The Poison People

by Alex Makepeace

  It begins to grow dark outside. Jane is starting to sound tired and I had better get going.

  “Thanks for coming,” she says.

  “That’s alright,” I say.

  “Why did you come?” she asks.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I just wondered, that’s all. And why are you calling yourself ‘Paul’? Is that another name you didn’t tell me about?”

  I shrugged. “Had problems logging on to my account, so set up a new one. It’s just my middle name.” She seems satisfied with this, or at least as best as I can tell from her eyes. “I came because, well, you know, because I thought I would see how you were getting on.” I stood up. “Hope to see you back at uni again soon!”

  “I won’t be going back.”

  “Oh . . . ”

  “But thanks anyway, for coming. It was good, you know, when we were together.”

  “Yeah,” I say gruffly. “It was great.”

  “Bet you were never expecting that—the blowjob, I mean, in your sleep!”

  “I must confess, it came as a wee bit of a surprise.”

  “I don’t want you to think I make a habit of that sort of thing, you know. I’m actually quite a good girl.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  As I’m leaving, I say, “I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Please,” she says. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  27

  THE FARM

  The Swami wanted to see me more often as he approached the end. From near-indifference, his interest became almost an obsession.

  “Come here, boy.” I would try to hide in the folds of Ma’s skirts. “Get him over here,” he would bark and I would find myself lifted, wriggling, towards the emaciated guru whose breath smelt of dustbins.

  “Now listen to me,” he would snap. “Keep your trap shut. That’s true enlightenment, my boy. The secret of silence. Share it at your peril. You’ll teach him that, Ma Renuka.”

  “I will, Swami.”

  “If nothing else, teach the boy that.”

  In those days Hyderabad was more like an armed camp than an ashram, but it was too late, too late.

  “Those bastards got me,” said the Swami. “Do you hear—they got me good.”

  It was during the escape from America. Some sannyasins clashed with a group of rednecks at a local store. Guns were drawn, shots were fired, but although no one was harmed, the blame only went in one direction. Things began to turn ugly fast. The media was all over it, the ATF, then the Feds started sniffing around. It was decided to get the Swami the hell out of the there.

  But at the airport he had been separated from the others on an immigration technicality and got ‘lost in the system’ for two weeks.

  While the Swami’s lawyers tried to find out what was going on, the guru was shuttled in chains between state and county jails all over the country.

  They finally released him but he was given no rest. He first returned to India but the US authorities put pressure on the government and he was forced to leave. He fled to Nepal, where it was the same story.

  Armed police evicted him from Crete. Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, nowhere would take the holy man. Canada would not even allow his plane to land. For a period, he thought he may have found some peace in Uruguay, but soon he and his entourage were obliged to leave there too. They managed to give their persecutors the slip in Lisbon and spent a few peaceful days in Portugal until the police burst in and they were expelled at gunpoint.

  At this point the Swami decided he would return to India whatever the consequences and this time he was allowed to stay. But being hounded out of twenty-one countries can take its toll. By now he was an ill man.

  “Nausea, light-headedness, night sweats . . . Thus it began.”

  The Swami was convinced he had been poisoned. One time in particular stuck in his mind during those lost days in the American prison system. “I was taken to a roach-infested cell, with a clogged lavatory and piss-stinking mattress. I said—this is no way to treat a person, someone who is innocent, who has done nothing, but the guard just laughed and closed the door.

  “Then, in the early hours of the morning, the same guard returned—and a transformation had taken place. Instead of being rude, he was cordial, kind even. He had brought me a new mattress and bedding. Then returned shortly afterwards with breakfast, despite it being five in the morning.

  “He told me, “You have to eat now because you are being taken to the airport.”

  “I said, “So why, then, the mattress and the bedding?” He did not reply. The breakfast, such as it was, consisted of toast smeared with some kind of bitter paste. That, I am convinced, is when they did it.”

  The Swami was never going to go down well in the US, let alone the Midwest.

  What must have seemed like a harmless enough movement in India became a very different animal when it migrated to the US and hundreds, thousands of middle-class kids flocked to the gates of the Farm.

  “Families,” he said, “are over. Villages, towns, cities are of the past—the future is the commune . . . ”

  I can see the mums and dads of America loving that.

  But while the Swami may have threatened the US, did he ever understand the risk to himself? Just as Jesus believed he was the Messiah as he journeyed towards Jerusalem, so the Swami had the hubris to believe he could convert a continent.

  Liberate a people from themselves.

  But some folk don’t want to be set free, do they, Swami.

  Crow Town. He selected you well though, Ma—smart, resourceful and, after all these years, still a true believer.

  “I went to India and never really came back,” is how you once described it. You had just finished your degree in sociology at Stanford. That summer you took the new age trail, ended up at the Swami’s ashram. “It’s difficult to explain, Vereesh,” you said. “All you ever experienced was the bad stuff. Even with the Swami. But it wasn’t like that—not at the beginning, not at all. It was the antithesis of all that: it was the embodiment of love, of laughter.”

  The gathered sannyasins would roll with laughter, intoxicated by the Swami’s jokes, his impish smile.

  UNBELIEVABLE: religion could be fun.

  Salvation, enlightenment could be attained not through repentance but joy. “The bliss, Vereesh, to be in Hyderabad, close to the Swami then.” Twenty-two years old, with dark gypsy curls and bright eyes, Ma had found her man.

  She negotiated a bedding space. She bedded down.

  The encounter groups, the group encounters. I am for absolutely everything, said the Swami, and absolutely everything went. Why not? The spirit of revolution was in the air. These young Westerners were the cream of their generation, sickened by the emptiness of the capitalist promise but also shrewd enough to see through the socialist chimera. What did that leave them? Abrahamic religion? A set of rules that began and ended at prohibition? How did that add up post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Holocaust?

  The Swami settled himself down among the small group gathered on his porch. The solemn namaste, the gentle, mischievous eyes that rested unblinkingly upon each person and provided simple acceptance—the most powerful offering of all.

  You were yet to receive sannyas but achingly keen to do so, Ma, and, naturally, you caught the Swami’s attention. You were, after all, a bit of a babe.

  Yet when it came your turn to talk, you found you had nothing to say.

  “I was just overwhelmed. The presence, the field of energy around the man. It was like having the most tremendous orgasm.”

  “Ma.”

  “Well it was, Vereesh. It was like being in the shining presence of a god.”

  The Swami waited as you tried to compose yourself, yet still you found it impossible to spit out a single world. “Yes.” He nodded. “Yes. I know.” The Swami grinned and Ma burst into ecstatic tears.

  Apart from a few unhappy intervals in dreary, angry New York to earn some extra cash and one t
errifying jaunt to Amsterdam with a suitcase packed full of hashish, Ma spent the rest of the decade in Hyderabad before accompanying the Swami’s caravan to the US.

  Right from the start, Ma said, there was a different vibe to the Farm, as their US base was known. Whereas Hyderabad was set amidst a vibrant Indian city, the Farm was cut off from mainstream society. This gave the authoritarian tendencies of those around the Swami, who had jealously guarded their privileges in Hyderabad, full reign.

  Ma said it was particularly bad for people like herself, who had been with the Swami since the early days, people he trusted but who had not sought authority, and who became regarded with increasing suspicion by those that had.

  As the Swami began to retreat into himself, he began to increasingly depend upon this inner circle. A kind of Cultural Revolution took place. Rooms were bugged, accusations made. Established sannyasins like Ma were obliged to take on the most menial tasks in the name of ‘purification’ or be cast out, separated from the man they loved, yet whom they saw less and less.

  Things grew worse after the gunfight. Doors were locked, weapons were stockpiled, strangers were no longer let through the gates, sannyasins had to account for every journey they took outside.

  The Swami had placed laughter at the centre of his philosophy, but he was the only one laughing now—high on nitrous oxide in his quarters half the time, the rest shut away, lying there in the dark.

  Ma was shaken awake. It was four one Friday morning and she had finished her shift just a few hours previously.

  It was Shuna, one of the Swami’s bodyguards. “You’re to come with me,” he said. Ma experienced a moment of true terror. Although she was no longer part of the inner circle, everyone had experienced the ATF and FBI raids, had noticed that even inside the Farm buildings the Swami’s ‘people’, like Shuna now, had taken to going around armed.

  As she followed Shuna through the dormitories, she was careful not to wake anyone else. She didn’t know where she was heading and feared the worst, but if that was the case, she didn’t want anyone else to know, anything more to blemish the reputation of the Swami. She meant nothing in comparison.

  She followed Shuna across the floodlit compound. Finally, she had the nerve to ask, “Where are you taking me? What’s happening?” But he didn’t respond.

  They were now passing through the inner sanctum. She noticed how much it had changed since they had arrived. The plush furnishings, the electrical goods. The cars, of course. It was like a twentieth century Aladdin’s cave.

  They arrived at the Swami’s door. “Stay here,” said Shuna. He went in.

  It was only now she realised: she was going to have an audience with the Swami. Tears again began to fill her eyes. She drew herself up, wished she was wearing something smarter than this old t-shirt and jeans.

  The door opened. Shuna, grim-faced.

  “You can come in now,” he said solemnly.

  He closed the door behind her.

  So, it was true then, thought Ma. The rumours.

  The Swami was alone, lying back in his dental chair, holding the mask, said to be feeding him nitrous oxide, over his face. He took it away.

  “Ren. Oo. Kaaa . . . ” He gestured her to come forward. “How are you, my child?”

  Her eyes streaming now, the tears splashing audibly onto the floor, she smiled despite herself. “Good, Swami. I’m well.”

  “Where have you been hiding yourself, child? I often ask but they say you won’t see me.”

  “I . . . ” She thought about telling him the truth, thought again. “I’m . . . sorry, Swami.”

  The Swami wagged a censorial finger. “In the end I had to insist,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, Swami.”

  The Swami placed the mask over his face once more. His eyes bulged as he took a series of deep breaths. He took it away.

  “I am told we are having to leave this USA,” he said, shrill giggles beginning to sneak between each sentence. “This United States of Arseholes, this arse united in its all too solid state. This great turd. The FBI, the CIA, the UBS are on our case, Ma Renuka. They say I’m a charlatan, a confidence trickster, an election fixer!

  “A pied piper who harvests their young, brainwashes their best and brightest. They may be right.” He let out a guffaw. “I hope so. I hope I am as clever as they make out. Wouldn’t it be fun, to be such a man. So much . . . easier. So much less complicated.” He sighed. “So much less responsibility. I could go and live on a Caribbean island and suck rum punch out of a coconut. You could wear a Hawaiian skirt and dance the hula. Hell, I could buy an island. I wonder what’s the going rate? One million? One hundred million?” He reached for the mask again, his eyes fixing on Ma as he took the gas down. When he took it away he said, “Look.”

  She hadn’t noticed me until then, but why should she? She only had eyes for the Swami. Yet there I’d been, all that time. In a cot at the foot of the chair, snuggled in a pale blue jumpsuit, fast asleep.

  “He’s lovely,” said Ma.

  “I know,” the Swami giggled. “I know.”

  Born into the world without papers, the Swami was worried I wouldn’t make it through immigration, that I would be snatched up by the state and disappear into the system before I even had a name.

  A premonition, then? Or just good sense?

  Coincidence? Or a leap of faith?

  Ma was to leave, go tonight. Not even return to the dormitory—someone had already collected her things.

  She was to hide out until the Swami had settled once more, sent for us.

  She got a bag stuffed with dollars and an address a thousand miles away, in North Carolina.

  She was given one of the Farm cars. No, not a Merc—a Toyota. She drove out of the compound towards the rising sun.

  Ma told me the time she—we—spent in Elizabeth, North Carolina, was among the happiest of her life, one of the Swami’s greatest, if most unexpected, gifts, although it took a while for her to appreciate it.

  After the increasingly paranoid, not to say sinister, atmosphere of the Farm, the genteel atmosphere of the colonial town near Cape Lookout couldn’t have provided a greater contrast.

  An overwhelmingly white, middle-class community in the outer suburbs of Jacksonville, it embodied all the bourgeois values the wealthy sannyasin who had donated his late parents’ summer house to the Swami had come to despise.

  Ma, too, and she had mixed feelings as she pulled up outside the house with its picket fence, its postal box, its spacious veranda. Relief, certainly—the overwhelming sense of weariness she felt as she got out of the car was not just to do with the ten-hour drive with an increasingly ratty baby. The Farm had felt like a prison, she said. I only realised once I was out how scared I had been, the pressure I was under. The thought that she would have mutely acquiesced to whatever Shuna and his intimates might have had in store for her shocked her profoundly.

  Yet over the days to come she also felt a tremendous sense of shame, of failure. She mourned the Swami, their hopes for a miracle in the desert, the tongue-tied girl who had presented herself to him. Eight years of her life. Her abandoned studies, family, friends. The hysterectomy. For what? To end up back where she had begun? Worse! A barren woman with a baby in a bourgeois town. What kind of sick joke was that? It was like waking from a dream into a nightmare.

  The pale blue Toyota did not move much during those early weeks. The shutters of the house on Cowper Street remained closed. The sole thing that would make you think there was anyone there at all was the intermittent wail of a hungry, un-changed baby.

  Ma ignored the first knock at the door. She lay in her bed, the sweat-sticky sheet covering her head. There it was again.

  Thinking it might be someone from the Farm, she got up, padded over to the edge of the shutter, peered through the slats. No. It was just one of the neighbours—a chubby old woman in her white summer shorts and golf shirt. The woman tried again but eventuall
y went away.

  Interfering small-town busybody, thought Ma, and went through to the living room to check on me.

  I was beginning to lose my rosy sparkle. My skin was growing increasing waxy and when Ma tried to feed me some more milk I threw it up. I began to cry. Ma did too.

  Stuck in this steaming shithole with somebody else’s baby. She couldn’t even look after the brat properly. Maybe they cut out her maternal instinct when they took out her tubes. The kid was going to croak and she was going to wind up in jail. Oh Jesus Christ, this was going from bad to worse!

  So when Lauren called again the next day, Ma hesitated, then went to the door.

  “I knew there was someone in there,” the woman exclaimed. “I said to Pat. I said there’s that young girl in there and no one’s even said hello!” She held out her hand. “Lauren,” she said.

  Ma couldn’t help but smile.

  “Claire.”

  “And where’s your darling little baby, a boy or girl?”

  “Boy,” said Ma.

  “Can I see him?”

  Ma, slightly overwhelmed by the bright, busy Lauren, let her in. She headed straight to the sofa, where I was lying upon a nest of pillows.

  “But honey,” said Lauren, sweeping me up, “don’t you have a crib?”

  “I’ve . . . ” Ma remembered the carefully constructed backstory she’d worked upon the previous night. “We haven’t had time yet. It must seem crazy, I know.” Then she let her have it: how she and her husband had purchased the property but he had died in a car crash shortly after I had been born. She couldn’t bear to stay where she was, so instead headed down here. But she had to admit that perhaps she had bitten off more than she could chew.

  Ma was very plausible: even as she recounted her tale to a wide-eyed Lauren, she was discovering a talent she had never suspected existed. While she had spent all that time uncovering the apparent truth about herself, the Swami had sensed a flair for deception that would guide her, and our, lives over the years ahead.

  I think of your smiling eyes, your laughter, Swami. Surveying Ma behind the mask in your Aladdin’s cave, every inch the deranged demagogue, while your acolytes plotted. Yet it was Ma you chose, before your lost prison days, before your expulsion to that wilderness of departure lounges, before your long decline.