My Life in Orange

by Tim Guest

  After that, he tried harder to avoid me in the street.

  Then, on 11 November, the whole Wioska commune was called into the Cologne disco for a major announcement. We lined up on the rows of platforms on the edge of the dance floor and looked towards the woman on the stage. She said that scientists on the Ranch now believed AIDS was transferred in saliva. There was a new list of guidelines. Before joining the food line, everyone was to wash his or her hands with alcohol. No one was to share food, drink, or cigarettes at any time. If two sannyasins wanted to share a chocolate bar, it was recommended that they break it with the wrapper on. Sannyasins travelling outside the commune were to take bottles of alcohol for use in public toilets. Telephone mouthpieces were to be rubbed with alcohol before use. No one was to lick envelopes, lick their fingers to turn pages, or lick thread when sewing. Dentists were to wear gowns, masks, gloves, and protective eyewear. Since early 1984 every commune bathroom had had a bin marked ‘contaminated waste’—now even cigarettes and gum belonged there. There was also to be no more kissing: no kissing friends on the cheek, no kissing hands, no kissing your children.

  At that last announcement my mother gasped. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but she was livid. ‘That means your mother can’t kiss you!’ she told me. ‘Go and complain!’ But I didn’t. I walked out of the Cologne disco with her and everybody else.

  It snowed heavily in Cologne that winter. Coldness marked our time there. I remember how much I loved the hot showers at Wioska Rajneesh. I would wait my turn, then stand under the showers for as long as I could. The other kids pushed at the shower curtain but I stayed there, rubbing my hair, pushing my face into the water. I loved the warmth of the water as it ran over me. I never wanted to leave.

  Outside, in the afternoons, we walked among the cars, holding armfuls of snow ready to throw at people in the street. By then I knew enough German to improvise a little. ‘Who wants a present?’ I asked passers-by, sannyasins and strangers alike, showing them my open arms filled with snow. ‘Wer will ein Geschenk?’

  Halfway through December a message came from the Ranch. We were no longer to celebrate Christmas or any such Christian festivals. In rebellion my mother saved up her weekly vouchers, and on Christmas morning we sat on her bed and exchanged small gifts we had scraped together. I got a scarf and hat and a few bits of Lego. I gave her a bag of the best sweets from the Wioska sweetshop. There was no school, but we had worship to do. I dragged myself down to the cleaning department and ironed sheets all through Christmas Day.

  Then, in February 1985, another fiat was handed down from the Ranch. Ever since Sheela had replaced the Medina coordinators, the British Buddhafield had stopped turning a profit. Now Sheela had decided that Medina Rajneesh was to become Rajneesh School. All European sannyasin children were to be sent over to live at Rajneesh School, in the Medina house and grounds. Apart from the mothers of children under two, who were also allowed to live at the school, the parents of these kids had to stay where they were.

  I remember getting on the bus repatriating us to Medina. There was a line of kids leading up to the bus doors. I pushed to be near the front of the queue. My mother stood next to me. When we got to the doors my mother hugged me. She was crying. I thought I was going home. ‘It’s a sad day for the mothers, but a happy day for the kids,’ I said.

  At that same time, in Oregon, the yellow school buses that ferried sannyasins around the Ranch had nearly finished bussing homeless people off Rajneeshpuram. By 16 November, just weeks after the programme began, only two thousand of the original four thousand members of the Share-A-Home scheme remained. When they were asked to leave they were piled into the yellow school buses and taken to bus stations in nearby Oregon towns, not to their home cities as had been agreed. Although it was mid-winter, many ‘friends’ had their down jackets, donated by the commune, confiscated on their departure. In early February Curtis Sliwa, the head of the New York Guardian Angels, came to Rajneeshpuram wearing his red beret to protest about the way the homeless were being treated—he was arrested by peace Force officers. By then, however, only a few hundred remained. (The Ranch inner circle quoted the total cost of the ‘Share-A-Home’ programme at around $1 million.)

  That same week in February I was bussed back to Rajneesh School in Medina. We parked on the ferry. We stood on the upper deck, all the Spanish and German kids and me. They watched Holland recede behind us. I strained my eyes west, desperate to see the English coast.

  15

  Rajneesh School was not Medina: it was meditation boot camp. When I arrived from Cologne they put me with the French, German, and Spanish kids, in a new dormitory up by the Main House. All the old Medina kids still slept in the Kids’ Hut. Once again, all my toys were poured into the communal box, all my books were put into the communal kids’ library. The old Medina kids seemed stand-offish but because I knew my way around Medina, the European kids liked me. They always lent me toys in the hope I would show them around. With regular dropped hints about secret passages only I knew about, I kept them interested. (When a matchbox car slid on the floorboards and into a wall vent, I’d tap my nose and say, ‘I know where that’s gone.’)

  The main difference between Medina and the new Rajneesh School was how much we had to do. There were now 140 children to keep an eye on. Where before the Medina sannyasins were content to let us kids do pretty much what we wanted, now the new guard couldn’t find enough activities for us. As well as the school hours, now mandatory, each evening’s two hours of worship were harder to get out of. The work was also more serious. Kids sat together in the accounts office toting up figures with a print-out calculator and wondering what would happen if, for fun, they started putting in wrong numbers.

  We also now started the day with meditation. Although Bhagwan once said that children could never meditate—they were too energetic—Sheela decided that Bhagwan’s meditations were energetic enough. Each morning at eight o’clock, we headed off down to the Portakabins near where Hadiqua’a used to be to do Dynamic meditation. In the second phase of the meditation, you raised and lowered your elbows like a chicken and shouted ‘Hoo! Hoo!’ through your nose. We did our best to expel as much snot as possible. We were amazed at the amount of snot that a hundred or so jumping, whooping kids were able to produce. In the third stage, the one with all the whirling, we peeked out from under our blindfolds and tried our best to hit each other ‘accidentally’. At the end, we jumped around and sang along to the music the adults chose: Stevie Wonder’s ‘Celebrate’; the Pointer Sisters’ ‘Automatic’; the Eurythmics’ ‘1984’. This last song was our favourite. It drove us wild. At the chorus we went mad—about the only time we did let ourselves go in the same way the adults went mad all the time. We shouted down Annie Lennox and stamped our own year over the chorus—‘nineteen-eighty-FIVE!’

  In our shouting we were not just being pedantic about the date. We had heard so much about how the world would end: in AIDS, cyclones, nuclear destruction. We also knew that, as predicted by Bhagwan or George Orwell or somebody, 1984 was the year it would all happen. Our shouts of 1985 were a gleeful claim to our own small triumph. We had outlasted the apocalypse. We had scratched together one more year past the end of the world.

  And, each evening, we also had to do our Gachchamis.

  On the morning of 1 May 1981, when Bhagwan went into silence and gave his Satsang for the first time, this new silence was marked by a sung chant, one that had been sung at the feet of Gautama Buddha twenty-five hundred years before. Bhagwan chose a handful of sannyasins, dressed in ceremonial maroon robes, to kneel in front of the audience of six thousand and to lead the chant by example. ‘Buddham Sharanam Gachchami’, they sang, bowing down towards Bhagwan. The auditorium was filled with the chant. ‘Sangham Sharanam Gachchami . . . Dhammam Sharanam Gachchami’.

  In May 1983, in the brand-new Rajneesh Mandir auditorium in Rajneeshpuram, the thousands of residents and visitors gathered to hear Bhagwan speak were led through the Gachchami
s over the Rajneesh Mandir PA system. The routine spread across the Ranch. Each morning and evening, wherever residents, visitors, or workers gathered—in the bar, the canteen, the boutique, the A-frame hotels—someone who knew the Gachchami chants gathered everyone around them and led by example. The Gachchami chants and their English translations were carved on two pillars and placed on either side of the fifteen-mile dirt road leading to the Ranch. Now, by early 1985, the Gachchamis filtered through to us at Rajneesh School. At first we did them all together in the Main Hall, but then later, when that proved hard to manage, we separated off into smaller rooms, in groups of twenty or so. We knelt on the floor to face the direction of Rajneeshpuram. There, bowing down to the floor once for each vow, we sang out the words we had learned by rote: the three vows of Gautama Buddha.

  ‘Buddham Sharanam Gachchami,’ we droned, bowing down.

  ‘Sangham Sharanam Gachchami.’ Noses to the floor.

  ‘Dhammam Sharanam Gachchami.’

  For most of the words your voice was supposed to stay at the same monk-like monotone—‘Bhuuuudhammmm . . . Sannnnnghammmmm . . . Gaaaa . . .’ Then for the last two syllables you slid down an octave: ‘aa-aachchaaaamiiii’. We made up different words and droned them under our breath so the adults couldn’t hear: ‘Buddham Dongalong Bart-faaaarty.’

  Soon after the introduction of the Gachchamis, there was a new tradition. Each day a different kid was chosen to lead them. This meant you had to say a little improvised introduction before the Gachchamis—e.g., ‘Thanks to Bhagwan for the new minibus.’ Then you droned each line yourself first, before everyone else followed after. The teachers knew me as a troublemaker; when it came to leading the Gachchamis they were reluctant to call on me. Eventually, however, my turn came around. I wanted to say something funny, to ridicule what we were doing, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was a long silence. For some reason, I had to bite back tears. Eventually I just launched into the chant. After we had finished, I could not think of a reason to raise my face from the floor. I stayed there, face down, my nose touching the floorboards, staring at the dust caught between cracks in the wood, until long after all the other kids had got up and filed out of the room.

  My mother wasn’t here. My father wasn’t here. Not even Sujan was here. I was beginning to wonder what I was doing here at all.

  Not long ago, in a Medina programme I found a translation of the Gachchamis. They were handwritten in curly letters on a page dedicated to the winter celebrations (Hallowe’en: ‘The Broomstick Ball’—to New Year: ‘A live band to boogie us into a new beginning!’) As we pressed our noses to the ground, roughly facing the direction of Bhagwan, we were intoning, in Sanskrit, the first Buddhist vow: ‘I bow to the feet of the Awakened One. I bow to the feet of the Commune of the Awakened One. I bow to the feet of the Ultimate Truth of the Awakened One.’

  Soon after we all arrived at Rajneesh School a new missive was sent out from Rajneeshpuram: the Gachchamis had potent mystical properties. If something was not working—a burnt-out toaster, a relationship on the rocks, a car that wouldn’t start—we were to get down on our knees and do the Gachchamis to these broken things, too. On some summer mornings, the adults carried Bhagwan’s chair down by the ha-ha, and did their Gachchamis in long rows out on the front lawn.

  In Medina we had spent our time running around the corridors and over the grass; Rajneesh School, however, was just a school. I hated it. We did our lessons—maths exercises, essay writing, lessons in business; still no politics or history—in the upper rooms of the Main House, where I remembered thirty people had once slept in mattresses packed side by side. We spent much less time playing games outside. I remember one of the few times was when, as a treat after one lesson, we were each given a Tupperware box and told to go out on our own to find some earth and plants, to make a little garden box. The box was supposed to represent our view of the commune. Arvind decided to make a rose-garden and even try to capture a bee to put in it. Saddhu decided on a grass pasture. I decided to make mine into a desert.

  I found some sand in the building department, and I picked up an old dry twig from down near the birch trees. All it needed to finish it off, I thought, was a big, ugly spider. I crouched by some bookshelves in the books and tapes department, where I’d seen a big one recently. The spider didn’t materialize. I even crawled right under the Portakabin, chasing the shapes I saw scuttle across cracks of light. The spiders all eluded me. Finally I arranged my sand and twig in the box, added a rock at the last minute. The teacher gave me a long look when I handed it in.

  Despite all the new rules, we still managed some forbidden fun. The adults had proudly arranged for three arcade machines to be set up in a new Portakabin: Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command. Majid and I loved to play Asteroids, especially the two-player version; it was hard to get the older kids to put out their cigarettes and stop playing. When the Guest House was empty, I got together with Bindu and Majid—the Medina old guard, Computo, Marmite, and The Professor. We strapped ourselves into the new rope-pulley fire escape—the one we had been told explicitly never to touch, not unless the whole place was definitely burning down—then jumped out the window and drifted gently down to the ground.

  Out in the forests near the boundary, we dug two deep pits seven feet into the earth. I loved these holes; they were about as close as I ever got to my secret underground lair. I wanted to cover them with boards and earth, and conceal the entrance with a trapdoor. None of the other kids were quite enthusiastic enough, so before we ran back into the Main House I climbed in and sat in the pit for a while, among the spiders and the crumbly earth. Eventually the tunnel collapsed, and we left the pits alone.

  The tuck shop that had been started in Medina before I left was kept on at Rajneesh School. We each had an allowance card which granted us one chocolate bar and one can of drink per day (that date was crossed off your card by whichever kid was running the tuck shop). I didn’t like the way fizzy drinks burned the back of my throat, but we weren’t allowed to swap the drinks for chocolate, so I took to shaking up my daily can as much as I could before opening it to see how much of the drink I could get to spray out onto the lawn. It was fun, and, even though he liked his fizzy drinks, Majid started doing it, too. For a while a group of us held daily competitions on the front lawn to see who could get their drink to spray the highest. Majid came up with the idea of throwing his can from the top of the oak tree to shake it up, and that day his drink sprayed twice as high as everyone else’s. Soon we were all doing it, waiting our turn to climb up into the highest branches and throw our cans of 7UP and Dr pepper sixty feet down onto the ground.

  Majid and I had our own secret respite from the Rajneesh School regime. Majid’s father, pragyan, lived close to Medina, with a friend called Avinasho. Every Sunday we used to walk over to Avinasho’s. We’d stroll the five miles, past the guard who now watched over the gravel drive, past Mr Upton’s fields and acres of pine trees planted in long diagonal rows, to sprawl in Avinasho’s biggest green beanbags and do the things we weren’t allowed to do at Medina—eat meat, wear blue, watch Dallas and Britain’s Strongest Man. Bake Monster Munch crisp packets in his oven until they shrank to an inch square. In a workshop out by the side of his house, Avinasho taught us to make boomerangs. He showed us how to cut the right boomerang shape from four-ply wood, then file the edges in a certain way depending on how far you wanted your boomerang to whirl before it made its way back. In the late afternoon we walked back to Medina, along the bumpy B-road. We didn’t dare throw our boomerangs out over the fields in case they hit the floor on the farthest part of their arc; we would have had to risk Mr Upton’s wrath by trampling his carrots. We held on until we got to Medina, where we walked out onto the front lawn and hurled the boomerangs over the grass as far as we could. We tried to catch them, but they flew so fast, and they wheeled out so low, you could hardly see them at all against the evening sun. (Even if you did manage to catch one, we reassured each other it
would definitely hurt your hand.) Later in the week we varnished our boomerangs in the Medina carpentry shop; by the end of the week they would be lost or broken, and the next Sunday we’d head back to Avinasho’s to make new, better boomerangs with a smoother front end or a tighter curve.

  At Rajneesh School we ate communally in the main dining hall, but I still fed myself with occasional scraps from the kitchens. The boutique no longer sold halva, but by looking at the ingredients on an old packet, I discovered how to make it myself: just mix tahini and honey in a cup, with a little milk powder—my own invention—to get the same crumbly texture as the halva you could buy in the shop, and you could lick it off a spoon. I started to grow plump. On our morning runs around the Medina boundaries, I began to get hard stitches in my side. I would lag behind everyone else before sloping off to make a sandwich and a cup of halva, steal some cashews, read a book in the schoolrooms.

  The girl I had ridden the Wioska elevators with was also at Rajneesh School. One afternoon in the week after we arrived, I was standing outside the dormitory playing running games on the gravel with some other boys, when a group of girls who had been watching came over. Among them, at the back, I recognized her. One of the girls stepped forward and asked me if I remembered my friend. The group parted to show the elevator girl in her thick round glasses, propped back on her crutches, smiling. I said nothing. ‘Do you remember her?’ the girl who came forward said. ‘She says you used to play together in Cologne.’

  I looked the elevator girl up and down. She’d been my only real friend in Wioska. But I thought the other kids might tease me if they knew I had played with this bespectacled girl, who now hobbled on crutches around the Medina grounds. She smiled at me again. I turned to the other girl and shook my head. The elevator girl’s face sank. The group closed around her and carried her away.