by Tim Guest
They had trips where they came to believe they were beings from another world sent to Earth on a special mission to meet each other. UFO books began to pile up in our living room.
That summer for one final time I went to California to visit my father. As a surprise he also sent my mum a ticket; she arrived a week later. We ate peanuts out of cans. We visited the beach fair at Santa Cruz.
I had been waiting for this for ten years. For the first time since Leeds, when I was two, my mum and dad were at last here, together, with me, and without Sujan. It was terrible. For the whole week, none of us seemed to get along.
Bhagwan used to say the problem with his Indian disciples was that if they ever met God face-to-face, they’d ask him for a Cadillac. In the years after the commune ended, what Majid and I ended up coveting was a Lamborghini. I had plastered the walls of my room with posters of Italian sports cars; Majid had a Scalextric racetrack laid out among his football toys. So, reunited in our love of cars, we took to dressing up as smartly as we could, and heading down to the West End car showrooms. In the rich and leafy back streets between Green Park and Marble Arch, we tapped on the glass and let the attendants know, in our poshest voices, that ‘Pater’ was considering buying one of these ‘sports automobiles’, and had asked for our opinion. Our idea of dressing up smart involved borrowing shirts from our mothers’ lovers’ wardrobe, and going so far as to tuck them in (later I added a clipboard to the ‘disguise’). Often the attendants wouldn’t even bother unbolting their glass doors. Sometimes they gave us a handful of glossy car brochures. Every now and then they humoured us, and we got to sit in the Ferrari, or Bentley, or Rolls-Royce, or Lamborghini. Sometimes, when I got to sit in the driving seat, I might nudge Majid with my elbow, then press my palms together, roll down the window, and bow to the attendants lined up by the side of the car. We would collapse in laughter; bend over double on the leather seats, gasping for breath until we were finally asked to leave.
Once Majid borrowed his mum’s sheepskin mittens. We wore one each, and pretended they were driving gloves.
After six months at Rhyl Street I moved to Haverstock Secondary School—right round the corner from where Kalptaru had been. The corridors of Haverstock were like the corridors of Medina, tiled in dark glazed red instead of green. By then we were living in a house on the next road up from Oak Village. My journey to school passed both those places from my past—the two posts that marked the first leg of our journey.
I was a mess, a wreck. My hair was unkempt, my shoelaces were untied, my nails were never cut. On my way to school my nose was planted deep in a science fiction paperback. I looked up every now and then, to watch out for lampposts. School felt like a prison. I scribbled all over my folders, refused to cover them or to clip pages in. Everything was crumpled, blotted, covered in my thin, neglected scrawl. I covered my folders in pictures of ninja weapons—throwing stars, curved swords, a balaclava with gleaming ninja eyes—the chemical names of drugs (‘Lysergic Acid Diethylamide’); the names of Stephen King books in uncertain spellings; over and over again an occult symbol—
—that looked like a cubist line-drawing of a sour old man, but in fact spelled out, in overlapping letters, my secret sannyas name. In the playgrounds I continued to scan the ground, as I had done in Germany, for small things of value that I could keep. The most I ever found were a few pieces of small change, but it kept my eyes down, away from the past and the future.
Back at home, I was still ashamed of the feelings that music brought out in me. I refused to listen to music in my room. If my mother asked me, I told her I didn’t listen to music because I didn’t enjoy it. Later, when I bought my first tape, I hid it in a sock and listened to it only when my mother was not in the house.
I still lined up my soft toys each night in order of that night’s preference, careful not to offend any by having them too far down the line, careful not to leave any of them feeling neglected or left out. My favourites were the Snoopy, because you could change his clothes and buy new sets (his best outfit was a tennis kit with a racquet that stuck to his hand with Velcro), and the seal, whom I had managed to keep hold of through all the intervening years. When I wet the bed, I made sure each of them was clean.
Majid and I went our separate ways. By the time I moved again we’d lost touch. I had no idea where Champak or any of the other Medina kids were living. We had been each other’s consolation, and now our consolation was gone.
This was my nuclear winter. I stumbled around, wrapped in a blanket of books, in a crumbled landscape where all my friends were gone. I read books on the street. As I walked, I tensed my shoulders against the loss I knew was always coming. At home, I drew pictures of fireballs, skeletal eyes, carefully detailed hands with balls of flame at the centre, hunched silhouettes, long-jawed sabre-toothed faces with slitted yellow cat-pupils. The only brightly coloured sketch I ever drew was a big pastel piece, over a metre wide, entirely in oranges, yellows, and reds: two skeletons embracing, silhouetted against an enormous mushroom cloud, in all the colours of the sun.
On the top decks of buses I read H. P. Lovecraft—The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; At the Mountains of Madness. I loved his dark tales, old gods under ice caps, awakened to wreak havoc on the earth. I almost convinced myself they were real. I set myself the task of tracking down a copy of the dark spell book that features in all Lovecraft’s stories. I spent whole days walking up and down Charing Cross Road, going into the dustiest secondhand bookshops I could find and asking for The Necronomicon by The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. They would raise their eyebrows, shake their heads, then the doorbell would ring as I shuffled out. It was like a Yellow Pages ad. Finally I found a copy in Watkin’s Books in Cecil Court—the sign outside read SPECIALISTS IN THE OCCULT, and their sandwich board had an Egyptian carving which made me hopeful. And then I spotted a copy on the shelf. It was a mass paperback edition; I tore the Corgi logo off the spine, but as soon as I got it home and opened it to see the line drawings of ‘occult’ diagrams, I knew it was a fake. It filled me with despair.
I wanted secret powers now for some of the same reasons I wanted them back in Wioska Rajneesh, in Germany: to connect myself to society and history, to make me feel I had some noticeable effect on the world. But now there was something new. Something in me had been lost, surrendered at the altar of sannyas in exchange for what Bhagwan was offering. I was looking for an excuse to make my own brutal sacrifice.
At the commune school, we were never taught anything about history. But if you turn away from your past, you also turn away from the future.
I had left the commune, then the commune had ended. At eleven, living in London, confused about my own importance, my effect on the world, it seemed to me that maybe I had destroyed the commune. Maybe, by leaving, I had removed the foundation stone.
My mother told me recently that it was when I called her to tell her I was leaving Medina that she finally fell out of love with the commune. In a way, maybe I was right. Maybe it had been me who made it end.
That year, in an echo of the last time my life changed, the leaders of the world wrote me a letter about my name. This time, I got to choose.
Dear Sir,
Your National Insurance Records do not show a consistency with regards to your name. Please communicate in writing the name by which you wish records to refer to you:
First name:
Tim, Timothy, Swami
Middle name:
Prem, Paul
Surname:
Guest, Yogesh
Yours sincerely,
Clerk to the National Insurance Register.
Now, only my mother and Martin (once Sujan) still call me ‘Yogesh’. (Eventually, ten years later, the new world wrote to me again. In a sweet attempt to compensate for the delay, they’ve been sending the same letter ever since. ‘Dear Mr. T. P. Guest. Although you have been reminded that you are in arrears with payment of your council tax, my records show that you are not paying as required by law . .
.’)
In November 1986 my mother told me she was going away again, this time with some of the therapists from Medina and the Ranch, to a residential therapy group at The Villa, in Italy. She would be gone for a month, she said. I’d heard that before. A month later my mother returned. A month after that she went back to Italy for another six months. This time my father agreed to come back from California while she was away.
At that time my favourite teacher was Mrs Howell, a big woman, with orange hair that was just starting to turn grey, and who looked a bit like my mum. It was Mrs Howell who first encouraged me to write. It was Mrs Howell whose arms I cried in, outside the classroom in the school corridor, when my mother left for Italy a second time.
After the six months, my mother left The Villa to return to England. She and Sujan had separated; he moved to live in Holland. For the first time in ten years, I had my mother to myself. Even now that we had all left the commune, my mother’s name changes weren’t over. Earlier in the year my mother had changed her name, she told me, to Erin. I had no idea why. Now, back from The Villa, she changed her name again, to Kutuma (it rhymed with ‘tumour’). She told me she had chosen it herself; but within two months, she was Erin again. By the end of the year, she reverted to Anne, the name her family had given her, which she had first dropped ten years before. She may not have known who she was; I did. Her name never changed for me. Whenever I wanted her, I still called out: ‘Muuu-uuum!’
She went, and she went, and she went, and she went. Things changed, and we moved, and things changed again. She was Erin, Vismaya, Kutuma, Anne. He was gone. She was gone. We moved. We moved. We moved. I was Yogesh. I was Tim. We moved again.
My mother was back from Italy; my father made plans to leave England for Germany, to live with his German girlfriend. My mother planned to take over his flat. Now she was in England, my mother wanted me back. I remember sitting round the back of the flat in the cracked and cobwebbed conservatory, when they posed this question to me: which of them did I want to live with? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t choose. I thought about how much I loved my father. I thought about the distance there still was between us. Then, although I had no idea how long she would be around this time, I chose my mother.
Finally, my mother began to tell me stories again. At night, as my eyes closed, she sat by my bed and made up stories about a trio of animals who could talk. She would pause at certain moments so I could chime in with names for the creatures, and what they would do next. ‘Along came a . . .’ ‘Snail!’ ‘Called . . .’ ‘Boris!’ ‘and a . . .’ ‘Koala!’ ‘Called . . .’ ‘Kit-Kat!’
Those evenings, drifting off to sleep, my whole life felt like a dream of change and motion. Letters written, games played, goodbyes said; she was there, she wasn’t there, she was there. Each night once the story had ended I asked her not to leave me, to stay by my bed until I drifted off to sleep. After ten or fifteen minutes she would pull her hand carefully out of mine and slowly get to her feet. Each night, as she stood, I reached out and grabbed her leg. I begged her to stay for a few minutes more.
Then, one morning that December, my mother and Sujan, who was now calling himself ‘Martin’ again, bumped into each other on a bus in the centre of London. They concluded that the forces bringing them together were evidently stronger than the forces pulling them apart. They went for a coffee. Within a month Sujan was living with us again. He and I barely spoke a word.
And then, a week after he arrived, I found the article in the newspaper about the boy who had died at Ko Hsuan. At the same time my mother, too, realized we would need to go back to rediscover our history.
It was the winter of 1989. Soul II Soul was at number one with ‘Back II Life’. Now that Sujan was with her again, my mother felt we had some possibility for stability. She sat me down in our living room one evening and asked me to write a letter to her. She wanted me to write down all the bad feelings I had about her, and all that had happened between us since we left Leeds ten years before. This is what I wrote.
Dear Mum,
I was quite happy living in Lumley Mount. You dragged me off, dragged behind, not carried in your arms but merely by the umbilical cord—only because I was your obligation. You had to go on your pathetic little quest for the answer to it all while I, too alone to cry, bounced up and down, confused and hurt. The only reason I knew you were there at all was the Smarties you periodically fed me by a cold, blind hand. Now I have to sort it all out—it’s me, not you, that has to eradicate the (perfectly valid while I was young) knowledge that I am alone—there is nobody else, really. Sure, you might feel guilty every now and then, but so what? For 14 years I was alone.
Throughout my whole life you have been selfish to me. Not with sweets or pathetic little packages sent from a country I had never seen, from a mother I had never seen, but with all the things I needed: love, attention, all the standard and rather obvious maternal obligations. But most of all, time. Was I worth so little to you that all the time you could spare for me was 5 minutes to say goodnight, or 10 minutes to buy a few sweets, stick them in a box and send them to your only child, a million miles away?
For all this I hate you, for all the times I sat, so alone, all I wanted to do was cry but I could not—you had not taken the time to teach me how.
I was worthless to you, to everyone—how could I help but become worthless to myself?
After she read my letter, my mother wrote her reply.
Dear Yogesh,
When I had you I was only 26 years old. John and I were not living together but he agreed to have a child with me. Later just before you were born he moved in with me. After you were born I worked part time and so did John so we both took care of you. When you were 18 months old we separated, you then lived ½ week with me then ½ week with John. I was upset about all this but John and I didn’t seem to be able to communicate properly. As I saw it then he wouldn’t talk about his feelings. I now see my side of it too, which is I couldn’t settle down because I was too afraid of staying in one place or with one person. I felt confused & frightened a lot of the time and thought that this would get better if I did therapy groups etc. I did a few and heard about Bhagwan. I listened to his tape and felt that this man could teach me how to be more at peace with myself & life. By this time I used to sometimes worry that I was going mad. I would get into panics about myself. So I went to India for 3 months. About 4 months before I went I met Martin who came to live with us in Lumley Mount. He also used to freak out and go into depressions about himself and so he too was hoping to get out of this by becoming a sannyasin. Up until this time I wasn’t a perfect mother but I was good enough. I remember you happy & lovely. My big mistake was to move to Oak Village. At the time I thought it would help me become a better person, a happier person. It didn’t. I lost myself in a whirl of meetings & business that meant I spent less time with you. You have every right to be angry with me about this. I did something that I now see was very wrong and I regret it. It still hurts me that I did it and so deprived you of certain things you needed as a child. I have suffered more from this mistake than from many others that I made because this also hurt you. An innocent child that had no choice but to put up with being left alone too much & abandoned. I am very sorry for this though I know that it doesn’t make it hurt any less for you. But I know now we’ll get through this & end up with an even deeper relationship which will maybe be even more precious & loving because of the difficulties we have gone through. I feel there is a deep love between us even though I know you have to be angry with me for a while.
love Mum.
A week later, on 19 January 1990, Bhagwan died.
19
After Bhagwan fled America, my mother became Anne again. She built a fire in our back garden and burned her mala, her Bhagwan Box, Bhagwan’s letters, and anything else that reminded her of Bhagwan. I watched her through the kitchen window. After she burned her mala, she took a hammer to the blackened remnants of her gold mala rim. She tore up and
burned all her photos, stamped on all her Bhagwan meditation tapes. She ripped up his books, cut her red clothes into strips, and threw everything onto the fire. When the fire reached the gold of her mala rim—the gold I had tried to persuade her to prise off and give to me—the flames spat and turned green. In the sparkle of that fire, the green glow of her mala rim lighting up her face, my mother cried and cursed Bhagwan.
She told me later that the moment I telephoned her from Medina in 1985, to ask if I could leave to go to live with my father, she finally fell out of love with Bhagwan. When she burned her Bhagwan Box, she didn’t know—she won’t know until she reads this—that in Medina I rummaged through her drawers looking for her Walkman and I found the box. I prised it open. As the lid jerked back, the box slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor. For a moment, I saw a wiry grey curl drift down onto the carpet. By the time she burned it, the Bhagwan Box was empty because of me.
If the Bhagwan Boxes ever did have anything in them, then after the dream of Rajneeshpuram exploded in a shower of bombings, poisonings, murder, and neglect, little pieces of Bhagwan were burned in these boxes, in similar furnaces of disappointment, in suddenly non-communal back gardens and sinks, all over the Western world. That fire, smouldering in the peat of sannyasin resentment, seemed to spread eventually to him. When he died five years later, Bhagwan’s body was carried on a stretcher of tree branches to the Pune river. They laid him down on the ghat and watched his body burn.