I was on holiday in Spain with Adae and her boyfriend Marco, the son of a rich Italian restaurant owner, when my A-level results came through. After countless teachers had told me I was on a much lower intellectual level than Tom, after a childhood in which my only real achievements were to jump over a stream on a BMX and climb the highest tree in Surrey, I got two As and a B. It came as a surprise to everyone.
‘It’s very annoying,’ said Tom, when I spoke to him down the line from Marco’s marble-floored apartment on the Costa Del Sol. ‘I always used to think you were so much less intelligent than me. Now I’ve discovered you’re only slightly less intelligent than me.’
While I was living the high life with Marbella’s nouveau riche, our parents were moving into separate flats. In the last few months, two events had happened that brought about the end of our unconventional family arrangement and took Nev beyond the point of no return with the Brahma Kumaris.
Without telling Mum about it, Nev went to a solicitor to see if he could draw up a rather unusual will. He wanted to make an arrangement that if Mum died after him a large percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the house would still go to the Brahma Kumaris. As it turned out he wasn’t legally allowed to do it, and that would have been the end of the matter had not the solicitor, fearing Nev had been taken over by a bizarre cult, broken professional conduct and told Mum about the meeting.
‘It’s turned me off Nev forever and made me determined to get divorced from him as soon as possible,’ said Mum, when I got back from Spain. She had moved into a pretty maisonette in Ladbroke Grove and Nev into a featureless flat in Kensington. We were in her new living room, sitting on cream-upholstered armchairs. ‘By trying to leave the money from the sale of the house to the BKs after I die, he was hoping to control me from beyond the grave. Nev was furious that the solicitor had rung me up and told me about it, but I’m jolly glad he did. It opened my eyes to the level of Nev’s commitment to the Yogis.’
‘What does Nev say about it?’
‘He says he was in a weird frame of mind,’ she replied, getting cross as the thought of it. ‘All I can say is that his frame of mind wasn’t so weird he couldn’t go to a solicitor and try to bequeath to the BKs the money I wanted you and Tom to have. He went behind my back. He says he still loves me. But he’s made our life together totally impossible because there’s no compromise on his part whatsoever. I didn’t want to tell you about it when it happened because you were in the middle of your A-levels, but now that you’ve finished school it can all be out in the open. Nev and I are over.’
Mum could put up with almost anything, it seemed, apart from someone interfering with her cash. ‘But he’s always been a good dad,’ I told her. ‘And a good husband.’
‘That’s true,’ she said, stretching her legs out along the newly fitted carpet of her luxuriously appointed flat. ‘But there’s something important you need to know. The BKs come first in Nev’s life. You and me and Tom will always play second fiddle and there’s a reason for that. If you look at religious cults, the one thing they have in common is they have to replace the family. That’s the strongest bond in a person’s life and so it may threaten the cult. And cults will have an unconventional approach to sex. You may have to have sex with lots of people or you may not be allowed to have sex at all, but it’s going to be different from the norm. Nev may not think of the BKs as a cult, and they would certainly claim they don’t break up families, but you can’t deny the similarities.’
Whether the Brahma Kumaris were anti-family or not, it was Mum who called halt on our own family life, even if it was Nev’s act of subterfuge which convinced her to do it. It was a chance event, meanwhile, that allowed her to do that.
While I was in my final years at Frensham Heights, I was unaware that the old arguments had returned. The house was in need of constant and expensive restoration and Mum and Nev were spending money quicker than they were earning it. To make matters worse, Nev was giving a chunk of his monthly salary away to the Yogis.
‘It’s not the amount you’re giving away that bothers me,’ Mum said over Sunday lunch. ‘It’s the fact that we need every penny we’ve got to fix up this house.’
‘I’ve given enough time, energy and money to you and the kids!’ Nev replied in spirituality-supported indignation. ‘It’s quite right that I should give my support to the BKs now. They have treated me extremely well.’
‘As far as I’m concerned you might as well have told me that you’ve got another girlfriend, she’s had a baby, you need to support her, and she’s great in bed so it’s all worth it,’ Mum snapped back.
Nev poked at his lentils. ‘It’s a preposterous comparison.’
‘In real terms – in money terms – it’s exactly the same.’
Eventually, my girlfriend broke the long silence that followed in the way only a well brought-up young woman like her knew how.
‘This home-made bread is gorgeous.’
At the same time, Nev had just won a three-year fight with the council to be allowed to park a car on the street outside, and to make interior and exterior alterations to a house previously condemned by preservation laws to a state of eternal decay. As a result the house doubled in value, almost overnight. Then one Saturday afternoon, when Mum was at home by herself, the phone rang. It was the owner of a local art gallery who said she had heard our house was on the market. It wasn’t. The woman said it was her dream home and asked Mum how much she would be prepared to sell it for.
‘I honestly don’t have a clue how much it’s worth.’
‘How about half a million?’
It was 1988. Half a million pounds was a ludicrous amount, five times more than our parents bought the house for – and enough for them to buy separate homes and get divorced. But when Mum mentioned the offer to Nev when he returned from work, he said that they were not selling. He didn’t want the family to split up. They finally had planning permission to do all the things they wanted to do, and with him in the basement and Mum upstairs, the arrangement was working well. He had gone for a walk along the river with an old friend who said he would be crazy to sell, just when the house was coming together after being a slum for so many years.
The following morning, Nev chugged off on his little motorbike to the Brahma Kumaris centre in Willesden for his six o’clock class. Dadi Janki and Jayanti were there. When he came back he said to Mum, ‘We’ll sell.’
The Yogis, the only people with any real power over Nev, had changed his mind. He had asked Dadi Janki and Jayanti what he should do. They told him, ‘You must do what Liz wants.’
All of this went on without my knowledge. But when I came back from my last term at school and Mum and Nev sat Tom and me down and told us the news, we reacted in a way that might seem strange: we welcomed it.
It was for pragmatic reasons as much as anything. I hated Richmond by then. It was boring and sterile, and every time I went to a concert I ended up missing the last train and having to walk for an hour and a half along the pollution-encrusted dual carriageway from Hammersmith. I was soon off to university in London, and it would be ideal to have a flat in Ladbroke Grove to stay in when I needed a break from life in halls. We had long got used to the idea that our parents weren’t together in the conventional sense, and as far as I was concerned I had left home when I first went to Frensham and hadn’t suffered pangs of homesickness five years earlier. For Mum to have a crash pad in the place I had first scored a block of vacuum-sealed wood seemed like an excellent idea.
Tom was already living another life. We all were. Will Lee was now a handsome art student at Camberwell. Whenever I went round to his shabby flat above a kebab shop on Denmark Hill, bohemian art-school girls were pouring him glasses of cheap red wine before taking him off to a pub called The Hermit’s Cave and admiring his nihilistic pronouncements on the death of God, or why cheese-and-onion crisps were better than salt-and-vinegar, or the way he stared bleakly out of the pub window and said ‘moo’ in such a poetic fashion. Gael became a full-on hippy. Adae was a face on the London club scene. Polly was heading off to the wilds of Louisiana to study Cajun cooking. Eugene drifted through Southern Africa, where the Zimbabwean secret service made an ill-fated attempt to recruit him (he decided to take a job in a backpackers’ bar instead.) Will MacCormac continued to be convinced that every girl fancied him with the result that a few actually did, and he spent the next few years sitting at Jocasta Innes’s weathered dining table with one hand pressed against his cheek and the other drawing up his latest pioneering automobile design or revolutionary hi-fi system on a scrap of paper, a female admirer never too far away.
I hadn’t seen Sadie since our New Year’s Eve party, but one day Tom came back to Mum’s flat to announce he had spotted an extremely attractive girl by a bus stop in Hammersmith whom he vaguely recognized. When he got up the courage to talk to her, she recognized him too. It was Sadie. She was working as a DJ in Brighton. Tom forgot to ask her whether she was still going out with the would-be Elvis, but at least he suggested we all meet up some time. Then he lost her number. I never saw her again.
Nev was alone in his flat in Kensington. It was only much later he told me how the years after the break-up of the family were the worst of his life; how he felt that, rather than him choosing a life away from us, we had chosen to be with Mum and to cast him out. He certainly didn’t give any indication of his loneliness at the time, but one of the problems of the spiritual path is you are forever meant to be learning and growing, not wallowing in misery. Meanwhile, Mum was busy discovering that while sex may not be compulsory, it can certainly be appealing after a long time in the desert, and she got herself a new (grumpy, sixty-something) boyfriend.
It was around then that I began to reflect, more than I was expecting to, on the teachings of the Brahma Kumaris. I decided I had to find out properly whether this was the life for me, as Nev so deeply hoped it was.
The supposed freedom of university turned out to be a big disappointment. The food fights and high jinks of so many young people let off the leash for the first time just seemed like an average evening at Brackenhill. I kept away from it, spending most of my time with a Puerto Rican-Italian-American called Alexa who quickly became my girlfriend. Her rich father had run off with a Swiss woman, and now the pair of them lived a peripatetic life in Europe’s finer hotels – her family life was as odd as my own. When I wasn’t with Alexa, I worked: for Jocasta Innes as she set up a paint effects company, as a cleaner in an old people’s home, in a health food shop off Portobello Road, and, for a few memorably disturbing nights, in the bowels of University College Hospital where I had the task of making notes on the provenance of various human brains, hearts and livers medical students had dissected, before putting them into plastic bags and throwing them into an incinerator. On one occasion I bagged up a brain too hastily. I chucked it towards the flames, only to see a plastic bag floating in the air. I looked around, wondering what had happened to my brain. Then I looked down. It was on my foot.
All of this meant I had a bit of money, not a common situation for a student, so when Alexa announced she would go to back to New York to stay with her mother at Christmas I decided to make my own journey: to Madhuban, the Brahma Kumaris’ World Spiritual University, on Mount Abu, India.
Nev was overjoyed. His greatest wish was for us to follow him to that blissful place to which meditation opens the gates. Nev had gone out earlier, so I flew into Delhi by myself, arriving at night and taking a grand old Ambassador taxi from the airport through seemingly endless swathes of homes made of mud and tarpaulin, to the Brahma Kumaris’ centre at New Rotak Road, New Delhi. This was a middle class area but you would be forgiven for not realizing it. I had never seen so many people sleeping on the street, some in narrow wicker cots and others on mats on the dusty ground, next to the huge open drains that separated the busy road from the houses. The hot smell of the place was a cloying blend of diesel and petrol fumes from the thundering trucks and little auto-rickshaws streaming along the road, cooking oil from the food stands still open along the street, and raw sewage. I had to wake up a man to open the gate on the metal fence surrounding the BK centre, while another man in a dirty blue dhoti, with no hands and an eaten-away face, presented his stumps and asked for baksheesh in a low pitiful murmur. When a BK in a white pyjama suit welcomed me into the building, also white, built on two floors around a courtyard and fringed with banana and palm trees, I could do little more than sit in the dark, drink water from a tin cup and listen to the singing of the cicadas.
The following morning, the environment seemed more familiar, less threatening. I recognized the childlike paintings of the Tree Of Life, and of the smiling blue baby Krishna playing with a pot of ghee, and I knew the significance of the red egg, which groups of Indian men and women, dressed in white and swathed in shawls, stared at during their morning meditation in the courtyard. The man who had opened the gate, a cheerful young BK called Mahesh, took me into the centre of Delhi and taught me how to haggle with a rickshaw driver, how to fill in an endlessly complex form which would allow me to buy a train ticket to Mount Abu, and how to cross the road at Connaught Circus without getting killed. He donated to me a white pyjama suit, which made sense in this country of heat and dust in a way that it never did in Richmond and Willesden. We bought bhelpuri from a street vendor for a couple of rupees, Mahesh shouting at a monkey that tried to take it from us in a manner far more assertive than any of the western BKs would have dared exhibit.
After a few days with Mahesh I was ready to travel down to Mount Abu. Sleep on a second-class berth was interrupted every time the train pulled into a station and the vendors made their eerie, drone-like chant of ‘chai, chai, coffee, coffee’ as they pushed clay cups through the metal bars of the carriages. At one point in the night a group of men in saris and makeup waltzed onto the train and started shouting and singing with a camp rolling of eyes and tossing of hair, to the terror of the passengers who proffered rupees while shielding their children. They were hijras, eunuchs, treated with a mix of fear and respect in Hindu culture, and – although I didn’t know it at the time – they were putting horrific curses on anyone who didn’t give them money. One hijra angrily clapped his hands and put his lipstick-clad face right up against mine, so close that you could feel the stubble. It was intimidating, but no more so than being harangued by a transvestite in a London nightclub. I ignored him until he and his friends eventually went away.
Then it was Mount Abu. This hill station in Rajasthan has been a holy centre for centuries: Brahma is said to have done penance there with the goddess Saraswati. It’s a lush oasis built around a lake, amid a desert land of tribal villages and rocky expanses, and a former outpost of the British Raj which has remained popular with Hindu pilgrims and Indian honeymooners. Madhuban is a grand, temple-like building, long and low, with a wide span of stone steps leading to its entrance. Outside, with its white turrets and rows of windows, it looks like Brighton Pavilion. Inside it is both chic and spartan: it may have an ashram-like sense of emptiness and space but everything, from the marble floor to the huge paintings of the Brahma Baba on the walls, speaks of wealth and comfort.
Madhuban also feels like a spiritual holiday camp. It has five hundred permanent residents and tens of thousands of visitors each year. You can walk through foxglove-filled gardens from Universal Peace Hall to the Tower Of Peace, a pillar under a canopy which serves as a memorial to Brahma Baba. The garishly painted World Renewal Spiritual Museum takes you through the stages of the world cycle, and if you fall sick there’s always the Global Hospital in which to recover. Once you are better you can watch dances on the hedge-lined lawns of Peace Park, experience the calm of solitude in the Forest Of Peace, or have a look at statues of gods and goddesses in the Spiritual Art Gallery. Madhuban has everything for which a peace-loving Yogi could hope, not least the Majestic Diamond Hall, capable of holding meditation sessions for an astounding twenty thousand people at a time.
It was here Nev’s journey was leading him to. A sari-wearing sister took me to his cell-like stone room after I told her I was Brother Neville’s son. It had nothing more than a single bed, a desk and a window with no glass but two wooden shutters to stop the monkeys from getting in and stealing all your toli. Nev was sitting by the desk, reading a murli, looking like he wanted for nothing.
‘Sturchos!’ he said, gripping me by the shoulders and giving me the old Nevvy grin as he jumped up at my arrival. ‘I can’t believe you’re here! I’m so pleased. Right then, let’s get you settled in.’
After I was given my own small stone room, and after visiting the vast food hall and getting a plate of brown rice, vegetable curry, chapatti and salad – all remarkably similar to the food served in the London Brahma Kumari centre – Nev and I went for a walk through the Forest Of Peace. We talked about the chaos of Delhi, of how it felt as if a thin thread of control was always just stopping the whole thing from falling apart, and I told him about university life, without too many details of what exactly I was up to and no mention of my girlfriend. We must have been talking for an hour or so, walking side by side in our white pyjama suits, when I asked Nev about the incident involving the solicitor and the will that had proved the final straw for Mum.
He stared at the dusty ground. ‘Oh look, a gecko,’ he said, but when I didn’t respond, he answered my question:
‘You know, I … I was very stupid in that regard, Sturch. And this is where the religious thing can become dangerous. A teacher had come over from India and mentioned a story about someone who had died regretting they hadn’t made a will to make sure the BKs got something. I was about to fly out to India, and I thought, what if I die in a plane crash and none of my share of what we had worked for all these years goes to the BKs? I dropped the idea when the solicitor told me it wasn’t possible to leave a chunk of the capital from the house to the BKs when Mum died, but it looked very bad when she found out.’
‘She certainly thinks so,’ I told him, thinking of Mum’s anger when she recounted to me what had happened.
‘It was a turning point,’ Nev said, nodding reflectively. ‘But the thing is, I had reached a stage in my journey where I wanted to surrender to the BKs. I had to do it to move on. When you burn your bridges, you protect yourself against straying from the spiritual path.’
The idea of a believer completely giving up his or her own will to a higher power is not a new one. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ talks about the emptying of self to allow God to live through the person: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.’ The word ‘Islam’ is an Arab word for ‘surrender’. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that freedom from the cycle of rebirths comes from surrender. The belief must come first, before everything and everyone else.
And what about the surrender of all those Brahma Kumaris who filled our house day after day, who took the place of old friends we never saw again? Of the early English converts, only Nev remains. Brother Malcolm of Beyond Sound is married with children and working as a psychologist. Brother Benji also renounced the faith, and according to Nev he’s extremely bitter about the whole experience, feeling he wasted the best years of his life on something that ultimately served no purpose. Sister Clare, Tony, those earnest young men and women who crowded into our elegantly appointed suburban drawing room in white pyjama suits and saris to tell Sandy and John and Anne and Pete and Hugh and Penny how they should renounce their materialistic ways and embrace the Yogic path … all gone. Nev said the struggle of maintaining spirituality in a body conscious world defeated them. But if these people no longer believed, who had spent so much time lecturing me about the metaphysical reality and ultimate truth of the Brahma Kumari worldview, then how can anyone be qualified to tell someone else how to live their life? It makes you ask yourself if faith is something that can ever be recommended or imposed.
After pacing through the forest for much of the afternoon, Nev and I went to the Great Hall for an early evening meditation alongside a few hundred other Yogis from around the world. Everywhere you looked there were people, all dressed in white, with serene smiles, moving in slow contemplation, sitting on chairs, leaning against walls, cross-legged, gazing out in silent engagement, rarely talking to one another. If I didn’t experience the transcendental pull from the divine here I was never going to experience it, so I decided to do everything I could to clear my mind of extraneous thoughts and concentrate fully on the soul. We sat down on little white mats and stared at the red egg on the wall, with its white and red beams of light emanating in all directions. Now was the time for revelation. Now was the time to feel whatever it was that Nev felt.
I needed to achieve soul consciousness. I had spent years listening to Nev telling me how the physical experience of incarnating through a series of bodies had caused me to lose sight of the spiritual life, but that deep spirituality lay within. I needed to truly believe the soul was eternal in order to experience the blissfulness Nev felt; blissfulness so profound it replaced the world. I could hear the message of Dadi Janki: God gives us everything. All I had to do was concentrate.
Here I was in this beautiful place, with my father. I stared at that egg. I waited for meditation to take me into pure peace, soul consciousness and divine connection.
Unfortunately, a supremely hot BK girl was sitting right under the egg. And as I waited for my Damascene revelation to arrive, I couldn’t help but wonder if this white-clad beauty was a fully paid-up follower or just a curious, maybe even single backpacker passing by and checking out the action. Perhaps I could ask her afterwards.
And that’s when it hit me.
I was never going to make it as a Brahma Kumari.