26) Of Big Babas and Grand Cinemas.

It took an inexorably long year for his old mentor Compassion to show his wizened face upon India’s sun-stroked shores and in the meantime Arthur led the itinerant’s life, wandering along as many arcane byways as he could discover, mulching down into the landscape in crusty “Ali Baba meets Kim” fashion till he was golden brown and glittering, like jewels in the dust. No matter what outlandish locale he found himself in, he zealously performed yoga, meditated on his inner-light and studied esoteric texts. He relentlessly searched out reputable Babas to ponder on the nature of existence via their lila, “existential game-playing”, and to get his inspirational batteries charged in their charismatic presence. Homo-sex was non-existent but still nagging from his subconscious, and while yoga, trekking, drawing, music and dance joyfully soaked up his energies he longed to get over his hang-ups by experiencing Nirvana under the guidance of a supreme guru.

During his many interludes in Shangri-la he imbibed philosophical lectures on all the Indian sacred texts from wise old Swamis like Chidananda and Krishnananda at the Sivananda Jungle University, concentrating on Vedanta philosophy with its void full of creative, blissful consciousness as the basis of all existence. Swami Sivanada, the founder of the Divine Light Society, was a most illustrious dude, fabled to have been illuminated by the Master yogi of yogis, Babaji, who was reputed to be hundreds of years old and to live on sunlight and water high in the glacial Himalayas near Mount Kailash. Sivananda entered his final Samadhi in nineteen-sixty three after a life dedicated to providing free medicine and education to all comers, and all of Sivanada’s disciples became powerful Babas in their own right, establishing centres of Divine Light throughout the world. Arthur tried to absorb wisdom from them all when they called in at home-base in Shangri-la to give pep-talks to the restless, celibate Brahmachari students, the cynical swamis and voracious westerners.

Yet throughout this endless seminar on the Blissful Void and the wiles of Samsara he yearned for sensual gratification and meatier myths to sink his turbulent mind into. He would then sneak off into the city of Delhi to ogle mystic movie treatises like “Vanishing Point”, about a misfit car-driver chased into infinity, and “The Last Valley”, some shining knights holding out against the dark forces of ignorance in Medieval Europe. The celluloid equivalent of his whole Indian odyssey was the Bollywood schlock-buster, “Hare Krishna Hare Ram”, about Indian gangsters infiltrating the dope-addled hippie scene, the music-soundtrack of which followed Arthur to all the far-flung corners of India, from Kanyakumari to Kathmandhu, “Dum adha dummm…”

Whilst in Delhi he took the opportunity of visiting the Maharaja of Shakti Babas, Swami Muktananda, ensconced in a giant marquee on a trashed up back-lot on the edges of the city. He was reputed to raise Kundalini energy by a mere touch of the finger, his devotees fainting in a fit of bliss as he passed amongst them. A multitude of adoring fans crowded the tent trying to get to his hallowed feet, Muktananda brooding like Jabba the Hut upon his throne, soaking up the adulation. To Arthur it was an absurd saffron circus show, marquee and all, and the Shakti Baba came across as a captive King Kong chained to the podium and Arthur felt terror at getting anywhere near him. He edged his way calmly out of the clamouring mob and beat a hasty retreat to the cinema where he saw “The Towering Inferno”, visualising the flaming Shakti Baba come crashing down upon him like a falling skyscraper.

At some stage, when he was wandering around South India, he obsessed about sitting at the feet of Satya Sai Baba, he who produces gold watches out of the air for rich men, and sacred ashes for the lumpen proletariat. Arthur hoped to give his burgeoning Nirvana a booster shot and he set out with determination to tread the hot, dusty road out of the town of Mysore in search of the renowned magician’s lair. He trundled on and on up an endless dirt road, thinking up a storm of twaddle of how he’d win over the charismatic saint and receive various boons, and in a daydreamer’s fugue he walked straight past the ostentatious front gates of the Baba’s ashram, and on into the sunset. He espied a temple-like structure atop a hill on the far horizon and the closer he got the more it looked like the exalted Parthenon of Democratic Athens and, in his fevered mind, it surely had to be the celestial abode of the remarkable Satya Sai Baba.

He hobbled to the top of the hill as the black heavens descended and the multitude of stars winked on, and he discovered his temple of enlightenment to be in reality a grand cinema-house with “Ben Hur” as the night’s attraction. Lost deep in the Indian interior, longing for familiar territory, instead of retracing his weary steps back to the ashram, he opted for the ‘swords and crucifix’ epic to while away the balmy evening with. The vast cavern of a cinema was packed with excitable Indian peasants who screamed, cheered, wept and stomped their feet right up to the chariot race, and that’s when all hell broke loose and Arthur thought the ceiling might collapse with all the ballyhooing. He’d seen the film as a child but only fixated as memorable the gory bits of ships exploding and limbs severed in great spurts of blood. This second viewing, wherein the tale of Christ’s tribulations projected itself into Arthur’s brain as the main theme, came as something of a shock to his confused religious sensibilities, seething and curdling atop a hill in pagan India.

If he tried to live up to the Christian ideal of the life of Jesus as he imagined all good souls should he knew he would be accused of having a messianic complex. He staggered out of the cinema with the hordes of babbling Indians, stunned and guilt-ridden that he wasn’t even as stalwart and honourable as Charlton Heston and thus undeserving of healing, (though the relationship between Charlton and Stephen Boyd was suspiciously homo-erotic.) He forgot all about the big Sai Baba in his sacred fortress with his magic ash, and in a wistful daze wandered down the road a bit and curled up under the stars and cogitated over the heroics demanded in redeeming one’s soul.

The next day he returned to the front gates of the saint’s Ashram, only now he felt like Barabbas let loose from the cross and had lost his enthusiasm for notorious Babas, hauling his sinner’s body off into the dust to explore the multifarious hotspots of an ancient land. He did eventually get the touch from Satya Sai Baba a year or so later when the old huckster showed up at Sivananda Ashram in Shangri-la. In bright orange robes and fuzzy Afro hair, he stood upon a bench and hectored a hysterical crowd of Swamis milling around his knees. Arthur sent his Indian mate into the swarm to get some of the highly desired sacred-ash the Baba was conjuring out of thin air, and wresting some ash from the claws of the scrabbling Swamis, his friend returned to smear it upon his forehead as a blessing.

Arthur then tripped down to the river Ganges’ edge to meditate, experiencing an intense euphoria, a brightening of the world, a clear, lucid thrill at being alive and conscious. He wondered if he’d absorbed the mass hysteria and been hypnotised or if the Baba really did have magic powers and was the Baba of his dreams. Jaded with the showbiz hoopla of great Babahood and disillusioned by their obvious, stolid humanity, he whined that there was little personal touch and no room for his own ego to garner special attention from any parading saint. Accordingly he went on his own merry way, dancing to the music of his own pipes. In later years old Satya Sai Baba was accused by several of his young male followers of taking advantage of his powers and sexually approaching them, (it was just his "lila" explained his loyal followers.) Perhaps Arthur had missed his perfect Guru but he couldn’t have cared less.

The Big Baba that scared the shit out of Arthur the most was Prabhupad, founder and Grand Master of the International Hare Krishna Movement. In his youth he’d been married with kids, an astute businessman, manager of a chemical firm, he knew how to sell a message. He took the vows of Sanyas at the age of fifty and at sixty-nine was sent to the West by his guru to make converts to Lord Krishna. The ditzy hippies of New York and San Francisco, searching for alternatives to Christianity, capitalism and its Vietnam War, were ripe for his cult of worldly renunciation, sexual abstinence and meditation. Hypnotised into mindlessness by chanting non-stop “Hare Krishna Hare Ram”, an army of them spread across America and the world selling incense and Bhagavad Gitas on the streets and living in their own cut-off communes. He set up the world centre of this cult in Krishna’s reputed birthplace of Brindavan in Rajasthan and returned there to eventually die in ‘77.

At one point in his Indian sojourn Arthur happened to be strung out in that very town, penniless and starving, when he spotted some yellow-garbed Hare Krishna acolytes handing out prasad, consecrated food, in the bazaar. He approached the group, considering them to be fellow westerners, and asked them if they couldn’t help him out with a few rupees and they disdainfully directed him to their headquarters where they promised a grand feast was to be had. He hurried to the Hare Krishna ashram and blundered into an international congregation of the crazed zealots, a thousand shaved white heads with hardly an Indian face amongst them while Arthur stood out like sacred bull’s balls with his dreadlocks and hippie mien. From the moment of entry they tried to direct his every move, he couldn’t eat, drink, walk, sit, shit without having the Vedas dictated to him. For three days they held mammoth feasts and Arthur filled his sadhu’s belly to maximum capacity yelling “Hare Krishna Hare Ram” with the best of them, though in his sadhu’s garb, seated in lotus position on an old spotted deerskin, he invited their irate Hindutva scrutiny.

Every night, on a large outdoor screen, they showed dreary home movies that extolled the glories of Hare Krishna consciousness and the blissful life the members led on their communes, toiling selflessly under the sun. To Arthur it looked like the inmates of a concentration camp acting out a parody of religiosity dressed in bizarre costumes. He didn’t rush to sign up with the “Club from Pluto” though every morning they glared at him with proselytising zeal, waving their Bhagavad Gitas like quack hypnotists while he continued to stumble about the bald throng, stuffing his face under their baleful eyes. The pressure to convert got on his nerves and when the Morals Patrol caught him smoking a chillum on his rooftop and castigated him mercilessly, he started looking for an escape route.

On the penultimate night of the International gab fest, after yet another boring home-movie, they made a big hubbub about hauling out their Guru, Swami Prabhupad, on a chariot and hoisting his craggy, old butt up onto a podium. There enthroned, with jowls quivering, he jabbered militant Hare Krishna consciousness to the serried ranks of devotees lined up in front of him. They were grouped in order of rank, the platoon leaders in red and orange, the brahmachari students in yellow, the householders in white, the women all clustered up the back somewhere, out of sight. His lieutenants and sergeants had wicked iron-tipped, wooden staffs that could knock the teeth from a water-buffalo and with which they banged the ground and shook as a threat to the sky, the whole crowd stomping up and down like Zulu warriors at every rabble-rousing pronouncement of the Hindu demagogue.

“Krishna is the only God, He is love, He is power. Krishna will conquer the world, if not with love, if not with gifts, then with the sword. See it as a Holy War, for the world’s own good. You must dedicate your lives to fight for Lord Krishna. Hare Krishna Hare Ram!”

His legions hoo-haaed, “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram!”

“A king must do his duty, so said Lord Krishna to Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetna. We must win the world for Krishna!”

“Hare Krishna, Hare Ram!”

Then they all plopped down on the ground while Prabhupad launched into an erratic monologue covering life, history and the end of time and Arthur grew more perturbed by the minute as the rabid old guru croaked on and on about how Krishna consciousness was the only “way to go”, the crowd mechanically crowing “Hare Krishna Hare Ram” to his every utterance.

Arthur fumed where he sat, thinking strong thoughts of what an irascible old villain the ranting Guru was, cogitating on comparisons with Ghengis Khan, repetitively beaming out “you nasty old bastard” in the old boy’s direction till suddenly Prabhupad stopped all proceedings and glared piercingly in his direction. Like an ancient crone he lifted one bony finger and pointed it towards Arthur, blubbering what sounded like a voodoo curse, jowls shaking and spit flying. The army of zealots froze and stared at what the all-powerful one was jabbing his finger at, a sea of bald heads in front of Arthur turned and rubber-necked the environs, searching out the culprit who dared disturb their Master’s inspiring performance, all eyes alighting upon Arthur’s lone dread-locked head.

Arthur sweated out the mob’s hostile gaze, shifting in his seat, shutting down his scabrous thoughts, pretending blithe innocence, but still the old mug jabbed his finger at him, growling and spluttering furiously, “Him, that one, grrrrr… ggrrr… gobble gobble gook gook.” The higher-echelon warriors scowled and the crowd peered earnestly about them and Arthur thought he was about to be set alight by the mob, Hindu-style, for Prabhupad was scorching him with his Third Eye.

Prabhupad kept jabbering and pointing and Arthur had to brazen out the murderous atmosphere till finally a young brahmachari in yellow sitting directly in front of him glanced around at everyone, sheepishly, nervously, then jumped up and ran off into the shadows. This seemed to satisfy the old despot for he grunted in satisfaction and turned back to face the crowd and carried on with his righteous harangue, and all the acolytes relaxed, ignored Arthur, and got engrossed in chanting their acquiescence to their Lord’s will.

Arthur gradually let out his tensed breath and slowly but surely extricated himself from the gathering, creeping away into the night, climbing fences and crawling across thorny fields, the sonorous caterwauling of the Hare Krishna fracas booming like a threat in the background. He imagined them hooting and jumping like pogo cannibals around an unbeliever tied to a stake and boiled in a big pot of oil, and he quickened his pace to put a gratifying distance between him and the reverberating, howling chants. He had escaped with his skin intact, his stomach full and his bowels evacuated, never to enjoy Hare Krishna food again, in his life, no matter how “free” it might be.

Years later he saw a documentary on the Krishna cult, how the women were treated as third class citizens and made slaves of, how the children were all separated from their parents and beaten, starved, unschooled and horribly sexually molested while the vast amounts of money collected were used to build more elaborate temples and clothe the idol of Krishna in gold. Most bemusing of all was that the only film the kids were allowed to see, other than commune home movies and Krishna life-stories, was “The Day After”, the post-nuclear Armageddon schlock-buster, as if the cultists believed they would have the chance to take over the world once it was reduced to cinders. Arthur could only bless the rationalist, cool side of him that did not allow him to be a sucker for such rubbish.

The kookiest Baba of them all was Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, a stand out in the crowd of outrageous cosmic poseurs it was Arthur’s kismet to brush up against. In 1973 Arthur had been sleeping on the streets of Bombay when a German friend waxed ecstatic over his grand discovery of a great new Guru and took him to an apartment tower on Malabar Hill to meet him. Whisked up to the penthouse in an elevator, he was first sniffed over by Rajneesh’s chief promoter and zealous front-person, Susheela Tough Titties, who deemed him unworthy of being in the great man’s vicinity. She must have been able to smell money and as Arthur looked like Kipling’s Kim gone native, grungy brown and fresh from the Great Game, he was quickly evacuated down the chute and away from the palatial penthouse.

He was happy to be rejected from the Rajneesh Seed Club for he’d had a bellyful of restraints and surveillance by spirit-mongers and wanted very much to have fun, and Bombay was the city for it. While sleeping out in the central park or Maidan he discovered it was the main homo beat, many an evening stroller wandering over to his blanket in the hope of cracking onto some prime Euro-trash flesh. He stoically refused all approaches until the most gorgeous of souls lured him from his yogic discipline by quietly sitting next to him and gently kissing him on the lips. Hidden by the night they lay on his sadhu’s blanket and kissed like sultry cinematic lovers, passionately, swooning, as if no other love would ever be found as sweetly innocent as this, the Indian guy’s arms entwined lasciviously around the white Sahib’s neck like a grown-up Sabu being kissed by a young Errol Flyn. Better than sex, this erotic escapade was a rare happenstance in Arthur’s Indian journey, it informed him that love between Indians and Europeans was indeed possible, and he lapped up every delicious moment.

Otherwise he dawdled at the cinema, Bombay being a city that loved movies, making them and showing them. His favourite movie house was a crumbling Art Deco monstrosity called The Regal, situated near the waterfront in Colaba. The projector went in and out of focus, the soundtrack switched from stereo to mono, the movies were slashed by the censors till they jumped-cut to absurdity, and still he cherished the thrill of being swamped by raucous Indian cinema-lovers. It was here that he saw “The Poseidon Adventure”, during which the Indians themselves seemed to be drowning, climbing the walls and screaming from the rafters, and at the end they all left the movie-house looking like their own lives had been swept away. Arthur got the melodrama of this movie mixed up with the mythologies created around Rajneesh, little realising how spot on he was. (After a fun-filled cruise, a luxury liner goes belly-up in a storm, the captain of the ship sent to oblivion, and a few tenacious voyagers and diehard crew claw their way through the ruins back to the top, to relaunch the ship and carry on with immensely profitable lives.)

Two years later he was again sleeping on the streets of Bombay, out of money and busking outside the seedy Colaba hotels, sometimes fed by the crippled beggars who enjoyed his singing. Then his German friend, Peter, reappeared to rescue him and take him to the Rajneesh Ashram in Poona. He was sniffed over at the front gates for the alien scent that could kill their over-sensitive guru with his many allergies and this time he passed the examination as the Rajneesh crew probably wanted to rope in all westerners, no matter how ragged the outcaste be, in their desire for the organisation to grow into a global empire.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was a Jain Professor of Mathematics at Bombay University who one bright morning saw the light and realised an eclectic approach to enlightenment therapies would make an attractive package for hungry western soul-seekers. He mixed Yoga and Vedanta philosophies with other Eastern religious practices such as Zen meditation, Indonesian Subud, Dervish dancing and Sufism, Taoist art and T’ai Chi movement, and then threw in liberal doses of western psychological practices like primal scream and psycho-drama to keep the punters fully occupied and dizzy. It was not only his clear, lucid rendition of the simplicity of attaining eternal wisdom that made him explosively popular, he also promulgated Tantric Sex as a staple discipline on his menu card. He became infamous for pairing off the most unlikely of candidates and encouraging them to practice the divine art of fucking with no hang-ups. Many a dull, ugly no-hoper joined up and got themselves some self-realisation, a spinal tap, a foot massage, a jolly good screaming session and a nice juicy ‘root’ to boot.

Rajneesh was a groundbreaker, trouncing straight-jacketed tradition, cutting away the mumbo-jumbo detritus of religion and using any world-practise that had the potential to provide knowledge and fitness. He offered what the westerners were accustomed to, a surfeit of choices, not an abstinence of desires. He was basically a good guy who wanted to revolutionise the world with love but he didn’t quite realise what kind of monster he was unleashing as he was adrift in Maya like the rest of humanity and, getting involved with other humans, venal and cruel, he got “brought down.” He often prattled on about how his fans would deify and make an institution out of him, he just didn’t figure how badly out of hand it would get.

Arthur was offered the array of mind-blowing therapies, seminars, books, tapes, incense and orange outfits but he wasn’t interested, particularly put off by the photo of Rajneesh’s ugly mug hanging heavily from clunky wooden beads strung around everyone’s neck. There was the usual pressure to “join up”, at such and such a price, it all smacked of brainwash therapy to him and he preferred to hide out in Peter’s room smoking ganja and reading science fiction. He was still curious about this so-called great God-man so he went along to the sunset dance and pep-talk presided over by the old rascal himself. Inside a marquee a crowd of vacuous foreigners were asked to dance blindfolded, abandoned and free, to raucous electric music, and they all flopped about like fish in a net, while Rajneesh watched from a podium. Arthur pretended to fling off his inhibitions and prance about like an epileptic fairy, all the while peeping from under his blindfold, watching the Maestro squint his voyeur’s eyes at the crowd, coolly appraising every lithe movement.

When the posse of frenetic punters were loosened up and quietened down, Rajneesh launched into his pat spiel, droning on and on, tantalising and mesmerising, about how everyone present was already enlightened, they had ‘It’, they were ‘It’, they’d simply covered ‘It’ over with heaps of crap. His mixed-up mysticism could clear away the crap, or, if they wanted, load them up with more crap than they could handle until they exploded and in the end they’d realise they’d been ‘It’ all the time. They don’t even need to be sitting here listening to all this crap, because they’re as enlightened as he is and they always were.

The audience cheered and asked for more, Arthur got restless and wondered indeed why he was sitting there, for he had a flash about his own inner light, knowing he’d always bathed in it, and didn’t need the next instalment of the how-to-get-illuminated manual. Hanging around the ashram, his patience was stretched thin by the constant, relentless referral to Bhagwan’s ubiquitous presence, his every word, gesture, move, blink and fart mulled over ad nauseum by the army of would-be Buddhas. He resisted donning one of the variegated shades of orange ‘sanyassi’ robes they tried flogging to him and, at the first opportunity, ran away to Goa where there was no Master as well as no God and he could really get his rocks off. He’d had a fortunate escape for if he’d truly been desperate for direction, and somehow wangled his way into Bhagwan’s select high guard, he might have got trapped for years in the old fakir’s money-grubbing menagerie getting his brains convoluted every which way.

Bhagwan Rajneesh was a wimp who fainted in the proximity of alien molecules, and he was a zen trickster who created tests to discover if one stank or not. Actually, he was a bit of a cold fish with a secretive private life, one voluptuous white woman as long-term lover and Susheila Tough Titties as administrator sticking to his arse like a limpet mine, and only the chosen few faranghi power-mongers allowed into his personal quarters. It was rumoured they had orgies in the inner-sanctum and Bhagwan, as a world-weary voyeur, liked to impassively watch all variations on sexual congress, but that was more like Arthur’s pornographic imagination at work, the egghead mystic was too uptight and queasy for any such action.

It came to pass that the masses of Indian men got wind of the free sex with white women going on in the ashram at Poona and they tried storming the front gates and climbing the back walls. The scandal and the ruckus that ensued from all the primal, sexual screaming caused the Poona Council to expel Rajneesh from the city and in 1985 he fled to America. In the ‘money talks’ USA his movement grew exponentially till it went into meltdown with ninety-six Rolls Royces, the buying up of a whole County and the incarceration of Rajneesh in a prison cell for a lengthy period as a tax-evading, illegal alien.

Throughout the ordeals his delicate constitution was much put upon and he was slowly, surreptitiously poisoned to death with untraceable thallium by Susheila Tough Titties to get her hands on all that money, or so urban myth has it. The mad professor come avatar died in 1990 at the age of fifty-seven and left behind as his legacy a franchise of eclectic spiritual conundrums and simplistic instant-wisdoms via books, tapes, incense and orange underpants. Arthur long found it difficult to discover the truth of Rajneesh’s downfall, of whether the Authorities or his own disciples killed him, and he wondered where all the millions in royalties went. And he was bemused by the poor fool’s white-washo-ed resurrection in the mid ‘90s with the scrubbed up presentation of ‘Osho’, a new brand-name dreamed up by his barnacle-like followers. Arthur felt kind of saddened by the fact that, long after his death, Rajneesh’s acolytes continued to throw themselves at the feet of his empty throne, screaming his name hysterically and worshipping a piece of empty space, the antithesis of what Rajneesh himself promulgated, but a few dudes made a lot of money and that’s what counts.

The sweetest of all the Babas into whose presence Arthur had the good fortune to be introduced was a female saint by the name of Ananda Mayee Ma, Universal Hindu Goddess made flesh. She was so renowned that Indihra Ghandi, “Mother India” herself, wore to the end of her days a mala, a sacred wooden-bead necklace, Mayee Ma had given her. She had been discovered as a young woman in the early twentieth century, totally blissed out, eyes rolled back in Samadhi, exuding profound peace and love, and even her young husband worshipped her as the Goddess made manifest.

Without really knowing where he was going, Arthur travelled with a party from Sivananda Ashram to Her temple abode in Haridwar, and stepping into the antechambers he gasped over wondrous, brightly coloured wall murals depicting the many forms and acts of the Goddess. Even the domed ceiling told a fantastic story in images Michelangelo would drool over, and to Arthur it was reminiscent of the décor of the old Plaza Cinerama Movie Palace in Melbourne where he’d seen many a wrap-around, mind-blowing movie, the epitome of Maya, trickster of illusion. Taken through psychedelic, painted corridors with the Goddess Laxmi as the central motif, he was then ushered into Her celestial company, female attendants fussing over Her while She sat, tranquil and Nirvanic, upon a cushioned divan under the windows of a small room. He didn’t have a clue who She was except that She gave off an effulgent light that filled the room and induced peace in his troubled mind.

Along with the twenty or so other adorers, he was allowed to meditate for half an hour in front of Her, She radiated an expansive Universal Consciousness that made his heavy flesh evaporate, and the taste of celestial nectar dripped from his palate and joy surged up his spine to melt his rigid headspace.

Next thing he knew he was stumbling out of the door in an ecstatic daze, and the bright, sunshine-splashed day seemed to welcome him as a chorus of Indian peasant drummers in the temple courtyard set up a blood-thumping rhythm, loud and compelling, drawing him in. He couldn’t help himself, he leaped amongst them and danced wildly, primordially, mindlessly, Kali’s dance of destruction, Saraswati’s dance of creation and Laxmi’s dance of munificence. His euphoric dancing mimicked the universe spinning and in mid-swing, when he glanced up, he saw that Ananda Mayee Ma watched his inspired ballet from her window, her attendants huddled behind her, and she smiled unreservedly, delighted and beatific.

Afterwards, when the drumming had stopped and he was out on the roadway panting, one of the Sivananda party-members approached him, her face scrunched up in a fury, spitting chips. Arthur had always referred to her as the German Countess, she sat around the Ashram in a mock-pose of enlightened beatitude, false teeth thrust forward and jutting out of the silly grin on her face, she was always dressed in a glowing blue-rinse sari, her hair in a grey-white pageboy style. She once favoured Arthur fondly, chucking him under the chin and telling him what beautiful blue eyes he had, like an old tart. But then she must’ve heard the salacious rumours about him being a homosexual, making her sour old puss drop every time she saw him, till outside Ananda Mayee Ma’s she had plummeted to hissing depths of apoplexy. She was scathing in her abuse of him, declaring,

“Your sexual, cabaret dancing was disgusting, how dare you act the fool at such a sacrosanct location, have you no shame? You danced like a male prostitute!”

He dashed back to Shangri-la crestfallen and dehumanised, yet still hanging onto the memory of the compassionate face of the Goddess made flesh, Ananda Mayee Ma, smiling down upon him from her window, and the joy it communicated to him. At Christmas he gave the uptight German Countess a card with a poem by Paramahamsa Yogananda that read,

“In this world Mother, no one can love me. Where is there true loving love? Where is there truly loving me? That is where I long to be.”