A castle in the hills

Part 1 from chapter 22: Saswad – A dream vanishes, of Chitbodhi’s memoir, One Life

Fort Jadhavgadh

How to describe that place? In the middle of nowhere, in the dry season just a barren landscape between two rocky hills… The ashram had leased a stretch of land, maybe 2 kilometers long and about 800 meters wide. With nothing on it except some old wells – huge ones, open, six meters in diameter. Water was pumped from these wells for irrigation, and some to our castle for showers, kitchen, and laundry.

Our castle, or rather fort, was an imposing sight right at the beginning of the property. (I just looked it up on the internet and found out that they’ve now made a luxury hotel out of it! Shit!)

This Moghul-style fortress was built in the 18th century, with walls 15 meters high and at the bottom approximately 10 meters thick. With only one gate, and probably still the original huge old wooden door to close it. At regular intervals, high up at the top, there were small slits from where centuries ago the Maratha lieutenant of Peshwar could defend the fort by shooting cannons against Moghul attacks.

The fortress was independent because it had its own water, and could apparently be defended for many months at a time. Inside the walls there was just a huge empty space with an old building in the middle, a water cistern underneath, an old well, and to the left five or six rooms inside the castle walls.

When I arrived in mid-January 1981, a pioneer group of engineers and plumbers from the ashram had already built a kitchen, and a central shower building, with 6 showers and 6 toilets, for the approximately 80 people who were living here. And leaning onto the right-hand side of the castle walls there was a beautiful wooden structure built on two floors, which was almost completed. Interesting that it had no closing walls towards the courtyard. It was divided into 3×3-meter sleeping spaces.

Work could be hard, and some people down in Poona referred to Saswad as ‘the concentration camp’. I heard this kind of talk, but for me it was never like that, not even for a second during all the time I was there. I enjoyed every minute tremendously, every day. But yes, work was hard, for we not only worked in our own department, but also worked extra hours to prepare the place, so that more people could be moved up and live there.

A usual day in Saswad:

7 to 8: a very good breakfast.
8 to 12: I made soap, shampoo and creams.
12 to 1.30: an excellent lunch.
1.30 to 6: working again in the soap department.
6 to 7: an excellent dinner.
7 to sometimes 11: extra work, whatever was needed: wrapping soap, cutting vegetables, carrying sand up into the castle in buckets for the next day’s work, laying down a flagstone floor in the courtyard or wherever, so that in monsoon it wouldn’t get muddy.

Work finished late at night. After all that: partying, music, sleeping, making love to your girlfriend, and once every few weeks a movie projector was brought up from Poona, and bedsheets were hung from the castle walls for us to enjoy a movie.

Within four weeks after my arrival, the castle was buzzing with energy, 180 people living and working together.

The following departments were now established: Kitchen, Soap-making, Publishing, Translation, Guards, Handymen, Transport, Shopping, Cleaning, and to top it all off, one morning 10 cows arrived, imported from Ireland – the first imported cows in India. The stables were built in one day and the Cow and Milk department had begun.

Nobody in India at that time had ever seen a big beautiful Irish milk cow, which could give more than 30 liters of milk a day, compared to 4 or 5 liters from an Indian cow.

My best friend Amita, our doctor of chemistry, the one working in the soap department, started his day at 5 in the morning milking the cows. He worked the whole day making soap and finished his day cleaning the stables.

Our soap department produced about 500 cakes of soap a day, 150 bottles of shampoo, and also creams and cosmetics.

We were very isolated up there in the castle. Each resident could go down to Poona once a week, the bus leaving at 5.30 am and coming back at 11 am. Nobody was allowed to miss that bus coming back; that was the rule. If you lived up there, then you were up there. You miss one bus coming back up, and that was it. No more living in Saswad.

Amita and Julia

My relationship with Julia worked well for six weeks, then one night, after we had made love and the feeling between us was just very beautiful, Julia got up and said, “Chitbodhi, I have to go to the toilet. Back in 20 minutes.”

She never came back. She met a guy on the way to the toilet, probably sexier than me. It clicked, she spent the rest of the night with him, and from that day on she lived with him. Crazy beautiful woman!

The next morning, I was depressed. In a small space like ours, where just 180 people lived together, there were no secrets. Everybody knew the next morning – before even I knew.

That day work continued, no time really to be depressed. But that night something clicked between Australian Sindhu, the in-charge of the cow department, and me. From then on, I spent the nights with her. Sometimes I heard Julia’s fucking noises from afar – she was really working hard to get her orgasm… Wow, that’s life. Crazy Saswad.

Amita, my most beloved friend, brother in arms, brother in fun and crime (small crime…). Brother in soap-making and cooking up all kinds of schemes.

There was no alcohol in Saswad. The commune provided us with everything: the best food, our laundry was done and we found it neatly folded and ironed on our mattress… but no alcohol. Shit! (In Poona we could have gone to the Blue Diamond, if we wanted a beer or a whisky; but where to go in Saswad?)

Beer & wines

One night I was sitting with Amita, it was already very late, we were just talking. Most people had already gone to sleep. It was quiet in the castle.

“Chitbodhi, I need to get drunk sometimes. No alcohol here.” Then he turned to me, “We are chemists. So, let’s make alcohol!”

“OK, I am in. Don’t know how, but you will show me. What do you want to make?” (In this conversation I probably mentioned that I knew how to make fruit wine – but we discarded the idea because it takes too long for a start, and we didn’t know how our beautiful Indian Mukta, the woman in-charge of the castle, would react.)

“Ginger beer, simple and quick. Only two days’ fermentation; we only need sugar, lots of ginger, and a few oranges or limes.”

That night we sneaked into the kitchen, grabbed heaps of sugar, ginger and some limes. The cooks would be wondering the next day where their supply of sugar and ginger had walked off to, overnight!

Next day we started our ginger beer production. A 70-liter plastic bucket, ginger, lots of sugar, limes cut into small chunks, and water. Two days later we had 50 liters of ginger beer, ready to be consumed. At 10 pm we carried the bucket into the middle of the cobblestone courtyard with a sign attached saying, “Free ginger beer for all.”

Word spread in seconds.

“Free ginger beer for everybody!” and the whole castle came running. The first five minutes we were a little nervous and tense, because we hadn’t asked for permission to make alcohol, and what would Mukta say? Just then she came to check what the big crowd in the courtyard was all about, looked around and stood properly in the line. She took a sip and left, saying, “I hope we’ll get this every night!”

So now we were free to continue, and venture into new things too.

Our 50 liters were gone within an hour.

From that day on we produced ginger beer regularly. Every third day we had 50 liters, and they were finished that same night. Now we had alcohol! Amita tested the alcohol level; it was just under 1%, not bad as a start.

A week later while sitting in the middle of the courtyard next to our empty bucket of ginger beer, Amita said, “Chitbodhi, we need more. We need something stronger than ginger beer.”

“How about wine?”

“I don’t know anything about wine. How do you make it?”

“I know something about wine. Grape wine takes too long, but fruit wine is ready in 5 to 6 weeks, with 6-to-8% alcohol maybe.”

“Okay, Chitbodhi, you teach me. Let’s make fruit wine; 6 to 8%, that’s better than 1%.”

“Avinna also knows how to make wine. I heard him mention it.”

Avinna, another doctor of chemistry, also a German like me, had been working in soap production with us, but he never helped with our wine production. He was just too serious, and to make wine for fun was just a bit below him as a doctor.

I knew about fruit wine for sure; back in Herten I had to give my father a helping hand every year. We had 10 fruit trees in our garden. Too much fruit to eat, too much to even make jam. So he made fruit wine, a hundred liters a year, 5 big demijohns, and I had to help him at every step of the process. Squashing the fruits, cooking the juice out, filtering the yeast until the wine was clear, then filling the bottles. As I was too young I never got to taste it officially (just secretly). It was just for the grownups, but shit did I know every step of the production by heart. Cherry, gooseberry and red currant, and sometimes apple wine.

Amita and I started our wine production that same night. We got our shopper out of bed, put a list together of what we needed him to get for us in Poona City. He was the one who went down to town every morning in his small truck to buy fruit, vegetables and whatever was needed for the kitchen. A few days later he proudly arrived in our laboratory, handing over five 25-liter demijohns and the first fruit in season: 40 kg of mulberries. Our first wine! Within a week we had four wines in production: Mulberry, Date, Mango, and Banana.

Has anybody ever heard of banana wine? Hahaha. Okay, it was not very good; we had to add a lot more sugar for the fermentation process. It was just all right to drink if you were already a little bit drunk…

Our mulberry wine was clear and ready to drink after 6 weeks. In the morning I did the last tasting, and Amita tested the alcohol: 11.5%, excellent! We were proud. That night a small party happened with people playing guitars. After the ginger beer was finished, we carried our first wine up to the party room. Free for everybody! I took my first glass and immediately noticed that it tasted different than it had in the morning. It now had an aftertaste that I didn’t like.

I called Amita over and he tasted it. “It tastes different than this morning.”

“Yes, and I don’t like the taste. Could it have turned into vinegar already?”

“So quickly? Within 8 hours? But it’s not yet vinegar… I’m not sure.”

I looked around. Everybody seemed to be enjoying the wine. Only we had our doubts. We decided to keep quiet, just ignore it… but both of us had stopped drinking it.

The next morning… the mulberry wine was all finished, and many people had gotten really drunk. And we could see the result of that wine: 12 people were sick like hell, vomiting all day, and some came up to us with questions about our wine. We played it cool and denied every wrongdoing.

But we knew the reason: because it had already started to turn into vinegar. This can happen if the fruits or the bottles are not properly cleaned. We knew this must have happened although we had washed fruits and bottles with potassium permanganate, but maybe not thoroughly enough. For us it was a lesson to be very careful with the other wines. Our Date wine was the best I have ever made; it tasted almost like vodka, and Amita tested it to 18%.

Wine-making, some secrets: our wine-making was done in a room which we had discovered when we put a flagstone floor down in our soap department. While removing some earth to create a flat surface, we saw a step peeking out. It led us, step by step, 8 steps down, to a room, 10 meters long and 2 meters wide, with a domed ceiling.

The room was empty.

Over the first 6 weeks two of these hidden rooms were unearthed, probably not used as dungeons (as we first suspected). Most likely they had been used as storage rooms.

Just the perfect place for our wine-making, because they were cool!

Our castle had many more secrets hidden in its walls. We discovered two secret rooms just to the left of the big entrance door. Just by accident, because one of the big stones had come loose. There was nothing valuable inside, only some old wooden furniture, partly rotten and probably a few hundred years old.

Back to my working space: Now we were making soap and had a ginger-beer-and-wine production going. The idea for our next project came from Avinna, the German doctor of chemistry.

“We have now come this far, why not make red wine?” After all, red grapes were widely available in the Poona market. For sure not the quality of grapes wine is usually made from, but then grapes are grapes, no?

Two days later, two batches of 25 liters of red wine were started. It took three months until we had a clear wine. Crazy as we were, during the various steps of sifting the yeasts out and tasting the product, a lot of wine got lost in our systems…

In the end we had 11 liters of clear wine, ready to be filled into bottles. Our vegetable shopper had organized old wine bottles from the Poona garbage dump, which we washed and sterilized.

Then the big day arrived: the filling of 15 bottles of excellent red wine.

That night, Amita and I worked until morning to hand-draw 15 wine labels, as best as we could, a bigger one for the front and a smaller, also professional-looking one, for the back. We used a coat of arms an Indian friend had discovered, which had apparently been used for this castle.

Château de Saswad
Vin rouge
1981

We gave 6 bottles to Mukta for our Master as a gift. And the rest we kept for ourselves. We surely deserved it!

Our wine, when we tasted it, matched any good red wine produced in France, and was at least better than any red wine from Australia or California – an almost impossible feat considering the circumstances and conditions.

A few days later, a big surprise: Sheela, the upcoming Indian power woman, one of the big macho women in charge in Poona, arrived at the castle. She called a meeting and announced that Osho sent his thanks for the beautiful wine. She said that he actually drank 2 bottles.

I don’t know if it was true…

PS: Working in Saswad, and later in Rajneeshpuram, also called ‘the Ranch’, in Oregon, was nothing like a concentration camp, as some people later wrote in their books. Work was hard. Work had to be done. We did it for all of us. We labored for our comfort. We built something for all of us. (In today’s world some have this experience by building their own home where wife, kids, and husband pitch in the best they can.) There were no hierarchies in our work. We all just pitched in together and had a great time. So, hard work was never an issue for me.

Follow the whole series of excerpts on Osho News: One Life by Chitbodhi
Oberhausen College – too good to be true – From Chitbodhi’s memoir, One Life. Co-protagonists are: “A teacher, Dr. L. and 26 incredible classmates!”
Holzkamp – Chitbodhi remembers events during his days at Uni in Berlin
Squatting a Church (16 December 1977) – Chapter 8
A sudden decision – A Long Read from chapter 13
Becoming one of them – Chapter 14 (Part 1) – Receiving a new name and being in the Encounter Group
Tasting life in orange – A second excerpt from chapter 14 of Chitbodhi’s memoir
What a huge adventure it has been! – Chapter 15 continues the day after his leaving darshan with Osho