Corruptible by Brian Klaas

Author:Brian Klaas [Klaas, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

VIII POWER CORRUPTS

Rancho Rajneesh

In north-central Switzerland, six miles south of the Rhine River, lies a picture-postcard village. With lush green foothills and chalets that look as if they’ve been ripped out of a glossy tourist magazine and slapped on the hillside, you can practically smell the fondue. But if you blink as you drive onto its blip of a main street, you’ll miss it. Halfway up one of the village’s idyllic slopes is a midsize care facility. It’s home to two dozen disabled people and the woman who looks after them—a petite, frail, Indian-born septuagenarian who also happens to be the worst bioterrorist in American history.

“Do you want some water, maybe?” a nurse asks, as I get out my notebook.

I hesitate. “No thanks, I’ve already had some.” It’s not a normal response when offered water, but I panicked and couldn’t think of a more natural refusal. Under no circumstances was I going to consume anything offered to me.

In late 1949, just after an independent India was born, so was Sheela Ambalal Patel. She grew up in a loving family—and one that had sufficient resources to ensure that she’d have opportunities that most Indians didn’t. In 1967, at the age of eighteen, Sheela set off for the United States to study at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “I wanted to study fine arts and become an artist,” she tells me. “Now, I have learned to be an artist of how to live life!”

Sheela’s path to Montclair initially set her up for an all-American life. She married a man from Illinois. But in 1972, like many other young people in the wake of America’s 1960s cultural awakening, Sheela and her new husband sought something more than the standard-issue suburban existence. They wanted a spiritual awakening. So, together, they set off for India in search of a guru. They joined an ashram, a monastic collective devoted to the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—a tall, thin man with bug eyes and a wizard-like long gray beard who promised enlightenment to his disciples. He was known to them as Bhagwan or Osho. His followers became known as sannyasins or Rajneeshees. Bhagwan’s new age religious movement was always a bit ill-defined. But its core tenets seemed to be a blend of free love and sexual liberation combined with enjoying the excesses of capitalism in an ostensibly classless commune. The Rajneeshees engaged in experimental “therapies,” which included long group-sex sessions. (These were later alleged to have also involved violence and sexual abuse.)

As a convert to Bhagwan’s teachings, Sheela adopted the sannyasin name Ma Anand Sheela. In 1980, her husband died of Hodgkin’s disease, leaving Sheela a young widow. But her real love was Bhagwan. The guru had taken a shine to her, too. They grew closer. “I was just a simple young person,” Sheela says with a wistful smile. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” Nonetheless, by 1981, Sheela had become Bhagwan’s right-hand woman. Everything related to Bhagwan filtered through her.

Sheela was soon tasked with finding a place to build a new age utopia, where the entire world could revolve around Bhagwan.

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