The following article was written by The Smoking Jackets:
Rishikesh is a town I read about before going there. I didn’t know anything about it besides that’s where The Beatles went to study Transcendental Meditation with the morally questionable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (more on him later). I didn’t know anything else about the town and didn’t really care to. That was reason enough for a powerful itching to start in my feet that only Rishikesh could scratch.
I took a midnight bus to Rishikesh, leaving from a travel hub in New Delhi with a friend. The ticket cost me five dollars and it soon became apparent why. The bus was a hot, humid rust machine that was captained by a Sikh man who was driving it like he stole it. Par for the course, really, when it comes to Indian buses.
The bus finally arrived at about four in the morning. We decided to take a quick nap until dawn; the ride over was taxing. Finally, the morning came and we continued our journey on foot to the Ashram Maharishi, located on the outskirts of the city. After stopping for a quick breakfast, we began making our way across town, watching as shop fronts opened up and merchants began laying out their wares for the day. It took us a bit longer than we thought but finally we arrived at the ashram, it’s cobblestone architecture standing out against the banks of the Ganges.
We approached the front gate which was padlocked from the inside. The ashram has actually been abandoned since 1997 and decreed as closed by the Indian government. But, a man in a fake guard uniform will charge you 50 rupees (about one dollar) to enter. Clever huh?
As we were walking through the gate a man dressed in tattered shorts and a head wrap approached us an offered to be a guide through the ashram. We couldn’t say a word before he was beckoning us to follow him and began jogging up the path that lead to the main grounds.
We first stopped by the kitchen where The Beatles used to take their meals. Since the ashram has been abandoned for over a decade there is little here but broken pieces of tile and the remnants of a sink. A monkey walks outside and I can see him through the crumbling kitchen wall.
I wasn’t prepared for the next room we visited. It was long and narrow, with a brightly colored mural stretching around the entire room. Raju, our guide, laid out a blanket on the floor and we all sat down. We sat in that room for a while as I picked out some White Album tunes on the Givson (“I’m So Tired”, “Blackbird”). There were Beatles references painted all over the walls. Definitely a happy place.
Soon, it was time to move on to Lennon’s meditation room. Number 9. We walked in the front door of the little hovel, first paying respects to the religious idol that sat next to the entrance. We first took a moment to examine the ground floor− nothing more than a hole in the wall where a sink used to be and more crumbling tile strewn about the floor. But we didn’t linger long and quickly descended the dirt covered steps into the basement where John actually sat and meditated in the spring of 1968. There wasn’t much in the room. No furniture at all and just a single window that let in the afternoon light and the sound of songbirds that had made their home in the teak and guava trees that had been growing unchecked for years. I sat in that room and Darren and I listened to disc one of the White Album and did a field recording of I’m So Tired.
After we’d both had our fill, we ascended the steps and made our way down the pathway and out of the ashram. We capped off the visit with a dip in the Ganges River, something the Fab Four may have been doing just forty years earlier.
