Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
heartland, Rajneesh read a lot of Taran Swami as a child. Raised in
a minority within a minority, he soon came to identify with the
saint's trials and tribulations, and saw himself also as a pure voice
crying out in the impure and chaotic wilderness of Hinduism. Thus
he, too, became an iconoclast; but his target was the demolition of
all faiths so that he could replace them with a new one - his own. As
a philosophy professor at a very minor university during his
twenties and early thirties, with an MA from another such university,
he knew what he wanted from philosophies and what he did not
want. He also had an unerring grasp of what Western seekers of
Eastern truths in the seventies wanted, and he learned how to give
them precisely that. In a 'madhouse of religions,' the Shree Rajneesh
Ashram was more like a spiritual supermarket in 1976.
Poona is a pleasant city nestled in the hills about a hundred miles
southeast of Bombay and more than three hundred miles north of
Goa. Our car ran into some problems half an hour north of
Kolhapur. As we bumped over the hump of a bridge, there was a
loud thud, then the scream of metal grating over hardtop. The
gearshift appeared to float freely through all five stations, engaging
none, and the engine roared aimlessly when the accelerator was
pressed. The driver pretended nothing was amiss, however,
attempting to unobtrusively re-engage a gear, any gear, as we
gradually slowed to a halt near a grove of palm trees like every other
grove of palm trees we'd passed during the hours of our trip north
from Goa.
Indian drivers take breakdowns very personally. Without a word,
our man got out and opened the hood. Esther had something
happening in her intestines that increasingly obsessed her with
finding a clean toilet. She was also, I overheard, getting her period.
'What
now
?' she hissed.
In order to give David the privacy in which to receive the regular
allowance of verbal abuse that I sensed was overdue, I got out and
joined the driver. He was poking at valves and wires the way
motorists do when they know nothing about cars.
'Could it be the transmission?' I asked him - not that I know
anything about cars, either.
