by Tim Guest
Suddenly my feet slid out in front of me; I was skidding down the slope, my whole body rigid with the cold. I plunged into the deeper waters at the bottom. I was underwater, looking up. I could see the surface, a rippling sheet of light, a long way above me. The water sucked at me. I thought: I’ll leave the boat. Someone else can fetch it. I struck out for the surface. But the water slipped past me and I barely moved. The current was tilting me. My feet were pushed round above my head. I twisted my body round and the current pushed me up. My face broke the surface. I breathed a hoarse spray of water and air. I shouted out, but I was already underwater. There was no sound. The current pulled me back towards the concrete slope of the weir. I became aware of the moss that was all around me, swaying in the gentler currents below and at the edges of the river. The fronds of moss bent and gestured, beckoning me, cheering me on. I thought of all the plants I had pulled at in the Medina forest—whipped, snapped, torn, tugged up by the roots—and suddenly I felt afraid. My foot scraped against an edge of concrete. Tendrils of moss licked at the graze. I felt for the concrete again. I pushed towards the surface and broke at an angle, but almost immediately I was back under, caught in the roll of water where the weir hit the river.
My limbs felt tired. I struck out again but water flushed through me and I watched the surface recede. I went round again, dizzy, caught in a loop. I thought: all I need to do is wait. The current will drag me up. I relaxed then, found myself on my back, staring up at the underside of the water’s surface. The surface roared in a mess of light, but down here everything was still. A single, wide beam of sunlight slipped through to where I drifted, and I watched tiny green particles hang there in the light. It reminded me of mornings in my attic room back home in Leeds. The particles were moving slower, weren’t dancing, weren’t moving at all. The sight soothed me. I am not moving back to the surface, I thought. It doesn’t matter. I might drown here. It’s OK. I’m drowning.
I drifted.
There was a roar and then I was above the surface, skating backwards across the water. Someone’s arm was around my neck. Another roar and I was scrambling up the dirt slope that runs from the river to the opposite bank. Someone was pushing me hard from behind. I tried to get them to stop pushing. There was a blank. I turned and stumbled backwards, coughing water. The sun was on my back. Everything felt cold. Another blank. I was sitting against the door of the hut. A girl wrapped a towel around my shoulders and was hugging me. I was crying, sobbing. My throat tasted like moss. My teeth were chattering. I couldn’t get them to stop. The crying faded, then stopped. I shivered. The crying came again. Someone said that we’d better get back. The girl helped me up, and we walked back up along the side of the river towards the bridge. We went past the car park and set off back down the dirt track towards the B-road that led to Medina.
When we got back one of the kids led me to the shower. I stood under the scalding jet, still shivering. Someone wrapped a clean towel around me and led me to my bunk bed. I sat there, huddled in the towel. A group of girls gathered around me on the bed, hugging my shoulders, stroking my hair. My teeth weren’t chattering and I didn’t feel so cold now, but I was grateful for the girls’ hands rubbing my back and didn’t want them to go away, so I stared off into the distance without saying anything.
My mum was at Medina that week. One of the girls ran to fetch her. I remember her running into the Kids’ Hut about half an hour later. When she saw me she let out a wail and ran to give me a hug. The girls made room. She asked me if I was all right. I still didn’t want the girls to go away. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘sort of.’ My mother hugged me again. She hugged me for a long time. Then she pulled away.
‘Who saved him?’ she said, looking at the kids around the room. ‘Who pulled him out?’ Some of the girls pointed to Will. My mother ran over to him and hugged him, too. Then she went back to her bag, pulled something out, and went back over to him. ‘This is for you.’ She handed a box over to Will. ‘For saving my son’s life.’ Then she came back to the bunk to hug me again. I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the box: it was Black Magic chocolates. Well, I thought, I hope he gives me some chocolates, especially if my mum’s going to ruin this good thing here with the girls. After my mother had gone, they gathered around me again.
That night, after I had stopped shivering, we took showers and changed our clothes. We went into the TV room, to turn off the lights and watch a film. I can’t tell you the name of the movie; but if I close my eyes I can still see that room.
It was dark. All the kids were silhouettes. I was sitting next to Sargama. The only light was the flicker from the TV, but at the edge of my vision her shape was clear. My eyes were on the screen, but all my attention was on her. I felt her side pressing against mine. I wanted to lean into her, to press myself against her. Out on the front porch a few days before, Champak had told me he fancied her. I thought I fancied her, too. Later that day on our bunk beds I told Jonathan about it all, and he told me I should ‘make my move’. He said I should sit next to Sargama in the dark, and lean into her, or put my arm around her. I told him I couldn’t do that, she’d just push me away. He said no, she wouldn’t. I wasn’t convinced. Now Jonathan was watching me, I could tell, through the dark. I knew I had to do something. I knew that if I did lean into her, Sargama would turn on the lights and point and laugh. I knew it would be better not even to try. But I had to do something, or Jonathan would tell everyone anyway. I did it. I let myself go. I fell into her. She put her arm around to hold me. I pushed my head against her neck and she looked down and smiled. Something lurched inside me and I felt I wanted to cry, although I didn’t know why.
If the adults wouldn’t give us the intimacy we needed, we’d get it from each other.
We all needed something unique that the commune didn’t provide. There were hundreds of people joyously washing our clothes, cutting our tofu, rinsing our string beans. But none of it was done for us personally. No one washed our individual clothes; the clothes were washed together. Likewise the food that was provided was sort of generic. It was healthy food, lovingly prepared: split-pea soup; spinach; bean-sprouts; carrot salad with sesame seeds and tamari dressing; pizza with olives, garlic, and vegetarian cheese. On Wednesdays we even had eggs, chips, and beans. But the food was the same for everyone. I wanted some things that were just for me.
At lunch- and dinnertimes I began to ignore the food on offer in the Main Hall. In the morning I would sneak a bowl of cornflakes back to the dormitories. Later in the day I would drop by the kitchens to make myself a doorstop Marmite sandwich, spreading the tarry black yeast-stuff thick over the butter. In the afternoons Majid and I would sit in the tearoom, next to the Main Hall, to drink cup after cup of Earl Grey and Darjeeling—never Lapsang Souchong, which we both agreed tasted like socks—poured from the row of huge silver urns. We’d get sky-high off the tea, drink eight, ten, twelve cups. (When we were ‘on tea’, as we called it, we’d sit across from each other and make bad jokes about the few TV shows we’d seen since we arrived. He’d offer me sugar, say ‘One Flump or two?’, and we’d collapse into laughter, spitting tea at each other across the table.)
By then I had discovered the Medina food cellars. There was a white wooden door by the shelves where the tahini was kept. This door led to the basement, where you could fill your pockets with cashews and vegetarian baco-bits from the huge black dustbins, then come back out without anyone having noticed. Although I never bumped into anyone else down there, I knew other kids were doing this, too: searching the underground cellars for the food that wasn’t on offer up above. I used to hide behind the cashew bins whenever I heard anyone coming. There were supposed to be rats down there. I thought about Hammy, the big friendly rat I had left behind in California. Sometimes, to look for rats, I crawled a little way out down the concrete tunnels that ran under the foundations of the house. But I never went very far.
To supplement my balanced diet, I roasted chestnuts with Majid in the open fires in the Ma
in Hall, and shoplifted chocolate from the boutique.
At times we banded together to get the forbidden foods we craved. There were those times when, on outings into the world, we’d slip away on the way back to the car park and head for the fish-and-chip shop. We’d buy as many hamburgers and battered sausages as our pocket money would allow, cramming them quickly into our mouths before we got back to the minibus. Eventually one or two of the less-enthusiastically vegetarian adults cottoned on, and joined us on our illicit meat missions.
There were gooseberries, too, out in the forests. On our nettle-whipping trips Majid and I would pause for gooseberry-breaks, plucking the weird, hairy fruit from the prickly gorse bushes and stuffing them into our mouths. Down by the crumbly wall, in between the wood hut and the old tennis courts and avenue of cherry trees, there were also low saplings, hung heavy with green plums. We thought they were sour plums that just never ripened, until one day Champak told us that although they were still green they tasted sweet. We didn’t believe him. He ate a whole one, then another, until finally we were believers. For two weeks we walked around with green flesh and skin on our lips, juice dripping down our chins, stunned at the sweetness that had come, it seemed to us, from nowhere.
One morning, on our way to the weir, Champak ran right out into the ploughed ridges of one of Mr Upton’s fields. We held our breath; no one appeared with a shotgun. Champak pulled at a sheet of plastic, and he came back up with a fistful of green and orange baby carrots. From then on, whenever we went off to the heath or the weir on our own, we’d bring a bucket of water, slopping it against our ankles as we carried it from the kitchens down the drive and out into the fields. When we got to the carrot field, we’d team up to run out over the plastic sheets and pull the green shoots up in handfuls. There, beside the road, we’d wash the baby carrots in our basin, pass them round, and eat them, still cool from the ground.
We made our own decisions about our lives, but it’s strange, looking back, how much of the adults’ antics were reflected in our own. In their groups they played ‘Robot’, in which one Swami sat in the centre and turned mutely to face other group-members in answer to questions: ‘Who is the best cook?’ ‘Who would you most like to have sex with?’ ‘Who is most likely to commit suicide?’ In the Kids’ Hut playroom we played Truth or Dare. ‘Who has the nicest breasts?’ ‘Who would you most like to have sex with?’ ‘Who is the least likely to get a girlfriend?’
One of the most popular group-dynamics exercises played in sannyasin therapies and their patented ‘no holds barred’ encounter groups was a game called ‘Rock the Boat’. You filed into the group-room, left your shoes—and minds—at the door. You took up all the green cushions—those essential group-room props—and you piled them in the centre of the room, roughly in the shape of a boat. You all clambered in, to sit and to chat, or to spend the time doing whatever you wanted to do. Then the group leader announced that a storm had blown up and the hull had sprung a leak. In order to keep the boat afloat, it was announced, someone needed to be thrown off into the sea. The members of the group determined who that should be. People used all the tricks at their disposal to persuade the others to spare them. The oldest member went first, as they had the least time to live; or the stupidest, as they had the least to contribute. Someone was duly selected and thrown into the sea.
Of course, the leak got worse. Another person was chosen. Then another. There were no other rules. As the number of people grew smaller, physical force began to play more of a part in the selection. Finally, only two people were left, and a pitched battle broke out. My mother told me that when they played this game it was often she—with her ferocity and damning wit—and Sujan—with his brute strength—who were left grappling on the floor of the boat.
That Christmas, 1983, the kids at Medina Rajneesh—officially off school for two whole weeks—also played a game involving a boat. We gathered together all the cushions and pillows from the Kids’ Hut, piled them up in front of the television in the playroom, and built a boat. We all had our duvets and soft toys. No adults were allowed. None of us said it, but it was as though we felt a storm coming, too. Only our boat never sprang a leak. Every now and then we sent off a beanbag-dinghy for supplies. From the breakfast shows right through to the evening Christmas films we stayed like that, watching TV, until school began again in January. Whenever anyone fell out of our padded boat, we cried out, ‘Shark!’, then we hauled them back in.
11
In early 1984 a new sannyasin newspaper, the Rajneesh Times: European Edition, was launged. The British Library has a stack of these—no doubt sent by a sannyasin who had mischievously retained some sense of history. The masthead, dated 1 February, included the two-birds logo (with a trademark) as the dogt over the ‘j’ in ‘Rajneesh’. A joke on the front page: ‘Why did the Rajneeshee cross the road? To buy the other side.’)
The new sannyasin newspaper, typeset in the Medina Design Studio and mass-printed in Mildenhall, was launched with a parade down Fleet Street. The march was ‘to bring a message to the British press,’ the leading article explained. ‘The birth of the British Edition of the Rajneesh Times is the direct result of the hypocrisy, sensationalism and distortions of the British Press and British public.’ The front page of Issue 2 was plastered with photographs from the launch parade (‘fleet street sees red!’). There were orange floats. There were maroon balloons. There was an inflatable purple dinosaur, eight feet high, sixteen feet long, ‘representing the British Press’—because it can take up to four minutes for a signal to travel from the tail to the brain; an age before it ‘gets the message’. (We joked about this for weeks in the Kids’ Hut. We’d stamp on someone’s foot, and tell them: ‘Don’t worry—it’ll take at least four minutes before you feel the pain.’) Pictured on the front page, sandwiched between Adheera and a cheery jug-eared policeman, was my mother. My mother: always at the front of the parade.
On page three of the Rajneesh Times was an indictment of Fleet Street practices—‘how facts are made to lie’—and then on page six was an article by Sheela claiming that Bhagwan should be allowed to stay in the USA because, as a child, he had been adopted by a couple who were now US citizens. The adoption had been kept secret, but could now be revealed. There is no mention of the fact that these two adopters who handily materialized, when the need arose, were in fact Sheela’s mother and father. On an inside page, above the headline ‘ADOPTION: A COMMON PRACTICE IN INDIA’, was a photo of various sannyasins pointing at the certificate and ‘sharing their memories of Bhagwan’s adoption’.
By this time Sheela was insisting every article written by sannyasins around the world be vetted by the Ranch’s inner circle, and she had forbidden the use of any pictures of, or quotes by, sannyasins who had left the movement.
It was a strange time for sannyasins. Back in 1983, as I rode the bumble-bee ride in the Fantasyland section of Disneyland, a thousand miles up the coast Bhagwan was living in his new air-conditioned home in Oregon, wearing diamond and platinum jewellery, driving a different Rolls-Royce each day, and regularly predicting the end of the world. There was a cyclone of destruction coming, he said, both natural and man-made, that would tear across the world and kill most of humanity. Sannyasins, Bhagwan said, had the best chance of survival. We were to dwell in the eye of the storm: his people were to be a ‘Noah’s Ark of consciousness’.
‘The period of this crisis will be between 1984 and 1999,’ he said. ‘During this period there will be every kind of destruction on Earth, including natural catastrophes and man-manufactured suicidal efforts. There will be floods that have never been known since the time of Noah, along with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and everything else that is possible through nature. The Earth cannot tolerate this type of mankind any longer. There will be wars which are bound to end in nuclear explosions, hence no ordinary Noah’s Arks are going to save humanity. Rajneeshism is creating a Noah’s Ark of consciousness, remaining centred exactly in the middle of the cyclone.’
No one could quite tell if he was talking metaphorically or physically. Rajneeshee watchers in Madras and Portland thought the Rajneeshpuram sannyasins were building underground shelters to survive an actual nuclear holocaust. To the sannyasins Bhagwan’s goal seemed to be a spiritual survival: to transcend the dangers facing society through meditation; to condense all time and history into one single, safe, ecstatic, infinite moment up in the Oregon hills. (Except for Poonam’s husband Teertha—still Bhagwan’s leading therapist. He believed that Bhagwan meant extra-terrestrials would descend in their mother-ships to save us.)
Nuclear family, nuclear explosion—the energy released when fundamental structures are broken apart. The parallel was, of course, not lost on the writers for the Rajneesh Times: European Edition. ‘Coming up next issue,’ they wrote: ‘a look at the troubled modern family. Is it the stress of 20th century living that is fraying the fabric of family life? Or, is the nuclear family itself the root cause of our unbalanced, violent society?’
We weren’t the only ones to be living under the light of a sun that threatened to descend at any moment. We were lit by the same lights as the rest of the world—the thousand smaller, man-made, inter-continental suns, delivered in groups of ten or twelve, in multiple warhead payloads, from underground silos halfway round the world. Bhagwan had predicted the holocaust would begin in 1984, and now it was 1984. Someone must have decided it was time to let the kids in on the truth about the world. One afternoon we filed into a room off the landing on the first floor of the main house. We knew we were going to watch a film. Mallika seemed convinced it was going to be E.T. 2, although there was disagreement over whether this had even been made yet. In the darkened room, one of the adults pressed play. Bhagwan walked out onto the stage in the Rajneesh Mandir auditorium in Oregon. He told us all about the coming holocaust. ‘Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Bombay,’ he said, ‘—all these cities are going to disappear. It is going to be global, so no escape is possible.’
