My Life in Orange Read online

  Contents

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  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright © by Tim Guest 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Photograph on page 25 © Yorkshire Post Newspapers Ltd

  Photographs on pages 86, 102, 112, 121, 134, 136, 192, 230 © David Hargreaves Limited

  Photograph on page 252 by Tom Treick © The Oregonian

  First published in the U.K. by Granta Books, 2004

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Guest, Tim, 1975–

  My life in orange/Tim Guest.—1st Harvest ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Harvest Original.”

  1. Guest, Tim, 1975– . 2. Rajneeshees—Biography. I. Title.

  BP605.R344G84 2005

  299'.93—B22 2004052603

  ISBN 0-15-603106-X

  eISBN 978-0-544-15161-1

  v1.0216

  1

  I have photographs of my mother leading a commune parade down Fleet Street. I have photos of me curled up on a commune beanbag reading a commune library book. I have photos of the commune kids running three-legged races on the front lawn; photos of us in maroon body-warmers, tugging each other around on sledges over the frozen waters of the commune lake.

  I have brochures, too, designed and printed on the commune printing presses, that list the therapy and meditation groups on offer at the commune. I even have copies of commune videos, made to promote the new lifestyle we were pioneering on the cutting edge of consciousness and out in the middle of the Suffolk countryside. I have another video, made by the BBC, with early footage from the Ashram in India. People saying ‘beautiful’; people doing t’ai chi; people naked in padded rooms, hitting each other with fists and pillows. I have copies of the newspapers that were hand-printed in the commune design studios, the photos silk-screened, the headlines hand-applied in Letraset letters. In these newspapers there are interviews with the commune’s leading spiritual pioneers, written by other commune residents in the zany language of the time.

  I even have some evidence that there was family life before the commune. Photos of me back in 1978, sulking on the steps of our house in Leeds, clutching a Snoopy doll and two stuffed monkeys, just a month before we dyed all our clothes orange.

  This evidence has taken me years to gather together. I can look at these artefacts now, and see myself; but in the late 1980s, a teenager living with my mother in North London after the communes had ended, I had no evidence of our history. In a small fire out in our back garden my mother burned her photos, her orange clothes, her mala necklace, with its 108 sandalwood beads and locket with a picture of Bhagwan. Despite my pleas to let me sell it and keep the money, she even burned the bright gold rim she had paid a commune jeweller to fix around her mala locket, in the later, more style-conscious commune years. A week after the fire, I borrowed a pair of pliers, prised the silver rim off my own mala, and threw the beads away.

  I had no other evidence of my commune childhood. I had lost touch with the other commune kids. My mother never talked about the commune—or if she did, I refused to reply. We had both stopped using the names Bhagwan had given us. In our cupboards there was no longer a single red or orange item of clothing. Sometimes it seemed the only evidence of the past was in the shape of my body: the tough skin on the soles of my feet, from years of walking barefoot over gravel. The tight tendons in my calf, from a lifetime of standing on tiptoes, looking for my mother in an orange crowd.

  Then, in January 1990, when I was fourteen, in the back of the newspaper on my mother’s kitchen table I found an article about the commune. I tore it out, folded it, put it in my back pocket. For the next month I carried the clipping everywhere. At school and on buses I would pull it out, read it, fold it, and put it back. I carried that newspaper article until it was too tattered to read; still, I carried it in my back pocket for another two weeks, until finally I left it in the pocket of my jeans and put them in the wash and it was gone.

  The article, from The Times, was headlined MINISTER ACTS AFTER INQUEST ON SCHOOLBOY.

  A boy was found hanged after a row during a clothes-swapping game with girls at the Ko Hsuan private boarding school, Devon, an inquest was told today.

  The school, where some teenage boys and girls share the same bedroom, is organised on communal lines and follows the teachings of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

  Nicholas Shultz, aged 13, fell out with a girl he had a crush on because she would not let him wear her clothes. About half an hour later Nicholas was found hanging from a rope swing in the grounds.

  I was convinced I knew that swing and the tree it hung from, a great spindly oak in the forest out near the commune boundaries—but I also knew I was mistaken. The commune I remembered had already closed. But this school, Ko Hsuan in Devon, was a continuation of my commune. I knew the teacher, Sharna, who told The Times that thirteen-year-old boys and girls shared bedrooms because ‘the kids were mature and totally trustworthy’. I knew some of the Ko Hsuan kids from my own years in those mixed dormitories. I also knew the loneliness of that boy, whose sorrow did not quite fit into the commune’s decade-long dream of laughter and of celebration. I could feel that same, familiar sorrow, deep in my chest like an old bruise, but I had no idea of the origins of my sadness. When I read the clipping I remembered there was a reason why I was this way: isolated, strange, shabby, and alone.

  I carried that clipping around with me because I finally had one single piece of concrete evidence: at last, something outside of me existed to confirm it had all taken place. I treasured the clipping because it was a single piece of ballast: something to hold me to the ground, to make my history real. I carried that article around because I knew the boy hanging from the swing could have been me.

  2

  I was always trying to catch my mother’s eye.

  Even in the few photos I found she is mostly looking up, at the camera or at some point in the higher heavens only she can see. I am never quite in her line of sight. You can see her in photographs from the time, standing square on, her arms folded in a habitual attempt to disrupt restrictive bourgeois conditioning and the sexist division of labour. Her hair is tied back with a peasant shawl, in Marxist solidarity. You can’t see her colours, but I’ll fill them in: her skin is pale pink; fawn freckles spatter her face; the hair that spirals out from under her shawl—hair she used to iron as a child, but she has recently begun to let spiral into a bush about her head—is a bright, startling red.

  My mother surrendered herself to the world without a second thought. She sacrificed herself to the gods, and in time, because I was carried in her arms, I was laid out on the altar, too.

  In the years since the communes, I have learned her history. She was born into a Catholic
family. Her mother was the seventh child; only two of the others survived beyond the age of five. ‘Life is hard, Anne, don’t you forget it,’ her mother would say if she caught her daydreaming instead of peeling potatoes. My mother remembers chasing vans down cobbled streets to pick up fallen pieces of coal. Her family were devout; through daily Bible readings they passed the religious fervour on to her. At the age of eight my mother read a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet about the many trials of the journey to sainthood; she decided then and there she wanted to become a saint. Like her favourite St Margaret Mary, who opted to stay alive and suffer the tribulations of the world instead of entering heaven, she was convinced it was her duty to redeem the world at the expense of her own suffering. Even God hinted so, when, at fourteen, she prayed to him for a sign; that day at Mass, when she opened her Bible, a Carmelite verse from St Teresa of Lisieux fluttered to the ground. ‘I desire to reserve nothing for myself, but to freely and most willingly sacrifice myself and all that is mine to thee.’ My mother took this as an article of faith; she was obliged to suffer. Each evening, after dipping her hands in the holy water stoup by her bed, she rearranged the wooden blocks under her bedsheets to mortify her flesh.

  But despite her best efforts—and to the great loss of nuns the world over—pleasure crept into her life. At a school dance, out of sight of the nuns in the crush of the dance floor, a boy kissed her then took her outside. She discovered the delights of sex; it felt to her like the same ecstasy she’d felt praying at the feet of the crucifix. Listening to records at another boy’s house, she was passed a joint, and she discovered drugs. She read Jung and Marx, discovered psycho-political rebellion, and sneaked off after school to sell International Socialist outside factory gates—until she was called into a disciplinary committee, for distracting the workers from the class struggle by wearing a miniskirt. She was torn between her yearnings for pleasure—through sex, drugs, and rock and roll—and for paradise—through politics, psychology, and religion. She kept the miniskirt. By age seventeen she also carried a brunette wig in her handbag, to disguise herself on her way to the confessional booth.

  My mother turned nineteen in 1968, and she was a wilful child of her time. She experimented with sex and with drugs, then with sex and drugs together. The first child in her family to go to university, she studied Psychology; she became angry about the way Catholicism had co-opted her sexuality into religious fervour. She split with the church. She took LSD and saw God—but not the Catholic one. A week later she had a flashback, saw huge mouths coming out of the walls. She dug the Stones, preferred the Beatles, and she knew how to do the Twist. She made a pilgrimage to the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference at the Roundhouse in London, where in a talk called ‘The Obvious’ the existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing spoke about how what looks insane can in another context seem sane. (‘Someone is gibbering away on his knees, talking to someone who is not there,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s praying.’) To my mother, it was a revelation (and not just because, after the talk, Laing invited my mother home). Salvation, she saw, lay in understanding, not in ideology. She went in search of it. By the time I was born, my mum was twenty-six; she had been married and divorced. After her divorce came through, she had driven from Sheffield to Nottingham in her wood-panelled Morris Minor, crying all the way, to be with her family. Her search for understanding had already taken her far beyond what her parents understood. She had separated from her husband; she was no longer a Catholic. She was on the road to hell, and they were frightened for her soul. When she arrived, in tears, her mother stood in the doorway and refused to embrace her, telling her instead she should move back in with her husband. She realized she had to choose between her family and herself; she chose her freedom. It broke her heart. By the time I arrived my mother had moved through a series of communal households—Marxist, Marxist-Feminist, Alternative Socialist—and in each one she had argued, from different basic principles, over whose turn it was to do the washing-up. My birth, out of wedlock, brought the beginnings of a reunion with her mother. (‘I want to hear about Tim,’ her mother told her, ‘but I want to hear nothing about your life.’) Now, however, I was wholly dependent on her and she felt depressed, weighed down by the responsibilities of having a child. She still longed to combine the ecstasies of the spirit and of the senses; but she had tried so many things. She despaired of finding a way.

  And then, in the winter of 1979, a friend, who had recently dyed all her clothes orange without explanation, gave my mother a tape, and insisted she hear this man speak. On the cover, below the title—Meditation: the Art of Ecstasy—was a grey photograph of an Indian man with a long white beard and a mischievous smile. On the back cover was a single phrase: ‘Surrender to me, and I will transform you. That is my promise. Rajneesh.’

  My mother had seen a photo of this man before. In 1976, when I was eight months old, she had travelled with her Marxist-Feminist comrades to give a talk at a humanistic psychology conference in London. After her talk, the whole posse stumbled on a Sufi-dancing group, led by a woman dressed entirely in orange. All the men stood proudly on one side of the hall, singing ‘Be alert!’ while the women, dancing opposite, opened their arms and sang back: ‘Let it happen!’ Outraged by such blatant patriarchal conditioning—and from a woman, too!—my mother and her friends decided to bust up the group. After placing me in the careful hands of Men Against Sexism, who ran the crèche, they strode into the hall. Then my mother called a halt. ‘We shouldn’t judge it before we’ve tried it,’ she whispered. ‘We should join in first, and then disrupt it.’

  As she danced, my mother was swept away. By the end of the evening she and all her friends had their arms raised; they were singing and facing a huge photo in the centre of the back wall—an Indian man with a white beard and mischievous eyes.

  That evening, in the living room of our Alternative Socialist commune, smoking a joint in her dressing gown, my mother listened to the tape. Before Bhagwan’s voice began she heard a symphony of car horns, the hum of air conditioning, the roar of an occasional aeroplane as it traced a line in the skies over Bombay. Bhagwan spoke in a low, hypnotic purr, trailing the end of every sentence out into the faintest hiss. He talked to my mother about joy, about bliss, about an end to fear and pain. That night she cried herself to sleep. She cried herself to sleep the next night, too. During the day, at her work placement in the Bradford Royal Infirmary psychiatric ward, she managed to keep herself together; but each night the tears came again. All the suffering of her separation from her family, the pain of her search for some way to heal herself, came pouring out. After four nights of crying she wrote a letter to Bhagwan. ‘I heard a tape of you speaking,’ she wrote, ‘and I felt you were speaking to a part of me that has never been spoken to before. I have heard that the way to learn from you is to become a “sannyasin”, one of your followers. I would therefore like to take sannyas from you, and go deeply into what this may mean.’ She put the letter in her handbag. She altered her route to work each morning so she passed the post office; but she could not bring herself to post the letter. At work she began to hear Bhagwan’s voice inside her head, telling her, ‘You have come home.’ She was terrified. She had long been convinced she was going insane—now she was hearing voices, just like her patients. She agonized over whether to turn herself in at the unit or to post the letter to Bhagwan. She considered suicide.

  Long, heavy blizzards swept through Leeds that year. I spent those afternoons in the gardens near our house, in my blue gloves and purple hooded jumpsuit, kicking my way through the snow.

  Three weeks after hearing his voice on tape, my mother posted her letter to Bhagwan. That afternoon, upstairs playing with my Lego, I heard a loud splash. I went down to investigate. My mother was in our bathroom, her arms stained orange up to the elbows, sloshing all her clothes around in the bath, which was filled to the brim with warm water and orange dye. Later that evening she wrung her clothes out and hung them by the fire—to my delight, they left permane
nt orange stains on the fireguards—and from then on, she wore only orange.

  She was now an orange person; but she had no idea what to do next. She had never even spoken with an actual sannyasin. Then, that night, a man dressed in flowing orange robes and a bead necklace knocked on our door. Swami Deva Pradeep had heard that my mother and her friends were thinking of moving out of their Alternative Socialist household; he had come to investigate the possibility of turning it into a sannyasin commune. My mother was amazed. A good student of Jung, she was convinced the meeting was no coincidence. She told Pradeep about the letter she had just sent; Pradeep grinned. Of course, he said. That was how Bhagwan worked. This was her birthday, he said, the first day of her new life; to celebrate, she should come to the disco. Pradeep’s circle of friends, my mother discovered, consisted of five sannyasins—Leeds’s full quota at that time. There at the disco one orange person in particular caught her eye: a bearded man, dancing outrageously on the cleared dance floor, who looked in profile a little like a young, orange-clad Clint Eastwood. After the dance, the crowd applauded; he came over to their table. He introduced himself as Swami Deva Sujan. (The name, he explained, meant ‘Wisdom’. In his previous life, he admitted, he had been called ‘Martin’.) Sujan had a wild, unpredictable air that my mother found both menacing and attractive. That night, in the living room of our Alternative Socialist commune, a fight broke out between Pradeep and Sujan over whether to use my mother’s house for a sannyasin commune or rent commercial premises. Unable to reach an agreement, they cleared the chairs and wrestled on the floor. My mother was furious. She told them they were macho poseurs; she lectured them about their obligation to become conscious of their repressed anger before they expressed it in ways that were so insensitive to others. They told her to piss off, and carried on fighting.