by Tim Guest
My old passport still has the stamp: 6 August, San Francisco Airport. My seal tucked under my arm for company, I flew alone, on a Pan Am flight from Heathrow to San Francisco. Because I was an ‘unaccompanied minor’, the Pan Am stewardess whisked me through passport control and gave me a free pair of headphones. The sky was overcast that day, and I remember being amazed that the sun was still there when we rose above the clouds.
6
Medina Rajneesh. More than four hundred adult sannyasin disciples gathered in the Suffolk countryside—to whoop and cry, to shout and whirl, to dance and embrace, to pull on rubber gloves and buff the wooden floors. Never in history had so much maroon gathered together to say ‘Beloved’ so often. Medina Rajneesh was a palace of wild abandon, for the kids, too: we let go of our pasts; of our parents; of our Lego. Medina was exactly what my mother and all these sannyasins had been looking for: anything but a normal life. At Medina, even the signs in the toilets loved you: ‘BELOVED . . . PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS. LOVE, ♥’
I arrived at Medina on 12 December 1981, a day after the opening celebration, which coincided with Bhagwan’s birthday. For four months I’d lived in California. My mother and I spoke on the phone once or twice a week. When she arrived at Medina to coordinate the construction workers, she was free to call me more. She talked to me about the school they were planning, where there would be other sannyasin kids. She talked with John about the school, too. They were planning creative teaching methods, based on Bhagwan’s teachings, to help foster and protect the spirit of the children.
I had been living with my father in California, where the air was as hot as in India, but didn’t taste so much of petrol. Sometimes he took me to his work, Four Phase Systems, in a technology mall on the outskirts of San Jose. I spun on a chair or typed random words into a green-screen terminal while he worked with one eye on me. Nearer his apartment, we went for walks through small parks under pine trees along paths made from redwood chips. After a while, I began to tuck my mala into my new red Star Wars T-shirt. Some days I would leave it at home. On Sundays we would walk for a mile to our landlady Beth’s mother’s house—where they had their own swimming pool—or I would sit at home and read Beth’s old copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the third time, or skim through Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox again, to see if this time I could read it all in a single day.
To commemorate my moving to live with him, my father took me to a huge pet store, and let me choose anything I wanted, as long as it was small. They didn’t have any monkeys, so the choice came down to either a rat or a hamster; hamsters were less likely to bite, the pet store man said, but rats were much smarter: you could train them, for example, to walk along a straw. That clinched it for me. John had wanted me to buy the hamster, though, so as a concession I called our new pet—I picked out the biggest, brownest rat in the cage—‘Hammy’. This was my new life.
And in California, as in Leeds, there were climbing frames; and there, when I fell off, there were wood-chips to soften the fall. After one of those falls my body was marked again, in a different way. My hands slid off the top bar and I skidded on the woodchip; a long splinter of redwood bark slid under the skin of the little finger of my right hand, right on the inside crease of the first knuckle; and when Beth pulled at the wood with a pair of tweezers—the two of us leaning against her tall fridge-freezer from which I knew would soon emerge something frozen, cranberry-flavoured and consolatory—the splinter broke in two, and something of California remained inside me, remains in me still.
One afternoon, after a particularly long phone conversation with my mother, I told John I wanted to go back to England. We talked about it; my father said I should do what I wanted. He booked me a flight. On 11 December 1981—the day of the opening ceremony—I left my father to go and live with my mother again, at Medina Rajneesh.
It was cold. I had flown back from California, so I was wearing just red cotton trousers and my red Star Wars T-shirt. In England there had been weeks of snow. My mother met me at the airport in a maroon commune car, loaned to her on the condition she go to Oxford Street to do the commune’s Christmas shopping. I remember trekking behind her in a borrowed jumper, watching the slush flicker orange in the light from the Christmas decorations. She went in and out of shops ticking the items off a list: bubble bath for Satyamurti, socks for Anubhava, a pumice stone for Poonam; boots, woollen hat, and mittens—all in dark red—for me. On the way to Suffolk I slept in the back amongst the presents.
It was dark when we arrived. My mother parked the car on the gravel courtyard under the looming moonlit silhouette of the manor house. We crunched over the frosted gravel, round the corner to a long, low building with a pointed roof. In the hallway, my mother introduced me to Sharna, one of the men who helped take care of the kids at Medina. She asked me if I remembered Sharna from the Ashram school. I shook my head. As Sharna led me towards the stairs, I glanced into the room off the hall to my left. The lights were dim. I could see a few other kids silhouetted against the flickering light from a TV screen. In the dormitory upstairs, my mother helped me pick a bed, then unpack my toys. She said she was sorry she had to leave me to go to work, but she would come to see me later. Sharna would take care of me now.
There was more snow than I had ever seen. What memories I have of those first few weeks at the commune are separated by all the snow: blurred shapes glimpsed through the drifts and flurries of the blizzard that settled over us that winter. I remember kneeling in front of the building called ‘Hadiqua’a’, where I knew my mother worked, looking down at the floor. The snow outside the door had been packed tight with footprints, which gathered together and stomped around before they headed off across the vast plain of fallen snow in two different directions. I wondered which way to go. Two kids wearing maroon wellies like mine were walking up across the white lawn to the left. I watched them turn a corner, head under an arch and away up a snowy avenue of cherry trees, which stood with their naked branches bowed and white. I thought the building where the kids lived—the Kids’ Hut—might be the other way, the way the other footprints went. I didn’t dare head that way on my own. So I just stood with my head down looking at the footprints; examining them, like I thought Zorro would, for clues.
I remember making a snowman with some other kids on the lawn next to the Main Manor House, pushing our gloved hands along the floor, trying to get the powdered snow to stick together. Shortly after, I remember pushing huge slabs of snow up the short slope at the top of the lawn, wide-eyed with how large we had made the snow become. The snow fell more then, in flurries, in blizzards, blanketing the forest and the lawns; the snow fell thicker, it seemed, than it ever had or ever would again. As we shook off clumps of snow, thick swirls muffled the claps of our hands. We gathered our strength together to lift one of the slabs and to swing it up on top of the other. I watched as one of the other kids took off his mala and placed it round the snowman’s neck.
I remember piling into the Kids’ Hut with some of the others. We pulled off our gloves, flicked clumps of ice onto each other and all over the floor. I put my hands on the radiator to warm them. Another boy came up next to me and pulled my hands off. He made no move to put his own hands on the radiator, so I put my hands back again. He pulled them off. I looked over at him. He was a little taller than me, with black hair in a curtain, a galaxy of freckles across his nose, and brown eyes squinting behind square black plastic-rimmed spectacles. I asked him what he was doing. He told me I would get chilblains if I heated my hands up too quickly. I said I’d rather have chilblains than gangrene, which is what I’d get if I didn’t warm my hands up at all, and what he’d get if he wasn’t careful. I asked him whether he knew you died if you got gangrene, or else they’d cut your hands off. He said that he’d rather have gangrene than chilblains. I said no, he wouldn’t; he couldn’t prefer dying to being in pain. He said yes, he could, because he did. He turned his head to emphasize the point, and his hair flew out like swings on a Ferri
s wheel.
I remember just after this we all ran upstairs, with our hands and faces still red and sore from the cold. We stripped off our wet clothes by the showers, clambered into a thick cloud of hot water. The curtain whipped back, and three girls shrieked into the tiles and steam.
And I remember the wrought-iron lampposts, like the ones in Narnia, that were littered around the Medina grounds—lamps that were turned on at four o’clock each evening to throw a bright, heavenly white light out onto the snow.
According to a newspaper report at the time, the average age of sannyasins at Medina was thirty-five; three quarters of them had university degrees. The commune made its money through such middle-class enterprises as construction, graphic design, computer software, therapy, and alternative medicine. Medina was a profitable place right from the start. The residential therapy groups were always full. People came from London and nearby towns for aromatherapy, acupuncture, bodywork, Reiki healing. (Occasionally locals came expecting a massage with ‘extras’—they were, apparently, given a talking to and sent home.) The design studios were always busy. Every morning you could see the workers in the construction department, ‘Sun Services’, pile into a commune van and two pool-cars, off to take their combination of light-heartedness and professionalism into the marketplace. A handful of sannyasins with the most marketable skills—including a doctor, a midwife, and a bevy of ruthlessly efficient sannyasin cleaners—were sent out of the commune to work in local cities and towns.
The publicly acknowledged tally of adult sannyasin residents at Medina peaked at 300: the actual figure was closer to 450, not including the kids. In the later years, under the eaves of the Manor House, industrious sannyasin carpenters built even more dormitory rooms. The door to these illicit rooms looked like a cupboard, and it remained firmly closed whenever the fire inspectors came to visit. Sometimes we kids climbed through these rooms; we bounced over the mattresses pressed tight under the eaves. As well as the dormitories we discovered storage rooms filled to the brim with every kind of suitcase and carryall. (Sannyasins knew about travel, I later discovered. If there was one commodity every sannyasin commune had more than enough of, it was luggage.)
By spring the snow had melted into patches, our snowmen reduced to low, rounded mounds. The Main House was surrounded first by a patchwork of muddy brown and bright green, then just green. Yellow and white daffodils sprang up across the lawn, and sprayed out in bunches by the edge of the forest in front of the building where the kids slept. Throughout most of those first few months, just like back in the Ashram in Pune, the sound of hammering and sawing rang out everywhere in Medina.
My first memory of that spring is of walking with Majid, the boy who preferred dying to being in pain, across the gravel courtyard in front of the Main House. I was carrying my stuffed seal and a black marker pen I had borrowed from the laundries. On arriving at the commune, I had been encouraged to put all my toys into the communal playrooms. Soon all my Lego was mixed up with everyone else’s; the few toys I had hidden under my bed were spread out all over the dormitories. The seal was my favourite—a long, grey, furry torpedo with hard black shiny eyes that came in useful when I needed to hit people. For the first few weeks I carried him everywhere, tucked tight under my right arm, to make sure all the other kids knew he was mine. I was determined to keep hold of my seal, so I decided to name him. I asked Majid to help me think what to call him. I rejected all suggestions until, as we stepped across the gravel, Majid turned to me and said: ‘Why don’t you just write, “Tim’s Seal”?’
I ran to the Kids’ Hut to find someone to help me with the letters.
I had twenty-nine new brothers and sisters. We played on the lawns, ran across flowerbeds, through the hallways, and inside the dormitories of the Kids’ Hut and the Main House. We climbed trees and made tracks throughout the forest that you had to swing all the way across, from tree to tree, without once touching the ground. We took up sticks and hunted daffodils, knocked off their heads when no one was looking, then gathered them in bunches and presented them to each other in mock-romance.
The Medina kids. We were upstanding urchins, regal spivs, curious half-breeds, at once spiritual aristocrats and material refugees. There was the blonde beauty Purva, an early developer everyone had a crush on. There were Rani and Soma, Poonam’s daughters, who had looked after me in our shared room in Oak Village (although it was clear there would be no more getting into Soma’s bed now there were other kids around to see)—and who still looked out for me that early spring—taught me how to make daisy chains, for example, near the tall mulberry tree on the grass in front of Hadiqua’a, by splitting the stems of each daisy in turn. There was Champak, a blond boy a little older than me, who sometimes played with me and Majid, and sometimes played with his older brother Gulab and the older group of kids. With his long blond hair down to his shoulders, Gulab would usually be showing off his AC/DC badge and playing air guitar. There was Asha, a girl a few years older than me, who was so expert in provocation that one loving, non-violent sannyasin teacher picked up a blackboard eraser and threw it at her across the classroom. (The teacher was promptly shifted to the cleaning department.) The girls: blonde Deepa (cute, bigbreasted); dark-haired Deepa; Mudita, boyishly skinny with short black hair. Mike, an older guy, a teenager, who kept to himself and who worked on cars down by the garage. And many more.
When we weren’t outside, most of our time was spent in the low two-storey building that had been the old manor stables, which we now called the Kids’ Hut. The Kids’ Hut was our domain. We slept upstairs, in the dormitories (early on we could choose where we wanted to sleep, but later, when we were preparing for the school inspectors, life became more organized). In between the two dormitories, there were two sets of showers. One was supposed to be for the girls, and one for the boys; we used whichever was closest. We hung around the dormitories in the mornings and the evenings, watching the girls shaking their hairbrushes and singing ‘Girls just wanna have fun’.
Downstairs were the two schoolrooms—the younger kids’ room, where I went each day, had tables and chairs, cushions, beanbags, and a full-size movie-theatre-style cardboard photo of Bhagwan. On the other side of the hall was the playroom, with cushions, more beanbags, an upright piano; a cupboard which wobbled but stayed put when you climbed up it to jump down onto the cushions stacked below. That first morning and most mornings afterwards, we ran around in the playroom with our arms wrapped round huge cushions held in front of us, and, protected by our puffed-out plate armour, we tilted at each other as hard as we could. On the small playroom window, above the piano, there were a series of round transparent stickers that glowed with the bright colours of the semi-precious stones I loved. I tried to peel these stickers off to hide them under my pillow, but could never get my fingernails far enough underneath: unicorns under rainbows; big blue whales in the deep blue sea.
There was also the terrapin tank with its lone inhabitant, Terry, basking above the waterline on the tank’s single rock. Terry would wave his beak at you when you stooped to look in. On my first morning at Medina one of the kids told me there had been two terrapins; the other one, Bubbles, had died two days before. On the day of the Medina opening ceremony, after a treasure hunt in the forest and grounds, the kids, holding candles, strumming guitars, and banging on drums, had carried Bubbles’s body in a procession, down to the dip at the bottom of the lawn. There they placed Bubbles on a pile of sticks and twigs by the old duck pond. Sharna lit it. As Bubbles’s body burned, they sang a Bhagwan song. ‘Step into the holy fire . . . step into the holy flame.’ I heard varying accounts of Bubbles’s death; someone had—it was whispered, on purpose—turned the temperature in the tank right up to the top so Bubbles boiled; someone else had dropped an electric razor in the tank, and Bubbles had fried. (In both cases Terry, on his rock, was saved.) I also heard that Saoirse, one of the girls, had lifted Bubbles out and kissed her beak at which point Bubbles had expired from fright.
Sharna, the head of the Kids’ Hut, was an honorary kid himself. He was a man with a beard like all the others, but he always had a joke, or a funny made-up word. If you looked sad, he’d pull a face or give you a nickname—I was ‘Marmite’, Majid was ‘The Professor’. If all else failed, he would hurtle at you with his ‘Tickle Fu’. Chopping his hands through the air and howling like a cartoon karate-master, he dug you in the ribs until you collapsed. For much of that first spring, Sharna wandered around the Medina house and grounds making a promotional video with the commune’s clunky shoulder-mounted video camera. If you asked what the video was called he would nonchalantly lower the camera to the ground, and say: ‘Medina Rajneesh: A Study in Tickle Fu’. Then he’d lunge for your armpits.
In the afternoons, as we gathered in a circle in the Kids’ Hut playroom, Terry the terrapin craned his neck to watch us through the thick glass of his tank. We sang songs or clapped our hands to the accompaniment of Sharna’s rainbow-strap guitar: ‘Drink-a-drink-a-drink to Lily the Pink-a-Pink-a-Pink’, and ‘Poor Old Michael Finnegan (Begin Again)’. I was one of the youngest; I’d never heard these songs before. I sang falteringly and looked up at Sharna for reassurance, my face nearly hidden behind the neck of his guitar.
When the adults weren’t around we sang other songs, too, songs that were also new to me. One was about Champak and Saoirse, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. The other, sung to the tune of ‘Daisy, Daisy’, was about blonde Deepa’s rapidly developing breasts.
Deepa, Deepa, give me your tits, please do.