Across the universe, p.27
Across the Universe, page 27
The Maharishi’s birthday gift to Love was a private, one-on-one initiation, elevating him as an instructor of Transcendental Meditation. He was taken to the yogi’s private room of worship and meditation down in the basement of his bungalow. The Maharishi began by lighting candles, burning incense and offering rice, flowers and fruit to Guru Dev as the strapping Californian crouched on the floor. He recited ancient Hindu religious texts in Sanskrit, asking Love to learn them so that he could raise his consciousness and fully integrate the spiritual with the material world. Love felt an intense sense of devotion to the Maharishi and found himself so overwhelmed at the end of the ceremony that he could not even get up. ‘Maharishi reached over with his left hand and patted me on my neck three times, and I’ll never forget what he said. “You will always be with me.”’15
Within two days there was yet another grand birthday celebration at the ashram—a double one for Pattie and Horn. Singh was once again summoned to play at the party. This time he took along a young Englishman, Nick Nugent, who had come to the nearby Doon School on a temporary teaching assignment. He would go on to become a senior editor of the BBC World Service. They carried a birthday gift from Horn to Pattie made by Singh’s craftsmen at Pratap Music House. It was a beautiful dilruba—a Hindustani classical instrument that Pattie had learnt to play in London.
Nugent’s description16 of the party provided fascinating details. It commenced, he said, on the Maharishi’s arrival, with prayers, with everybody standing up in silence to hear his chants. After that, Nugent recalled, all formality was abandoned and everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ for Pattie and Horn who were sitting cross-legged on the stage behind their cake.
Pattie looked gorgeous in a mauve gold-braided Benarasi sari, adorned with flowers like an Indian bride. Horn was wearing a flowing Indian kurta with ‘Paul’ painted on the front and ‘Jai Guru Dev’ on the back. It was a present from Paul and Jane who had painted the names.
The dilruba was formally presented on the stage to Pattie who seemed thrilled to bits but had to wait to try it out. This was because the instrument was monopolized by George and Paul who demonstrated to the gathering how it was played. Finally Paul handed over the instrument to Pattie declaring, ‘I think I’ll give it up.’
Then the music started, with the visiting rock stars and local Indian musicians exhibiting their skills with different instruments. The musical highlight of the evening was George serenading his wife to the accompaniment of a sitar on her twenty-fourth birthday. After playing a couple of ragas, the Beatle stunned everybody with a rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’, drawing loud applause from his audience. Paul accompanied him on a tanpura that Donovan had recently acquired. It was perhaps the first time that the British national anthem had been played on the sitar and tanpura. John, however, stayed off the music, according to Nugent who saw him engrossed in a discussion on meditation with an American.
The musical session was followed by a spectacular fireworks display. It was much like the show put on for the two earlier celebrations for George and Love. The yogi was clearly fond of fireworks.
The evening ended with a magic show by a conjuror dressed in a shiny red suit. He had the rather grand title of Shahenshah, and had come from Dehra Dun. One particularly droll moment, Nugent recalled, was Donovan being drafted by the magician as his helper on the stage because his own assistant was going to be hypnotized for that particular magic act. The Scottish balladeer put his heart and soul into the act, drawing peals of laughter from the audience. One bearded sadhu in the gathering found Donovan particularly hilarious and was in splits. ‘I have never seen a monk laugh so hard,’ Nugent recalled.
Holi, the Hindu festival of colours heralding spring, was another occasion of revelry at the ashram. Paul, John and George, along with their partners and other celebrity guests, doused each other with coloured powder and paint. The journalist Naqvi remembers playing Holi with the Beatles, particularly Paul, who was the most enthusiastic of all. It was the first time that the Beatles and members of their party had participated in this most boisterous Hindu festival that gives cultural sanction for grown-ups to behave like rowdy children. By all accounts, everyone enjoyed themselves immensely.
Nearly fifty years later, Pattie remembered those lazy, hazy, crazy days at the ashram with fond nostalgia. It was that rare period in her life after marrying George when she had so much time to herself, and the remote idyllic setting made it even more appealing.17 With George happy meditating by himself, she would often visit the nearby towns of Mussoorie and Dehra Dun, which she would later mistakenly identify as Tibetan trading posts in her book, perhaps because of the proliferation of shops selling a variety of handicrafts and trinkets by Tibetan refugees. Pattie bought quite a few of the trinkets—a prayer wheel and lots of pretty Tibetan beads.
She recalled walking down to the Ganga with friends and witnessing scenes that would have shocked her earlier but failed to do so in Rishikesh. There were lepers on the other side of the river, begging, and a man who sat meditating in the middle on a pointed rock. ‘If I had seen lepers in Oxford Street, I’d have been upset, but in India they and the man on the rock were just part of the scenery.’
Pattie’s adventures outside the ashram got more daring as time passed. With the days getting hotter as the month of March progressed towards the Indian summer, she found the fast-flowing cool waters of the Ganga ‘delicious’. She said that the river moved so fast you could sit on it, quite literally, and it would take you along as if you were on a chute. George disapproved—he thought it far too frivolous. One day Pattie lost her wedding ring in the river. She panicked, knowing George would be furious. Fortunately, Mia’s brother Johnny was with her. They looked and looked, Pattie getting more and more convinced that the search was in vain. But miraculously, after about twenty minutes, Johnny had it in his hand.18
The cool waters also tempted John and Paul to take a dip in the river. A few times they quietly slipped off their clothes and waded in completely naked. Once Naqvi too joined in the skinny-dipping and his photographer managed to sneakily take a shot of a nude John in the water, though the picture would never get published.
Unlike George who regarded the Maharishi with utmost veneration, both John and Paul treated him with a familiarity that bordered on irreverence. Donovan, for instance, remembered one occasion shortly after he arrived at the ashram. He was sitting with the Maharishi along with the Beatles, their wives, Mia and Love, and the conversation had petered out to a period of awkward silence. He was surprised to see John suddenly get up, walk up to the Maharishi who was sitting cross-legged, pat him on the head and exclaim, ‘There’s a good little guru!’ Everybody, including the Maharishi, burst into laughter.19
Most of the Maharishi’s devotees bowed to him with folded hands, according him the formal respect that gurus and god-men normally get from their disciples. However, in the case of the Beatles, particularly John and Paul, the Maharishi accepted a far more familiar relationship and often talked to them like friends and partners.
Paul, in fact, recalled conversations where it was the Maharishi who asked them for advice:
‘He would ask what kind of car they should use and you’d say, “A Mercedes is a good practical car, not too flash, pretty flash, it’ll get you there, it’ll tend not to break down.” “This is the car we should have!” It was all done like that, it wasn’t “Rolls-Royces are very nice, Maharishi. You could have a couple of them on what you’re earning.” It wasn’t that, it was very practical. He wanted to know what was the strongest car that won’t break down and that they would get the best wear out of.’20
Despite the hype about the Beatles coming to meditate at the ashram to attain spiritual bliss, Paul and Jane appeared to regard their expedition to Rishikesh more as a relaxing vacation in an exotic place. Paul felt that they were after all from England, and wanted the Maharishi to also be a guide, showing them the sights and experiences of India that an ordinary tourist would look for.
‘We asked him, “Can people fly? Can people levitate? We’ve seen it in all the books and stuff.” And he said, “Oh yes, people can, yes.” We said, “Can you?” He said, “No, I personally have not practised this art.” We said, “Well, who could?” He said, “I believe there might be someone three villages away from here.” We said, “Can we get ’im?” There was an element of, “We’re on holiday, after all. We’ve come all this way, could we have a levitation display? It would be great to see people do it.” And he half thought of fixing one up but nothing ever materialised.’21
Paul remembered persisting in demanding from the Maharishi more stereotypical Indian exotica.
‘“Eh, you got any of them snake charmers then, Swami? Can you do the Indian rope trick?” We were just Liverpool lads. Let’s face it, this was not the intercontinental Afro-Asian study team; this was not a group of anthropologists.’22
As they all got more comfortable in the ashram, the temptation to break the rules of the mediation camp grew. For instance, eating any kind of non-vegetarian food including eggs, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes or joints were strictly forbidden. There was also a ban on leaving the ashram premises without permission. But these restrictions, particularly on smoking and bunking out of the camp, were routinely broken. Paul told Miles that defying the ashram rules took him back to the pranks he used to play as a teenager in school.
‘So when I got out to Maharishi’s I got a bit constricted and I found a way I could bunk out of the camp. Because you weren’t allowed to go out, you actually had to ask permission, I thought, I’m going to sag off. So I got down to the Ganges a few afternoons. I remember playing by the banks of the Ganges, which was rather nice, just like a kid, it was such a nice day. I just thought, I’d rather be on holiday.’
Donovan too told Miles about their schoolboy pranks at the ashram:
‘After the day’s meditation, we would all gather for the evening lecture by Maharishi. One night Paul and I were having an illegal cigarette by the lecture hall. Maharishi approached, surrounded by his usual admirers. Paul saw him coming and said, “Quick, lads, fags out. Here comes teach!”’23
The Scottish folk rock singer had a very unusual name for cigarettes. He surprised Nancy once, asking her for a cigarette, leaning close to her and whispering, ‘Luv, have you got a cough?’ Mia too loved to puff in secret at the ashram. According to Naqvi, she would come every evening, exactly and daringly, to the same spot behind the cottage that used to double up as the office and home of Suresh Srivastava, the Maharishi’s aide who looked after the administration of the camp. Knowing how fond the guru was of her, Mia perhaps felt confident that she would be forgiven even if she did get caught smoking.
The yogi most probably knew what was going on behind his back—his celebrity guests smoking and occasionally slipping out of the ashram without permission. But he may not have known that joints and not just cigarettes were being smoked, and that there was a fair amount of alcohol being consumed as well. Nancy, in her tales from the ashram, did mention several drinking parties in her room, with bottles of liquor smuggled in.
Naqvi maintains that the celebrities as well as a number of meditators freely smoked pot and drank liquor after dinner and the evening lecture were over. He himself drank and smoked in his room every night and nobody disturbed him.
Wonderwall director Massot had a revealing tale about the time he arrived at the ashram shortly after Paul left.
By the time I arrived, John and George were the only Beatles around. Ringo didn’t like the food and his wife didn’t like the flies, and this was definitely not Paul’s scene, so they’d all flown home. John was up on a rooftop dressed all in loose white cotton and sandals, playing the melodeon. Later he claimed to have licked the problem of how to meditate and smoke at the same time. He leaned against a tree and closed his eyes in deep inner thought, took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit up, ‘See? I’m still meditating.’24
Later, while showing him to his room, John saw his Philips portable cassette and asked what music he had brought.
I told him ‘(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay’, Otis Redding’s last recording—just released—and a small piece of hash. John lowered his voice and told me there was no dope in Rishikesh and not to tell anyone, especially George. George, it seemed, was locked into some sort of meditational duel with Lennon to see who the stronger character was.
That night, after dinner, we smoked all the dope and listened to ‘Dock of the Bay’ at least 20 times.
As for the ban on non-vegetarian food, it was a non-starter from the outset, with Evans regularly smuggling in eggs to cook for Ringo. Even Nancy quietly sneaked in several cartons of hard-boiled eggs for meditators who were sick of the bland vegetarian food. The Beatles and their entourage occasionally travelled to Dehra Dun for more exciting non-vegetarian fare. But these excursions were few and far between and Naqvi suspected that non-vegetarian food, along with cigarettes and liquor, were being consumed within the four walls of the cottages in the ashram.
Love, who otherwise took his meditation very seriously, committed the most sacrilegious act of all. Daunted by the prospect of switching from his regular diet of beef, lamb and chicken back in the West Coast to the completely vegetarian food served at the ashram, he had brought with him a vital ration. It was a piece of beef jerky that he had carried into the ashram to chew on in case he failed to resist the urge for something non-vegetarian. Had his secret been discovered, it would have caused a furore considering the sin attached to eating the flesh of the cow, regarded by many Hindus as their holy mother, and that too, in the sacred Valley of Saints. The Beach Boys singer was perhaps the first to have done the unthinkable in Rishikesh. Ironically, Love, who got increasingly involved with the Transcendental Meditation movement, would later turn completely vegetarian after going back home to the West where there were no such eating restrictions.25
He left the ashram soon after his birthday and his initiation as a full-fledged Transcendental Meditation instructor. The Maharishi urged him to stay on till the end of the camp but his band had a big tour coming up in the United States and required him to get back. He promised to keep in touch with the guru and attend other meditation courses and camps organized by him. He would be true to his word and got closer and closer to the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, attending several other events in subsequent years. The Beach Boys even took the Maharishi on their next tour across the United States.
Other celebrities also started leaving the ashram. Mia had rushed off to London for a film shoot. Nancy, who had by then taken an active dislike to her, recalled with considerable sarcasm how the actress had said a fond goodbye to the Maharishi, cooing ‘I hate to leave you and all this knowledge.’ She promised, batting her wide, beautiful eyes, to be back with the guru when he held another meditation camp in Kashmir later in the summer.
As she watched this emotional parting, Nancy could not help feeling uneasy wondering how many people in the ashram Mia had gossiped to about her earlier allegation of the Maharishi coming on to her. They appeared to have made up and she even got the yogi to promise to make Johnny the director of a film being made on him. The actress also left Prudence in the yogi’s care, alone in one of the cottages, still alternately meditating and screaming. According to Nancy, she left no money for her sister whose passage back to the United States had to be paid for by the Maharishi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement.
Donovan too had to leave for a series of scheduled concerts. His departure was widely mourned because the soft-spoken, charming Scottish singer with a head full of dark curls was popular both with the Beatles and others in the camp. The ashram was not the same after Donovan left.
Then, in the fourth week of March, after spending a little under five weeks in Rishikesh, Paul and Jane decided to go back home. Jane said she had an important theatrical assignment she could not get out of. Paul felt that he could not stay away from London any longer, with the Beatles’ new company, Apple, just about getting off the ground. He got on his knees and made a grand farewell speech to the Maharishi in a way only Paul, with his amazing skill with words and gestures, could.
Nancy recalled a touching goodbye to Paul and Jane at the gates of the ashram as she and Rik walked them to the car. Paul handed over his camera tripod to Rik, and told his mother, ‘I’m going away a new man.’ She remembered John standing at the gate strumming his guitar to bid his mate farewell.26
The couple was careful to keep their departure from Delhi quiet and had a brief interaction with the large media contingent that had gathered at the London airport when their plane landed the next morning to know their experiences at the ashram first-hand. Both were diplomatic enough not to raise any controversy as is evident from the following transcript of their interaction at the airport with the media.
Paul (on meditation): ‘You sit down, you relax, and then you repeat a sound to yourself. It sounds daft, but it’s just a system of relaxation, and that’s all it is. We meditated for about five hours a day in all. Two hours in the morning and maybe three hours in the evening, and then, for the rest of the time, we slept, ate, sunbathed and had fun.’
