My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  Five official archive sets of Bhagwan’s books and recordings—eight thousand hours of audio and two thousand hours of video—are kept in climate-controlled facilities around the world. (A further eleven copies of the archive have been sold to rich sannyasins.) Bhagwan liked to draw arty doodles (called ‘signature paintings’ by his sannyasins) in the plates of the books in his library: these have been razored out and moved to New York for digitization and safekeeping. Like the man’s reputation, his discourses have been cleansed of some of the detritus of his past. ‘Digital technology has made things easier,’ Devendra, a member of the archives team, told the Times News Network. ‘We are able to remove the constant hum of the air conditioners while retaining the sound of chirping birds in the background.’

  Bhagwan’s ashes are at the Ashram, too, in a huge round room made from a suitably cosmopolitan mix of materials: Italian marble, Spanish mirrors, a German chandelier. Above the ashes is a plaque which reads: NEVER BORN, NEVER DIED, ONLY VISITED THIS PLANET.

  There are no photos of Bhagwan. They were taken down in January 2000, to the indignation of the old guard—who, banned from the Ashram itself, were forced to wave their banners outside the ‘gateless’ gates. In 2001 Buddha Hall was pulled down to make way for a six-storey black marble pyramid—a design based on Bhagwan’s last wishes.

  Bhagwan always said that once the spiritual leader was gone, the followers should leave. Do not make a religion out of me, he said. Do not allow my words to become a scripture that represses. ‘Anyway, you cannot,’ he said, ‘I am too contradictory. When I am gone, forget me.’ For those who just can’t forget him one of his more garish Rolls-Royces—the ‘Black Kimono’ (with a Japanese design spray-painted across the roof)—is for sale, for a cool $2 million. The current manifesto of Rajneeshism is that sannyasins wear maroon as a colour that ‘resonates with the rich human capacity for empathy and celebration of joy’—nothing to do with what happens when you wash all the colours of the sun together.

  From time to time my mother hears news from her old sannyasin friends. Occasionally she passes the news on to me. One or two of the old group leaders are still doing their utmost to leave the earth and its fruits behind. They’ve given up food, she tells me; they now claim they can exist just on the air they breathe.

  My mother and her friends wanted, as Bhagwan said, to leave gravity to the graves. But you can’t. You can’t break free of gravity without breaking free of life. Families, children, friends—all the things that weigh you down—are ballast as well as millstones. They bind us to the earth. They are gravity’s angels—the brighter side of loss.

  They say you can’t go home again. Since the age of two, I had never been home. When my mother, Sujan, and I finally found ourselves living together as a family, I wasn’t grateful for it. I wouldn’t clean the house. I wouldn’t wash up. Because everything I cared for kept getting stripped away, I didn’t want to care for anything. Over the next three years, as my mother shuttled between London flats, we fought. I absolutely rejected her. I refused to talk to her or to Sujan. While they pleaded with me to tell them what was wrong, I’d sit and stare at a book or a computer screen. I did not want to give them anything. I did not want to give anything to anyone.

  Out in our tiny concrete back yard I would smash things—a spade, an old vase. I took wood planks meant for building shelves and stomped them into splinters. When my mother or Sujan asked me about it, I’d say, ‘It must have been one of my friends.’ They’d look at each other and say things like, ‘Whoever did this has got a lot of aggression that needs to come out.’ With tight lips I’d reply, ‘Well, when I find out who it was, I’ll tell them.’ I refused to cry. I refused to suffer. My heart was a fist, clenched against loss.

  My mother has since told me she was in agony throughout those London years. She woke up every morning grief-struck for what she had done, to me, to herself, to the family. ‘I had a pain,’ she told me not long ago. ‘It was like a physical pain. I had a pain when I went to bed, a pain when I woke up, a pain all through the day. For years.’

  Not long ago my mother told me that, when she came from Germany to visit me in Medina for a single day, she made a secret vow. Whatever it took, she told herself, she would repair the damage between us. Now that we were living together in London, she and Sujan tried to bring their therapeutic knowledge to bear on our situation. My mother told me I was angry. She told me I needed to find out why. She told me I needed to trace my feelings back to my childhood. I wandered the streets around our home scraping my knuckles against brick walls until they bled. I barely knew I had a past.

  Bhagwan wanted us to let go; but it felt like all I’d ever done was let go. Bhagwan wanted the children of his communes to be free of history; but if I was to free myself, I needed a history.

  One evening when I was fourteen I came home from a club, went upstairs, and began to smash up my room. Martin heard the noise and came up to see what was wrong. I told him to fuck off, but he lingered at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Go on,’ I shouted at him. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You know your mother’s downstairs in her bed, crying because of you.’

  Of course I knew. I could hear her sobbing.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, ‘or I’ll stab you.’ I picked up a metal chair and threw it across the room.

  He went back downstairs.

  The next morning I woke up to find my chair bent, my table smashed. I had spat on the window; my spit had run all down the wall. I had no idea what was missing, or what I needed.

  After that, every Thursday evening we began to hold ‘family meetings’, where we tried to talk about how it felt for us. It was in one of these meetings that I wrote my letter to my mother, and she wrote her reply. On other occasions, at my mother’s suggestion, we acted out scenes from our past: I crawled into the living room, pretending to be a child, and my mother said, ‘No, I’m too busy to see you now.’ She pushed me away. At first I was bemused, then surprised, then upset. Instead of slamming doors I remained to kick up a fuss. I would push her angrily away; she would pop her head back up; I would push her away again. She would pop back up again, relentlessly, inanely. We ended up in hysterical laughter. I got the message; this time, she was planning to stick around. I began to realize that I was furious with my mother, but afraid to say it. I was afraid to get angry in case I lost her again.

  I lost count of the number of times we started off our family meetings shouting, and ended with one of us crying on the sofa between the other two. Over time, we began to discover each other. I saw the position my mother was in when she found Bhagwan. As well as trying to save herself, I saw she was also trying to save me from her pain. I learned that after my mother’s sterilization, she was deeply unhappy. ‘I cried about it for years,’ my mother wrote in a letter to me. ‘Still, I have found a little boy to love in Martin, and he has found a little girl to love in me.’

  One morning, after a two-week holiday in Australia, my mother and Sujan sat me down and announced they wanted to move down under. I told them there was no way I was going anywhere. After I finished school I said, they could move wherever they wanted. For now we were staying put.

  We lived in a flat. They went to work; I went to school. They had a cat; I had a hamster. This was normal life. At the same time as we were finding out about each other, I was also making new friends. It was a revelation. Not since Georgie, my best friend and ‘superhero’ co-conspirator from Lumley Mount, had I had a friend who did not wear orange, who wasn’t Swami Prem or Ma Deva or Swami Anand so-and-so. For ten years everyone I knew or met wore orange and maroon. Although this new North London school felt like a prison, I realized that outside of school I was suddenly free. I could walk down the street and see hundreds of people who all saw the world in different ways. None of them knelt or swayed with their eyes closed in front of pictures of Bhagwan.

  I met up with a bunch of kids from school; we skipped classes, took drugs, hung out. Finally, I had a life that
was nothing to do with what my mother and her friends wanted. It had nothing to do with Bhagwan, nothing to do with orange clothes, nothing to do with malas, nothing to do with being forced to bow your head down onto the floor for some reason that had absolutely nothing to do with me. I had a chance to take my life in my own direction. I’d been waiting for this chance for years. The sannyasins entered communes to leave the past behind. Only now, after I left the communes, could I put the past behind me.

  I loved it. All I had ever wanted was to come home.

  One afternoon, full of rage with no idea why, I stamped on Martin’s spades in the back garden till they snapped in two, then ran out into the street. Through the window of my bedroom a friend called after me. I ran on. I wanted to hurt people and to hide from them. Along the street was a church; I clambered up behind the SUNDAY PRAYER sign, lifted myself up onto the wooden beam which held the sign to the wall. I could hear my friends looking for me out in the street. I curled up tight behind the sign. They rustled bushes, clanged dustbin lids, called out my name.

  Finally, one of my friends looked up behind the sign and saw me. I pressed a finger to my lips. He looked around, then climbed up alongside. One by one, it was my friends who found me.

  Then one night, drunk and stoned, I came home and knocked over something that made a loud noise in the corridor. My mother and Martin came into my room to find me in bed with my clothes on. I started to cry. My mother held out her hand. I took it. We talked for a long time about Medina. I told her about the time I had called her on the internal phones to ask if I could sleep in her room, and her voice, I thought, had mocked me.

  ‘Oh, love. Of course it wasn’t me,’ she said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I would never say anything like that.’

  Thinking about it now, I guess it’s true. Later at Medina, a year or so after that phone call, I was doing ‘worship’ on the Medina switchboard, routing internal and external phone calls by flipping switches on a bank of knobs and lights. Saddhu came into the switchboard room with a toy he’d got in a chocolate egg. It was a good one, a footballer that kicked a little ball across the room. I put a call through on the switchboard, and then, with the headphones still on, I started trying to get him to let me have a go. ‘That’s cool, Saddhu,’ I said. ‘Let me see?’ There was a pause in the conversation. Over the headset I heard a voice ask, ‘Hello? Is somebody there?’

  So when I called my mother to ask if I could stay, it was probably some kid on worship at the switchboard who mocked me. Although I don’t know which kid, it doesn’t matter now who it was. It was Medina itself calling. It was the element of Medina that no one talked about, that not many could see—a voice over the wires that ran through the heart of the commune, the voice not audible in the brochure photos of caring Mas and grinning Swamis. It was the voice of Medina’s contempt for the needs of children.

  Sujan—Martin—is now officially my stepfather. Two years after they re-met on a bus in North London, they were married as Anne and Martin in a simple registry office wedding.

  Soon after returning to London from California, I had given the roll of photographs I took on the day I left Medina to my mother for safekeeping. As the wedding approached, I remembered the photos; I had a sudden longing to see what I had taken. ‘Oh yes,’ my mother said. ‘I put them in a safe place.’ (A phrase that should have warned me.) ‘I’ll have a look for them.’ She did look; she couldn’t find them. I never saw the photos again. I never got to see those last glimpses of Medina.

  But I had my revenge.

  They made me the official photographer at their wedding. At the party afterwards I got progressively more drunk; my uncle caught me rolling up a joint in the back room. Halfway through the party my mother asked if I had changed the film. I looked at her. We opened up the camera: it was empty. Martin frantically produced a roll of film. By then, though, I was too far gone. When the film was developed, the only record of their wedding was a photograph of everyone’s feet.

  When I was eighteen years old, and Martin was forty-three, to keep us out of the way while she cooked—we had been bickering in the small space of the kitchen—my mother sent Martin and me out in the forest to fight. We trooped out dutifully, picked sticks from the forest floor, and squared up. I expected him to let me win, but he didn’t. We were suddenly banging sticks hard against each other. I was fast and agile, quick to strike twice where he struck once, quick to deflect. He had the brute power of his years. I strained to meet his strikes head-on. He shouted as he struck; I remained silent. He looped around me to get an angle; I stood and turned. We wheeled about. I dodged a heavy strike, he slipped in the wet leaves, and I was over him, my foot on his stick. He pulled to one side, and I knelt on his chest. ‘Give in,’ I said. ‘Surrender.’

  ‘Never,’ he roared. Somewhere a loose branch slid from a tree and clattered to the ground. He wasn’t giving in, and in a moment he would buck me off and get above me and I would never manage to throw his weight off. I grabbed my stick and held it above his face. ‘Surrender.’ I jabbed the stick down to within an inch of his nose, swaying dangerously near his eye as he still bucked beneath me. ‘No, never.’ He roared again and jerked to one side. He pushed me up, and he was out from under me, rolling to one side. I turned. In the last moment before he leaped up I jabbed my stick down into his bollocks. He froze. I jabbed the tip down harder. ‘No—’ he said. I pushed the stick down harder. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You win. I give up.’ I didn’t move the stick. ‘Say it again.’ ‘You. Win. I. Give. Up.’ I pulled the stick away. He laughed, lying on the floor, breathless. He held out his hand. Breathless, too, I took it. Laughing, I pulled him up.

  In the years we lived together, in the countless fights and arguments the three of us had, it was Martin who tried to stop me walking out. It was Martin who stood in front of the door and would not let me leave.

  My mother and Martin are still moving. In the ten years since I left for university, they’ve changed locations four times, in three different countries. Each time they move, they say to me: ‘This time we’re here for good.’ Nowadays my mother has reined in her dreams of saving the world; she’s brought them closer to home. Last I heard she wanted to keep two pigs in the back garden, and to treat them kindly, ‘as a homeopathic remedy for all the ills mankind has inflicted on animals’. (I couldn’t resist pointing out that if it was a homeopathic remedy, you’d have to be slightly but consistently mean to the pigs until they fought back.) All she wants is a place to write and to feed the birds.

  My mother sometimes wonders out loud about what would have happened if she had said no to Poonam and not left our home to build a British Buddhafield. If we’d stayed in Leeds, would we have stayed happy? Did it make any sense? Was it worth it?

  When she does, I say: how could anything have been different? How could all this have come about in any other way?

  After one conversation along these lines, my mother cried. ‘I’m sad,’ she said. I reached out and held her hand. ‘No,’ she said, laughing through the tears. ‘Actually, I’m not sad. I’m happy. I’m so happy that you can talk this way. It makes me feel like it was all worthwhile.’

  ‘I got lost,’ my mother said to me once. ‘Because I was a lost person. I didn’t have a strong sense of myself and my values—I would just give myself away to the moment. I didn’t have a substance that kept me anchored in the things that mattered.’ In the end, though, she had enough substance. Enough substance to stop the family from splitting apart altogether. There was just enough gravity, between us all, to keep us together and on this earth.

  Nowadays more and more people are living by themselves. We read the figures in the newspaper: between 1971 and 2001, the proportion of people in Europe living alone doubled. At times the need for privacy and for freedom conflicts with the needs of our bodies and our shared histories. Capitalism thrives when people live separately. In order to survive, the system that offers us so much personal freedom must also keep us apart. As a r
esult, the commodity that at Medina was so plentiful—the company of others—out here in the world is scarce. We have found ourselves; we have lost each other.

  One of Bhagwan’s—and my mother’s—favourite Zen stories goes as follows. A fish swims around looking for the sea. He asks all the other sea creatures: what is the sea? They all shake their heads. No one knows. One day the fish is flipped by a big wave, out of the water and onto a desert island. He struggles and flips on the sand, gasping, drying out, until, when he is on the verge of death, a wave comes up and flips him back into the sea. As he swims away he thinks: Ah. This is the sea. When I hear that story, I always think about the communes and the world outside, us kids tossed on big waves between them. But which is the desert? Which is the sea?

  I lost my mother because she lost herself in the dream of a new way of being, a new way, so she thought, without suffering. ‘We were trying to create heaven on earth,’ she wrote me once. ‘We had never been to war, never seen hell, and we got the idea we could make heaven.’ But in making their heaven, they couldn’t help but also make hell—for others, and, in the end, for themselves.

  My mother and her friends left behind the world that had hurt them, in order to build a new one to the dimensions of their desires. They left the Earth and went into a new orbit. (Some of them went so far out, they couldn’t come back.) Perhaps that was what needed to happen; maybe we needed to see the world from an extraordinary vantage point to realize the preciousness of the everyday. We had to look down from orbit in order to fall in love with the ground. I was born into that orbit; all I ever wanted was to come home.