armful of toys I was carrying. I told him I had swapped them for my new bike—the one he had brought when he arrived. I said I was now worried I had made a mistake. His mouth opened into an ‘O’, then he grinned. He took me by the elbow and led me gently along the gravel path round to the front of the Kids’ Hut where Saddhu was still doing long skids in the gravel with my bike. John took the toys and handed them to Saddhu, took the bike and handed it back to me.
For a few weeks my father worked in the books and tapes department, until Poonam discovered his computer skills. Then he was sent out to work in Mildenhall five days a week, his wages paid into the commune coffers. The arrangement was not to his liking; a few months later he returned to California.
The second memory is from later that year. For a few days I’d had my eye on the aerial of a broken cassette player in the playroom at the Kids’ Hut. That morning I walked in when no one else was around. I seized my chance. I bent the aerial back and forth until the metal creased, then I twisted it until it snapped and the aerial came off in my hand
s. At last—an extendable sword. I went in search of a suitable foe, but no one else had a sword, or they weren’t interested, or they didn’t want to play. After testing the sword on some daffodil heads by the edge of the drive, I found myself on the lawn in front of the Kids’ Hut, staring up at the five thick electricity wires that ran in a straight line high above the grass.
With the first three throws the aerial didn’t even reach as high as the first wire. I discovered there was a knack to the angle at which you let it go: on the fourth throw the aerial sailed high over all five wires. I threw it again: it went over. And again. On the sixth throw I misjudged the angle completely. The aerial slipped through between the third and fourth wires and fell back onto the grass.
‘Couldn’t do that again if you tried.’ I looked round. Saddhu had come out onto the grass and was watching me. I squinted at him then turned, took aim, and threw the aerial straight at the wires. For a moment it looked as if the metal rod might slip through, but the lower end clipped the second wire and the aerial flipped up and hung across all five wires. There was a bang and a puff of dark smoke. The aerial hung there for a moment, then fell blackened on the grass.
Saddhu ran towards the Kids’ Hut. All the lights there had gone out. And the noise of the fans and machines in the design studio had stopped. The door of the computer office opened and a man looked out. He took in the scene: the aerial, the wires, the smoke, me. He strode out across the grass. He was shouting. ‘. . . idiot! If you’ve blown the transformer . . .’ He got closer. ‘That’s ten thousand pounds worth of transformer you might have blown. If there’s any damage you know you’ll have to pay for it.’
I thought quickly. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘your father will have to pay.’
My father? He was safely ensconced now in a technology park in San Jose, California. He wore a mala occasionally, perhaps, and still had a maroon sweater or two among all the white company T-shirts. My father was still going about his business under his original name. No, he won’t have to pay, I thought, because he’s not here. He’s in California, in the sun. He’s nine hours on a plane, then passport control and a drive from the airport. And even then, where will you look? Which air-conditioned software company building will you search in? How are you going to find your way to him?
