by Tim Guest
I’m half crazy, my bollocks are turning blue.
I can’t afford a Johnny, a plastic bag will do.
But you’ll look sweet
Under a sheet
With me on top of you.
Here we are in that first spring—the children of Medina Rajneesh. We were a rag-tag bunch; disciples by default, the half-willing followers of Bhagwan. This is just a few of us, gathered together on the front lawn by the edge of the forest. You can’t see it, but even our tattered theatrical rags, gathered for us from across the commune by Sharna, had been dyed various shades of orange and maroon—orange at first, and later maroon after being washed time and time again in the communal laundries.
In the photo you can see our malas, rattling symbols of our devotion. The mala necklaces had 108 polished rosewood or sandalwood beads, one for each of the 108 sacred meditations, strung now on nylon cord (the original elastic having been abandoned a month before, after one too many kids caught a flicked mala bead in the eye). Along with the subtlest shades of maroon picked out from the design studio colour cards, the mala was the premier mode of style in the communes. The original oval malas issued in the early days of the Ashram were coveted symbols of long-serving sannyasin status; our malas, issued after the mid-1970s, were round. The technique for the shiniest beads was to rub them against your nose at odd times of the day. After a jeweller arrived at Medina he added new, classy touches—silver beads, a gold link, a mother-of-pearl inlay, a polished locket with seamless gold rim. By 1982 the latest thing was to have your mala polished smooth, the plastic perfectly flush against the varnished wood: a lacquered lozenge of surrender.
We kids wore baby malas, with smaller beads. Now that there were so many of us playing together, our baby malas would snap once or twice a week, pop in the hands of some kid as you slid past; a rain of sandalwood to be gathered up as best you could and taken to the mala cupboard to be restrung.
At the bottom of each of our malas was the same black-and-white photo of Bhagwan. Bhagwan. My mother’s guru—mine, too, in a way—who, in my whole time in his communes—eight years in India, Germany, Suffolk, and Oregon, USA—I saw just twice. Bhagwan, collector of ninety-three Rolls-Royces (mostly Corniche models, because, he said, the seats in the Silver Shadow hurt his back); Bhagwan, who in his final years claimed the only solution to the problem of parenting was genetic engineering. Bhagwan who was never there but always there—in his books, his tapes, the songs we sang at celebrations—‘Disappearing into you, oh Bhagwan, the sun and the moon . . .’ Bhagwan was wrought in miniature around all our necks; and writ large, too, in laminate photos sometimes six feet wide, on the walls above our heads at all times.
To name is to claim; and Bhagwan had given us all new names. The biggest and boldest step of the sannyasin’s dance was the first: a new name, chosen by Bhagwan. We were each given three names. The first was always the same: ‘Swami’—meaning ‘Lord of Oneself’—for the men, or ‘Ma’—‘Divine Mother’—for the women. The middle name varied, but was usually one of three—‘Deva’ (meaning ‘Divine’), ‘Anand’ (‘Bliss’), or ‘Prem’ (‘Love’). Then there was a unique name plucked by Bhagwan from the Eastern tradition of sages, mystics, religious philosophers, and pretty-sounding words, sent to the new sannyasin by post. At the opening of these crisp white naming envelopes, there would sometimes be good-natured griping. Not all the names augured well. Ma Viyog, for example, meant ‘Ms Divided-from-Heaven’.
In those days I never remembered the names of the adults. Even now I have a hard time telling which were for men and which for women. Sometimes Bhagwan would give out the same name more than once, which led to some confusion.
‘Where’s Amrito?’
‘Swami or Ma?’
‘Ma.’
‘Shit, man, which Ma?’
People with duplicates ended up with nicknames: ‘Irish Vidya’, ‘Black Somesh’. To make it worse, Bhagwan couldn’t resist a pun: Majid’s sister took sannyas at the same time he did; Bhagwan named her Majida.
Many took sannyas before visiting the Ashram in India. Most, like my mother, received their new names in a letter from Bhagwan with no guide to pronunciation. My mother called herself ‘Viz-ma-ya’ and told people it meant ‘Wonder’; halfway through our time at Medina she discovered Bhagwan pronounced it ‘Vish-may-a’. As she said it, her name meant ‘Poisonous Illusion’. (To save the trouble of explaining herself, my mother kept quiet about her discovery.)
One or two of the adults decided to keep hold of their European names. In the Main House bar, called ‘Omar Khayyam’, you might get a John joking with Jyoti and Jayananda; in the Hadiqua’a group rooms you might find Diana and a David doing Darshan next to Dwara, Devadasi, Dadu, and Dharmen. Enough people were given the same, or similar, names, that we quickly gave up trying to remember all four hundred. We knew everyone by their faces, and that was enough.
But not the kids. I have not forgotten the kids. The girls: Abigail, Alice, Asha, Briya, Chloe, Deepa, blonde Deepa, Majida, Mallika, Mudita, Purva, Rani, Rupda, Sandesh, Saoirse, Sargama, Satsoma, Soma, Sorrel, Tarang, Trinda, Viragini. The girls I had crushes on: Abigail, Alice, Deepa, blonde Deepa, Mudita, Purva, Sandesh, Soma, Sorrel, Tarang, Viragini. It seems now there were fewer of the boys, but maybe I just paid them less attention: Alok, Arvind, Bindu, Champak, Govindo, Gulab, Harley, Jonathan, Little John, Majid, Saddhu, Toyvo, Will. Me.
I will always remember the names of the kids in this photo. Just to the right of centre, her head cocked to one side, is Rani. She looks just like her mother, Poonam, the Medina coordinator—the woman with whom my mother worked so closely, and would clash so many times. At the back, on the left, is the luscious Purva—you can just see her eyes, which were a gorgeous brown. In the front of the photo, arms wide, hamming it up for the camera, is the goofy, affectionate Saoirse. She looks sweet to me now, but back then Saoirse was the awkward one we teased in song. In the middle, at the back, baring her teeth, is Rupda. Majid and I called her ‘Rupda the Terrible’. The week before this photo was taken, Rupda and another boy stopped me at the back of the Kids’ Hut by the newly renovated shed where the older kids used to hang out in the afternoons to smoke cigarettes. Unless I did as she commanded, Rupda told me that day, she and the boy would wake me in the middle of the night, hold a hand over my mouth, and burn the inside of my arm with a cigarette. Beside her the boy nodded, then rolled up the arms of his jumper to show me his own burn. I was scared, and also confused. What exactly did she want me to do? As we stood there, for a long minute or two, it grew clear to all three of us that Rupda didn’t have any actual ordeals in mind.
That’s me, in front of her in the photo, hiding behind Saoirse’s outstretched arm. I was already known as the commune space-case. (‘Hellooo! Earth to Swami! Do you read me?’) The non-embracer. The anti-whirler. Saoirse’s arm seems to be hiding my face; but look at my elbow. I’m hiding myself, too, just to be sure.
We were dressed up because we had been auditioning for Grease, the first Medina Kids Players production. On sunny weekends hundreds of people sprawled out on the sloped lawn by the Main House. In the first week of March Sharna decided to entertain them with a play on the front porch. After two weeks of rehearsals, the older kids got together to push an old Triumph, appropriated from the commune car pool, round onto the gravel path in front of the Main House porch. The Medina residents and the younger, shy kids, me included, sat on the lawn to watch. Will, Champak, Gulab, and the other older boys—wearing small leather jackets which had somehow been obtained, and which they subsequently wore everywhere for months on end—climbed on the Triumph’s bonnet and roof. They made breaststroke motions with their arms; they sang ‘Go Greased Lightnin’’ out into the evening air, with voices as deep as they could muster.
Rupda was typecast as the tough-guy lead, Danny Zuko. Tarang, a pretty girl with bright red hair, played Sandy, his shy crush. It felt like the play was about us. The boys pulled up their leather collars; the girls threw
on pink bomber jackets and squeezed themselves into tight satin pants and jeans. The Pink Ladies pouted, the T-Birds strutted, and all our crushes were established.
Champak fancied Sargama. (I knew, because later that year, when I told him she had hugged me, we nearly came to blows.) All the girls fancied Will—annoying, good-looking, monkey-loving, likeable Will. We knew they fancied him because it was obvious; it was obvious to me especially because each year, the week before his birthday, at least one of my soft toys (generally the smaller monkey) would go missing; it always turned up at the bottom of Will’s bed, as a present from some blushing girl.
Gulab was a heart-throb, too; his younger brother Champak was one by proxy. They were blond, athletic, annoying—through jealousy if nothing else—and they sometimes wore their malas wrapped twice around their neck like a fashion statement we younger boys did not understand.
Jonathan fancied Dale Arden, the heroine from the Flash Gordon film. Sometimes in the afternoon he bounced up and down on his bed—inspired, it seemed, by the scene in Flash Gordon, where Flash battles a winged soldier on a rotating disc of spikes as Dale Arden cheers him on. I copied him—me on the lower bunk, him on the top—faking exactly what I wasn’t sure. Jonathan shouted, ‘Dale, Dale!’ On the bottom bunk, I bounced and shouted, ‘Go, Tarang, go!’
I wasn’t even sure what ‘fancied’ meant, but it didn’t stop me from going around telling everyone whom I fancied. Later that year I even mentioned to someone that I might fancy Saoirse. I was mercilessly teased for a week; I resolved never to tell anyone again. But back then, around the time of Grease, I kept everyone up to date on my latest crush, even my mum.
In most of the photos of her I have unearthed from the time, my mother stands among the big-time players of English sannyas, Bhagwan’s UK shot-callers. When she’s pictured on her own, it’s as a therapist poised on a beanbag, her face full of calm compassion. She’s gazing sympathetically off-frame, into the eyes of some troubled sannyasin.
My mother was the coordinator of Hadiqua’a—‘The Walled Garden of Truth’—which was Medina’s healing centre. It was a long, low building down against the back wall that ran along the Medina drive. Like all the departments, Hadiqua’a had a lovingly carved and hand-lettered sign on varnished wood at the entrance. Inside, there was a reception room with cream walls and green carpets, fern plants spraying out from against the walls, and a small kitchen where you could help yourself to herbal tea or lemon barley water. There were always people waiting in the Hadiqua’a reception for masseuses, beauticians, herbalists, acupuncturists, therapists. In one room, I knew, there was a flotation tank—a dark tent filled with salt water that you could float in. I was always asking for a go in this tent, but for some reason I was always told it was in use.
As well as coordinating Hadiqua’a, my mother held individual therapy sessions. She ran groups whose focus I learned from the paper signs she Blu-Tacked onto the door: ABSOLUTE FREEDOM, ACCEPTANCE, INSIGHT AND AWARENESS. So when I wanted to see my mother, I headed down across the daisy fields to Hadiqua’a. By the time the snow had melted and the daffodils had sprung up, a routine was established. I ran down from the Kids’ Hut, past the garages, across the daisy field, my baby mala flailing, carrying a piece of folded paper with flaps arranged so I could move them around in my fingers to reveal the writing hidden under each flap.
Jagruti, the receptionist, would try to stop me, but I ran through that chamber. I’d sneak past her and bang on the door of my mother’s session room until she had to let me in. ‘pick a number!’ I’d say when she opened the door, then wave the paper in her face, folding and unfolding the flaps, chanting ‘One, two, three, four . . .’ When I got to her number, I’d unfold the final flap and read the writing underneath out loud: ‘I fancy Tarang’ (or, depending on what week it was, Purva or Sandesh, or Soma, or Abigail). Behind me the Swami or Ma in the room with her would pause—fists planted deep in the centre of a weary cushion—to look uncertainly at my mother until she ushered me towards the door. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ she’d say. I’d start to tell her what I had learned at school about, say, Africa; she would smile. ‘Why don’t you go and make another one? Tell me who else you fancy. I’ll come and tuck you in tonight and you can tell me all about Africa then.’ She’d gently shut the door. I’d press my ear against it until the shouts resumed. Then I’d run back along the corridor and out into the sun.
I know more now than I did then about the rationale behind the communal child-care. My mother and her friends wanted to surrender us, their children, to the love and support of the commune, in order to save us from the traumatic confines of nuclear family life. Bhagwan’s proposition for sannyasin children was simple: they were children of the commune, not of their mother and father. ‘In a commune a child will have a richer soul,’ Bhagwan once said. ‘He will know many women, he will know many men, he will not be attached to one person or two persons. In a commune you will not be too attached to one family—there will be no family to be attached to. You will be more free, less obsessed. You will be more just. And you will be getting love from many sources. You will feel that life is loving.’
In the March 1982 edition of the Rajneesh Buddhafield European Newsletter, there was a centre-spread—‘I’m Here To Wake Up’—featuring interviews with Medina residents. In it Rani and Soma’s mother, Poonam, talked about her hopes for communal child-care. Her children had been at the commune for three months. ‘My children don’t identify me as the personification of woman, and their father as the personification of man,’ she said. ‘They have many mothers and fathers here. If they need some attention and I’m too busy or in a bad mood, they can turn to someone else. They don’t have to get all their nourishment from me, and that has relieved a lot of pressure that could have turned into nagging, quarrelling and resentment. We really do love each other and enjoy each other, yet we depend on each other less. It’s a joy to share our lives.’
In that first year, my mother was at Medina most of the time, and we saw each other around; but there was none of the daily intimacy we had had in our two-storey house in Leeds. Medina was a busy place, with a busy future, and my mother was busy making it happen. I would run down to see her in Hadiqua’a; if I was lucky, she might come and tuck me in at bedtime. Back in our house in Leeds, after tucking me into bed, my mother used to tell me stories. She began the story herself, then paused for me to fill in the blanks: ‘Along the road came a . . .’ and I’d shout, ‘Squirrel!’ ‘Called . . .’ ‘Sally!’ Now, in the Medina dormitories, there was less time for stories. On the evenings she could make it to tuck me in I did what I could to keep her by my bedside, pleading with her to stay. But the stories ended soon after I arrived.
My mother slept in a shared room on the top floor of the Main House—a light-filled double-room, with her futon mattress under the window and a chest of drawers against the far wall. Because she was important, a player who had helped set up the British Buddhafield and who was now involved in running the place, she shared her room with only one other person. I soon discovered a new way to spend time with her. If I wanted to see her that night I ran down to ask her, or I dialled ‘08’ for Hadiqua’a on the internal telephone, and hoped to catch her in between sessions: ‘Mum—can I sleep with you tonight?’ She always said yes. We met outside Hadiqua’a or in the Kids’ Hut, or I ran up to her room in the evening. I filled her in about my day, the masks I had made, the books I had read. Sometimes I fell asleep before she arrived; often in the mornings when I woke she had already left for a session or for an early meeting. I loved to wake up in the quiet of her room, so very different from the morning racket at the Kids’ Hut.
A lot of the children who had mothers at Medina stayed in their mothers’ beds, especially in that first year. It became so common that a decree was sent out among the parents: children were not to spend more than three nights a week in their mothers’ rooms. None of us took any notice. Most mornings when I slept in my mum’s bed I would wake up
alone; my mother—and Sujan, too, if he had also stayed in her bed—had already gone off to work in Hadiqua’a. If I woke up there on a Sunday morning, though, the three of us would have breakfast in bed: my mother, Sujan, and me.
That’s me, on the right. My teeth as wild as they ever were; my hair growing long the way my mother preferred it. We have just eaten Marmite on toast and drunk at least three cups of tea each, all brought up on a wooden tray by Sujan from the kitchens two floors below.
Late that spring I picked up one of the Medina internal phones to make the usual call to my mother. All the internal phones in Medina were the same: rotary dial, plastic, mostly dark green—the shiny colour of the leaves on the holly bush outside the kitchen windows. For this call I was standing in a hallway outside the Medina Main Office. I remember watching the dial spin right the way round. The phone rang two, three times. Someone picked up on the other end. ‘Hello, Health Centre?’ I asked to speak to Vismaya. There was a clunk and a pause. I hoped my mother would be on a break so she would be able to come to the phone. Through the receiver I could hear people talking faintly in the background. Then my mother’s voice came on the line. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. The mouthpiece was a bit big for my head. I moved it down to hear her better.
‘Tim! Hi, love.’
‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ I asked. There was a muffled pause.
‘Sorry, love?’ my mother said. Her voice was clear again.
‘Can I sleep with you tonight?’ I repeated. ‘Please?’ I added. There was another muffled pause.
‘Sorry, honey. What was that? Of course. Yes. Of course you can. You always can. Come up to my room about eight-thirty, OK?’ There was a resignation in her voice I hadn’t heard or noticed before.