by Tim Guest
I knocked on Chandan’s door. When she answered, I told her I wanted to leave. She said, ‘You’d better come in.’ Matthew made to follow me, but Chandan told him to wait outside. She closed the door. She asked me if I was sure. I said yes. She asked me again if I was sure.
I had the feeling Matthew was listening at the keyhole. I told her again that I wanted to leave. She asked me why. I said that I just did. She asked me, had I thought this through. I looked at the door, then at her, and then said yes. She asked me where I wanted to go. I said to live with my father in California. I sat there for a while, in the soft white armchair in Chandan’s office, looking at the dark brown wood of the desks, the wall panels, and the thick carpet, then looking out of the window hoping to see someone I knew on the front lawn. No one was there. Then, Chandan said that if that was what I wanted, I should go. I sat there for a little while longer. Then I asked if I could have permission to make a long-distance call to my mother. Chandan nodded and pointed towards the phone in the corner. I picked it up and waited again, looking at the dark brown panels on the wall. Then, from memory, I dialled my mother in Germany. I was connected first time. I asked to be put through to the laundries where I knew she worked. She wasn’t there, I was told, and the voice at the other end of the line asked me, with a German accent, if I could call back later. I said no, can someone go and get her, it’s her son. After a moment’s silence, they said OK. I waited. Pretty soon my mother came on the line. She sounded surprised. I told her that I had decided to leave. I asked for her help. Could she call my father and ask him to send me a plane ticket to San Francisco? She said, ‘Yes, of course.’ There was a sound like a surprised swallow or a sob. I felt like crying, too. Then she said again, yes, of course. I said I loved her, and then I hung up.
Within two weeks I left the commune for the final time. I was ten years old.
I still have some of the books I surrendered to the commune library when I first entered Rajneesh School. I have them now because in the days before I left the commune, I went to the kids’ library, walked along the shelves, and took back all the books I knew to be mine. One by one I picked them out, peeled the little pieces of yellow and green-striped tape from some of the spines, and put the books into a creased black leather holdall. As I picked out the books the light in the room shifted. I looked up. One of the teachers, a man with a moustache, was standing in the doorway. He commented on how honest I was being by only taking what was mine. I thought, how do you know?
Later that day, on my last cleaning worship, I was on polishing duty in a room off a back hall on the second floor of the Main House. When I knew no one was watching, I unscrewed a little brass knob from one of the cupboards and slipped it into my pocket. Later, in bed, I folded it among my clothes. Even then, I knew Medina was something I would need to find ways to remember.
Majid and I were still best friends. We had even nearly done the blood-brother ritual. Some of the older boys had done it, but someone mentioned you could get blood poisoning, and neither Majid nor I were sure whether that was better or worse than gangrene, so we gave it a miss. We did, though, decide to mark the occasion of my leaving. That night, my last night in Medina, Majid and I got hold of some black socks. We cut holes in the end of each sock and slipped them under our pillows. I had borrowed a torch from somewhere, and Majid had a Swiss Army knife. We had a plan. By this time I had persuaded the people who ran the school to put me in the dormitories downstairs in the old Kids’ Hut, with the other old Medina kids. So we planned that, after lights out, I would get into his bed, or he into mine. We would whisper until late, maybe doze lightly for a few hours, until the very middle of the night when we would wake up, slip out of bed, pull the socks over our heads like balaclavas, and, while everyone was asleep, spend the night wandering through the grounds and the Main House. It was to be our last and greatest NATLASU. We had argued for an hour about when exactly the middle of the night was. I said twelve, because it had to be—that was the middle number. He said four, because everyone would definitely be asleep. As a compromise we agreed on two o’clock.
But when the time came, I slept in my bed, and he slept in his. We were still planning to do the NATLASU, though, except I closed my eyes and he closed his. Suddenly the sun was up, and it was time for me to go.
The week before, I had persuaded one of the designers to buy me a roll of black-and-white film on a visit into the local town. He warned me that although black-and-white film was cheaper to buy, it would be more expensive than colour to develop. I said I wanted my photos in black-and-white. It seemed more appropriate for photos of a departure.
Early that morning I went out onto the front lawn with a camera borrowed from the design studio. I wanted to say goodbye properly, not rush it like the hundreds of quick goodbyes—over telephones, by bedsides, half-hanging out of cars—that had coloured my time in the commune. I could see clearly how the photos would look when they were developed. A grainy shot up the trunk of the big oak, branches thicker than my waist spread out high above me, thick with the effort of centuries. Click. The Main House, seen up the front lawn from the ha-ha, squatting low on its man-made hill with the white walls and black beams still bright with dew. Click. The tiny frog I found struggling through the wet grass by the lake and placed on my small palm, his minute fingers stretched as far as they could out over mine, his red eyes staring straight at the single eye of the camera staring back. Click. I took the last photo from the back of the mini-van as we crunched our way down the gravel drive past the old spiral wall. The dark leaves of the trees, the nettles and long grass, the moss and dandelions that grew out of the crumbling brick, all scattered into pieces by the rear window already wet with the rain that had begun to fall lightly. These photos would be a hedge against loss: something to protect me against whatever was coming. They were promises of my history, and a charm for the future. Exact records of the light which fell on us at the moment I departed.
17
In Germany, my mother’s dreams had driven her to distraction. She had been banned by Sheela from running therapy groups; she was given the most menial tasks. She washed dishes. She cleaned floors. She worked as a cloakroom attendant—just long enough to learn the German words for coat, hat, and umbrella. She worked as a cab driver for Rajneesh Buddhafield Transport. She never got used to driving on the right-hand side of the road, or hurtling up and down the no-speed-limit Autobahn in the pouring rain. She asked to be transferred, but the more she asked, the longer her driving missions became.
In my mother’s isolation, her misery grew. Sujan, who was not being punished, seemed to actually enjoy Wioska; he had left my mother for another woman. At Wioska each sannyasin adult was allowed two black plastic bags full of stuff. My mother kept within her limits, but occasionally the cleaners would rummage through her belongings and ‘zen’—i.e., confiscate—her favourite clothes anyway. Without me or Sujan or the therapy work she loved, or even any semblance of privacy, my mother sank into despair. Each day after the Gachchamis, she took longer and longer to raise her head from the floorboards. She asked to see Ramateertha, the Wioska coordinator (known among the more rebellious German sannyasins as ‘der Bishop von Köln—the Bishop of Cologne). She told him how she was suffering, and she pleaded with him for leniency. He said no. He told her she had a lot to learn. He told her she was unhappy because she was clinging to her ego. He told her she had to rid herself of her will to power, and cure herself of her rebellious lack of surrender.
Bhagwan had begun a new series of discourses called ‘The Rebel’, in which he talked about his own rebellious childhood, and the importance of refusing to submit to any external authority. After watching the videos of these talks, my mother dawdled reluctantly to the transport department to begin her evening shift. She cursed herself for not having the inner authority to stand up for herself.
As a commune cab driver, she was sent on regular trips to Cologne train station and Frankfurt airport, to pick up job-lots of shell-shocked sanny
asins from the Ranch. She recognized many—they were people who had been labelled rebels by the Ranch administration, now sent to live and work in Germany. In their company she found some comfort. She asked how they were, what was happening at the Ranch; some told her everything. Others seemed less keen to talk about why they had been sent away.
My mother and these rebel sannyasins began to share a table at the Wioska canteen. They laughed and joked about the people they remembered, the strange changes that were taking place at Rajneeshpuram. One Ma, a recent arrival, told my mother she had seen the back of her filing department card. She knew the coded symbols; it said my mother should never be allowed to run groups again.
After one particularly raucous lunch, Ramateertha issued a new decree: the rebel group’s negative laughter was disrupting the Buddhafield’s energy. English-speaking sannyasins were no longer to sit together in the canteen.
And then one evening two weeks after I left Medina, the transport department sent my mother to drive Ramateertha to Cologne station. When they arrived, Ramateertha left the car, then returned with Jayananda, Sheela’s husband. Ramateertha asked my mother to drive them back to Wioska Rajneesh.
In the back, Ramateertha and Jayananda began to talk. My mother could not believe what she heard. Sheela and her whole entourage had disappeared, Jayananda said. In secret they had taken one of the Ranch planes and left Rajneeshpuram for Switzerland.
Staring into the mirror, my mother was hanging on Jayananda’s every word. She glanced back to the road just in time to swerve around the back of a truck and into the fast lane of the Autobahn. Horns honked, and it took her a minute to squeeze back into the right lane. Ramateertha leaned forward to put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, and told her just to concentrate on the driving: he would explain everything to her when they arrived. After my mother dropped Jayananda off, they pulled over and Ramateertha explained the situation. It was true, he said. Sheela had left. She had taken money and people and fled the country. It would all be made public the next day. He asked my mother to keep it a secret.
In shock, she drove to the Cologne disco; she went to the juice bar, where Sujan worked. She told him: Sheela’s left. She went into the disco and up to the bar, where the bartender saw the look on her face and gave her a free drink. She told him. Soon a crowd gathered. They all repeated the same thing: Sheela had left the Ranch. Everyone was bewildered. Sheela was so powerful, so unstoppable. And now she was gone.
A few hours later, at the Ranch, ten thousand miles west of Cologne, the skies were still light. Bhagwan walked out into the Rajneesh Mandir auditorium, faced the crowd with his namaste bow, and announced that Sheela, along with a dozen of the Rajneeshpuram commune leaders, had left and fled to Europe. There was a huge communal gasp. Bhagwan called them a ‘gang of fascists’, who had attempted to poison his doctor, his dentist, Laxmi, the Jefferson County DA, and The Dalles water system. Sheela, he said, had mismanaged commune finances; she had stolen a fortune in sannyasin money.
In the days that followed, rumours spread that Sheela had skimmed over $10 million from the Rajneeshpuram accounts. Bhagwan made daily appearances, and each day he added to the charges. To destroy the Rajneeshpuram land-use zoning records, Sheela had robbed and set fire to the Wasco County planning office. She had planned to crash an explosives-laden plane into The Dalles courthouse. Sheela and her inner circle, Bhagwan said, had created a Stalinist regime on the Ranch, bugging rooms and telephones, bugging even his own bedroom. They had tried to kill or sicken him with substances prepared in a secret tunnel behind Sheela’s house.
‘Things will be different,’ he said, ‘now the fascists have left and their crimes have been exposed. Sannyasins will dance and sing, they will talk to their families and outside friends again; they will make peace with their neighbours and give Antelope back to its rightful owners.’
But finally—amazingly, considering their appetite for celebration—no one wanted to dance and sing. His protestations were sounding increasingly hollow. Most sannyasins did not quite believe that Bhagwan had nothing to do with what had been happening. The US government agreed; it stepped up its investigations.
Bhagwan appeared daily, embellishing his story. In one announcement he joked Sheela had left because of jealousy. ‘I never make love to my secretary,’ he said. Another day he declared it was his power she was jealous of. ‘Sheela was not much when she met me,’ Bhagwan said. There was a long pause. ‘A waitress in a hotel.’ A week later, he talked about what would happen now that the regime had shifted. Meetings were arranged where people could express their anger with Sheela and her cohorts. Rajneesh City was to return to its former name of Antelope. ‘Rajneeshism’ had been Sheela’s invention, he said. He was not a religious leader but a friend. He urged his sannyasins to destroy any remnants of sannyas as a religion. They no longer needed to wear red and orange clothes. That weekend at the Ranch there was a bonfire of five thousand copies of Rajneeshism; some sannyasins threw their ceremonial red robes on the flames. (There were bonfires in Germany, too. My mother stayed away; burning books made her very uncomfortable.) In a subsequent announcement Bhagwan chided his sannyasins for so easily giving up their attachment to him. The red clothes and malas were swiftly reinstated.
As the outrageous extremes of the inner circle came to light, it became clear the previous regime had finally collapsed. Some of the sannyasins my mother had picked up from Frankfurt and Cologne, who had been reluctant to discuss the reason for their transfer to Wioska, began to talk. There were confessions of further plots: bombings, poisonings, the use of false AIDS diagnoses to silence people who spoke out against the inner circle. One sannyasin man, who had been Sheela’s lover, said she had asked him to fly a plane over Portland and drop a bomb on the town hall. He refused; Sheela—reluctant to excommunicate her old lover—had him banished to Cologne.
In the last week of September Ramateertha called my mother in Germany with a personal message from Bhagwan. Bhagwan said it had been a mistake to stop her running therapy groups. He said it had been part of Sheela’s manipulations. Ramateertha apologized for his own behaviour, too: he had been told to treat my mother like a rebel who needed to be kept in her place. He had been unduly harsh. She was now free to run groups and sessions, and she should take some time to see what she wanted to do. If she was into the idea, Ramateertha said, he would like her to go back to London to set up another commune in the UK.
A colossal weight had been lifted from my mother’s shoulders. It took her all of a minute to decide what she wanted. She packed her bags, and by nightfall she was on a train heading for the ferry port, to bring her back to London.
Bhagwan’s lawyers could not hold off the US government for long. On 2 October search warrants and subpoenas for a hundred sannyasins were served. Federal investigators headed down the one-lane dust-road into the Rajneeshpuram valley. In case of resistance National Guard troops and helicopters were put on twenty-four-hour standby, but sannyasins opened the gates and let the Feds in. Bhagwan showed investigators wiretaps in the phone system, hotel rooms, and Jesus Grove. They found some papers—the Shit Lists; a plan to steadily reduce the amount of food in every commune’s menu rota. Bhagwan took them to the secret tunnel under Sheela’s apartment, where they found syringes, dead mice in cages, HIV-infected blood, CIA guerrilla tactic handbooks including Deadly Substances and How to Kill—and a lavender hot-tub.
At the Ranch, near the end, it wasn’t just the phones that were tapped. Microphone wires hidden inside specially hollowed copies of Bhagwan’s discourses were distributed throughout his private quarters. In order that his every word of wisdom would be captured for the benefit of future generations, or so they were told, a rota of trusted sannyasins from ‘Edison’, the electronics temple, was set up to eavesdrop on the guru twenty-four hours a day. No one in the inner circle was surprised by what the mikes picked up; but all the worker sannyasins on the rota were shocked at this glimpse into their guru’s private life. Bhagwan missed India
; while the dream of a sannyasin city became a sump around him, he watched videos of Indian films through the afternoons. In the evenings he and Vivek argued. She shouted: ‘You don’t love me anymore, why don’t you love me? Why don’t you make love to me?’ The microphones picked up the sound of something thrown in the kitchen. He threw something back—a book, a shoe—and muttered: ‘Shut up, woman. I am trying to watch television. Always you are moaning.’
In Rajneeshpuram City Hall, a taskforce of seventy local, state, and federal law enforcement officers began gathering and sorting through the evidence. The task wasn’t easy. They asked, where is Satya Puja? Who is this Shanti Bhadra? The administrators reached into their filing cabinets, pulled out a fistful of cards, and said, which one? We have five. And four Shanti Bodhras. And one Shanti B. Identities changed, people were confused with one another, people disappeared. One federal investigator likened it to a vast criminal conspiracy, where no one used their original names. The maze of related Rajneesh corporations—Rajneesh Humanities Trust, Rajneesh Investment Corporation, Rajneesh Legal Services, Rajneesh Medical Corporation, Rajneesh Neo-Sannyas International Commune—was almost as confusing. There was even discussion of invoking organized crime laws that would implicate every sannyasin administrator in the crimes. Meanwhile, Bhagwan was making plans to leave. On 23 October a federal grand jury, convened on behalf of the INS, issued a thirty-five-count indictment charging Bhagwan, Sheela, and six other disciples with conspiracy to evade immigration laws. Sannyasin lawyers asked the attorney, Charles Turner, if Bhagwan could surrender in Portland. No deal was struck that day or the next. On Sunday night, 26 October, two chartered Learjets left Rajneeshpuram, filing flight plans for Salt Lake City, Pueblo, Colorado, then on to Charlotte, North Carolina. Two sannyasin women were waiting at Charlotte, with two more jets chartered for Bermuda.