by Tim Guest
My mother sent me parcels from Germany filled with things she thought I might like. Once every two weeks, among the other letters and packages given out to the kids in the morning meeting, one arrived for me. The parcels from my mother all looked alike: about half a foot across, a little wider than it was tall, wrapped in brown paper, Sellotape, and string. On the top was always the same label, written in my mother’s careful, sweeping hand: Yogesh, Medina Rajneesh, Suffolk, IP28 6SW. After checking the label to make sure it was for me, I ran upstairs to a corner of the upper landing where I could open the parcel in peace. I peered closely at the top right corner where she’d written the return address. The first line fascinated me most: ‘Vismaya’, her name, writ large in blue Biro, looped and swirled like her signature.
Then I ripped off the paper to get at the box inside. My mother knew the sweets I liked: the brightly coloured sticky ones they made best in Germany, much nicer than chocolate. I loved the colours. When they came in small fistfuls out of the box, I held them up against the light and they shone—the bright reds and greens of cherry gum rings, the muted yellow and brown of cola bottles, wrapped in fizzy sugar, dark green crocodiles, yellow-orange birds, chewy blue Smurfs with spongy white hats.
Later in the day, as Majid and I threw the Smurfs at each other in the tearoom, I would tell him again how in Germany they call them ‘Schlumpfs’. He would grin. ‘Papa Schlumpf,’ he’d say. Blue bits of Smurf would dribble out between his teeth. I’d throw a cola bottle at him, trying to hit him in the mouth. He’d catch and eat it, then pull faces to make me throw another. All the time I pressed the box close under my arm.
By the end of the day the sweets had been eaten, thrown, or given away. The brown paper was torn and left behind. All the evidence of my mother was gone.
My mother telephoned, too, occasionally. A month after I arrived, the new Medina co-ordinators told my mother her phone calls left me tearful and upset. They asked her to stop calling. She agreed, but she began to send me increasingly larger parcels. In April the Medina co-ordinators phoned her again. The parcels were making the other kids jealous. They asked her to stop sending them. She kept sending the parcels, but she had no way of telling whether any were getting through.
That month I wrote my first book. I wrote it by hand in a little red exercise pad with thin blue lines and red margins. The story began with a series of gruesome murders that took place at the same time each month. The reader saw these horrendous crimes from the viewpoint of the detective assigned to the case. As the detective stalked the killer and the murders grew more gruesome, the victims started to become people closer to the detective himself. He became convinced that he was to be the final victim. It became a race against time—to discover the killer before the killer discovered him. The detective noticed that all the murders had taken place on a full moon. At the next full moon, using himself as the bait, he set a trap for the killer.
When the full moon came, the narrative voice changed. We saw the killer from the outside. The reader was shocked—or not—to discover that the killer was a werewolf. We saw that the werewolf was already in the room where the detective was waiting. He had penetrated the trap. Then we saw the rest of the room, draped with the shredded clothes of the detective. Our hero had already been murdered. The murderer had won. Then we saw that the clothes had been torn from the inside. The werewolf’s clothes were the detective’s clothes. The detective was the murderer.
The ending pleased me. The thing he was searching for was also the thing he was running from: himself. I showed it to a few people, but no one had time to read it right away. I put it in the library with the other books and went out to the forest to whip nettles.
Not long after that, my mother managed to arrange a short visit to Medina. A van needed to be delivered from Germany to Rajneesh School, and my mother, then working as a driver in the Wioska transport department, persuaded them to let her drive. When she arrived, late that same evening, someone was sent to bring me to meet her in the Main Hall. We had not seen each other for six months. When I saw her sitting at one of the coffee tables, I smiled, uncertain whether to run to her. She came over and hugged me. I felt myself stiffen in her arms. She began to cry; I wondered why, though I was struggling not to cry myself. That morning I’d woken up early and made her a round brown chocolate cake with multicoloured candles. I pulled her down the corridor and into the kitchens to show her. I made two mugs of tea. We ate the cake together.
After the tea, I took her on a tour. I showed her the upstairs rooms that had once been adult dormitories and were now our schoolrooms. I showed her my dormitory, which had once been the transport room. As it grew dark we went for a walk around the Main House and out onto the front lawn.
Then it was bedtime. I planned to show her my werewolf book the next day, but at 8 A.M. she came to my bed to say goodbye.
That June the mothers at sannyasin communes across Europe were given a choice. They could either go to visit Rajneeshpuram, for the Fourth Annual World Celebration, or they could visit their children in Rajneesh School. Bhagwan had begun to speak publicly again; not all the mothers chose to visit Rajneesh School. I flew out to visit my father in Mountain View, California, so my mother was spared the choice. There was talk of me visiting her in Oregon, but I didn’t want to go back to the Ranch. Instead I stayed with my father until mid-July, for nearly a month.
My father bought me a bike. It was at least three frame-sizes too large, but I told him I liked it that way. I cycled up and down his street, swerving to catch the far end of lawn sprinklers on their arcs over the pavement. We hadn’t yet decided whether I was there for good, but he promised that even if I went back to England, he would keep the bike in his garage for me until next year.
Another summer in California. Even now, the dry smell of pines in July makes those summers burst again in my chest. Those summers with my father—stillness, separation, silence—everything the commune was not. At the weekends we would wander together along wood-chip paths in the park a few blocks away; each summer, among the trees, we found we had a little less to talk about.
Up the coast in Oregon, the tensions between Rajneeshpuram and local communities were still rising. On 21 June 1984 Rajneeshpuram filed a suit claiming that state and county officials had conspired to drive them from Oregon. Sheela called in a PR adviser who had worked for Ronald Reagan; the adviser made a number of recommendations, including that Bhagwan swap his Rolls-Royces for US-made Lincoln Continental limousines (‘If it’s good enough for the president, it’s good enough for the guru,’ he said.) When he heard this advice Bhagwan laughed, but the Rolls-Royces kept on rolling. By August 1985 those entering and leaving Rajneeshpuram were checked and body-searched by uniformed Peace Officers and sniffer dogs. Residents and visitors wore colour-coded plastic ID bracelets which identified where they were allowed to go; ‘no hiking’ signs appeared around the centre of Rajneeshpuram. Local law enforcement agencies had begun to wonder whether this would all end in an armed siege. The National Guard was warned. On the Ranch there were helicopters, armed guards, towers with binocular stands, and rose petals everywhere.
That summer my mother received a message to be at a certain place at a certain time and tell no one about it. A truck picked her up and took her with four others to a private Darshan in Lao Tzu, Bhagwan’s house. When they arrived, Bhagwan handed round some gifts (my mother received another straw hat) and he talked about his Noah’s Ark of consciousness. He rambled on. My mother had difficulty following him; she gave up, stopped listening, and tuned in on the energy of the master. Then he crossed the room to press his thumb on her third eye. He told her to keep her eyes closed; as he pressed his thumb into my mother’s forehead, she opened her eyes and looked straight into his. She felt something like an electric shock run through her. The year before, on a safari my mother took while running a group in Africa, a giraffe had bent down and looked straight into her face. To my mother, Bhagwan’s eyes looked just like the giraffe’s: bla
ck, bottomless, something with no sense of self. Something wild.
By the time I returned to Medina, the latest word on AIDS transmission from the Ranch was that mosquitoes and other insects could spread the disease from bite to bite. ‘Insectocutors’—electric machines that sparked and zipped every minute or so—were to be installed immediately, wherever food was prepared or eaten. These cropped up very soon, in the kitchens and the dining areas. Now, when we cooked and ate, it was against this background of an unearthly blue glow and the acrid smell of burning flies.
16
They danced in orange, pressed themselves together in crowds, sang their songs about heat and love and the sun. It was left to the younger ones, who couldn’t help it, to live out the cooler end of the spectrum, the silvers and the solitary blues.
When I returned to Rajneesh School from California, it was beginning to grow colder. Late in the evenings, when there was a clear sky, I took to standing outside the Kids’ Hut. I stood on the frosty grass, set my feet apart, and looked up at the moon. I had never seen anything so clear-cut as this moon. It looked like the perfect, pearly moonstone set into a silver ring I had stolen from my mother in Germany, which I fingered in my pocket as I stared. From an upstairs window Asha once called out: ‘Oy! Come and look what Yogesh’s doing! He’s staring up at the moon!’ I hoped they would come to look. I hoped they were intrigued, but I didn’t turn around to check. I just stood there and stared up at the night sky.
When I finally left Medina, it was partly out of loneliness, and partly out of pride. Although at the time my departure felt sudden, it seems to me now that I had long been practising my exit in as many ways as I could.
In the half-light by the dormitories, late into the warm evenings, we played games. We dared each other to step out into the darkness behind the laundries, where no light could possibly penetrate. We all said it would be easy, but no one dared. Then, I did. I walked out into the dark, felt my way into it. I had the feeling I had done this somewhere before.
I’d sneak into an empty classroom, to read and reread a science fiction book, Nicholas Fisk’s On the Flip Side, in which people decide they are going somewhere else, some other place, and they just disappear. It seemed appealing to me. I could just make the decision and go, step into some new angle and leave the universe entirely for some unknown and utterly different destination. I read more and more science fiction. I began to have daydreams of an empty world, most of the inhabitants killed in the Martian invasion. Except that I, and perhaps one or two others—usually both girls—survived. We clambered at will over the ruins of civilization. In a magazine someone had left in the Omar Khayyam bar, I found an article about a tiny spore that scientists thought might have come from Mars. The photo showed a mossy green stalk with a yellow pointed tip. I began to look for these spores in the Medina grounds. Once, standing on a ladder outside the Kids’ Hut inspecting the walls, I was convinced I had found one: a tiny plant, one millimetre tall, an alien spore taking root in the walls of our home. Sitting on the porch of the Main House on long summer evenings, watching the tall grass, thick brushes of burnt sienna, swaying on the front lawn, I began to dream this was the Martian red weed. I had read H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; I had even heard Jeff Wayne’s musical version with David Essex and Richard Burton; I began to half-believe—hope, even—that these new, tall grasses had come to us from another world to choke the front lawn and to send us all fleeing the destruction, finally running out of the Medina boundaries and into the world.
One morning I awoke to silence. I sat up. Every single bed in the dormitory was empty. Every bed was made. I wondered for a moment whether it had happened, whether I really had suddenly left for some empty place, whether I was the one and only survivor. I got up and went downstairs. The Kids’ Hut was empty. I walked out into the gravel courtyard. I could see no one. I began to run. Finally, I found all the kids playing football at the bottom of the front lawn. I was enraged. I asked the teacher why she had let me sleep; she said she was tired of getting me out of bed against my will, and she’d decided to let me sleep in from now on. It felt to me like she was saying I might as well not be there at all. I left them playing football on the lawn; on the way back to the Main House, I paused by the three bikes that were lying on the grass and jumped up and down on the back wheel of one for so long that the wheel bent out of shape. Some of the kids started running; before anyone could reach me, I ran to hide in the Main House. It turned out the bike was Gulab’s. He wanted me to pay for it. How could he make me?
I was sick of living there, sick of leaping and shouting in the mornings, sick of having to hide my toys and sick of them still getting stolen. Even my new plan for hiding toys—the best such plan I’d ever had—had only worked briefly. Each morning the Mas and Swamis on the early kitchen rota baked tray after tray of long loaves of bread; if you could manage to wake up at six you could help, and even create your own custom-made loaf. One morning I dragged myself out of bed and I made a big round loaf. I dug the flesh out through a small hole in the crust, then I hid my Lego men inside. For weeks the loaf, on a window-ledge by the side of my bunk, was untouched. Finally, someone complained about the mould, and I had to throw it out. I took to carrying my Lego men in my pockets again.
A week later fifty or so of us went on a day trip to the beach; maroon kids gathered under a grey sky, making slumping castles in the wet English sand. Then the sun was setting, and it was time to go home. We began to pack up. I suddenly realized I didn’t have my Bhagwan watch.
Two days before, Chandan, who now ran Rajneesh School, had come up to me on the stairs of the Main House and told me Bhagwan had sent me a gift from the Ranch. I had no idea why Bhagwan would send me something, and said so. Chandan just smiled and gave me a long, thin, black plastic box. Maybe, I thought, Bhagwan knew I had been watching from the side of the road, waiting for him to stop his Rolls-Royce in front of me. Maybe he had known about me all along. I ripped open the box. Inside was a watch with a thin black face and plastic strap; Bhagwan’s face grinned out from the dial. I turned it over to put it on my wrist. When the strap was in place, I turned my wrist over and blinked. Bhagwan’s face had gone. I examined the watch face carefully for any sign of him—his beard, his twinkling eyes—but there was nothing. Then, as I watched the second hand creep round, Bhagwan’s face appeared again. Bhagwan had sent me a watch on which his face appeared and disappeared every thirty seconds. I laughed and ran to show someone. Sharna was the first person I bumped into. I asked him if he had any idea how it worked. He said it was magic. I squinted at him. He said it was Bhagwan’s Buddhafield working by remote control all the way from the Ranch. I shook my head in disgust and went to find someone who might really know but no one could offer me an explanation for the incredible disappearing Bhagwan. The watch became my favourite object. Even asleep I kept it strapped to my wrist.
But at the beach that day I lost it. When we arrived I took the watch off so it wouldn’t get sand inside; I put it carefully under the corner of a blanket. When I came back, the watch was gone. I rummaged everywhere—under the blankets, in the fine dry sand, in the dune-grass. The other kids packed up around me. I kept asking everyone, including the teacher, if they had seen my watch. No one had. I asked the teacher again: she insisted she hadn’t seen it. Finally, everything had been packed up, and we were leaving. A lump in my throat, two plastic bags of rubbish clutched tight in my hands, my feet dragging in the sand, I was the last to shuffle over to the minibus. My eyes still scanned left and right, hoping for a glimpse of my watch at the last moment. Just before I got into the minibus, the teacher pulled me aside. She had my watch, she told me. She’d had it all along. I asked for it back. I could have it back, she said, but only if I had learned my lesson about not taking care of things. She held it above me until I thanked her for taking care of my watch.
Seated in the minibus, looking out of the window as we bumped along the B-road towards the Medina boundaries, I fumbled with the wa
tch’s plastic strap trying to return my watch to my wrist. I was furious; and I knew suddenly that it was over.
On the seat next to me was Matthew Bunyan; we called him Bunyan-the-Pickled-Onion. Matthew was a new arrival. He had made his mark on his first day, in the room next to the dining hall—the one with Bhagwan’s chair. The year before, Bhagwan’s chair had been replaced with a newer one. By now we had all guessed that Bhagwan was probably never going to visit, but the chair was still untouchable. So Matthew Bunyan-the-Pickled-Onion couldn’t understand our speechless disbelief when, playing tag in the Main House on the first day, he spotted Bhagwan’s chair on its plinth in the bay window, ran at it, jumped in, spun around, and shouted out in his Brummie accent: ‘I’m Mr Mastermind!’
Once I got over the shock, I liked his irreverent attitude—he called Bhagwan ‘Bhaggers’. We became friends. In the back of the van on the way back from the beach I told Matthew what had happened with the watch. He asked me what I was going to do about it. I was going to leave, I said. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded. When the van pulled in and all the other kids had run off, Matthew hung around waiting for me to get out. As I climbed down onto the gravel he was right next to me. ‘So, are you going to do it now?’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Tell them you’re leaving.’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Right,’ Matthew said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
So, with Bunyan-the-Pickled-Onion on my tail, I marched on over to Chandan’s office in the Main House.
