My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  Bhagwan had never made any secret of his admiration for the rich. His attitude to money was that it was there to be used: ‘Money needs to be a current,’ he said, ‘fast moving. The faster it moves, the richer is society’. (An Oregon bumper sticker from the mid-1970s: ‘Jesus Saves, Bhagwan Spends’.) Bhagwan said that the poor could never achieve enlightenment as they were too busy looking for fridge-freezers. In fact, he maintained, the seeker of truth had a duty to be rich (an attitude which, some observed, might explain his popularity in West Germany and California). Back in the mid-1970s, the Ashram had two safes: one was reserved for stacks of cash, gold bars, and jewellery given as gifts to Bhagwan. Deeksha, a member of the inner circle and responsible for the Ashram catering, kept her stash of Swiss chocolate in the other. Bhagwan had always loved to collect expensive trinkets: monogrammed towels, gold pens, cuff-links, jewelled watches. Now he had moved on to bigger things. Unknown to most sannyasins, gold jewellery given to Bhagwan at the Ranch was now melted down into bullion. What he really wanted was Rolls-Royces.

  His first two white Rolls-Royces, a Corniche and a Silver Shadow, were shipped over from the Ashram when he established himself at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon. In 1981 the early guard of Rajneeshpuram sannyasins took up a collection, with the richer sannyasins donating the lion’s share. On the morning of 11 December, his birthday, Bhagwan was led out from his Chuang Tzu living quarters. His birthday present was unveiled: two new Rolls-Royce Corniches, one white and one silver, parked on the gravel drive.

  By the end of spring, work on the main infrastructure of Rajneeshpuram was nearly complete. There were generators, sewage works, and water supplies. There were sixty acres of vegetables, a hundred beehives, and a vineyard. There were twenty-eight hundred chickens, a hundred ducks, twenty geese, a flock of peacocks, and two emus (to keep the coyotes at bay). At Medina we settled for Muscovy ducks; at the Ranch they imported black swans. Despite its being an entirely vegetarian city, there was also a herd of a hundred beef cattle, bought from an influential local. Bhagwan’s apartment had a sculpted garden, a heated indoor swimming pool, and—his favourite—a door that opened automatically as he approached. There was a new private airstrip for ‘Air Rajneesh’s’ first two Douglas DC-3s. Work had begun on a massive two-acre solar greenhouse intended to be the largest in the USA. Nearly complete was ‘Krishnamurti Dam’, which would form a useful reservoir and ‘beautify the landscape’.

  Because of the steep ranch hills, TV reception was impossible—except in Jesus Grove, where Sheela had installed a satellite dish. There was no cinema, theatre, or library. There were few books; the second bestselling writer on the Ranch was Louis L’Amour. The bestselling author was, of course, Bhagwan. In every shop, office, and restaurant, Bhagwan’s face was on the wall. At the Rajneesh Hotel, his face was on every ‘hospitality AIDS prevention’ condom and disinfectant pack. In the Rajneesh Casino, his face was on the back of every playing card.

  Also complete were the foundations of a new kind of spiritual university: originally the ‘Rajneesh International Meditation University’, then renamed the ‘Rajneesh International NoUniversity’ (because it did not believe in ‘competition, examination or knowledge through memory’). The staff included deans of ‘the occult’ and of ‘altered states of consciousness’.

  To celebrate the birth of the new sannyasin city, they decided to hold a World Celebration, and invite every sannyasin from across the world. Promotional merchandise was ordered: baseball caps with plastic adjustable head-straps and high white foam front with a picture of Bhagwan. (Some of the Medina kids, whose parents visited from the Ranch, had these. I preferred my Marine World Africa USA hat, with two leaping killer whales and a tiger in the centre, because no one else had one.)

  The Antelope residents began to see that this was going to be more than a farming cooperative. The German footage of naked Tantra groups at the Ashram did the rounds in anti-Rajneesh circles around Antelope and Madras. The old anti-communist motto ‘Better Dead than Red’ started to reappear on bumper stickers around local Oregon towns. At community fairs you could buy ‘Ban the Bhagwan’ T-shirts and badges. There were also customized versions of our own caps, worn by some of the more confrontational locals: the picture of Bhagwan branded with rifle-crosshairs on his forehead. By early summer there were a dozen lawsuits outstanding between Rajneeshpuram and the Antelope City Council, including one long-running attempt to have the permit for the celebration revoked. The old Antelope residents had begun to leave. Staff at a Portland restaurant—unrelated to the Ranch—had to change their red uniforms after patrons assumed they were sannyasins and stopped coming.

  Sheela, who thrived when Bhagwan seemed to be persecuted, called the Oregon locals ‘fascists and bigots’. She began to call the sannyasins ‘the new niggers’; but they were as provocative as they were put-upon. During a visit by Sheela to Australia, the press published a photo of her giving the finger. She liked it so much she sent a signed copy to the Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer. On Oregon TV, Swami Devalaya, a Rajneesh investment corporation official, waved a paintbrush and declared, ‘we’re going to paint Oregon red!’

  That summer Rajneeshpuram played host to the Annual World Celebration. From 3 to 7 July, around seven thousand people came to the Ranch from all over the world to stay in newly erected residential districts—the ‘Buddha’, ‘Socrates’, and ‘Zarathustra’ tent cities. Most sannyasins paid to come: $500 for a week, with a sleeping bag and tent; $1,100 for three weeks; $3,000 for three months. Each visitor was checked for crabs and lice. Western airlines flights from Europe to Oregon did half a million dollars’ worth of new business that year, and the Ranch administration spent the same amount on food for the participants, including a total of seventy thousand cups of orange juice, fifty thousand cups of yoghurt, and five tons of granola muesli. The Noah’s Ark boutique stocked up on maroon Sun & Sand and Yves St Laurent clothes, the shades picked out from colour-cards showing all the hues, from yellow to deep red, that were seen as the complementary colours of the sun. Leaflets were printed and displayed on a clear plastic stand on the counter: a Rajneesh couple hand-in-hand against the dusty background of the Ranch hills. ‘He is wearing a “Rancho Rajneesh” sweatshirt, in maroon, and a “Nothing fails like success” screened baseball hat. She is in the “Rajneeshpuram” T-shirt, red only.’ Currency cards, bought in advance, were used to pay for food and accommodation. The card allocation wasn’t always perfect; some sannyasins got much more or less money than they had bargained for. Mostly, the mistakes were taken with meditative acceptance, especially when the balance swung their way.

  Now that the farming cooperative story had finally fallen apart, the greenhouse was unveiled as Rajneesh Mandir: a huge, sparkling glass auditorium, with room for audiences of thousands who came to see Bhagwan arrive in his Rolls-Royce each morning. As he walked to the stage Sheela held an umbrella over his head. After his discourse, people stood and bowed as he left. At 2 P.M. each day, Bhagwan began doing his ‘drive-by’: cruising the Ranch’s main street at a walking pace in one of his Rolls-Royces, waving and smiling to the sannyasins who gathered to watch him pass. In the four days of the First Annual World Celebration, as the crowds by the side of the road thronged to five times their usual size, the petals of fifty thousand yellow, orange, pink, and red roses were showered from the Ranch helicopter onto the crowds and the path of his car. His Rolls collection was growing. Some of the cars were now custom-painted across the sides and roof: gold flecks, flames, thunderclouds, wild geese.

  In mid-July one of his Rolls-Royces was raffled at $25 a ticket; and at the prize ceremony in the Rajneesh Mandir auditorium, to the roar of the whole crowd’s approval, the winner turned around with a beatific smile on his face and gave the winning ticket back to Bhagwan.

  On 11 December that year, Bhagwan’s fifty-first birthday, disciples handed him the keys to his twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth Rolls-Royces.

  I look back on those few weeks at the Ranch as one of t
he strangest times in my childhood. Because I was not staying forever, I didn’t feel I had to turn up for the worship. Nothing, in any case, seemed to have been arranged for me. I assumed that because I was to leave soon I would not be assigned a guardian; it wasn’t mentioned again. I never saw any of the other kids with a guardian either. They seemed to spend all their time just like me. We wandered all over the hundred square miles that was the Ranch, doing whatever we wanted to do.

  There were thousands of sannyasins at Rajneeshpuram. I remember having difficulty finding my mother’s tent among the thousands and thousands of tents lined up in rows, in dusty fields upon dusty fields. If I missed my mother during the day, I went to look for her in the evening at ‘Magdalena’, in the food tents. After a while, people dressed in the same colours all start to look the same. I would walk through the huge, long, low marquees, running my eyes along the hundreds of benches, pushing my way through the crowds of thousands of sannyasins arriving for their evening meal, looking down each row under the huge green canvas canopy. After dark, much of my time at the Ranch was spent wandering through those crowds looking for my mother. There were times when, as evening drew in, I felt I had spent my whole life on tiptoes, looking for my mother in a darkening crowd.

  The kids were supposed to sleep in a special communal dormitory, in a larger A-frame, but actually we slept where we liked—with friends, with friends’ mothers, sometimes in one or other of the department buildings. Once I slept outside near a row of A-frames; I thought it would be warm, but it wasn’t. I shivered all night looking up at the stars. My mother and Sujan had a tent in one of the huge tent cities. I always had trouble remembering which was theirs; one time in two, when I found their tent, it was empty.

  During the days I walked along the Ranch’s dusty paths, breathed in the dust kicked up by my flip-flops, and watched the Ranch scroll by—past Jesus Grove, Buddha Grove, Magdalena, down Zen Road and up Zarathustra Drive. Every now and then I would bump into one or two other kids and we would play together for a while. We searched between the rocks for quartz crystals, hoping perhaps to sell them—they looked valuable to us, cracked facets of clear crystal that emerged magically from nuggets of rock—but although plenty of the adults were happy to admire them, no one ever showed any real interest in making a purchase. Our pockets weighed down with quartz rocks, we walked down to the shopping district and wandered in and out of the wood-hut shops. Our favourite was Noah’s Ark, the boutique. When no one was looking we ran in and hid under the rails of clothes, peeked out at customers, ran our hands through the sleeves and hems. The boutique sold all kinds of Bhagwan souvenirs: Bhagwan pillowcases showing him in profile, asleep, resting his head on his own pillow; decks of cards, like the ones used in the Rajneeshpuram Casino, a different picture of Bhagwan on the back of each card; pocket-sized Bhagwan flashlights, ‘Be a light unto yourself’ written down one side. There were books, too: Bhagwan’s discourses, racks and racks of Louis L’Amour. I stood by the jewellery cabinet and stared through the glass at the silver malarings and necklace pendants crafted in the familiar shape: two birds in flight, wings touching, silhouetted against the sun. The other kids crowded around; we’d press our faces against the glass and covet the little pretty stones and silver inside. They’d leave and, anxious as to what would happen if I let these few friends stray away from me, I’d run to catch up. But I’d have already lost them in the crowd.

  Around the Ranch, converted yellow Oregon State school buses kept regular routes. I would get on one of these and travel right round the Ranch, past the shopping district, over the creeks, through yellow fields of tents and A-frames, past men with pink ‘peace Officer’ uniforms and big service revolvers strapped to their waists. Then I’d get off near the meditation halls. I ran all the way around the edge of them. They were huge symmetrical glass and cloth and metal marquees; great panes of glass emerged from the dust in glittering sheets, like the facets of the quartz crystals we found in the hills. These glass shards let in all the light, and people would sit and meditate in the light and the silence.

  Once, on my wanderings near Walt Whitman Grove, I came across a big marble slab with words carved in huge letters across the top: ‘I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.’

  There were times when my mother was with me, and we would get off the bus together. One time in two I’d manage to persuade her to shell out a dollar for a hot vegetarian bacon croissant from my favourite food stall. All the food at the Ranch, as at Medina, was vegetarian, but somehow—it amazed me—these croissants had some kind of stuff in them that tasted better than bacon.

  None of us kids knew each other at the Ranch, or really had the chance to get to know each other. I recognized some from Medina, but the rest drifted apart as easily as we came together. There was nothing to tie us down, keep us in place. As quickly as we found one another, we lost ourselves again in the Oregon sun.

  That year, the summer of 1984 at the Ranch, many of the Medina kids lost their virginity; boys and girls, ten years old, eight years old, in sweaty tents and A-frames, late at night and mid-afternoon, with adults and other children. I remember some of the kids—eight, nine, ten years old—arguing about who had fucked whom, who would or wouldn’t fuck them. The wilder kids smoked borrowed or stolen cigarettes, burned each other with their lighters, and tried to persuade the younger kids to inhale the gas from whipped cream cans stolen from the Magdalena food tents. I had just turned nine years old. I kept away from these kids. I spent my time in the hills, wandering among the juniper scrub, searching for quartz crystals.

  In the roaring heat of the afternoons, sometimes we went naked in Kabir Creek. Once, as we splashed about in the single cool aquamarine crystal of the water, one of the other kids told me there were hundreds of square miles of Ranch. It would take days to walk around the edge. That seemed huge to me. That seemed the same as not having any edges at all.

  In the afternoon I would run up to the lake to see if I could find Majid among all the other brown-skinned kids with suntan lotion all over them. We’d all heard about the kid who fell asleep and got stuck to his waterbed; his skin had to be peeled off; we all covered ourselves with as much lotion as we could find. If I found Majid I’d persuade him to swim or to row together out over the water. If you went out to the middle of the lake and looked down, the water was so blue, it was like flying upside down under the sky. The lake was a forty-five-acre reservoir: 350 million gallons held in place by 400 feet of earth, Krishnamurti Dam. We used to row out across the lake, slide out across the brilliant blue, walk out along the edge of the dam. We’d look down and imagine what would happen if the earth gave way.

  The Ranch was the beginning of the loneliest time of my life. On the other hand, I had never felt so free. There were hundreds of people gathered around the lake. Everyone you’d ever seen or known or knew or would ever meet. From the wooden islands we leaped out over the deep blue sheet of the reservoir, avoiding the adults floating on their backs and the kids in the inner tubes and sprawled on top of inflatable plastic milk-sacks they’d picked up round the back of the Magdalena food tents. At the peak of every leap my heart was in my mouth. I didn’t care how I hit the water. The world had never felt as huge or as open to receive us as it suddenly did then.

  Once, walking down the path from the lake, shuffling my flip-flops to encourage the clouds of dust that billowed out into the air behind me, I saw a boy coming up the path the other way. He stopped in front of me. We stared at each other. I had seen this boy somewhere before.

  We had met in India, he said. Had I been to India? I wasn’t sure. I thought I had been, some time ago with my mother—I remembered an avenue of the tallest palm trees, geckos, ceiling fans, hot whitewashed apartment blocks—but how could I be sure? But I was sure. This boy and I had met by an old rusty car in a playground, in India, screaming at monkeys in the midday sun. His name was Viruchana.

  Now here he was again, on a dusty
path near the quartz-fields at the edge of Rajneeshpuram. My best friend from the Ashram school. I raised my hand. He extended his. Slowly we reached out in front of each other, our fingertips outstretched. To the Swamis and Mas flowing round us on both sides, we must have looked the same: inverse images of sannyasin children reaching out to touch each other, like a maroon-clad monkey reaching out to touch its own reflection. And then, although neither of us was sure—we had no way to check, no one to ask—still, we went together to watch Bhagwan drive by.

  Before we even saw Bhagwan, we knew he was coming. The thrumming of the helicopter which showered rose petals in the path of his Rolls-Royce announced his arrival. Each day at two o’clock Bhagwan drove at walking pace along the Ranch’s central street. Along each side of the length of the road, standing sometimes twenty deep, sannyasins gathered to sing and wave their arms and roll their heads—a bit like Stevie Wonder, I had recently noticed—in their traditional sideways figure-of-eight. As the helicopter passed and the crunch of Bhagwan’s car tyres on the gravel approached, people played trombones, banged drums, waved their arms, craning their necks to get a better look. The traditional sannyasin dress had by now adopted a touch of the Oregon rancher: cowboy hats, sunglasses, and T-shirts among the malas, dresses, and beards. We kids pushed our way to the front; we always had a good view as, lifting one gloved hand from the steering wheel to wave, Bhagwan drifted by. As the car followed the road’s curve, the white leather interior lit up with pinpoint sparkles where his diamond bracelet caught the midday sun. One by one, sannyasins stepped forward to place long-stemmed pink and red roses, stripped of their thorns, on the bonnet of his car. They held their hands together against their chests as his Rolls slipped by. Occasionally Bhagwan took his hands off the wheel to press them together in reply. Once or twice each day he slowed to a halt and lowered his tinted window, through which he would hand a paper parcel to some ecstatic sannyasin. I remember once his Rolls stopped near where I was standing. He pointed to a young child in the arms of his mother. She looked surprised, then brought the boy forward to the car. Bhagwan reached to the passenger seat and passed over something rubber-duck sized and wrapped in yellow paper. He patted the boy on the head and grinned. As he turned back to the road, his gaze passed mine. His eyes seemed to look straight through me. I thought I saw something dark hidden in there. He scared me. Then he raised his window and drove on, smiling the whole time. Whenever I went to see him drive past, I always willed him to stop and give a gift to me. He never did. All I ever saw were his twinkling eyes, the gloved hand, the white beard, the glittering of his diamond-studded bracelet, and his tinted window going up, like a shadow over the sun. Peace Officer guards wearing aviator sunglasses, carrying Uzi sub-machine guns, walked ten paces behind the car.