by Tim Guest
What is left of my past now? There are the videos, the books, the brochures, the Buddhafield Newsletter and the Rajneesh Times. There are some clippings from newspapers: The Times, the Guardian, the Sun; a series of in-depth reports from the Oregonian. (When I called to speak with someone at the Oregonian who worked on the Rajneeshpuram investigation, he asked me if I was one of the kids who had been abused, then flown out of the country before they could be questioned. I told him that it was the first I’d heard of it.) I still have my toy seal and his cautious, anonymous name, although his hand-lettered label has since worn away. I have what other people say. I have my body, the physical custodian of my history.
A few years ago, on a week-long beach holiday, my feet started tingling. A week later, after returning to England, my toes went numb. They stayed that way. Eventually I went to see a chiropodist. I lay on the massage table and she rubbed and twisted and pushed my feet and eventually told me my toes had bent upwards over the years, pushing up the bones in my feet and putting pressure on the nerves. ‘Dropped metatarsal’, she called it. She said she had never seen someone so young with such an advanced state. I felt proud. She gave me a set of exercises to do. She asked me to push my feet down against her hands, as she pushed upwards against them. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘They’re strong.’
When I’m tense, I always rise up onto my toes. It’s a habit from childhood, when I strained on tiptoes to catch sight of my mother in the crowd.
When I did find her, back then, she was always looking elsewhere: to a picture of Bhagwan, to a troubled sannyasin beating an old pillow, to Sujan, playing a barmy old man on a makeshift music-hall stage. For a long time after the Ashram—through Medina, through Germany and Wioska Rajneesh, right up until I finally decided to leave the commune for good—whenever I walked off, I was always hoping someone would follow me. I always left the door open behind me. It was only later, when no one followed, that I stomped back to slam the door closed. I wasn’t just rejecting; I was hiding. Even when we played Not Allowed To Let Anyone See Us, all we really longed for was to be found.
I have a copy of the notes from the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference, including R. D. Laing’s talk, which set my mother on her transcendental journey. ‘“One looks into the mirror to see oneself,”’ Laing said, quoting the child analyst D. W. Winnicott—‘“What antecedes the mirror?”’ As my mother listened, Laing went on, ‘What comes before the mirror is the mother’s face. So when one looks in one’s mother’s face, one sees oneself.’ To be seen and to be held by the mother are the defining events of childhood—our mother’s embrace confirms we exist, and the adoring mirror of her eyes confirms who we are. My mother embraced Bhagwan, and she embraced Sujan, but she went against her instincts and let me run free. In those years, to the extent that my mother was looking into the eyes of others—Bhagwan, Sujan, troubled sannyasins, herself—she also lost sight of me.
To escape their pasts, and their despair, my mother and her friends went into communes; now, at the same age, I’ve gone in search of my past and my own despair. I’m back at the old game of looking for my mum, but with a difference: she’s looking for me, too. This time, though, I’ve found her. Or rather, she’s let herself be found.
My mother tells me stories about our family, but long ago she burned the photos. My father kept the evidence. He has a blue cardboard folder full of my old drawings. He must have pulled them off the fridge back in Leeds. There are many more colours than I remember: a giraffe and a tiger in yellow and brown, a house in dark pencil, a grey felt-tip butterfly. Two pink mice, one above another, in a field of lime green felt-tip grass. All these drawings my father encouraged me to do.
All the family photos, too, came from my father. Recently, he loaned me his book of family photographs. Because it records his presence in my life, there are more photographs of him and me than of my mother. There are photos of us from California: me in a go-kart, me in a swimming pool, me sitting in the shade of his red-upholstered Mercury Lynx, me, still dressed in red—always in red—on the bumble-bee ride at Disneyland. Me being carried in his arms on the Medina front lawn. Me being tickled by him in front of the Kids’ Hut.
There are earlier photos, too, of me before Medina; when my mother, Sujan, and John were all still around. I’m laughing in them, too. Poking my mum in the eye with a plastic Zorro sword, a black-paper eye-mask and towel-cape completing the disguise. My father and I laugh at the way she grabs her eye, playing along. Much more seems to have happened between us—in the Medina car park, in the malls, in the go-kart tracks of America, even in our Leeds gardens—than has remained in my memory.
In all of these photos my father assumes the same pose: he grins, raises his eyebrows, lifts his chin to the camera. I can almost see all the things he lacked—his mother, his father, his history—all the things he needed but couldn’t have. I can somehow see everything he missed, his abdications and his absences, billowing behind him. His whole life streaming out and back through all those years.
When someone points a camera at me, I strike this same pose. I grin, I raise my eyebrows, I hold my chin up. Not then—I posed differently back then. But now, like him, I brace myself to be seen, bolster myself against everything I keep behind me.
These days I spend less time on tiptoes. Now the bones in my feet are shifting back into place. When I remember, I do the exercises the chiropodist recommended. My heels are on their way back down to earth.
We’re on our way back down to earth.
On the last page of my father’s photo album is an early passport snapshot blown up six inches wide so that the family unit can be seen more clearly. There we are, the three of us, crammed into a photo booth not long after I was born. I’m looking off to one side, checking out something to the right of the frame. My mother is staring up to the left: her eyes are already moving away. My father is looking straight at the camera so that now, across the whole of my lifetime, I can look him in the eye. Martin’s not yet in the frame. He has not yet heard of my mother, nor felt the blow of my young foot against his shin. Still, he’s almost there: an imminence, about to catch my mother’s wandering gaze. The thing that strikes me now about the photo is that no one is looking at anyone else. We’ve already started on our own particular journeys. We are together, but already alone.
As I look at this photo, I want to give these people something. I want to take something of my heart and push it through the glossy paper, through the lens of the camera and back in time. I want to tell them I’ll be OK. I want to tell them things will work out. I want to wish them luck for what is coming. I want to wish them all the luck in the world.
Acknowledgements
For those readers still curious about Bhagwan’s Ashram and the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram, I recommend: Frances Fitzgerald’s meticulously researched Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures; Satya Bharti Franklin’s colourful accounts of life at the Ashram and the Ranch, The Promise of Paradise: A Woman’s Intimate Story of Life with Rajneesh and Drunk on the Divine: Life in a Rajneesh Ashram; and Hugh Milne’s Bhagwan: The God That Failed.
I am indebted to my editors at Granta, Sajidah Ahmad and Sophie Harrison, who did an exceptional job of helping me wrestle a life into shape. And to Denise Shannon, my agent, who had faith, and even took me out to dinner.
This book is dedicated to my mum, my stepfather, and my father, who all know there is so much more to this story than has fitted in here. Thanks for putting up with my gaze. To my friends, past and present, who put up with my absences of all kinds.
And to Emily, with love—for all her companionship in the wilderness.
About the Author
TIM GUEST writes for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. He lives in London.
