Now Rani lived in San Francisco with her second husband. She and my mum had stayed in touch. Rani’s first husband, Dave, had died a few years earlier, and they had a son together, called Asha, who I faintly remembered. Rani had left Asha with Dave and gone back to live with Bhagwan, in Oregon. So the story went. At some point Bhagwan had moved to America, to a big ranch in the middle of nowhere. The last time I saw Asha, he was an inconsolable child of four or five. Now he was thirty-eight years old and six-foot-seven, my mother said, a silent giant who lived alone in a shack that he’d built for himself near Torquay. He surfed, and hunted, and butchered his own deer.

Deer? I thought. Jesus Christ, who even knew there were deer in Australia?

I found Rani’s website and emailed her. She was a photographer. Three days later, on a packed train, coming home from work, I got a reply:

It was so lovely to get your email, Rani wrote. Of course I remember babysitting you. Of course I remember the ashram. But maybe we can speak about this over the phone.

Rani had lived in the ashram in India for four years, she told me, and she still considered it the happiest time of her life. And yes, she wrote, your dad was there, too. That’s where I met him. His name at the time was Swami Anand Komalatva. Swami means ‘master’. Anand means ‘bliss’. Komalatva means ‘tenderness’.

16.

16.

I called Rani a few days later. It was past midnight in Melbourne, and seven-thirty in the morning where Rani was in San Francisco — which was pretty much what we’d arranged. I’d gone out and got drunker than I’d planned, but now I was home again. I was standing in the kitchen. Rani answered on the third ring. Her accent disconcerted me; part Australian, part English, part American, and part something else I couldn’t place, but she laughed easily, and I liked her immediately for that.

‘I met your dad at the ashram,’ she told me. ‘I watched him get reborn.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I mean, what?’

‘I thought you’d like that,’ she laughed.

My father had lain on the floor, hyperventilating, while Rani sat behind him, guiding him with implacable calmness through the traumatic memory of his own birth. They were both naked.

‘Not that there was anything going on between us,’ she clarified. ‘I was involved with Abbie in those days, and Abbie and your dad were great friends.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sure. But what was it like? What was Bhagwan like?’