by Tim Guest
Our favourite part of the heath was the weir, a smooth concrete slope down which the river ran in a thin, fast-flowing sheet. We would nip behind a bush or to the hut across the other side and change into our swimming costumes. We would climb down the iron rungs that were bolted into the concrete walls on each side at the top of the weir, walk along the dry concrete platform, and slide down the concrete slope. To get back out we would queue up under the ladder, cling on to the metal rungs, wait for the next kid to climb up; get stung by horse flies, then sit on the concrete sidings to dry.
Some of the older kids liked to throw themselves off the concrete siding, landing in the waist-high water below the weir. Us younger kids used to stand on the side and watch. After they jumped, they would shout up at us to come on, to leap in. The water didn’t seem to me to be deep enough; I had swum out there and stood on the concrete riverbed, and the water only came up to my waist. So instead I ran with the younger boys to explore the rest of the heath. We found other things among the bracken, relics of a history about which most of us knew nothing at all. Two hexagonal concrete hulks—pillboxes, Gulab told us; old war defences—were tucked among the folds of the hills, and, as we could see through the thin gun-slots, they were filled with earth, cans, crisp packets, and condoms. We would give each other bunk-ups onto the top of these pillboxes and talk about digging up the machine guns that were buried inside after the war.
Then, on our last visit to the weir that summer, as the sun began to slant down lower over the bushes, I finally decided to jump into the river. I ran up and leaped high, holding myself for a moment at the peak of the leap through sheer force of will before surrendering myself to gravity. It was true: even though the water was only waist-deep it was enough to cushion the fall.
A week before the Medina opening ceremony, word was sent via telex from Rajneeshpuram that work was now to be known as ‘worship’. Work had always been seen as a meditation, a chance to worship in the energy of the commune and Bhagwan. From now on it would be called that, too. Some sannyasins, my mother included, couldn’t help wondering whether this new instruction had something to do with Bhagwan’s application to US immigration as a religious leader; still, they laughed, and accepted another level of surrender to the commune.
Then, in the early autumn of 1982, another instruction came over from the Ranch. Up until now everyone on the commune had had Sunday mornings off; now—to free more time in the week for constructive work—Sunday mornings were to be for meetings. I waved goodbye to my Sunday breakfast with Sujan and my mum. The kids, too, were now to worship each evening. For two hours after school, we were supposed to help out in one of the main departments: accounts, design, cleaning.
We knew all about the adults and their worship. We knew how they liked to jump around and sing songs even while they cleaned. As we argued over our Transformer toys one of them would run into the Kids’ Hut dormitories, press ‘play’ on the tape recorder, and blast out Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder. ‘Happy Birthday to ya!’ they sang, jumping around in bright yellow gloves as they wiped all the surfaces clean. None of us were so keen.
Some of the older kids helped out in accounts, or the Main Office, or the books and tapes department. The younger ones mainly helped out in the cleaning department. This meant either cup duty, in which you washed cups and plates in the special cup-room and stacked them in trays in the hallway by the kitchens, or general cleaning duty out in the Main House. After we invented a game in which we left out more and more cups from each tray to see how high we could stack them before they fell to shatter on the floor, Majid and I were banned from cup duty. (We could stack them quite high, it turned out; the ensuing crash brought everyone out from the kitchens to see.) So when the two of us were finally cornered for worship, we would beg and plead to be sent out with the buffing machines to polish the wooden floorboards on the upper floors of the Main House. Not only was the buffing machine’s odd wobbling motion hysterical to us, but the buffing also fulfilled our two main purposes in life. The machines made the floor more slippery, which allowed us to slide farther in our socks; more importantly we were on our own up there. We could get away with doing whatever we wanted. At first we just ran around, skidding on our socks along the hallways. Over time, though, it became clear that unless we forgot to get the buffing machines back by eight, no one would come looking for us. So we began to explore deeper into the second- and third-floor hallways. Up there on the polished wooden floors, while we should have been doing our worship, Majid and I began to act ourselves out.
We invented a game we called NATLASU. The name came from the first letters of the game’s only rule: Not Allowed To Let Anyone See Us. We would set ourselves missions, the hardest being to creep from the woods to the top floor of the Main House then back out again. We couldn’t allow anyone to catch even a glimpse of us while we were playing. We played NATLASU most afternoons. We would creep through the Main House disturbing nothing, our rubber soles squeaking very little despite the varnished wooden floor. Hiding in cupboards, climbing over racks of linen, and slipping into bathrooms, we spent hours avoiding the eyes of the other sannyasins.
Sometimes, in the late afternoons when the upper floors of the main house were empty and silent, we’d pause our game of NATLASU to pull on a pair of socks and slide along these corridors. From windows on either end, sunlight slanted into a pool, spilled out across the floorboards like lemon-scented mop-water. Here and there as we slid, we’d rattle spoons and teapots on leftover breakfast trays outside dormitory doors. If the floors had been recently buffed we could see the moon-like reflections of the big paper lampshades below us. Sometimes, in these quiet corridors, it felt like the polished wood was water and we skimmed our way across the surface of the world.
The corridors were never empty for long. When the doors at the end of the corridor creaked we made a dash for a communal bedroom. If the door was too far away, we’d freeze in exactly the positions we were in: on one leg, half turned, frozen to the spot. If a cleaner suddenly burst into the corridor, trailing a floor-buffer, humming a Bhagwan song, we might stand frozen for five or ten minutes as he waxed the floor towards us. Frequently, in apparent complicity, he cleaned around us then continued up the corridor with a smile but without a word or a glance. Only when he turned the corner and we could not be seen would we breathe again. Those times it was clear the cleaners were complicit in our game; other times we really were ignored. Sometimes when this happened we abandoned our game. We once spent what seemed like a whole afternoon squeezed behind a rack of shelves, as a Swami stacked folded sheets on the other side. Each time he added to the pile we stared him straight in the face; even so, he never noticed we were there.
Majid was nicknamed ‘The Professor’ for a reason. Not only was he good at maths, he was also the best inventor. Every commune child dreamed about owning the best rubber-band gun, but only Majid and I drew plans for a machine gun, with revolving stacks of clothes pegs that would produce a rate of ’laccy-band fire never before known to man. Majid was also the first kid to find out about static electricity. One afternoon, after finding out how far we could slide on the ground-floor carpet—not very far—Majid touched a brass doorknob, and a bright blue spark clicked across to the metal. I shuffled my socks and touched the doorknob, but nothing happened.
‘You’re not doing it for long enough,’ Majid told me, shifting his feet back and forth again. He reached out for the doorknob but at the last minute he whirled with a wicked grin on his face, his black hair flying, and prodded my bare arm. There was a sound like marbles touching; I jerked my arm back. We shuffled some more, and our hair stuck out on end.
We were mad scientists. We had discovered static electricity.
Majid and I began to lurk in the hallways with our newly found powers, giving electric shocks to as many passers-by as we could. We developed a project to generate the biggest static electric shock ever. Majid lay flat on the Main Hall carpets; I dragged him around by the arms. If I dragged
him for ten minutes, he figured, he would be granted unbelievable amounts of static power and might even be able to shock people from a great distance. Once he’d promised not to zap me, we wove our way in and out of the chairs and coffee tables in the Main Hall. At about the eight-minute mark I backed into one of the coffee tables and sat down on the smoked glass, which shattered under my weight. One of the adults carried me to the medical centre. Majid and I both agreed the resulting scar was shaped a lot like a cool-looking scorpion.
The incident must have been discussed in an evening meeting, because soon afterwards someone sprayed all the Main House carpets with anti-static spray; Majid and I had to find other ways to pass the time. One afternoon, searching for silver coins in the fenced area where the rubbish and empty bottles were kept, we decided to get drunk, to see what it was like. We crouched among the sacks of rubbish and mixed the dregs of all the empties until we had about a quarter-full wine bottle. We sipped our sour concoction in turn; to try to make each other drink more, we both pretended it tasted nice.
In the small clearing down past the lake, using planks and empty diesel barrels, the older kids set up BMX stunt-tracks. Majid and I both had bikes—I had the BMX my dad had bought me; he had his chopper. Although we couldn’t balance along the planks, we rode down to watch the others wheelie across. We watched them cycle down to it each morning, too, the older boys riding all the way down the lawn with no hands on the handlebars. One afternoon, with Majid watching from his chopper, I practised riding no-hands over and over again, bouncing and rattling between the trees. Time and time again I landed winded in the long grass. As the sun was setting, I finally took my hands off the handlebars and sailed on past the old lake.
One morning, hidden in the bushes near the BMX planks, Majid and I discovered a big plastic chest half as tall as us. It was full to the brim with what were obviously precious gems. We had discovered the commune’s hidden fortunes. ‘Rubies!’ Majid said; ‘Emeralds!’ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Emeralds are green. These are diamonds!’ We stuffed our pockets, socks, and sleeves with the stones, dragged the treasure chest round behind some bushes, then spent the rest of the day wondering how we could get to a jeweller’s in the local town to sell them all off and escape around the world. From an internal phone we booked a taxi for eleven o’clock that night, then decided to attend evening announcements one last time. Nothing special had happened that day: the garage had bought a new Ford Sierra with the insurance money from the Commer crash. There was a new Bhagwan video on the way. ‘Oh,’ Sharna added. ‘Has anybody moved the salt bin from down by the compost?’
We were already spending more and more of our time away from the adults, in the forests around the edges of the grounds where we knew we would be alone. We went out in the forest to be among the plants, the oak, the silver birch, the single lilac, the nettles, the avenue of cherry trees. We began to stalk the forests. We liked whipping plants, but people told us off if we whipped the prettier ones—daffodils, for example. No one could tell us off for whipping plants that stung you, we decided, so we made it our job to clear the whole forest of nettles. We pulled off long birch sticks, stripped them of leaves, and wandered through the forest, along the pegged white cord that marked out the Medina boundaries, stepping high to avoid any ticks that might be lurking in the long grass. (Peegee, the Medina chow-chow dog, got ticks all the time; if you caught one you had to have it burned out. I had seen it happen to Sujan, and the thought terrified me.) Whenever we found a clump of nettles we laid them low, starting with the purple flowers at the top and working our way down to the base. As we got good at it, we worked our way deeper among the trees.
The nettles out there were monsters, taller than either of us, with stems thicker than our fingers. Majid claimed that you could eat nettles—you could boil them, he said, and it made the sting go. I had yet to see him try. In Willard Price’s African Adventure I had read about the nettles on the Mountains of the Moon: their stings were the size of needles; they could kill a horse. I told this to Sharna, who laughed and said, ‘Well, I’m glad I’m not a horse.’ Har-har. Majid and I took no chances out there. We wielded the largest sticks we could find. The nettles were plentiful; they took the punishment we gave them, and they grew back twice as tall.
Slowly, on those whipping trips, we learned nettle-lore. We learned how to stroke the leaves downwards and not get stung at all. We learned how to grasp the nettles at the base, just under the surface of the earth, where the spines were too soft to pierce the skin. In this way, we could pull a whole nettle—roots and all—from the ground. The knowledge was more useful than it sounds. By being able to emerge from the bushes at a moment’s notice waving a huge nettle longer and taller than ourselves—with leaves the size of your face—to chase an older kid across the grass, we gained a level of peace and quiet not readily available. When a big nettle fell on us and the pain was too great to ignore, we knew how to search out the largest dock-leaves and squeeze the green juice over the rash until the pain eased.
Sometimes we wanted the adults to notice our absence—and our prowess. On those afternoons, on the way back to the Kids’ Hut with our birch sticks in hand, the carefully cultivated plants in the Main House flowerbeds proved targets too difficult to resist. We would look at each other and, without saying a word, strip a flowery bush bare with a few quick slashes.
One evening Sujan brought it up at the school announcements. The evening bell rang, and we gathered in the Kids’ Hut playroom. ‘Someone,’ he said sternly, ‘has knocked all the blossoms off the hibiscus.’
I bit my lip to stop myself from laughing.
Summer ended. One by one the swallows and house martins swooped out from under the eaves and flew away. Early that autumn there was a spate of sudden showers; thick, warm, heavy rain spattered the forests. The rain brought out every colour of green you had ever seen. Dark rivers of water ran down tree-trunks, like tears.
In October a team of sannyasins decided to dig a new lake where the old lake had been, down at the bottom of the lawn. They staked out the shape of the lake with pegs and wooden cords, and dug down into the clay—I remember being surprised at how grey and wet the sides of the hole were. Then they lined the hole with a great plastic sheet. Someone ran a hose through the window and all the way from the Main House to the lake. Someone else found a water pipe right by where the lake was, so they rolled up the long hose, and ran a shorter hose from there. The kids gathered to watch the lake fill, but after half an hour there was hardly even a puddle. We talked about what would happen if we stood on the hose—would the Main House swell up and explode in a shower of water?—then we got bored and went away. That night at the Omar Khayyam bar someone took bets about how long the lake would take to fill. The highest guess was three days.
The Medina gardeners wanted to get some exotic ducks to float around on the lake; it turned out another sannyas commune had a bunch of standard green and brown ducks, so they had to settle for those. Later that week the ducks were shipped in, and as the water rose they floated around in the hole. Even with all the rain, the lake took seven days and nights to fill.
That winter at Medina we felt ripples of another kind. After the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, investigating alleged arranged marriages at the Ranch, told her she would have to leave the USA, Bhagwan’s original secretary and first disciple, Laxmi, was evicted from the new Oregon headquarters. For fifteen years she’d been his most devoted sannyasin; she left the commune with just two bags and her gold Rolex watch. Laxmi moved from state to state, changing her name frequently to keep ahead of sannyasin spies and the INS. Her former assistant, Sheela, stepped into Laxmi’s place as Bhagwan’s secretary. Soon afterwards the hubbub in Omar Khayyam rose again, after Bhagwan’s bodyguard Shivamurti was also excommunicated. In response to Sheela’s condemnation, he published a series of exposés about the corruption of power in Bhagwan’s inner circle. He claimed that Bhagwan wandered about his apartment so high on nitrous oxide that, while m
uttering that truth could not be expressed in words, he would brace himself against the wall and piss in his own plushly carpeted hallways. Shivamurti also repeated a scandalous story he claimed was common knowledge in the inner circle: Bhagwan used only the missionary position and came quickly. Sheela wrote open letters in the Rajneesh Times advising sannyasins to close their hearts to Laxmi and Shivamurti—their egos, no longer fed by Bhagwan, wanted to destroy everything they had all worked for. My mother and her friends discounted Shivamurti’s allegations. Then in December, in an NBC television interview in Los Angeles, Sheela was asked about Bhagwan’s alleged anti-Semitism. She smiled sweetly and said: ‘How do you get four Germans and five hundred Jews into a Volkswagen? Simple. Two Germans in the front, two Germans in back, and five hundred Jews in the ashtray.’ When they heard about this, my mother and her friends were shocked; then they put it down to a publicity stunt.
On that level, at least, Sheela seemed to be succeeding. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, at Medina, it was apparent to us—the kids as well as the adults—that the world at large had begun to use the term ‘Bhagwan’ as shorthand for ‘flamboyant religious conman’. One of the kids clipped a ‘Bloom County’ comic strip from a newspaper, in which Opus is briefly entranced by the idea of taking sannyas. The clipping circulated in the Kids’ Hut dormitories. (Opus: ‘Say, brother . . . uh, how about refreshing me on this Rajneesh business . . .’ Sannyasin: ‘Well, Rajneesh is the truth, and the truth is the light, which is life. Life’s truth light. And happiness. Which is wearing red pajamas and blowing kisses toward the Bhagwan’s 72 Gold Rolls-Royces.’ Opus: ‘Whoa! By golly . . . that does make a lot of sense.’)