Around India in 80 Trains (17 page)

‘Epiphany. Nice choice of words.’ He pressed a palm to his chest. ‘I’ve barely been here three days and
I
can’t listen to him. Why don’t you go off on your own?’

‘I’ve thought about it. But it wouldn’t be fair. We came out here together and I don’t want to abandon him. Besides, it’s really not very safe for me to travel on trains at night by myself.’

‘I’m sure you’d be fine on your own.’

‘I would still feel mean. He doesn’t have any friends or family here at all, while I’m pretty lucky to have a support system if I need it. It’s not an easy country to negotiate alone.’

The following morning we squeezed into an auto to Koregaon Park, the home of the Osho Meditation Resort. Cameras were strictly forbidden, so there was no need for Passepartout to join us. We arrived at the gates and he refused even to get out of the auto, let alone come anywhere near the gates. He sped off to buy train tickets as we approached the reception area where an Indian man stood behind the desk. He smiled at Ed and handed him some forms, ignoring me.

‘We’re together,’ Ed said.

‘Indians register separately,’ he replied with a pseudo Californian accent, refusing to make eye contact. He reminded me of one of my brother’s teachers at boarding school who had spent a short time on sabbatical in Wisconsin and after his return, began every lesson with an apologetic, ‘please eggs-cuse ma’ yummerican aaaaccent,’ which he delivered in a heavy Keralan accent.

I pulled out my battered, burgundy passport, which matched his robes, and inched it forward under his nose. Flashing a Colgate smile, the autoracist handed over another form explaining that the registration would cost
`
900, which included the bonus of an HIV test thrown in for good measure, and then
`
850 for every subsequent day of attendance. Not to mention
`
5,000 per night should we choose to stay onsite. After stopping to hug a friend, ‘Jazz’ (Jaswinder) ushered us over to his colleague to complete the registration. Magdalena was a Bolivian artist with hazel eyes and wide, sloping cheekbones, who had been travelling in India for five months, four of which she had spent at the resort.

‘India is so beautiful,’ she said, waving a bangled arm at the custom-built waterfalls and the patch of sunshine falling on the potted palms. I glanced at the webcam as it snapped a shot of me with one eye closed.

‘I would love to draw your face,’ she said, scribbling onto the registration form. ‘You should stay for a while and then I can paint you’.

‘Why do you do an HIV test on arrival?’ I asked.

‘Osho encourages free love in the resort so you cannot come in if you are having the disease.’ She pointed behind to a small room. ‘The doctor is free to do the test now.’

Excited to see a fellow Indian, the doctor broke into a smile, revealing a broken front tooth, and scanned my papers. ‘Oh. British.’ His face fell and he produced a miniature stapler and clicked the tip of my index finger.

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘No.’ He shooed me out.

Twenty minutes later, declared disease-free, and fit for fornication, we were now to shed the constraints of our modern vestments and adopt the maroon robes. At first sight, the resort’s shop looked like a standard grocery store. But beyond the shampoos, soaps and stacks of condoms, the shop opened out at the back and was manned by a Croatian lady with a crimson snarl and a drooping perm that, like her enthusiasm, had long since lost its lustre. A myriad of maroon and white dresses hung around the room in styles designed to suit everyone—as long as they fell into a category that lay somewhere between slutty Tudor maids and wizards. Trying on a folk dress I emerged from the dressing room and was pounced on by the Sulking Perm who deemed it too short to be decent. Her concern was the mid-calf hemline, not that my tightly bodiced chest was struggling to stay within its compounds. Apparently decency only applied to below the knee. Once we had settled on a hippy-skirted, sleeveless number, I came out carrying the useless dresses over one arm and Perm started gasping in horror: the hems were touching the ground. Leaping from behind the desk she seized the robes, twisting her hands, muttering something inaudible about dirt and purity and hung them back on the rack. Ed’s eyes were shining with delight. Shuffling through a wad of money, I held out a 1000-rupee note to Perm, who recoiled.

‘We don’t use rupees here. Buy your vouchers at the gate.’

I later overheard that Indian money was considered dirty and germ-ridden. Once the vouchers were purchased, the robes collected and our nerves in shreds, all we had to do was return in the morning for a new beginning.

The sun had begun to stretch and unfurl its fingers across the sky, and the koels were calling their morning greeting as we arrived for orientation. A comfy-looking blonde lady with smiley eyes and red toenails sparkling from beneath her hemline greeted us at the gates. Tess was an ex-travel rep from Liverpool, who, suffering empty nest syndrome since her daughters had fled to university, had decided to spread her own wings and come to Pune.

‘It’s just lovely here, I like it a lot,’ she gushed, Scouse scraping the back of her throat. ‘I really do think tha’ if you wanna get the most outta being here, you should volunteer.’

So the resort ran on free labour. She scrunched her sunburnt nose, ‘and it’s great ’cos they place you where you’re most suited. Having worked in tourism they’ve got me showing people round and if you choose to work, you get a bit of a discount on your housing.’

Even better. Trained employees paying for the honour of working onsite. And they thought it was a great idea. Osho was a genius. Tess and Ed wound their way up the path, deep in conversation about freedom, which involved a lot of hands to the chest and blinking, when a burgundy blur appeared in the distance. It vanished, reappearing again, this time attached to a pair of outstretched arms and a sweep of hair. Through the trees, in a clearing, a handful of people twirled like ballerinas on a jewellery box. Each held one hand to the sky, the other to the ground, their skirts rising and falling in unison. Others were flat on the ground, oblivious to the human tornados twisting above their heads.

‘Whirling meditation,’ Tess said. ‘You keep whirling until you find an unmoving centre in your being.’

Tess brought us to Padma, the group leader, who was handing out leaflets, stopping every few minutes to hug fellow sannyasins passing by. Osho hugs were of a special brand. Not of the hearty squeeze and back-rubbing jollity normally shared with friends, but of a more deliberate process. Both parties approached with arms spread, placed their heads sideways on each other’s shoulders and remained wordless. It was the sort of hug commonly seen at funerals. Others had arrived to join the newbies, including an elderly German man, three pouting French teens, a Dutch couple, two Indian girls with tattoos and two Indian men in their 50s. Padma, a curly-haired nymph from France with tiny hands, a tiny face and a tiny brain, turned to the first Indian gentleman who was adjusting his robes to hide his belly. Tilting her head to one side, she asked:

‘Do you … speak … English?’

‘Yes’, he replied, ‘but I can speak to you in French if it’s easier for you.’

During the introduction Padma was joined by Kamini, a Dutch lady with Amy Winehouse eyeliner, who drifted around in a cloud of beedi smoke. She contributed little to the session other than nodding and disappeared halfway through. Satisfied that we were ready to trial the meditation classes on offer, Padma led us, like a line of ants in pursuit of a sugar lump, to the studio across the path.

Slipping off shoes, we went inside. A burst of Bob Sinclar’s
Love Generation
filled the dance studio.
Pum-pum, Pa-da-pum-pum, Pa-da-pum-pum
... and there, alone in the middle of the room, was Kamini, swaying from one bare foot to the other, sweeping bundles of air towards her chest.
Pum-pum, Pa-da-pum-pum, Pa-da-pum-pum
... Those beats were to live on in my subconscious like a Pavlovian nightmare.

‘Everyone dance!’ Padma called, clapping her hands and raising her arms above her head. Tufts of pale hair peeked out from her armpits. ‘Connect with each other with your eyes! Don’t smile, greet one another through your eeeeeeeeeeeeyes ...’

Kamini spun her way over, arms at full wingspan, eyes flashing from under her long fringe. She wore the look of a spider about to eat its young. Halfway through the song, the elderly German gentleman developed a severe cramp and collapsed beneath his weight, his face twisted in agony. ‘Feel the loooooooooove,’ sang Padma, ignoring him as he hobbled alone to the side, clutching his leg.

The impromptu disco was an exercise in shedding inhibitions, that was followed by a medley of music from different countries. As each song played, observers had to copy the native dancers. A tight circle of onlookers formed around the French teens as they struggled to dance to
La Vie En Rose
and the Dutch couple to a waltz. An iTunes update was in order. Osho claimed that his meditations were scientifically designed for the modern man to allow him to eventually experience the silence of meditation more easily. While dancing, one should become the dance. Just remain alert. Consciously go mad. Be total.

‘Anyone English?’

I stayed silent. This time St George would have to take a back seat while I cloaked myself in green and saffron. The four other Indians in the group provided enough mass for me to hide in, while they inevitably threw down some Bollywood shapes. Pushing plugs and changing light bulbs was manageable, but Morris dancing was out of the question. Ed edged his way to the middle of the circle alone, eyeing me with an expression that teetered precariously between pleading and murderous. As the stereo hissed and crackled, John Lennon sang, ‘It’s been a hard day’s night
…’
and Ed began to move like a dad at a school disco. Riddled with guilt, I broke out of the ring and joined him in the middle to consciously go mad. As The Beatles’ voices bubbled on, our dancing became a kaleidoscope of the Mashed Potato, the Shimmy and the Swim—complete with sinking underwater—ending with the Chicken Dance. On the periphery, Padma and Kamini were filled with concentration, holding their noses and flapping their wings. We came to a rest, bowed to one another and slipped back into place.

‘You see’, Padma declared, ‘we are so conditioned from birth that we are unable to dance like people of other nationalities.’

The grand finale was a video explaining the resort’s rules. Gathering cushions, the group settled down together. In one scene, the silent meditation hour is already underway. An Indian man clatters in late, unrolling a giant strip of carpet to sit on. A western lady, to his right, opens one eye in annoyance as he stretches himself out. His feet stink and she curls her nose in disgust. Laughter rippled through our group. He makes a phone call to his mother to ask about the cricket score. Kamini and Padma bent double in hysterics. The message of the skit? Do not disturb others’ meditation. It continued in a slapstick fashion, fixated on not touching food with the fingers and leaving the meditation hall should you cough or sneeze.

Free to go, the group disbanded at the end of the video and we wandered around the lush grounds, stopping at an onsite café where we met Tegh, a 24-year-old medical student from Jalandhar, who was training to be an ophthalmologist. Although his matching maroon turban was testament to his faith, he felt no loyalty towards its traditions and was in the middle of his seventh stint of volunteering at the resort’s café. He wheeled out the bins, dusted his hands off and straightened up to his full, towering height.

‘You know, what Osho says is so beautiful …’ He paused and fixed me with a defiant stare. A pair of green, ring-necked parakeets landed on the rooftop, edging sideways, nibbling lovingly at each other’s necks. ‘… especially about sex,’ Tegh finished.

Bingo.

That his words were so revered by his followers conflicted with Osho’s self-declaration: ‘My purpose is so unique—I am using words just to create silent gaps. The words are not important so I can say anything contradictory, anything absurd, anything unrelated, because my purpose is just to create
gaps. The words are secondary; the silences between those words are primary.’ Hanging off words designed to create noise was, at the very least, ludicrous.

‘You know’, Tegh said, dropping his voice and glancing into the café, ‘when Indian men come here, they are taken to a special meeting at 3:45pm and given a half-hour talk’.

‘On what?’

‘The sexual impulses.’

‘All men, or just Indian men?’

‘Only Indian men. They are so full of sexual impulses they need to be controlled so they don’t just grab at all the western women here.’

Anyone would think that western women were a pious bunch, nervous lest they show ankle, chastity belts in place. Together we crossed the grounds and collected in the smoking area by the main restaurant. Ed lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. A man I recognised from the video wandered over to the area and approached a slim Japanese girl, smoking a slim Marlboro Light.