Moss grows over stone, eating away at the remains of the bare slice of civilisation left behind by the self-proclaimed children of nature. These walls are covered by the words and ideas of those that were moved by the movement and touched by transcendence; if you listen carefully, you might still hear John’s flute, Paul’s sweet serenade, George’s guitar and Ringo’s complaints about the food. Enchantment is far from temporary: even when the beauty of the day has been betrayed, the essence of the movement lives on, untouched. In the collective memories of all that were present, of all that lived that beautiful life here in the forests of Rishikesh, unburdened by the screaming reality of the outside world.
They came here for shelter when the money and the fame and the drugs and the women all made it feel like the world didn’t mean anything anymore. 150 feet above the River Ganga, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, encircled by the monsoon green arms of the forest, Mother Nature’s sons came to bring peace and purpose back into their lives. Like puppies trailing the hand that holds a treat, they followed the Maharishi from London to Wales all the way to India.
And now you are here. What are you searching for?
He sits cross legged by the meditation caves near the entrance of the property. His soft, eggshell kurta stands out against the mess of psychedelic paint adorned by the walls of the caves behind him. A bejewelled turban sits upon his head, and the searing blue-green dye seems to have coloured his irises as well. Flecked with threads of gold that trail out of his eyes and etch the wrinkles on his face, speaking volumes without his mouth uttering a single word. His beard curls around his dark face like wispy white smoke, leaving a near-transparent tail whenever he moves his magnificent head. He is engrossed in his practice, hashish-stained fingertips dancing on his been; the cobra lies lazily around his neck, swaying gently with the vibration. His eyes catch yours, and he puts the instrument aside.
In this world, there is no right and wrong; no reality, only perspective. When such a grand history falls simply to the words of four bitter mouths, the concept of truth becomes a distant dream. Dropping acid for breakfast doesn’t contribute too much to a clean break, either. A mural of George begins to murmur, “sometimes I ask myself if I was really there or whether it was all a dream”.
The snake charmer rests his hand upon the space between Mural George’s eyebrows, and the murmurs fade away into silence. His eye catches yours once again, and the intensity of his gaze pulls you towards him like a snapped elastic.
“Do you know where you are?”
THE BEATLES MUSEUM
RISHIKESH, INDIA
“And with that, we’ve reached the end of our tour,” says the snake charmer. The sun is beginning to set, and the tips of surrounding mountains are bathed in the fiery red light of receding day.
You don’t know what to say. It doesn’t seem right to leave just yet.
“People come by here, and they say a lot of things about it. One that strikes me most is how they talk about familiarity: how they feel a connection with this place, and with these people they’ve never met before. I don’t know what it was about these four, but they really cast a spell on the world – for the time they were alive and for years to follow.
We love the Beatles for a lot of reasons, with the music definitely being the biggest one. But there’s something about them, about the way they pranced through life from suits to kurtas and the way they dealt with all the strange situations the universe threw their way. Something about how we can never relate to their lives, but how we can also most definitely relate to their lives – the search for meaning, the love for friends, the thrill of experimentation; just a few things among countless others.
In coming here, you were one person. In leaving, take with you the gift that the Beatles discovered in Rishikesh, and explore your mind in a different way.”
He beckons you to sit next to him, and whispers your mantra in your ear. You receive it, just as the Beatles received theirs all those years ago. You repeat it over and over, until it stops being a sound and metamorphoses into a sonic cloud that engulfs your entire body. The sun dips below the horizon, just as the barriers that separate the atoms that make you from the atoms that make the universe around slowly dissolve away into the inky night.
fin.