Here Comes the Sun

It was June 1993, twenty years since George had purchased Bhaktivedanta Manor for Prabhupada and his disciples. Gurudas, Mukunda, and Shyamsundar arrived in England to join in the anniversary celebration mounted by British devotees and their growing congregation. They also came to have their first reunion with George in more than a decade. On a sunny morning they drove out to Friar Park. George embraced each one, staring at deep trenches in familiar faces. He nodded with pride at Mukunda’s saffron swami robes and shaved head. He circled Gurudas, now huge with a scruffy beard and a head of hair resembling Einstein’s.

Appraising George’s sweatshirt and togs and plucking at a lock of his graying hair Shyamsundar asked, “How are you, Dad?” The two old friends hugged and laughed over the signs of aging.

They stumbled into the vestibule, fumbled with laces, tumbled through the vaulted entry, and stopped. Immaculate forty-foot-high beamed ceilings, gleaming stained-glass windows, panels of ancient oak polished to a mirror sheen—the restoration George had achieved since their last visit was magnificent. Above a massive stone fireplace hung life-size photographs of Yogananda and Vivekananda. Bric-a-brac peppered the spacious living room: ukeleles, songbooks, vases of fresh-cut flowers, tapestries and Turkish rugs, statuettes and photographs. Across the vast room stood an old Wurlitzer jukebox. George played guide, pointing to this and that, clowning with the instruments. Then he opened the glass doors and they took a tour of the grounds. The guests marveled at all that had been done and at the many varieties of trees and flowers George had planted.

George showed them his racing cars. Looking at one up close, the devotees noticed tiny Hare Krishna mantras painted across the entire body. Racing was dopey to a lot of people, George admitted, but good racing involved heightened awareness, he said. As far as he could tell, the best drivers had had some sort of expansion of consciousness.

As they walked, they yearned to ask George about Krishna in his life now that Prabhupada had passed on. He sensed their curiosity and steered the conversation back toward them. “What’s it like now at the temple? Many devotees?”

“Hundreds,” Shyamsundar said. “They’ve come from all over for the anniversary celebration. The new ones are so bright and shining. We’re old-timers now. It’s definitely the graying of the Hare Krishna movement.” He nodded at the others, saying how good it was to see them again. When it hit, that sense of having lapsed, it hit hard. “I’m not a very good example anymore,” Shyamsundar said. The gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked toward a lake shimmering in the distance. “I mean, I feel like an impostor compared to those pure souls. All the new kids ask us questions about Prabhupada and what it was like in the old days, but my memory’s shot. I can’t even remember how to tie my friggin’ dhoti.” He tugged at the cloth robe around his waist.

It wasn’t a small question somehow, despite casualness in the asking. From the beginning of their friendship, George had known Gurudas to make simple statements that carried critical weight. “Washing your hands is like chanting,” Gurudas had told him at their first meeting, “a cleansing process.” And now an offhand inquiry about chanting, on which so much rested.

George looked off at nothing in particular. “I have my little . . .” He turned to them, faking a serious expression with knitted brow, and in a deep comic voice said, “moments of doubt.” Then he laughed. “Yeah, I try to chant and meditate a little every day. It’s easier for me here. Or in Maui, with the gardens and the peace.”

They walked on, everyone chanting softly on beads, and passed by the miniature Matterhorn that Sir Frankie Crisp had installed on the Friar Park property. When the devotees had first seen it back in 1970, the hill hardly had any grass growing on it. Now it overflowed with shrubs and plants.

“When you go back to Vrindavan,” Gurudas told George, “you must visit Govardhan Hill.” He reminded George of a story from KRSNA Book that recounted how Krishna once displayed his mystic powers by lifting Govardhan Hill as a giant umbrella to protect the people of Vrindavan from torrential rains sent by demigod Indra.

Turning a corner of the Friar Park property, the group came upon a fountain featuring a life-size carving of Shiva that George had purchased from devotee sculptors in Los Angeles. Gurudas took photos of the gang with George’s castle looming in the background. It was a feel-good day. The Om flag flew from the castle tower. They played hide-and-seek like kids in the topiaries. Gurudas got lost in a tangle of bamboo. George reached in and pulled him out. “Beware the hand of Maya!” he cried. As they continued on around the grounds, he impressed everyone by rattling off the names of each plant in Latin: romneya and echinacea and cercis canadensis.

They walked on, crossing a little wooden bridge that spanned a stream. “Which is the reality and which is the illusion?” George asked Gurudas, pointing to a reflection of Friar Park in the pond.

Gurudas snapped a photo while reciting a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that described the material world as a reflection of the spiritual world. “It looks the same,” Gurudas said, “but the material world is only a shadow of true reality. It can get entangling if you confuse the two.”

The four men leaned on the bridge’s wooden railing and stared across at the sun gradually setting behind George’s manor in the distance. George noticed that Shyamsundar seemed worried and asked what was the matter.

The American sighed. His wife, he said, had waited until they were driving to the airport to tell him that she was filing for divorce and leaving home. There was a long pause, then the group looked at one another from the corner of their eyes and burst out laughing. The material world. What a dump. As if on cue, they applied the secret formula for rising above it all: Monty Python.

“You think you’ve got problems?” Gurudas chided, stabbing a finger toward Shyamsundar. “At least you have a home. When I was growing up we were so poor we lived in a cardboard box.”

In the last light of day, they headed back. The party moved to the dining room, where Olivia had prepared vegetarian treats and tea. Gurudas and Olivia talked about yoga and spirituality. George’s son, Dhani, and a few teenage school chums showed up lugging amplifiers. They had formed a rock band. Shyamsundar helped move the equipment to an upstairs practice room. The devotees expressed amazement at how much the son resembled the father. George smiled. The similarities extended beyond the physical. Dhani shared his passion for motor racing, and they enjoyed many of the same friends, including his Monty Python mates.

The guests reminisced. George mentioned the trouble he had had getting people to hear his spiritual message but acknowledged that the preaching part of his life was behind him now. “I’d rather just sit in my garden and chant.”

Olivia talked about her work on behalf of children orphaned by civil strife in Romania. A visit to shelters in the battle-weary country had left her overwhelmed and shocked. With help from friends, she had raised more than $1 million in relief funds. Mukunda reciprocated with a description of Food for Life, a program fellow devotees had organized in Bosnia. Deep inside the war zone, devotee chefs prepared nutritious meals and delivered them to thousands of locals stranded during periods of fierce fighting. They agreed that spirituality needed to make a tangible difference in the world.

George’s eyes lit up as he examined large oil paintings of Krishna in his many pastimes. One painting depicted infant Krishna hiding from his mother, Yasoda. Another showed child Krishna playing with his cowherd boy friends. In another, Krishna danced with Radha. The KRSNA Book, which he had financed twenty years before, had given rise to an entire school of transcendental artists who contributed to the oversized volume of paintings.

George’s friend and the former press agent for the Beatles, Derek Taylor, arrived carrying a box of videos. Taylor was overseeing production of The Beatles Anthology, an ambitious ten-hour retrospective, and had rough cuts to show.

At first George had been a reluctant participant in the documentary. Bob Smeaton, who conducted interviews for the series and took part in determining its content, favored revealing all there was to reveal about the Beatles, including scenes of arguments that led to their dissolution. “I’ll play whatever you want me to play,” George was saying in one of the clips.

When it came to showing footage of their time in Rishikesh and explaining rumors about the Maharishi that prompted their departure, George said, “Look, Bob, it’s bullshit, that whole thing. You shouldn’t even pay lip service to it, because if you do, you’re saying that it’s true. That thing didn’t happen, despite what people have said. I was there. And if you put that sort of stuff in there, all you’re doing is sensationalizing something. If you talk about something, people will think it really happened.”

The devotees followed George and Derek into a study. Derek pushed the start button on a VCR, and a photo of a boyish Ringo appeared on-screen. “My dad made cakes,” Ringo said in voice-over, “but he left us when I was three. After that, I’d sing ‘Nobody’s Child’ and that would make my mum cry.” George appeared on-camera talking about his childhood. Photos dissolved on and off: there he was as a boy in Liverpool, playing his first guitar, emerging from a swim at age eleven, posing for a school photo at age twelve in tie and jacket, his hair piled high over a baby-faced grin. Paul’s voice came on, saying how he always used to talk down to George because he was younger and how it probably was a failing of his to have done that. George appeared on-camera, interviewed just a few weeks before, confirming that Paul was indeed nine months older than he.

To top off their visit, the group retired to a quieter room for a bit of kirtan. George grabbed a ukulele and strummed verses of “Govinda,” then played a few new tunes. They gathered around the jukebox to hear old favorites: Radha Krishna Temple singles, some Slim Whitman numbers about lonesome trains and cattle, a Bob Dylan eulogy to Woody Guthrie. George looked up, dreamy-eyed. “Bobby Dylan. He’s greater than Shakespeare.”

For years, George had spoken with his devotee friends about taking a trip together to Vrindavan, the village southeast of Delhi where Krishna had appeared five thousand years before. In April 1996 George flew to Madras, South India to record an album of traditional Indian songs and mantras with Ravi Shankar. Taking advantage of his proximity to Krishna’s birthplace, George met up with Mukunda and Shyamsundar at the Taj Hotel in New Delhi, and the following morning they set out for India’s holiest of holy places.

George looked back from the front seat of their taxi, chatting excitedly about the Vedic chants he was recording with Ravi and telling stories about the last time he had visited Vrindavan, all the while mimicking the driver’s wild attempts to speed through crowded intersections and marketplaces. Time passed quickly as they jerked and jolted their way through the three-hour ride. The taxi arrived at the outskirts of Vrindavan, where cars and trucks trickled out in an imitation of rush hour. There was nothing of interest in Vrindavan for businesspeople, no matters of consequence or reasons for noisy traffic, and the group fell silent. Sound here traveled through filters of heat and light and ethereal space and entered the ear so spare and clean that birdcalls seemed muted, footsteps padded.

To the uninitiated, Vrindavan looked like a neglected village. Skinny dogs and mischievous monkeys scampered down its dusty roads. Loudspeakers blared kirtans from dilapidated temples. Ramshackle buses belched diesel fumes and honked weakly at creaking bullock carts that blocked crossings. Nonbelievers considered Vrindavan too hot during the day, too cold at night, and its residents too ignorant of how the real world operated. Believers, though, saw the village’s hidden dimension: Vrindavan was the spiritual world. Sixteenth-century scholar Viswanath Chakravarty had written that a devotee whose eyes were smeared with “the ointment of love” saw Vrindavan as “resplendent with exotic trees blossoming with fruits and flowers, splendid ponds and lakes replete with multicolored lotus flowers, swans, and waterbirds, earth overflowing with precious gems, and trees and bushes made of gold and crystal.”

In the sixteenth century, Chaitanya’s followers had developed the holy town and restored its many places of pilgrimage to rustic dignity. By the time of George’s visit, the population had grown to thirty-five thousand full-time residents. Once, thirty years before, Prabhupada lived alone in a tiny room on the grounds of Vrindavan’s Radha Damodar Temple. He had left India on a tramp steamer in 1965, and after four years of vigorous preaching in America and Europe returned to Vrindavan with his first Western disciples. He predicted that many pilgrims would visit in years to come and wanted them to be comfortable. With Gurudas and his wife, Yamuna, leading the effort, he constructed a white marble temple and guesthouse. Five thousand temples, some no bigger than a hole in the wall, decorated the roads and lanes of this small village, but residents considered Prabhupada’s Krishna Balaram Temple to be the most beautiful.

Two blocks from the temple stood a white three-story villa owned by Prithu Das, one of Prabhupada’s most senior German disciples. Prithu had invited George and his devotee friends to stay with him during their visit.

The taxi caromed down narrow alleys and screeched to a halt at the head of a footpath leading to Prithu’s villa. The husky, shaven-headed fifty-year-old came quickly up the path, holding the edge of his robes in one hand and reaching out with the other to take George’s suitcase. George waved him off.

The group entered the villa and parked their bags in a hallway lined with potted plants. It was too late to begin their pilgrimage that day, and someone suggested they plan tomorrow’s itinerary from the roof. The group made their way up a scrubbed stone staircase. From the flat roof, they gazed out on orchards of flame trees grouped in giant orange clusters. Ornate temple domes rose in the distance. The sun began its descent behind hills and trees. Prithu pointed a camera and waved the three-some into a clutch.

George put his arm around Mukunda and Shyamsundar. George laughed, shook the hair back from his eyes, and raised his cotton bead bag above his head. “Still Krishna after all these years,” he called out.

The day had been long. They bowed to one another, recited prayers of thanks, and George trudged off to his room. All-night kirtan singers kept vigil in temples lit with candles, while in the forest, tradition held, Krishna and the Gopis danced in the moonlight.

By 11:00 A.M. the next day, George still could not rouse himself from bed. Then he heard someone tinkering in the hallway and investigated: a thermos of Earl Grey tea sat steaming outside his door. The elixir worked wonders, and soon he emerged from his room in crisp white cotton pants and kurta shirt, his tulsibead necklace tight around his neck, his bead bag strapped to his right hand, eager to start the day. He joined his friends, and they went off in a bicycle rickshaw. First stop was Prabhupada’s samadhi, the domed marble memorial beneath which the teacher’s body lay buried.

The samadhi had been built alongside the Krishna Balaram temple, and as they approached, pilgrims came and went, pointing to details in the carved marble facade. The friends entered, bowed to the samadhi, and sat in a row, chanting quietly on their beads. George closed his eyes. He opened them after a moment and said softly, “To think that Prabhupada is right here.” He stared into space and whisked away a tear with his bead bag. “Starting to get a little misty. Shall we go down to Starbucks for a double cappuccino?” he joked.

The group piled into a bicycle rickshaw and jumbled their way down Vrindavan’s narrow streets. Arriving at Radha Damodar Temple, they bent down to enter Prabhupada’s tiny room. Outside the room’s one small window they spied fragrant eucalyptus and tamal trees. Residents considered Vrindavan’s trees to be evolved souls that were undergoing a last incarnation before returning to the spiritual world. The trees outside Prabhupada’s room had been rubbed smooth by caresses from pilgrims over the years. The visitors imagined what it must have been like for Prabhupada, approaching seventy, to have looked out this window and contemplated leaving Vrindavan for an unfamiliar and inhospitable Western world. Why had he done it? And if he had not come, what would their fate have been?

George chanted furiously on his beads. Instruments provided for visitors lined one wall. Prithu pumped a portable harmonium and began singing. Mukunda picked up a mridanga drum and kept time. George tapped a brass gong with a stick. They sang the old standard Hare Krishna melody. As the tempo built, the mystery overcame them, where they were, how the most secret of all secrets had come to England and America, how little they had done to deserve being invited into the heart of that secret, how their lives had been saved, the impossibility of it, feeling deeply the inadequacies that kept them from seeing God, from realizing the bliss of his love.

They strolled around the town of five thousand temples. George and his friends walked by a group of singers seated roadside. The lead singer stretched his hand toward heaven. The Gopis—cowherd women—hear Krishna’s flute, he sang in Braj, the local language, and run to him in the dead of night. Krishna multiplies himself into an equal number of Gopis so that each Gopi may be happy believing she alone dances with her beloved. In that moment of pleasure, the Gopis become proud and Krishna disappears from their sight and the cowherd women go mad from separation.

George did not speak Braj, but he understood the gist of what the man was singing—sorrow and yearning were universal. Yet there was nothing irreconcilable about the man’s sadness, for in the next moment the group broke into rapid drums and a joyous chorus. People stood and danced, hands above their heads, then swooped down, executing slow turns, then rose again with a jump. No one led; the waxing and waning rhythms and spontaneous dance came from intuition. There seemed to be no logical sequence to their actions. This was a display without notation or orchestration and, in that sense, not a performance at all—simply hearts drifting on waves of devotion, a song that would never be repeated exactly the same way.

George and his friends moved down the road. It was a long time before anyone spoke. They passed one kirtan, then another. Temple bells mingled with drums and bells, clappers and clapping. The world seemed afloat in music. Spirit for the people of Vrindavan was not a weekly class or a weekend retreat—they breathed it in at every moment and breathed it out in song.

George’s party descended an embankment and arrived at the Yamuna River. After haggling with a dispatcher over price for a rowboat and guide, they drifted along Vrindavan’s sacred water-front, identifying temples and the ruins of ancient palaces. George sang out, “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the riv-v-ver.” Packs of redrumped monkeys shadowed their cruise, leaping and swinging from stone parapets and balconies along the shore. Mukunda pointed out some huge turtles lounging in the sun, and the three Westerners debated what the turtles ate. Dead bodies, they guessed.

They disembarked and made their way down narrow streets and alleyways. A wrinkled old man sat on his haunches while tinkering with an ancient bicycle. A huddle of little boys coaxed water from a creaky iron pump. With his video camera, George traced their faces and captured images of architectural oddities. “Look at this,” he called out, focusing on a doorway painted a rainbow of colors.

In a hovel promoting itself as a “God Shop,” the group examined deities and items of worship: brass trays, copper water pots, carved wooden incense holders. A gaunt shopkeeper, his mouth stained red with betel juice, squatted beside his wares and haggled the price with George and Prithu for three-foot-high marble deities of Radha and Krishna.

The temple hall was filled with devotees waiting for the altar doors to open. “Let’s do some service,” George suggested, “and sing for them.” They sat with half dozen other devotees in a shaded portico before the altar and sang “Hare Krishna.” At first a pensive expression creased George’s face. “Headache,” he claimed. Then, as the kirtan built and resonated in the vast marble temple, he closed his eyes and his voice swelled with an intensity and beauty that his friends had not heard before.

In the temple that day was a young American woman named Karnamrita, who had come to India to study classical singing. From childhood she had played George’s recording “Hare Krishna Mantra” and knew its every nuance by heart. Hearing a voice that sounded like a young Yamuna’s, George opened his eyes. He turned to Karnamrita and smiled, gesturing for her to sit next to him. Together they sang as the London crew had sung thirty years before. The torch was passing to a new generation, one that might do better than their parents at setting the world aright.

“He made me feel like we were all simple devotees chanting for Krishna,” Karnamrita recalled. “I’ve been around gurus all my life. They’re supposed to be, you know, different. Nothing like that came to mind being with George. We were just absorbed in chanting. I was just in the temple room, in Vrindavan, George was there, and we were chanting.”

It was dusk, and a smudge of light rimmed temple roofs. The friends gathered in the living room of Prithu’s home, talking and listening to tapes of Prabhupada lecturing and of devotional music from around the world. George picked up a guitar and strummed for a while, singing snippets of his own songs and a smattering of others, such as Dylan’s “In Every Grain of Sand.” The group had rediscovered a lost paradise in Vrindavan, and even if only for a few days the demands of a world growing more and more material were left behind.

On the day of their departure, George and his friends packed, thanked Prithu for his hospitality, mounted a taxi, and set out for Delhi. The taxi rocked from side to side and hit every pot-hole. Temples and forests gave way to roads and fields. Farmers worked with their dhotis tucked up between their legs and turbans wrapped around their heads against a hazy afternoon sun. Trees and bowers yielded to low-lying scrub brush and then to crumbling concrete roads. Delhi was in the throes of a thick, steamy rush hour. Perhaps it had been a dream. Maybe they had never been away at all. Or perhaps it had been real, and it was only now that they were falling into a dream.

The driver lost his way in a circle of traffic and drove into a motor scooter. Drivers jumped out in the middle of a crowded street, yelling and shaking their fists. The Harrison party sat silently, waiting for the brouhaha to end. It was an abrupt reentry into the material world.

Inspired by his visit to Vrindavan, George assembled musicians at Friar Park to finish the work that he and Ravi Shankar had begun in Madras on Chants of India. The album was unlike anything either had done before. It was to be a collection of mantras sung according to traditions extending back before recorded history. For Ravi, Chants of India posed what he called “one of the most difficult challenges in my life.”

For Chants of India, George and Ravi intended to step back away from their own extraordinary musical abilities and allow Nada Brahma, God in sound, to flow unimpeded. Their job was not to produce an album but rather to create an environment in which sacred sound could emerge. The music had come down through the ages in oral tradition, improvised and with no written notation; as far as collective cultural memory would allow, George and Ravi would record original melodies. The repetition of such chants “would invoke a special power within oneself,” Ravi explained. With help from a Sanskrit scholar, Ravi chose fourteen chants for peace and harmony among nature and all creatures. He selected one verse from the Bhagavad Gita, composed three original musical interludes, and wrote one original prayer.

The sessions took place in the warmth and hospitality of Friar Park. From their positions on the carpet of George’s drawing room, the musicians and singers looked out tall French windows onto manicured gardens. Cables from microphones and video cameras snaked across the floor and up the wooden staircase to a studio where the engineers kept track of the session on television monitors.

The album opened with a single tambura drone. The chorus entered and offered an invocation to elephant-headed Ganesh, the deity who removes all obstacles. Next came a prayer to Saraswati, “blessed presiding deity of learning,” and another prayer honoring the guru as an incarnation of God’s compassion. These opening prayers shared a common message: do not neglect those who help you, even if they are unseen.

The next track offered musical instructions from a teacher to disciples preparing to enter the world. You may achieve everything this world has to give, the guru sang, but if you multiply the happiness of those worldly achievements one hundred times, and then multiply this number again one hundred times, and again and again, still you cannot calculate even the smallest fraction of happiness known by those who have realized their oneness with the Supreme.

As the album unfolded, a cello provided a handful of notes, a chorus sang, and a violin echoed the music of their prayer. There were few solos, none lasting more than a moment; the artists maintained a modest place in service to the prayers, and the chorus sang as one voice, without harmonies. The tracks that followed called for unity among people of the world, praised life in its many forms, and reminded listeners that all creation is interconnected.

George played on each track and occasionally sang with the chorus. He overdubbed instruments, mixed the voices, and submitted the results to Ravi for his review. It was an ultimate offering to his seventy-seven-year-old teacher, a man George credited with lifting his life to a realm of sacred sound and setting him on a course to God. The result was more than Ravi had dared hope.

A few days later, finished master in hand, George approached Ravi and embraced him with tears in his eyes. After half a century of mortal life, George had moved at last from the sounds of war to the sounds of peace. “Thank you,” he said, “for this music.”

When asked later about the album by an interviewer from VH-1, George said, “I believe in the thing I read years ago in the Bible. It said, ‘Knock and the door will be opened.’ And it’s true. If you want to know anything in this life, you just have to knock on the door. . . . That’s really why for me this record is important, because it’s another little key to open within each individual. Just sit and turn off your old mind, relax and float downstream and listen to something that has its roots in transcendence. The words of these songs carry a very subtle spiritual vibration that goes beyond the intellect, really. If you let yourself be free . . . it can have a very positive effect.”

Chants of India was warmly received, although in terms of sales it made hardly a dent compared to those of reissued Beatles albums. “In 1996,” the London Observer wrote, “The Beatles have achieved what every group since them has failed to do—become bigger than the Beatles.” By November 1996, more of the group’s records had been sold that year than in any year of their entire working career. In addition, sales of the newly compiled Anthology albums had surpassed more than twenty million copies. In the eyes of the world, despite thirty years since the group’s last concert, George was still a Beatle.

In July 1997, George was outside, gardening. The sun shone brightly, and as he reached up to wipe sweat from his neck he felt a lump. In early August, he underwent surgery. Doctors removed several enlarged lymph nodes through a small incision. A biopsy revealed that the nodes were malignant. Most people hearing that cancer has invaded their body progress through a series of documented stages, denial and anger among them. George went back to his garden, chanting and planting.

A few days later, light rain fell on the rolling hills of Hertfordshire. George was planting trees when he heard a car coming up the approach. He mounted a tiny golf cart and tooled silently across the lawn and around the corner of his towering Gothic manor in time to see his old friend Shyamsundar parking a battered Vauxhall by the front staircase. George knew he had changed—he saw it in the American’s eyes as he assessed George’s grayer hair and heavier jowls. In the thirty years they’d known each other, George had gone from a skinny beam of kinetic energy to a middle-aged meditator. The American smiled and waved but seemed nervous, uncertain perhaps over how George would be toward someone who no longer lived the full-time devotee life. George gave him a reassuring smile, and they embraced.

“What’s it been?” George said warmly. “How long since we were together in Vrindavan?” He watched Shyamsundar’s trepidation melt away. A quick moment of small talk and they were back to their jovial selves. George tossed out wry remarks, and his old buddy encouraged him with a laugh.

Shyamsundar looked at George’s frayed Levi’s and mud-spattered rain boots. “Quite the country squire these days,” he said, then, pointing to the tiny golf cart, asked, “Where’s the MacLaren?” George’s purchase of the exclusive sports car had been big news a few years back. Only two were manufactured each year, at a sticker price of $750,000 and a top speed of 235 miles per hour.

They walked the grounds. Shyamsundar glanced up into a massive oak and stopped. Staring down at them were life-size carvings of Krishna, Prabhupada, Yogananda, Yukteshwar, and other spiritual guides laminated into the tree trunk. George said he came here some mornings to sit and chant. “Shall we have a look round the garden?” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

George motioned him into the electric golf cart. “Please buckle up,” he ordered. “Put away your tray tables and bring your seat to the upright position.” Off they went at a breakneck five miles per hour. The tiny cart chugged past lakes where swans visiting from the nearby Thames River silently glided by, over fairy-tale bridges, around statues and gazebos. Rhododendrons in full bloom bobbed gently in the summer drizzle. Shyamsundar noted spots where they had played together thirty years before and marveled at how much work George had done since then. They puttered past a Japanese garden decorated with sundials, dwarf pines, and willows. They gazed at a Polynesian glen choked with bamboo thickets and flowers of brilliant hue. Their cart topped a slight rise, and through a rainy mist they looked down on a small rustic cabin.

“I come here to chant and meditate and listen to music,” George said. Rain fell in sheets now as they dashed inside. Sliding glass doors along one wall opened onto a stand of pine trees.

George opened the door and lit incense that mingled with wet forest smells. Half the room was taken up by a platform bed covered with an ornate embroidered quilt. A potbellied wood-stove radiated heat from a corner. Along one wall stood a large wooden box. He opened the box, which held a CD player and boxes of CDs, grabbed a CD, and put it in the player.

The opening bars to George’s recording of “Hare Krishna Mantra” spilled out of speakers mounted on walls. The two friends sprawled out on the quilt and laughed over old memories. George reached over and changed the music. Out came melodic voices from his latest recording of traditional Sanskrit chants. Then he switched to some bluesy numbers by Slim Whitman, a few Dylan classics, and a taste of stand-up from Lenny Bruce. George put on a tape of Ravi playing a rainy-afternoon raga, and the two friends chatted about how the world had been treating them over the years.

George pulled down the collar of his shirt to reveal a tiny pucker in his neck. “You know, they told me at the clinic I had a small malignant, this tiny spot, and they could cut it out, and I thought, Why bother? I don’t really care about sticking around this material world any longer than I have to. I mean—I didn’t even want to tell anyone, just let it go. I had it removed, but really there’s nothing, I mean, I’ve done it all, I’ve had it all.”

George chuckled. “No. No more gigs on Dave Letterman’s show. I’ll just go now, anytime, doesn’t matter. I’m ready, Krishna, whenever you want to pull the plug. I just want to be with—I mean, can you just imagine the spiritual sky.”

George fell silent and saw in his friend’s face the same anticipation over moving on that inspired him. Was this what the scriptures had been talking about? When yogis of the Himalayas spent years in caves preparing to see God, was this what they felt?

A few weeks later, George underwent surgery for a suspected recurrence of throat cancer, followed by several weeks of radiation therapy. “I didn’t really relate to it, to be honest,” he said. It was other events he found hard to reconcile. Shortly after the surgery, his old friend Derek Taylor died of throat cancer. Three months after that, his guitar hero Carl Perkins also died of throat cancer. Less than three months after that, Paul McCartney’s wife, Linda, died of breast cancer at age fifty-six. “The Beatles had an expression,” Paul told the press shortly after her death, “something will happen. That’s about as far as I get philosophically. There’s no point mapping out next year. Fate is much more magical.”

Whether the litany of deaths was magical, karmic, or just sad, George saw in them a reminder of mortality and a need to make every moment count. When Ringo asked him that month to compose guitar music for a new song, “King of Broken Hearts,” George put his own heart into it. One reviewer would later describe his beautiful slide guitar work as “sharing a little of his soul . . . [a] moving musical statement [that] spoke of the musician’s inner peace.”

In September 1997, Gurudas sent George a letter expressing love for his old friend and admitting to distress over reports of his cancer. George wrote back to thank him and offered words of reassurance. I don’t feel as bad as the newspapers make out, he wrote. Besides, there was always the gardening to make him feel better. “See you soon,” he signed off, “somewhere.”

By the end of the year, the three remaining Beatles were the third-highest-paid entertainers in the world, behind Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. Sales figures released that month confirmed the Beatles to be the most successful recording act in history. An online religion began, called Beatlism, exhorting followers to get in touch with their “inner Georgeness” and “inner Ringo.” Press coverage of the resurgent Beatlemania grew exponentially, and incursions into George’s private life increased.

Thieves climbed a ten-foot wall at Friar Park, evaded security cameras, and stole two bronze busts valued at a total of £50,000. In December, a deranged woman broke into the Harrison retreat in Hawaii and made herself at home eating pizza and doing laundry until police arrived to take her away. “I thought I had a psychic connection with George,” she told them.

George learned that Michael Jackson, who had quietly purchased the Beatles music library, was licensing “Drive My Car” for use in a car commercial. George lamented that unless something was done to stop the exploitation, every Beatle song would end up advertising bras and pork pies. “The history of the Beatles was that we tried to be tasteful with our records and with ourselves,” he said. “We could have made millions of extra dollars doing all that [commercial licensing] . . . but we thought it would belittle our image or our songs. As the man [Bob Dylan] said, ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’ Some people seem to do anything for money. They don’t have any moral feelings at all.”

His past refused to leave him alone. On October 9 he arrived with Olivia and Dhani at London’s Barbican Center for a concert by Ravi Shankar. A fan stepped forward, holding out a copy of Abbey Road for him to sign. George brushed it aside and continued inside the theater.

To emphasize his point, George delivered a dramatic statement that year in a lawsuit to block release of an unauthorized Hamburg recording. “Unlike the Beatles experts who wallow in Beatles trivia,” he told a London high court, “I spend a lot of time getting the junk out of my mind through meditation. So I don’t know or don’t remember—I don’t want to know or remember—every detail, because it’s trivial pursuit.”

At 3:30 A.M. on December 31, 1999, a crash from the ground floor of their home woke George and Olivia in their upstairs bedroom. George ran out and from the top of the stairs he saw a figure silhouetted in the moonlight. A statue from the Friar Park grounds lay on the floor surrounded by broken glass from one of the tall French windows.

George could see a lance in the man’s hand from another statue in the hallway. “Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna!” George chanted, hoping to distract him. A lawyer would later argue that the intruder, a heroin addict who had scaled the walls of Friar Park, suffered from “an abnormality of mind” that had him believing George’s chanting was “the language of Satan spoken backwards” and that “such sorcerers should not be allowed to live.”

If he gets by me, George thought, he might go after Olivia or Dhani or Olivia’s mother, who was also in the house. Finding courage, he tackled the intruder to the ground. The man jabbed at George with a six-inch blade. Olivia came out from the bedroom and ran at him from behind with a poker. The man turned and grabbed her by the throat. Despite his injuries, George jumped on him and forced him to release his grip. Olivia fell to the floor and crawled away. The intruder pushed George down and stabbed, over and over. Olivia grabbed a table lamp and brought it down on the intruder’s head. The man slumped to the ground. Dhani, awakened by the noise, rushed to his father’s side to console him. “Dad, you are with me. It’s going to be okay.”

Police burst in and arrested the intruder. An ambulance arrived. At the hospital, doctors examined George’s wounds. He had been stabbed eight times. The knife had come within an inch of essential arteries.

George recovered and, being George, managed to keep a sense of humor. Asked by reporters who his attacker was, he quipped, “He wasn’t a burglar—and he definitely wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys. Adi Shankara, an Indian historical spiritual and groovy-type person, once said, ‘Life is fragile like a raindrop on a lotus leaf.’ And you’d better believe it.”

Monty Python member Michael Palin recalled with admiration the difference between George’s reaction to the attack on his own life and his reaction after John’s death. “Amazingly, after that awful event with the break-in, he had become so serene that he was able to talk about it with complete ease, without any of the anger I’d seen before, without any of the distress or concern that had been there before. There was precious little anger or blame. He’d changed.”

Paul and Ringo learned of the attack and sent messages of love. News of the break-in was featured on front pages around the world, focusing on George yet again a spotlight he did not want. Ironically, this one came on the final day of the millennium. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, inside London’s Millennium Dome a band played “All You Need Is Love.” Outside George’s hospital room, two professional security agents stood watch against further madness and hate.

George turned fifty-seven on February 25, 2000. “Now I understand about ninety-year-old people who feel like teenagers,” he said. “It’s just the body that changes. The soul in the body is there at birth and there at death. The only change is the bodily condition.” Spectators that March were treated to the sight of a recovered George in attendance at the Australian Grand Prix, as were London concertgoers later that month at two performances by Ravi Shankar. By August, George was back at work completing unfinished songs.

“Sometimes he comes here and spends a few days,” Ravi told a reporter. “He’s not really studying or practicing sitar now. But he’s got much deeper into music itself, listening, understanding, and getting a lot of spiritual pleasure out of it. He’s very happy and he’s done a lot of recordings. We are all telling him to bring out a record soon.”

The Beatle-madness of the world continued unabated. In May, thieves made off with two eight-foot-tall gates from the Strawberry Fields children’s home in Liverpool; the gates were valued at £5,000. In November, a CD collection of Beatles number-one hits went straight to the top of the charts in nineteen countries, earning an unprecedented thirty-five platinum discs.

If any of this hysteria made an impact on George, he did not let it show. Cresting a Friar Park hill, he paused more often than before to catch his breath, and pruning a tree went slower than when he planted it nearly thirty years before. But his voice remained clean and bouncy, even if air kept escaping piecemeal from a lung damaged in the attack. Friends listening to him sing against such resistance thought it about the bravest thing they had ever heard.

George planted four hundred maple trees that year, and when he strolled around the garden he would pick up a flower or a leaf whose unique shape he admired. “I think he saw in that garden an affirmation that life goes on,” said Michael Palin. “That seemed to give him great pleasure in the last years of his life. It was almost as though the body might be weakening, but everything around him was an affirmation of life and the continuity of life.”

When friends came to visit, George would remind them to take time to live fully. He would ramble on about plants and flowers and hug them for minutes on end, not wanting them to leave before knowing how much he loved them. In their eyes he glowed with the truth that the worth of a person dwells inside, in something eternal and pure regardless of karma or politics or religious beliefs.

In December 2000, George began work on a rerelease of “My Sweet Lord.” He wanted to “freshen it up a bit,” he said, “to remind myself that there is more to life than the material world. . . . It is my attempt to put a bit of a spin on the spiritual side, a reminder for myself and for anybody who’s interested.”

In March 2001, doctors at the Mayo Clinic discovered cancer in George’s lungs. A growth was removed, but within a month the cancer spread. Soon a malignancy was found on his brain. This, too, he took in stride, knowing that death would mean he had finished his work here and was at last entitled to leave.

“He never sat around moping, ‘Oh, I’m ill,’” his son, Dhani, later said. “Even when he first found out that he was ill years ago and the doctor gave him—what, six months to live? He was just like, ‘Bollocks!’ He was never afraid. He was willing to try and get better, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t attached to this world in the way most people would be. He was on to bigger and better things. And he had a real total and utter disinterest in worrying and being stressed. My dad had no fear of dying whatsoever. I can’t stress that enough, really.”

After their return, Olivia tried everything possible to find a cure. While staying near a hospital in Staten Island, New York, George received a few select visitors. Ringo visited and stayed for hours.

George’s sister, Louise, arrived. They had not seen one another in several years. Louise had become a grandmother in 1990. Her son had taken up Transcendental Meditation, while she had joined the Self-Realization Fellowship and become a dedicated advocate of environmental awareness. “I believe this is your dharma,” George told her. “This is what you have to do.” Looking back, she remembered him at that final meeting as kind, loving, and completely fearless in the face of death.

Later, Paul visited the hospital and they told jokes, hugged, and cried. George and Paul had known each other nearly half a century. That last visit was the first time they ever held hands.