by Tim Guest
Also waiting at Charlotte was a team of federal customs agents. They boarded the plane at gunpoint and arrested Bhagwan. As well as the guru, they seized a handgun, $58,522 in cash, and thirty-eight jewel-encrusted bracelets and watches.
Congressman Jim Weaver told a press conference they had been waiting a long time for a stool pigeon. Now, he said, ‘We’ve got the biggest one of all. The Bhagwan himself.’
Bhagwan was held in Mecklenburg County Jail, Charlotte, for eight days. Flowers from his supporters arrived in droves. The chief deputy had never seen so many flowers. Newspapers and TV crews flocked to the court. The local deputy marshall had been involved in security for the trial in Washington, DC, of John Hinckley—the man who had tried to assassinate President Reagan. He said Bhagwan’s trial was even bigger. And every day while Bhagwan was held in jail a woman, dressed in red and with a red raincoat, stood across the road in the pouring rain and gazed towards the jail.
At the time, living with my father in San Jose, I saw only brief fragments of the story on Californian TV. As the power struggle spiralled out of control, the national news media picked up the story. There were allegations of poisonings, men and women collapsing in meditation tents, pinpricks on the skin, glimpses of needles in folds of orange robes. There were also confessions from the kitchen staff: as well as the normal muesli, orange juice, and mock-crab salad for Ranch residents, the Share-A-Home Friends canteen served ‘special salads’ laced with the tranquillizer Haldol. (One morning the drugged batch was lost; to cover up the mistake the whole day’s ration, thousands of salads, was binned.) In July 1985 a handful of sannyasins were told they had tested positive for HIV and moved to an ‘AIDS village’ in one corner of the Ranch. Over the summer one sannyasin developed symptoms she assumed were from the onset of AIDS, but in September, when Sheela’s doctor left the Ranch, the symptoms disappeared. The AIDS village residents were subsequently tested; the results were negative.
The Buddhafield had become a minefield.
After eight days in North Carolina, Bhagwan’s entourage learned he was being flown back to Portland. They returned to meet him on his arrival. In fact Bhagwan was flown to Oklahoma City, where he was driven to the city jail and signed in under the name ‘David Washington’. There, Bhagwan later claimed, he was put in a cell with a single bunk and brought a meal of bread and a strange-tasting sauce. Then he was taken to a second jail, a federal penitentiary ten miles outside Oklahoma City, where the jail records say he spent two nights, but he remembers only one. Bhagwan later claimed the US government slow-poisoned him, either with thallium or with some radioactive substance, in that meal. He and his doctor blamed this incident, allegedly orchestrated by Christian Fundamentalists in the US government—what Bhagwan called ‘Ronald Reagan’s America’—for the rapid and visible deterioration of his health in the years that followed.
Bhagwan appeared in court chained in manacles and pleaded innocent. He was released on a $500,000 bail, and a trial date was set for February. Then, on Thursday, 14 November, he reappeared at the Portland courthouse and made a surprise plea of guilty to two felonies: conspiracy to arrange sham marriages so his followers could remain in the USA, and concealing his intent to reside in the United States on his first arrival. Prosecutors agreed to drop thirty-three similar counts; in return, he agreed to drop several lawsuits against the US government. Bhagwan was given a ten-year suspended sentence, and agreed to pay $400,000 in fines and prosecution costs. He was ordered to leave the country within five days; he could not return for at least five years without the permission of the US attorney general. ‘No problem,’ he told the judge. ‘I never want to return again.’
That same day Bhagwan, Vivek, and Bhagwan’s seventy-two-year-old mother boarded a rented jet and returned to India.
Bhagwan liked to brag that his glittering, bejewelled watches were ‘worthless, just made from paste and glass’. If that were true, then his real diamond watches were also hidden somewhere close by. Not long after he fled the US, his jewellery collection was auctioned at Christie’s in New York City. The top price: $28,500 for a vintage diamond and sapphire watch made by Gerald Genta (‘the Faberge of watches’, according to the auction catalogue).
Advertised for sale at the Ranch in December 1985 were one flight simulator, two baby-grand pianos, two Samadhi flotation tanks, twenty-one Israeli-made Galil assault rifles, and ninety-three Rolls-Royces.
In San Jose my father took me to the library. You reached it by an arched wooden bridge over a pond, in the sunlight and the shade of trees. There I read the Hardy Boys, more Willard Price, Encyclopedia Brown Solves the Case (his arch-foe, Bugs Meany, was a big bully with a gentle side; he reminded me of Rupda). My new favourite books were a science fiction series in which a headstrong young boy got caught up in crazy science experiments, tales whose moral—Look before you leap—was always the exact opposite of Bhagwan’s. It surprised me there were people who advised you to do things the other way round.
I remember walking to school alone, not long after the sun had risen. I remember the lessons, too: learning the flag for each state; maths hour, doing sheet after sheet of multiplication or long division. I remember fancying Bonnie, who sat and played with her ponytail across from me. I remember not quite winning the spelling bee. School ended at four o’clock; I would hang around to ride across the concrete on a banana-board or play basketball with one of the other boys. Then I would make my way slowly home, along maple-lined streets back to my father’s house, enjoying the freedom of the walk home through roads that seemed to stretch in a straight line forever. I loved the silence, the wide streets, the empty roads. I hefted my backpack squarely on both shoulders and I took my time. My father and I spent the weekends by ourselves. I watched Saturday morning cartoons and munched on the sweet cereal I saw advertised in between each of the cartoons. Then he and I went for walks in the local park. I was so far inside myself by then that even I found little to say.
In October my mother took up Ramateertha’s offer and returned to England. There she re-met with Poonam who, just six months after they were sent back to the Ranch to be re-educated, had left the Ranch to return to London. My mother arranged to move into Poonam’s rented house: 3 Wembury Road, off the Archway Road in North London. Adheera and Udbodha—Poonam’s main squeeze—were also living there. Sujan had decided to stay in Germany; but a week after my mother left he followed her to London. It was the old Oak Village crew, reunited five years down the line. Now, in the early winter of 1985, my mother, Poonam, Adheera, and Udbodha decided to set up another British commune: Medina Mark II.
After Bhagwan left, it was announced the Oregon commune would continue. The Rajneesh Humanity Trust offered to pay air fares for European sannyasins to visit the Ranch. Very few accepted. Two weeks later the mayor of Rajneeshpuram, Swami Nuren, announced the Ranch would be closed and sold. That winter sannyasins were bussed wholesale off the Ranch and out into the world. The US edition of the Rajneesh Times announced that sannyasins should not follow Bhagwan back to India. Instead they should spread out across the world, like seeds of consciousness. (Albeit discreet seeds; each departing sannyasin was asked to sign a non-disclosure form.) Some people got their Rajneesh debit card money back; others drove off with four-wheel-drive trucks or car-loads of computers instead. Beds, desks, and typewriters lay in heaps in the Rajneesh Mandir auditorium. By February, on the Ranch, there were just one hundred sannyasins. I imagine a kind of synchronized dance; as thousands of sannyasins spread out and began to find their place in the world, Bhagwan, too, tried to find a country that would accept him.
In December 1985 the Indian government refused to renew his entourage’s visas. He left for Kathmandu, where they were refused entry, then they flew to Crete. There they set up camp with a porn baron, until armed police stormed the villa and returned Bhagwan to his chartered jet. Switzerland refused permission for Bhagwan to do anything but refuel, as did Sweden, England, Ireland, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Canada would not e
ven let the plane land. Eventually Uruguay offered his party visas, but after three months Bhagwan was again forced to leave. Jamaica cancelled his visa the day after he landed. He slipped into Portugal, until he was discovered there and the police returned him to the airport. At this point, six months into his world tour, Bhagwan announced he was returning to India.
While Bhagwan bounced from country to country, spreading his message of mystery wherever his plane-load of followers could get visas, I, too, was still moving. When my mother arrived in London, she phoned me. She said she’d left Germany for good. We spoke the next few nights; later that week I decided to leave my father and return to London to live with my mother. On my last day in California, my father took me to Pier 49; he ate clam chowder, I picked out posters to take home. He bought me five huge spray-painted posters of bright red Italian sports cars: Lamborghini Countachs and Ferrari Testarossas. The shop assistant rolled them tightly into a cardboard tube. I thanked my father and held his hand. The next day I held the tube under one arm and my seal under the other as I boarded the plane.
18
As we flew over England, I looked out of the window and watched London scroll by below. It was so big, even from up here I couldn’t see the edges. I remember the yellow streetlights, then falling asleep in the back of the car. My mother carried me into our new home. It was November 1985; I was back with my mother. Seven people—me, my mother, Sujan, and four of their closest sannyasin friends—lived in a three-bedroom house off the Archway Road.
I had no idea they were trying to build the commune again. I spent my days in the upstairs room where my mother slept, hoping they would leave me alone; during the day to make my point I blocked the door with a chair. Majid was living five minutes away, in a similar sannyasin communal household on Lady Margaret Road. We were finally back in the world. Our mothers had fled the material for the spiritual: as soon as we got the chance, Majid and I were like rockets in the other direction. At the newsagent’s around the corner, we bought as many sweets as we could stuff into our pockets. My mum joined the video shop, and we watched film after film, grabbing the cassettes off the shelves almost at random. In my mother’s room, while we played with my little Tomy Dingbot, a battery-powered robot six inches high, Majid and I watched Ewoks: Caravan of Courage. Dingbot, our electronic companion, had blinking LEDs behind his red plastic eyes. With his wide body and his upturned eyes, he looked like a lost owl. He chirped and barked and ran around until he hit something, then spun around and ran on some more. We liked him; he seemed even more lost than we were. Later I got out my bigger robot, Chatbot, who had a remote control. Majid and I would ‘accidentally’ hit each other with the wire from the controller, and make the polite-looking little plastic creature with his apologetic plastic eyes carry my last few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to us from across the room.
Sometimes I carried my Spectrum 48k around to Majid’s house in a jumble of wires, cassette spools, and plastic. We played computer games with alliterative names: Monty Mole, Manic Miner, Dynamite Dan. When I beat him, or he beat me and I tried my best to wind him up, we would sometimes come to blows. I would taunt him or push him across the room. When I successfully pissed him off, he always managed to grab me in a headlock. Majid was a year older and much stronger than I was; as he crushed my head, he recited his favourite piece of advice from Bhagwan: ‘When someone hits you, hit them twice as hard.’ I would thank Bhagwan sarcastically as Majid rabbit-punched my neck.
Within two months, my mother and her friends realized they didn’t want to set up a new commune. Rajneeshpuram had collapsed; they were exhausted. The energy just wasn’t there. My mother and Sujan went on a day trip to Worthing, a seaside town a hundred miles south of London, to see whether they might start a new life there. In the end, they put down a month’s rent and a month’s deposit for a flat on Prince of Wales Road, in Chalk Farm, North London—a stone’s throw from the old warehouse building where eight years before, we’d shared the lift with the Jam going up to Kalptaru. My mother signed me up to Rhyl Street Primary School, in the centre of a group of council blocks not far past Barnacle Bill’s Fish Shop, up Malden Road. I walked to school past the same broken glass and tall, red-brick apartment blocks I remembered from Oak Village. On the first day I walked into the school hall where the walls were grey and the floor a drab, muted green. I didn’t feel like saying much. When the teacher read out my legal name on the register, I put up my hand. ‘Yogesh’ was too complicated to explain. At Rhyl Street School, I sat on the bench in the playground all break and lunchtime and stared out into space. I would not talk to the kids who tried to talk to me, unless it was the girls, in which case I would bark out something cryptic and hurtful. Once I shouted at them in German: ‘Kannst du mich nicht allein lassen?’—Can’t you leave me alone?—an outburst designed as much to intrigue them about my secret history as to push them away.
Other times I would walk around the playground with my head bent forward, eyes scanning the ground. I told the other kids I was looking for loose change. I didn’t know what I was looking for.
I do now. I was looking for the ground beneath my feet. I was looking for my family.
In the playground, the other boys argued about their fathers’ cars. On my wall at home I had pinned the posters my father had bought for me on Pier 49 the day I left: the big airbrushed posters of Lamborghini Countachs and Ferrari Testarossas. My guru had driven ninety-three Rolls-Royces: nearly two for every week in the year. I told these kids their fathers’ Ford Escort XR3i’s didn’t impress me. They wanted to hit me, I could tell; but with my orange-stained clothes, the necklace under my shirt, and my silence, I was too far outside of what they knew for them to punch. In Medina all the violence had been confined to shrieking and raging and wrestling in the group rooms. The only times that scared us were when we peeked in at the windows of the group rooms down by Hadiqua’a and saw the bent figures screaming, faces dripping with snot and tears, thrashing their arms into pillows. Although we gave each other plenty of Chinese burns, the kids rarely fought. The playground scraps and threats I now faced when I laughed at the other kids’ dads’ cars was a kind of violence new to me.
After school, instead of going home, I would sometimes use my travelcard to go on into London. I was drawn to large buildings. I wandered London looking, without knowing why, for large collections of buildings—council estates, libraries, the Barbican. I sneaked into libraries, schools, hospitals, museums, and found myself wanting to set up a camp bed in the corner or find a sofa to sit behind and read my book.
In North London all the tall red-brick buildings pushed up together seemed to me like a warren of communes. Behind these tall façades, I thought, there might be a hundred thousand Medinas all pushed up against one another. I wanted to go looking for them. Maybe it seemed that way to my mother and Sujan, too, because once we were in London, we kept moving.
At a certain velocity, all things disintegrate. We moved. Then we moved. Then we moved again. There were no halls, no celebrations, no hot group-rooms. I ate chocolates, ice creams, watched videos. In one flat, where we stayed for six weeks, I never had to find my way home: I was sick for the whole time. I had eaten a bad bag of crisps, so it seemed to me, and I entered a long world of fever. In the curtains that blew out at night, in the yellow and white glare of the streetlights, there lurked strange shapes. I saw dragons chasing me across the walls; in the next room Minnie, my hamster, squeaked round and round on her wheel in her glass fish-tank.
For a while we lived in a small ground-floor flat with a side entrance, on Lawn Road near Belsize Park tube. I had my own alcove and a deep window under the stairs to the upper flat, which I padded out with cushions and where I read books for hours on end. I read The Neverending Story and felt a never-ending sadness. I found comfort of sorts in the deep tubs of mango sorbet from Marine Ices, the Italian parlour down the road, which my mother gave me £5 to buy. I sat in my alcove under the stairs, read science fiction, and ate my way through
the whole tub. It reminded me of the lemon sorbet my mother gave me on celebration nights at Medina. Now I discovered sorbet tasted better without the champagne. My mother took me to the supermarket—the first time we went we were both utterly overwhelmed. Neither of us had shopped for ourselves for ten years. We blinked in the bright aisles, picking out the few foods we were familiar with. My mother—who, when she left home for university, ate only pancakes for two months until she passed out and fell off the back of a bus—now passed her culinary wisdom on to me. As if to make up for years of foraging in the commune cellars, my mother let me buy whatever I wanted. Nothing seemed good enough. Nothing seemed right. I ate only cornflakes for breakfast, Marmite sandwiches for lunch, and for dinner chips, beans, burgers, or turkey drumsticks. Sometimes my mum gave me a £10 note for a new computer game. I found reviews or adverts in computer magazines for games I liked the sound of, and I’d get a bus across town to Wood Green shopping centre, the best place I knew to buy computer games. I rode on the top deck of the bus, my nose pressed against the glass, and watched the whole grey world roll by. At the shopping centre I’d walk through the crowd and, out of what was now an old habit, I stared at the faces of those who passed, hoping to recognize someone in the crowd. I’d come back, load the game onto the computer from a portable tape player, play it, then curl up in the window alcove again. That was my life: computer games, bus passes, mango sorbet, and sadness.
At that time, we were still wearing our malas and maroon.
My mother and Sujan had not yet given up their journey. They had not yet unwrapped from each other’s gazes to take on the world. A group of sannyasins in the US had begun manufacturing the drug Ecstasy, a chemical shortcut to the collective high they had felt in sannyasin discos. Friends sent bags of the pills to my mum and Sujan. Free from the regulations of the commune, drugs were now illegal only in a way that did not bother them. While I spent my days at the local primary school, drank milk from small bottles that were already warm by ten o’clock, sat in the playground staring down at my feet or up at the sun—my mother and Sujan took Ecstasy and spoke in tongues.
