I was still thinking about the Bugwum – had been thinking of little else for the last couple of days – when I opened the fridge door and there was a sudden splat which, in my distracted state, it took me a while to realise was an egg hitting the kitchen floor. At once, I was transported back to the evening when the same thing had happened during a dinner party at our next-door neighbour’s and, so difficult was it to get up the slimy yolk, that we went home and brought our beloved dog to lick it up.

There were no dogs in that six-hour film Wild, Wild Country* which had us and everyone we know transfixed. No antelopes either, though the little township that the Bugwum’s followers overran had been called ANTELOPE until they – the followers – outnumbered the 46 original residents, retired folk of modest means, and changed its name to RAJNEESHPURAM.

Who needs the comforting presence of a dog when they have a divine presence among them? And who would have had time to walk a dog when working day and night, unpaid, to erect a city in the wilderness?

The Bugwum

Of course, the Divine Presence wasn’t there from the beginning: he arrived when his followers – the sannyasin, the orange people – had already (with their bank accounts and middle-class skills) turned the wilderness into a thriving little city with its own water supply, electricity, airport, post office and lots of sturdy little houses: enough to sleep not only the 2,000 devotees but the hundreds more who came to the annual money-raising Festival and, later, to house the ‘street people’ – the down-and-outs – who were scooped up, nationwide, to swing the vote in the local election.

Of all the murderous acts orchestrated by the Bugwum’s sidekick, Ma Anand Sheela – aka Baba Yaga, Lady Macbeth, the Wicked Witch of the West: it is in fiction that she belongs – this was the worst. To collect the homeless – most of them veterans, many of them black – and then throw them back onto the streets when they were no longer needed, must be one of the most heartless acts imaginable, yet its perpetrator now owns and runs two homes for the elderly disabled in a Swiss village . . .

Ma Anand Sheela

It was also the beginning of the end and, before long, as the authorities closed in on Ma Sheela and her little band of female assassins (who had already fled the country), the Bugwum himself was whisked away from the ranch by a chartered Learjet, leaving behind 93 Rolls Royces and his followers.

As for them, the hordes of deluded westerners intent on self-fulfilment, each pursuing his or her ‘inner journey’, they began to trickle away, back, one supposes, to the families and lives they had left behind.

The Bugwum and followers

That the Bugwum, the eternal Father Figure, not only condoned free sex but encouraged it – the youthful Sheela, when she first met him, had been enraptured to find that he wore nothing under his flowing robes – was surely one of the most powerful forces in bringing these decent but innately selfish people together and, for a short time, creating a kind of earthly paradise.

A paradise for them, but not for the residents of Antelope who, during the final minutes of this remarkable film, are seen changing the signpost back from RAJNEESHPURAM to ANTELOPE.

And peace prevails.

 

* Wild, Wild Country (Netflix)