I did, and then I leant against the fridge and Googled osho bhagwan ashram on my phone. There were people weeping in long lines. There were lots of semi-naked people with their hands in the air. There were men in pink jumpsuits with semi-automatic weapons. They were all wearing the same necklace my father had worn in the photo, a set of wooden beads with a little image of the guru at one end. I read the words ‘Sex-Cult’. I saw Osho’s smiling face and those eyes of his. He looked pretty happy. But were they the eyes of a master or a villain? I couldn’t tell.

‘So it says here they poisoned people, Mum.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she laughed, ‘but that was after your dad’s time.’

Later, while everyone else was watching The Little Mermaid, I stood beside Tara at those big windows, looking down as the tiny surfers battled their tiny waves. From this height, all human suffering appeared comically insignificant, and maybe that was part of the attraction. Tara threw her arm around my shoulder, mock seriously, and drew me to her.

‘So hi,’ she said.

We hadn’t seen each other for a year. I’d missed her.

‘Did you know Dad was in a cult?’ I said.

‘You mean that Osho thing?’

I pulled away. ‘How do you know about that?’

Tara shrugged. ‘Is it supposed to be a secret?’

‘Yes. No one ever told me.’

‘Ah well, I guess,’ she said. ‘Anyway, how’s Sylvie?’

‘Sylvie’s fine,’ I said, bringing up an image of Osho on my phone. ‘Sylvie’s great. You know how it is.’ I handed her the phone. ‘What does this picture make you think of?’

She glanced at it. ‘It makes me think of Dad, I guess. And, like, I don’t know, mass-suicide or something?’

‘And?’

But that was all. Tara didn’t actually know any more than I did. She didn’t know how long Dad had been there, or what he thought about the whole thing, or why he’d left and never mentioned it again. It didn’t seem to interest her very much.

‘I just sort of assumed everyone was into that stuff in the seventies,’ she said.

And then we began talking about something else.

‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Seriously, Joe. Are you okay? Because, really, you look a bit like shit.’

14.

14.

On YouTube, a few days later, I found this:

Hundreds of semi-naked westerners; bearded, beautiful, hairy, orange-clad people hard at work in a jungle of dappled light. It was the ashram in Pune in 1976. The year my father was there.