My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  After the Third Annual World Celebration my mother and poonam returned to Medina with patipada, whom Sheela had deputed to oversee the reshaping of the British Buddhafield. Within a week patipada decided poonam was on a power trip and could no longer run Medina. Dark energy had accumulated in the British Buddhafield, patipada said; it would need to be discarded. Within a week, along with poonam and Adheera, my mother was sent back to Rajneeshpuram—they travelled on separate planes, so they could not contaminate each other with negative thinking. poonam was sent to work as a labourer in Chuang Tzu, the building department. Adheera was dispatched to Raidas, the cleaning offices. My mother worked in Magdalena, cleaning pots and pans. This mountainous task was the only job in the kitchens which wasn’t arbitrarily decided. The scrubbing of the hundreds of huge pans used to feed Rajneeshpuram was so arduous that no one was given the task for more than a week. On Sheela’s orders, my mother did it for thirty days.

  Each day she woke up at 6 A.M. and worked until 7 P.M. After work she went to see Bhagwan in the huge Rajneesh Mandir auditorium, then she dragged herself back to her shared A-frame to sleep. After washing pots for twelve hours, she had no energy for anything else. Nonetheless, the Big Mammas kept an eye on her. One morning two weeks into her stay, she was hauled up to Jesus Grove where Sheela held court. My mother was told to sit in front of a line of all the Ranch Big Mammas: Vidya, Arup, Yogini, and Patipada. They gave her what the lower-level dissident sannyasins called ‘the Full Number’. The Big Mammas told her she was a deceitful, manipulative, cowardly liar who had never let Bhagwan into her heart. She was un-surrendered, worthless; she hadn’t learned a single thing in all her years with Bhagwan. They told her she had ‘the negativity of a hundred lifetimes’ and, to ensure that she would not be able to spread her negativity, she would never be allowed to run groups or therapy sessions again. My mum started to cry. They remained stony-faced. The fact that she tried to cry, they said, was further evidence that she was un-surrendered, egotistical, and negative.

  To begin the hopeless task of atoning for all her negativity, my mother was told to report her progress each morning to the office of a woman named Dhyan Yogini, who ran her offices in Magdalena. Each day Yogini asked my mother how she was doing; each day my mother, holding back the tears, said, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘I’m doing fine.’ Every day, back at her post, she burst into tears. She had lost her home, her child, her friends. She had lost her place in sannyasin society. She had lost Sujan, who was living at Medina, running groups in her place, celebrating the changes Sheela had made. She wept into the dishwasher. One day in Yogini’s office she collapsed and sobbed on the floor. Yogini knelt by my mother, placed my mother’s head in her lap, and recited a Sufi poem of forgiveness. ‘Even if you have broken your vows a thousand times,’ Yogini said, stroking my mother’s hair; ‘come, come, yet again come.’ My mother burst into tears again. The next day she was promoted from washing pots to washing dishes. She felt she had been out of the fold, but was now returning.

  Some evenings walking back to her A-frame my mother noticed people—sannyasins who had worked in the medical centre, or the ones close to Sheela’s power group—leaving surreptitiously, under blankets on back seats, or in the boots of cars. On an errand to the filing department she noticed that the cards for each sannyasin were now longer, more detailed—and written in code. One or two people whispered that they thought the phones were bugged. My mother shrugged this off as paranoia. Then a bomb exploded on the guest floor of the Rajneesh Hotel, wounding a man who was charged with setting it off. Security at the Ranch intensified. Federal investigators discovered that the two men they charged had been at the Ranch just days earlier. They wondered: had the pair been planning to bomb the Ranch? Or were they working for the sannyasins?

  One afternoon Sheela announced every sannyasin needed ‘to give up hoarding’. Each Ranch resident required only two outfits. Bin-bags were distributed for spare clothes, which were sold to fill the Ranch coffers. Those who withheld more than their allocated clothing ration had them stripped from their cupboards by the cleaners.

  By then sickness, as well as materialism, had become taboo. Sheela’s assistants regularly strolled through the sick bay, taking down the names of the bedridden. ‘Sickness is negativity!’ they’d announce. ‘Who’s ready to drop the negativity?’ Many who received dressing downs went on to spend time in the sick bay; some came to be convinced they had been poisoned. There was renewed and suspicious talk about the bout of amoebic dysentery that had spread through the Ashram, infecting half the population at the same time as Sheela was campaigning for the move to the USA.

  After six weeks of dish-washing my mother was called again into Jesus Grove. Her hand shook as she opened the door. This time it was business. The new team Sheela had sent over to bring Medina into line was going to stay in charge. My mother was going to be sent to Germany to work in Wioska Rajneesh, the sannyasin commune in Cologne. She would not be granted any special privileged position, Sheela told her. She should expect to be treated like any other sannyasin. ‘What about Yogesh?’ my mother asked. ‘Can’t you just say “yes” for once?’ Sheela snapped. My mother nodded. Sheela said she would have liked to send her that night, but the last plane had gone. My mother would leave for Germany the following day.

  That night I got a call from my mother telling me about Germany. Sujan was going to the Wioska Rajneesh commune, too. Did I want to come? she asked. I thought for a moment, and then I said yes. My father got me a last-minute ticket. I flew back from California to meet my mother at Medina.

  I was half-asleep when I arrived. There were no children anywhere, and fewer adults than before: I remember standing on the gravel courtyard as evening fell. There was no one else around, no sound of crunching gravel, no music from the kitchens. The buildings seemed greyer than before, and I remember thinking: maybe Medina has closed. I wondered if I was dreaming.

  My mother arrived that night. The next morning she helped me pack. I was overjoyed. We were doing something together again. My old passport was stamped: Hook of Holland, 18 September 1984. We travelled by train, then the ferry, then another train, with all our stuff in three black plastic bags at our feet.

  I had moved so often—the surroundings seemed to change so frequently—and now it seemed to me the changes were speeding up. It felt like we were poised at the top of something; on a skateboard heading downhill, just at the point where you begin to pick up speed.

  14

  Wioska Rajneesh was utterly different from Medina. The main centre, on Lütticher Strasse, was in the centre of Cologne, on an old eighteenth-century row of seven-storey wedding-cake houses. A café and the kitchens were on the ground floor. The group rooms were in the basement. The six upper storeys were residential dormitories. My mother was given a bed in a shared room on the fourth floor of this main Wioska house. I was taken to the kids’ apartment on the sixth floor of a building on the other side of the street. We had two bedrooms and two showers. All our playing and fighting and running around had to be done in the squeezed spaces in between the eighteen bunks.

  As in other sannyasin communes, the German centres made money through therapies, books, and tapes. Cologne’s Rebel Publishing House was the most profitable sannyas imprint in Europe. German sannyasins also pioneered a new income stream: discotheques. If nothing else, sannyasins knew how to throw a party; they began to capitalize on their traditional outrageousness. Discos were opened in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Bonn. There were other ‘outrageous’ services; brochures advertised KISS-A-GRAMS! SURPRISE-A-GRAMS! PRANCE-A-GRAMS! ‘Surprising! Colourful! Singing Telegrams for any occasion’. (You would see the Surprise-A-Grams sometimes, in the Wioska café or out in Lütticher Strasse hiding behind a car: rouged, in pink feather boas and pantomime gear, waiting to jump out and burst into song.) By February 1984 the sannyasin disco in Cologne was turning over 3 million Deutschmarks per year. German sannyasins were just as intent on getting blissed-out—‘ausgeblissed’, they
called it—but they were also more business-oriented and more profitable. The German communes were also more receptive to direction from the Ranch in Oregon, and thus more acceptable to Sheela. Because the German communes were more under her control, and Wioska Rajneesh was the largest German commune, all the European troublemakers who weren’t quite negative enough to be fully excommunicated were sent to Cologne. Sannyasins from across Europe were encouraged to come to Wioska to help oil the gears of the enlightenment machine; some brought their kids.

  On my first evening in the kids’ dormitories at Wioska, I joined a play-fight in between the bunks. There were Spanish and German kids at Wioska Rajneesh, but that first night I discovered no one spoke more than a few words of English. One of the kids hit me hard on the head with a pillow; it hurt. I put my hand up to the top of my head where the sharp pain was; when I pulled it down, there was blood on my fingertips. Inside the pillow cover, I found a wooden building block. Clutching the block in one hand and holding my other hand to the cut on my head, I ran downstairs and across the road. If I showed my mother the block and my blood, I was convinced, she would take me home. When I found her, she put some arnica and a plaster on my head. Then she asked me where it was I wanted to go. I didn’t know what to say. She took me down to the Wioska dining hall for some food. I asked for some white bread and Marmite; all she could find was honey and some thick, dark stuff which she claimed was bread. It tasted like plastic. I pushed it away.

  There was no sannyasin school at Wioska. Each morning I made my own way to the local German state school, a big square rucksack, bright yellow and red plastic, strapped securely on my back. While the German kids read books and did sums, I learned German nouns one by one from flashcards (eggs, ‘Eier’; cat, ‘Katze’). German sounded to me like the garbled secret language Ryan, Purva, and Deepa used to talk in while I was sitting behind the Medina sofa. One of my favourite books, The Rainbow Goblins, became Die Regenbogenkobolde. The handwriting teacher was shocked—a little theatrically it seems to me now—that I could only write in my shaky, separate letters. On my part I marvelled at the pens these Germans had invented which wrote in blue ink at one end, and at the other had a pen with white ink that would rub the blue ink away. There were dancing lessons, bicycle proficiency tests, a housekeeping hour where we sat in rows and sewed patches on cushion covers. I looked around to see if anyone else was as bemused at this as I was, but they all seemed to take it in their stride. After investigating my lunchbox, I spent morning break-times in the playground playing with the Turkish boys if they’d let me. They were almost as much outsiders as I was; they spoke little German and no English. So I ended up spending every break-time on my own, walking the same route around three huge oak trees in the centre of the playground. They were wizards, these trees: old guardians. I imagined they were my friends. If I said the right words, they might uproot themselves and carry me away.

  In Germany they knew about cold and about loneliness; in the German school that winter I learned everything they had to teach. Loneliness was like frozen water, like falling into a pond in the dead of winter and turning blue with the cold. Loneliness was like stepping on a live rail.

  German school was only in the mornings; a blessing, I thought, until I realized I had to spend the long afternoons helping in the Wioska laundries. I could bunk off, I discovered, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go. My mother worked as a cocktail waitress at a sannyasin discotheque in another town. On my way back to Lütticher Strasse I sometimes looked for the name of the town—Düsseldorf—on the bus stops I passed; but I never knew how to find her. Like the Sister Sledge song they loved to sing in the laundries, my mother—and the other adult sannyasins around me—were lost in music; I lost myself in Lego. In the afternoons, after school when I was supposed to be folding sheets, I would swoop my Lego spacemen from mission to mission in the wavy air above the hot laundry presses.

  I lost myself, too, in the books from the English library my mother found on the other side of town. Once a week on Friday afternoons, she took me over there and I would swap the five books in my square school rucksack for another five. I picked them out carefully on a walk among the tall, spare, steel racks where each shelf was packed with thick hardbacks. My favourites were Susan Cooper novels, The Dark Is Rising and Silver on the Tree. They were books about young children in a wintry climate; children who discover they have magical inheritances. Children granted secret powers to save them from loneliness and to connect them to the world.

  Back at Wioska I gathered up my Lego spacemen and two of my new library books, then headed downstairs to the main Wioska centre, to the hall outside the group-rooms where stacks of mattresses were piled to the ceiling. When no one was looking I pulled one of these teetering stacks—fifty mattresses, each inches thick—and squeezed through the gap. Then I’d inch the mattresses back so that I was completely hidden in a six-foot rectangle between the stacks. With my book and a pillow and my Lego men I would settle in there on my stomach to read. I used to dream about a secret world under here, with one entrance in Wioska, hidden among these mattresses, and another entrance hidden in a gooseberry bush between two birch trees at the edge of the Medina grounds. There were secret super-fast underground trains that whisked me from Medina, where my friends were, to here where my mother wanted to be. When I was in the cavern, no one knew how to find me.

  In my loneliness, the smallest things seemed the most precious. The green visor that had fallen off the helmet of one of my Lego spacemen. A piece of blue glass I found on the pavement. I held on to what I could, and what I could hold on to was what fitted into my pockets. My bed became a pile of my favourite toys, but while I worked in the laundries I was never there to protect them. Each evening back in the dormitory I would spend twenty minutes struggling with the other kids to get back my books, my soft toys, my space Lego. I slept with blocks in my bed—to keep them safe rather than, as my mother had once done, to mortify her flesh.

  Loneliness was my mortification. At the Wioska commune there were no other English kids. We sang German songs in the kids’ dorm, Spanish songs in the bus on outings—‘Vamos a la playa! oh o-oh o-oh!’ The kids spoke a strange mixture of Spanish and German. When I arrived, some English was thrown into the mix. ‘Vamos a la playa?’ ‘Nein.’ ‘Why not?’

  My closest friend was a German girl with scraggly brown hair and thick, round glasses. There was something wrong with her leg, so she hobbled about on crutches. I walked slowly alongside her. We had fun. Our favourite activity was to ride the elevators in Wioska. After worship, the kids were supposed to stay in their dormitories, but the girl and I would cross the road, push open the wide teak front doors, and sneak into the main building. We rode up and down the elevators, pushing the buttons for every floor, closing the doors before anyone could get on. Eventually one of the Wioska coordinators—an officious one with a measly small beard—would order us to stop. My friend would pretend to swing herself out of the elevator on her crutches; as she made her slow movements I reached out behind her and pushed the button for the top floor. As he scolded us, we nodded at him until the door slid closed. On the top floor we switched elevators; from then on it took him at least ten more minutes to catch us on the right floor.

  I learned German quickly. After about a month of looking at picture cards each morning, I was translating for my mother at the cobbler’s—the ‘Schumacher’—down at the end of Lütticher Strasse. Later, when my mother wasn’t around, the elevator girl and I went down to the cobbler’s and joked with him. Who knows why we were fixing shoes but in Wioska, it seemed, when that girl and I needed something to do, there were always shoes that needed fixing. We watched the mechanical elf on the wall swing his bright hammer against the nail that always stuck out from his mechanical boot. The cobbler asked me if she was my girlfriend. ‘Nein, nein,’ I said, laughing. The girl laughed, too.

  When the sunlight came, as it did occasionally, it felt like warm rain.

  There was a photographer
who worked at Wioska. Yogi was about nineteen years old. I followed him everywhere. I wanted to watch him work; but after I opened the door into his darkroom at the wrong time and ruined his photos, he asked me not to hang around. So I took to staking out his building, then following him in the street. One evening I thought he’d seen me. He looked over, and I ducked behind a car. Then he kept going, and I thought I had got away with it. When I bumped into him in the corridor the next day, he gave me some tips. When you’re following someone, he told me, you should always move casually, even when you are hiding behind a car. That way they are less likely to see you out of the corner of their eye. He asked me why I was following him. I said I didn’t know.

  I know now. He had dark hair and an easy grin. He was a younger version of my father.

  That evening, when no one was looking, I sneaked around behind the receptionist to the board where all the commune keys were kept. I grabbed the spare key to Yogi’s apartment. Pretending I was a private detective, I went to his building and let myself in. I wandered around his living room and darkroom, flicking the lights on and off, until he came home. When he opened his door, he found me sitting on his leather chair, grinning at how clever I had been.