by George Black
I heard later that the protest had succeeded. It was annoying to the authorities, all those angry women milling around. So the town identified another dump site, much closer to the river. The consequences were just the same.
* * *
One evening, I went down to Uttarkashi to see Ajay Puri, an intense, athletic man who wears many hats, both sacred and profane. He is a trekker, a skier, a photographer, and a hereditary priest of the town’s Vishwanath temple, which is dedicated to Lord Shiva. Its construction was paid for in 1857 by the Maharani Khaneti, Frederick Wilson’s bisexual lover. Puri is also the president of the Uttarkashi Hotel Association and owner of the Shivlinga Tourist Complex, which is named for the phallic representation of the god’s cosmic energy and is one of the smarter accommodations for pilgrims on their way to Gangotri.
Late as it was, he was still in his office, clacking away at his desktop computer and answering multiple cell phones.
This place was just as important as Varanasi, which is generally regarded as the holiest city in India, he said at last after hanging up on a call. That city’s original Sanskrit name was Kashi, and Uttarkashi means “Kashi of the North.” Shiva himself resides here, among his close friends and other celestial beings. The Himalayas themselves are gods. And significantly, this is one of only two places where the river makes a northward turn, the other being Varanasi. “All this is authentic,” he said. “This is not from my side. It is mentioned in the Skanda Purana, the biggest of the eight Puranas.”
The shivling in the Vishwanath temple, which gives Puri’s hotel its name, is no ordinary one. “It’s a natural object,” he said. “It has not been created or placed there by anyone.” Also, it leans to the south. The reason for this is that Yama, the great lord of death, once came here to carry off an eight-year-old boy. The boy resisted, clinging on to the shivling and tilting it off its vertical axis.
The important thing about Shiva’s relocation from Kashi to Uttarkashi was not only the where but also the when. He had told the sages that he would make his move at a time when India came under powerful foreign influence. That clearly referred to the time in which we were living now, the Kali Yuga, the age of the demon Kali (not to be confused with the goddess Kali), of the Mughal invasions and the East India Company and the Raj and the market economy and the forces of globalization.
“Our galaxies are in motion, and the solar system is in motion within the galaxy, and these movements are what decide the age,” Puri said. The Age of Kali is the last of the four cycles in the evolution of humanity, the culmination of its long, slow slide from virtue into vice.
During the first age, the Satya Yuga, mankind existed in a state of pure goodness. “Everything was pure. Even this chai would have been golden!” he exclaimed, holding up his cup. The Treta Yuga brought silver and the beginnings of sin. The Dvapara Yuga was an era of brass, deceit, and disease. “And today in the Kali Yuga, only 10 percent of people are good, and 90 percent are bad,” he went on, switching back and forth between animated Hindi and English. “This is the age of iron, terra-cotta, mud, and plastic. And plastic is the main thing now!”
I asked Puri when the age of Kali had begun. He answered by pulling out a fat three-ring binder filled with dense columns of figures and detailed notations. “I have extracted all this from the texts of the Vedas and the Puranas,” he said. He scanned several pages and punched some numbers into a calculator. “Kali Yuga began 5,115 years ago,” he said.
That was long before the foreigners began to arrive, of course, but they accelerated the process. Puri named some of them: first the Greeks and the Chinese, then Ibn Baṭṭūṭah and the English indigo trader William Finch, who arrived in 1608 and stayed for three years. The Frenchman François Bernier, during the reign of Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. Father António de Andrade reached the upper Ganges valley in 1624, at the head of a group of Portuguese Jesuits who planned to cross the high passes into Tibet, open a mission there, and baptize the local ruler, who declined, saying that they made it sound as if this religion of theirs might get in the way of his belief in indiscriminate fornication.
After the misadventures of the Jesuits, there was a hiatus of almost two centuries until the second wave of Englishmen arrived, the big one. The soldiers and the landscape artists, the mapmakers and botanists and zoologists, the sportsmen and the taxidermists who stuffed the animals they shot, and Frederick Wilson, the Raja of Harsil, who cut down the ancient and sacred deodars and turned them into railway sleepers.
And now the descent into vice had given us the smoldering garbage dump in the ravine below Sangrali, which Puri saw as emblematic of the age of Kali. “People never used to think that the river could be for anything but getting your water and worshipping,” he said. “But as we started all this so-called developing, we left our old traditions behind. Fifty years ago, we never saw this kind of thing, because people still had faith. In those times, people were not money-fuckers as they are today.”
And when would the Kali Yuga end, I asked him, this era of filth, vice, and degradation? He went to his ledger again, fingers flying from line to line. “It will last a total of four lakh and thirty-two thousand years,” he said at last. Indians count in crores, multiples of ten million, and lakhs, which are one hundred thousand. So the age of Kali would last another four hundred and thirty-two thousand years. He grinned. “As you see, we still have a long way to go.”
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Despite Ajay Puri’s gallows humor, the age of Kali was also the age of peace, love, and understanding, and rootless young Westerners in search of illumination had been seeing the Ganges in that light for more than half a century. Few of them made it as far upstream as Uttarkashi, let alone Gangotri. Instead, they clustered in the ashrams and cheap hostels in the holy city of Rishikesh, yoga capital of the world, and, just across the river by a narrow hanging bridge that the British had built, the township of Swargashram.
Swargashram means “the rest house of heaven.” It is also the title of a soft-core porn movie with the subtitle Story of a Dirty Mind Guru, which is about a lascivious swami who seduces his naïve female devotees.
It was drizzling when I got to Swargashram, and there were slops of orange shit all over the muddy slope from the sadhus who squatted under rough shelters between the riverbank and the mossy walls of the abandoned ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. From the hillside above, there was the racket of teenage boys and young men on a pilgrimage to Haridwar, the Gateway to God, a dozen more miles downriver. Most of them were wearing identical orange T-shirts with screen-printed images of Shiva. Many were sottish with bhang, the slimy concoction of marijuana, yogurt, ghee, and spices, that was being ladled out from makeshift stalls. Others were measuring out their journey in body lengths, crawling along on their stomachs like inchworms. Music was blasting out of loudspeakers that went to eleven. A man told me that the song was in praise of Shiva and his fondness for ganja. The lyrics said, “I don’t want sweet lassi; I just want cannabis.”
There were rumors that the government was planning to restore the Maharishi’s ashram and open it to tourists, but when I got there, the gates were still padlocked, and a sign said No Entry in English and Hindi. The walls were topped with broken glass and rusty barbed wire. But I found a place where the upper part of the wall had crumbled away and hoisted myself across and onto a slippery, overgrown path lined with pink-painted concrete benches and windowless, beehive-shaped chambers where the Beatles had gone to meditate and wean themselves off drugs and ended up writing most of the White Album.
* * *
The idea of going to see the Maharishi—the Great Sage—came from Pattie Boyd. She had met George Harrison in 1964 on the set of A Hard Day’s Night and married him two years later. (Eventually his friend Eric Clapton would steal her away.) In 1965, the Beatles made Help!, whose plot revolved around a comical Indian cult. George found a sitar among the props, noodled around on it, added it to a song called “Norwegian Wood.” Ravi Sh
ankar heard the recording, said it sounded like an Indian villager trying to play the violin, and offered to give George lessons so that he could “feel the sweet pain of trying to reach out for the Supreme,” like John Coltrane, who had already fallen under the sitar master’s spell.
George and Pattie went to India, spending six weeks in Bombay, Kashmir, and Varanasi. Pattie joined the Maharishi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement. George’s own spirituality became deep and lasting. In August 1967, just after the release of Sgt. Pepper, the Maharishi came to London to give a talk in the ballroom at the Hilton Hotel. The Beatles went at Pattie’s urging, all but Ringo, whose wife, Maureen, had just given birth to their second child.
The Maharishi had grown up in Allahabad, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna. He studied physics, worked in a factory, found a guru, retreated for a while to the Himalayas, and developed a set of techniques he called Transcendental Meditation, or TM. One of his first pupils was a German cement manufacturer. “He taught the method to all his employees and thereby quadrupled the production of cement,” the Maharishi said. Before long, he was giving classes under the redwoods in California and opening a Swiss bank account. When the Beatles met him at the Hilton, he was about to turn fifty. A tiny man with a white beard, he was described as resembling “a beatific nanny goat.” He had a high, squeaky voice, and his laughter was like the twittering of birds. A close friend of John Lennon’s said that the Maharishi “giggled and chattered like a mouse on speed.” The Beatles were smitten.
Two days later, all four of them, together with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, boarded a train for Bangor, Wales, where the Maharishi was to give a weeklong workshop. For the first time in years, they traveled without their manager, Brian Epstein, which felt, John said, “like walking around without your trousers on.” At a press conference, the Beatles pledged their allegiance to “the Big M,” as George called him, and vowed to give up drugs. The Maharishi gave each of them his own mantra, “a password to get through into the other world.” George assumed it would be in Sanskrit, but it turned out to be in English. He never revealed what it was, of course, although he did say enigmatically that it could be found in the lyrics of “I Am the Walrus.” Expert-texpert? Semolina pilchard? Crabalocker fishwife? Pornographic priestess? Goo-goo-ga-joob?
But the Beatles were forced to cut short their Bangor trip when Epstein overdosed on a lethal mixture of barbiturates and alcohol. The Maharishi comforted them, but George said that it was okay, life would go on, because there was no such thing as death anyway. The Maharishi was now “the Beatles’ Guru,” appearing on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Look, and Life. Six months later, the Fab Four were on a plane to New Delhi, en route to Swargashram. Philip Goldberg, the preeminent historian of Indian spirituality in the West, called it “the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness.”
* * *
The ashram covered fourteen acres and was paid for with a gift of $100,000 from the American tobacco heiress and socialite Doris Duke. The Beatles lived in Block Six, which was more comfortably appointed than the other living quarters, with Western-style toilets, bathtubs, four-poster beds, and electric fires for the chilly nights of late winter. It was impossible, wandering around the ruins, to figure out where Block Six had been. Walls had been blown out as if by a bomb blast. Roofing had been scavenged. Trees grew up through the floors. Occasionally, through gaps in the dense forest, you could catch a glimpse of the temples and ashrams of Rishikesh on the far bank of the river. Accounts of the Beatles’ stay described a jungle full of elephants and leopards and tigers and monkeys and peacocks, but I saw none of them. The damp woods seemed dead apart from the flitting of black crows and green parakeets. I kept an eye open for cobras in the undergrowth.
Nearby, there was an old-fashioned pillar box, its red paint peeling and its rusted door hanging open. Cynthia Lennon had hoped that the trip to India would quiet John’s demons and repair their stumbling marriage. But within two weeks, he had moved into a separate room, claiming that it helped his meditation. Often he snuck down to the mailbox to send letters to Yoko Ono.
Other celebrities and demi-celebrities came and went. There was Donovan, Britain’s pallid answer to Bob Dylan, sweet-faced and sweet-voiced. There was Mia Farrow, recently estranged from Frank Sinatra. “I’m flying from flower to flower, looking for a place where people will let me be,” she said, but her experience of the place was mixed. One day she wrote a telegram to Sinatra that read FED UP WITH MEDITATION. AM LEAVING ASHRAM. WILL PHONE FROM DELHI, but she was persuaded not to send it for fear that it would leak to the press. There was Lewis Lapham, the patrician editor of Harper’s Magazine. There was Mike Love, the lead singer of the Beach Boys, who wore a floor-length coat and a fur hat and communicated, Lapham said, in variants of “yeah” and “wow.”
Farther along the path, I came upon a larger building, still mostly intact, that I guessed might have been the Maharishi’s own quarters. It had two stories and was set back from the path. Near the flagstone walkway leading to the house was a small shrine with two black Shiva lingams. The Beatles had come here for private lessons once the day’s organized program of lectures and meditation was over.
I stooped under the low doorway of one of the beehive chambers and went inside. The Maharishi had urged his students to sustain their meditation for four or five hours at a stretch. John eventually pushed it to fourteen. I imagined them sitting silently in the damp, claustrophobic space with songs taking shape in their heads: most of the White Album, a couple for Abbey Road, a few reserved for later solo albums. Early in their stay, John wrote “I’m So Tired,” a response to his strung-out, drugged-out state. George wrote “Piggies.” Paul wrote “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” after watching two monkeys do just that. Even Ringo weighed in with his first composition, a cheerful little rockabilly number called “Don’t Pass Me By.”
Some of the songs, like “Dear Prudence,” drew directly on their experiences in the ashram. Prudence Farrow was Mia’s younger sister, still reeling from a drug-induced meltdown that involved institutionalization and electroshock therapy. For much of the time, she remained in her room, near-comatose, drooling, unable to feed herself. At night, she screamed like one of the wild peacocks in the forest. “Dear Prudence,” John wrote, “won’t you come out to play?”
I heard footsteps outside. It was a young American who had also climbed over the wall. He told me he was a student at the University of Texas in Austin. He was tall, clean-cut, and good-looking, wearing khakis and a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. No one could have looked less like a hippie. He might have been on his way to a summer internship at a law firm. He was too young to remember the Beatles, of course, but he knew all the songs.
We walked over to the lecture and meditation hall, the largest building in the complex. It could seat two hundred, and the Maharishi’s students gathered here three times a day to listen to him dispense his wisdom from a gold cloth-covered sofa on a raised platform, surrounded by potted plants. This was where he had organized the party to celebrate George’s birthday, his twenty-fifth. So many garlands were draped around the birthday boy’s neck that he looked as if was wearing a life jacket, Lapham wrote. The Maharishi said he felt the vibrations of angels and that the arrival of the Beatles heralded the rebirth of mankind on the banks of the Ganges. His birthday gift to George was a globe turned upside-down. This was the state of the world; it needed to be corrected. George said he would do his best.
The walls of the lecture hall were covered with graffiti from earlier visitors.
BEATLES 4 EVER
LOVE TRUTH
ONE LOVE
I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE AS YOU ARE ME AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER
SHE LOVES YOU, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH
LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS. LSD
I SEND THIS WITH PEAS AND LOVE
IMAGINE. IS IT REALLY SO DIFFICLT
CNOW YOUR SELF BY HAPPY
And wrapped ar
ound a heart in a swirl of psychedelic colors, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE.
* * *
But of course it wasn’t all peace and love. Paul was affable and open to the experience, but his girlfriend, Jane Asher, remained detached, even a little cynical. Ringo, who had brought a suitcase full of Heinz baked beans and eggs as a hedge against spicy food, left after ten days. He missed the Mersey and he missed his cats and he wondered why, if you were going to sit for hours in the lotus position, you couldn’t do so equally well at home. He and Maureen were sick of checking the bathtub for scorpions. She hated the flies and spiders. The Maharishi told her that they would cease to bother her if she became a traveler in the world of pure consciousness, but she found this an unpersuasive line of argument. She was a hairdresser, not a mystic.
And there were scandals, real or invented. They were rock stars, and the press couldn’t get near them, so inevitably there were rumors. Newspapers in Delhi carried headlines that read WILD ORGIES AT THE ASHRAM and BEATLE’S WIFE RAPED AT ASHRAM.
Some of the accusations were directed at the Maharishi himself. Mia Farrow said he had made inappropriate advances, although others reassured her that his stroking her hair was just part of the process of spiritual enlightenment. The more serious allegations came from a young man named Magic Alex, a self-described electronics and light-show wizard who had insinuated himself into the Beatles’ inner circle. He told tales of an impressionable young blond nurse from California, who had been told several times by the Maharishi to lie back and let his spiritual power flow into her through pathways more intimate than holding her hand and caressing her hair.
George refused to believe a word of it, but John, who had adopted Magic Alex as a kind of court sorcerer, took the stories at face value and packed his bags in a rage, leaving a large photo of the Maharishi ripped in half on the floor of his room. The episode produced “Sexy Sadie,” the most notorious of all the songs they wrote at the ashram. “What have you done? You’ve made a fool of everyone.” John originally called it “Maharishi,” but George persuaded him to change it, still defending “the Big M” and nervous about libel.