Sylvie was asleep. Sarah was in bed, probably not asleep. I was sitting on the couch, in darkness. It was nearly midnight. There were plenty of Osho’s lectures I could have watched. I had, in fact, watched some of them. You can watch them yourself. Bhagwan on ‘Life’ and ‘Laughter’ and then — after he changed his name — Osho on everything else: on ‘Love’ and ‘Happiness’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Marriage’. Osho sitting in a chair that appeared to be made entirely from bubble-wrap. Osho looking increasingly bitter, it seemed to me, looking less and less trustworthy. I recognised his face from some distant region of my childhood, his unblinking eyes, his slow, soft, hissing way of speaking. I could not help liking him. I even felt myself wanting to love him, weird as that sounds. And yet I couldn’t look at him properly, either. I didn’t want to. I wasn’t ready for any of it. And so it was just this little film, a few minutes of silent Super-8 footage, that did something to me that night, that slipped past me and took me by surprise. The images pulsed like something that was alive. People moved through hanging pools of light. Images of women dancing or screen-printing or pouring enormous silver bowls of milk. Images of men, who all looked, it’s true, like Charles Manson, gardening or riding bicycles or repairing drainpipes. And yet, they didn’t look like brainwashed psychopaths. It didn’t look like alienated labour, like drudgery. The whole place looked like a vast artist’s studio, and the aura of sex clung to everyone. If nothing else, I thought, utopia is a quality of dappled light like this. I was looking for my father somewhere amid the crowds, the image of my father come back to life. I didn’t see him, but at three minutes and forty-six seconds I saw a glimmer of long blonde hair, a beautiful man in red overalls doing … what? Cutting wood? Measuring something? I couldn’t tell. It lasted barely a second. It was like an image from a dream. It was Abbie.

15.

15.

So my father was no longer an orange person — a sannyasin — when my parents met, although apparently they both knew plenty of people who were. Like Abbie, for instance. Like Abbie’s old girlfriend Rani. They were still wearing orange well into the 1980s.

‘You remember Rani, don’t you?’ my mother had said. ‘She used to babysit you.’