Chapter 1. The Burning Ghat

Life of Osho

Chapter 1. The Burning Ghat

We burned Osho’s body at night, at the old burning ghat, the one down by the river.

The bit I remember most clearly is walking with the body down the road. Because Asha and I were among the last to arrive at the ashram we were packed in right at the back; so when they brought the body out by the side we were among the first to leave, and found ourselves at the very head of the procession.

We walked through the marble gates and out into Koregaon Park.

That particular road, the one leading to the ashram, had always made me think of an English country lane, and in the dark it seemed even more to have the overgrown, shuttered- in quality of an English hedgerow. The night was cold, the moon was down, yet somehow everything was bathed in silver light – the trees, the bougainvillea, the pale road. Perhaps it was a reflection from all the white robes. Asha and I were walking right next to the body.

For years I had said I couldn’t tell what I really felt about Osho, not unless I could get close to him physically once again. Well, there I was;- I couldn’t have been much closer, I was wandering along down the road beside him… I’d only made it under the wire. My head was still full of the crazy taxi ride from Bombay, up through the mountains in the middle of the night. They call the mountains there ghats too, the Western Ghats, the word just means steps or a stair; and the road is one of the main trucking routes to and from Bombay.

In the taxi headlights there seemed to be overturned trucks on every hairpin bend. It looked like footage of a war zone… I still hadn’t got over the shock of hearing about Vivek. Her body had been found in a Bombay hotel room – dead from a drug overdose. Whether it was an accident or whether she had deliberately killed herself no one knew. Someone said she had been murdered. Vivek! How could Vivek be dead? It didn’t seem possible. In the old days I think all of us had been half in love with Vivek… “Death comes dancing” Osho had said once, in a famous rap. But I didn’t think Death had come dancing to Vivek – I didn’t get the feeling it had been like that at all. There had been a cover-up at the ashram. They had taken her body to the burning ghat, the same way we were going now, just a month before. Only they had taken it secretly, in an ambulance, and in the middle of the night.

I looked at Osho as I walked beside him. His face looked grey and waxy in the half-light. He had told his doctor he wanted to wear his hat and his socks when he was burned, he had been very particular about it. Across his body lay masses of roses, grey and silver in the light, and some other flowers I could not recognise. His face looked drawn – much, much older than I remembered him, and he seemed smaller. He must have been, I realised suddenly, in great physical pain those last years. How bad had it been? He had never said anything about it. Suddenly I felt awful, like I was sick to the stomach and, falling back, let the bier bob away ahead of me.

What had he really died of?

We turned at the end of the lane and began to walk out of Koregaon Park.

The glare and din coming from the main road became more pronounced now. So much had the procession swelled that it stretched right across the road and we had to walk over that heap of rotting garbage the locals always kept to one side there; I could feel it slipping and giving way under my flip-flops, I thought my foot was going to go right into it; that was bad stuff, even the crows and pie-dogs wouldn’t touch it. Then we were under the great banyans lining the main road.

Dusty roots hung down above the madness. Trucks, it was mostly trucks. Beat-up trucks, just in from the Deccan, heading on down through the mountains to Bombay. Buses, taxis, motorbike rickshaws, scooters, bicycles, buffalo carts. People on foot dodging in and out of it, and all around us the way India juxtaposes different cultures and centuries – all incompatible and yet intact and somehow functioning simultaneously, the way things function in a dream. Ragged silhouettes on bicycles, rickshaw wallahs darting in and trying to touch the body (someone shouting “Don’t let the Indians touch the body!”) peasants dragging carts out of prehistory back to their villages. We walked past the wrecked coach which had been turned into a PWD canteen selling tea and samosas. The presence of hundreds of foreigners in white robes carrying the body of their dead guru through the rush hour did not seem to particularly interest, let alone faze, anyone.

While we waited at the traffic lights a young truck driver, manky tea-towel wrapped round his head and beedi clenched between his teeth, leaned out of his cab and yelled something cheerfully enough. A young woman in a sari sat on the back of her fiancé’s bicycle, reading a book in the light of a truck headlights. A London double-decker bus, incredibly battered, went by like something out of a dream.

‘Rich man’s guru,’ that was what they had said, wasn’t it? Well, there didn’t seem to be too much money around that night, as we turned off the main road and took the little sideroad leading down to the burning ghat. We passed the shack selling sugar and soap and beedis, and went on down through the slum. This was the cremation of an ordinary Indian.

The ghat is just a bowl in the river bank, with a small Shiva temple and an ancient banyan, suffused like all the rest with the desperate grimy romanticism of the land. The firepits are set in cheap concrete. The river doesn’t actually come up to the steps except during monsoon. But that night as the ghat filled up with figures in white it took on a grand, almost operatic quality. People edged up into the scrub surrounding the ghat, or climbed onto the corrugated asbestos roof of the Pilgrim Shed, or up into the old banyan itself, to sit like children with their legs swinging from the boughs.

From where Asha and I were standing, slightly to one side, it was difficult to see as they brought the body to the fire-pit. The pyre had already been built. (I remember thinking, how together all this was. How come the pyre was already made? They’d said he died at five o’clock, hadn’t they, and what was it now? Around eight? I remember thinking, they’re not telling the truth about the time he died. Why?

Why were they in such a hurry to burn the body?) They must have laid his body on it and poured the ghee, the boiled butter, over the firewood as they built it up and over him. Someone played a flute, very softly, and just for a minute or two – and then they put a torch to the pyre.

The butter went up, almost like petrol. People drew back in alarm. Only then did it hit, that he really was dead…

The glare coming off the pyre was as soulless as neon. Instantly the ghat was revealed for what it really was. The ghat was a horror trip. Perhaps Death did come dancing. Dancing the way the ghat was dancing now, weaving this way and that, in great sheets of light; moving in for the dreamy kill… I wondered who would drive the sharpened pole into Osho’s skull to pierce it, lest, as his brains boiled and vaporised, the skull exploded… How had it all come to this – this shambles worthy of the last act of a Jacobean tragedy?