Some months and a dozen or so workshops later, I moved into Kaleidoscope Growth Center in North London. I was now having a scene with the group leader, who lived nearby and, besides, I wanted this juicy, dynamic environment to be the backdrop of my every day. Sharing feelings was our currency. It was intoxicating: there was always some drama or other unfolding. Happiness was a roller coaster of feeling, with all its thrills and spills. If toppling off the giddy heights and plunging down to earth again was painful, anyway it was all grist for the mill, something else to be shared. The intensity told me I was alive.
The other resident of Kaleidoscope was a thickset, red-haired Scotsman with the unlikely name of Shiva. Soft-spoken, he always wore an orange robe and some wooden beads around his neck. In his modest bookshelf I spied a slim volume by his guru “Osho” who, he told me, lived in Mumbai. I asked to borrow it, and asked again and again. Perversely, because he wasn’t keen to lend it, because I had to keep nagging, I became more and more attracted to it. Not that I was looking for a guru; I didn’t need a father figure and wasn’t interested in joining any cult-like setup where you had to commit to wearing orange for the rest of your life, along with the picture of the guru around your neck. In spite of that, when Shiva finally lent me the book, I liked it a lot. I liked the way Osho expressed himself, so simply and at the same time so poetically and I loved the thread of humor throughout it. Immersed in reading, from nowhere—I wasn’t consciously evaluating its authenticity and didn’t see myself as a seeker—the thought: “This man knows the truth.”
A couple of years and numerous workshops later, the appeal of constant emotional dramas had worn thin. Someone mentioned a Tibetan Buddhist retreat called Samye Ling and, curious, I set off for Scotland.
The week at the monastery was intriguing —the incense, the walls covered in pictures of scary gods and heavily made-up goddesses, the devout residents—but not enough to keep me there. Next was a Sufi community in Oxfordshire: there too was a bunch of devotees, but these ones were easy-going, loving and lighthearted. Instead of long periods of aloneness and silence, here was all warmth, smiles, laughter and dance. What more could I want? Still, in spite of myself something prodded me onward.
The Gurdjieff group on Haverstock Hill in London was very different from both the Buddhists and the Sufis and with entirely new ways of looking at life. The members regarded me quizzically when I talked about my feelings about this or that… as if they were completely irrelevant, even beneath them. I only needed that one encounter to write them off as cold, dedicated to refining their intellect at the cost of the physical and emotional aspects of who we are.
“Growth groups,” Buddhists, Sufis and Gurdjieffians: I’d had so many interesting experiences and met many lovely people, but nothing had stopped me in my tracks for very long. Yet everyone else I met along the way seemed content. Friends were either marrying and having babies (sometimes in the reverse order) or developing their careers, but an inner restlessness kept me on the move. I didn’t know what I was looking for—was not even aware that I was seeking anything in particular—but I knew I hadn’t found it yet.
My parents were keen for me to return to Australia. I decided to go back via India. The plan was to briefly call in to the ashram in Pune where Osho lived, then spend some weeks in the Himalayas before picking up the flight onward to Oz. That was the plan….
*
Mumbai, India, Monday, October 7th, 1974, ten days before my twenty-seventh birthday: the beetle-like zig-zaggery of three-wheeling motorized rickshaws, the cacophony of horns and hawkers, of children’s shrieks and canine chorus … the heat, and above all the stench of incense and urine.
As I am driven out of the air terminal to Dadar Station, I lean forward to watch scenes I have ever only viewed as National Geographic photographs from the comfort of the West. There are crippled and deformed beggars: a man with a withered limb, a blind old woman, a child, holding a baby, who comes up to the window of my taxi as we wait at an intersection.
The reality is appalling: even I can’t find the romantic in the poverty, disease, dereliction, and dirt that is Mumbai. Yet at the same I feel a strange equanimity, an unexpected sense of familiarity. Is it just because of those old National Geographic photos? This feels like something deeper, almost a sense of deja vu.
Two old women are raking through the muck in a huge rubbish container; another woman squats behind a little boy, picking the lice from his hair. A young man pees by the side of the road, while nearby a group of barefooted children play with an old tin and some sticks. A mangy-looking dog stands opposite another, hackles raised in the preamble to a fight. He loses interest and adjourns to his place by a hut where he starts examining himself for fleas. A goat is tethered outside the large concrete culvert that passes as someone’s residence and, through the doorway of a tin-roofed lean-to, I can just make out a dilapidated iron bedstead on the dirt floor.
The women especially draw me. Living in this slum these must be the “untouchables”—yet they carry themselves like queens. Some wear rings through their noses; others, anklets with little bells. All favor oiling and knotting their long, black hair in a neat bun at the nape of the neck. They are uniformly slim and dark-skinned, and many are very pretty. And then there are the smart, affluent, and well-padded women wearing gorgeous silk saris, stepping out of chauffeured cars with their businessmen-husbands dressed in Western clothes.
At Dadar Station, I manage somehow to find the taxi rank with a line-up of Ambassador cabs, one of which I hope will bear me Pune-ward. Jet-lag has kicked in and I’m too tired not to surrender to whatever is, trusting that the cosmos will look upon me kindly, nudging me along the final lap home, wherever that is. I sit, waiting, with the driver. He explains that the taxis are shared and we need a few more passengers to fill the car.
Finally three large Sikhs, complete with turbans, join us—one sitting in front with the driver and the remaining two flanking me. I am too tired to wonder if they will molest me and they look much too proud to entertain the thought, and so we weave our way through the network of suburban Mumbai and onto the plains beyond.
I muse over the puzzling inscription on the rear of all the trucks: “Horn Okay Please.” Does it mean they will tolerate you hooting at them, or that they’d be thrilled to bits if you would oblige them by honking your horn? It becomes a conundrum, a Zen koan that years later I will not have deciphered.
After a couple of hours our taxi climbs upward through the beautiful, lush green terrain of sundry hill stations. At Lonavala we stop for chai—a milky-thick, densely sweetened tea that sends your blood sugar soaring within half a second. Needing to pee, I reason that as I’ve had to ask for a key to the toilet it must be worth safeguarding. It turns out to be only for those for whom to pee or not to pee is no longer a question at all. My knickers are down around my ankles quicker than a bride’s nightie, the evacuation executed and knickers, gasping with relief, back where they belong before I am forced to take a second breath.
Once back in our cab, my Sikhs continue their animated three-way conversation over and around me as if I am not there. While I could have felt affronted, I luxuriate in my anonymity.
Finally the outskirts of Pune appear, and by and by we pull up outside the railway station. There we are disgorged onto the pavement at the feet of an old woman with a face that looks like melted plastic; later I learn she has leprosy. When she accosts me with, “Paisa, Memsahib, paisa,” I hand her two rupees then turn away, embarrassed. To compare my state with hers is just too confronting to think about.
“Koregaon Park” being the only address I know, I haul my luggage into a taxi and minutes later we are drawing up outside the ashram. A far cry