Pankaja writes from the launch, at Daunt Books in Oxford, of her republished novel she wrote more than 50 years ago
I’m a bit of a prude – as I get older, I find myself regressing to the moral code of 1950’s Britain where I spent most of my teenage years. I don’t like talking about sex, no longer interested personally for many decades – and prefer to use the f… word only for swearing. So it is a bit of a challenge to have a novel that I wrote more than 55 years ago (well before sannyas), republished as what one reviewer has called a ‘shag fest’!
Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady is not actually about fruity goings on in the dorm, but an English woman on holiday in Italy with actor husband and new baby, who has so little sense of her own existence that she finds herself transposed into someone else’s reality. Miranda’s husband has to return to London for a film; an Italian actor called Oreste drops by; they become lovers and Miranda finds herself travelling to meet his parents with their longed-for grandchild.
This was a very important scene for me – the feeling of this part of Italy (totally imaginary, I’d never been to such a place) – the dunes, the emptiness, the sense of abandonment, the old couple with their orphaned servant absorbing this unexpected visitor into their reality… and Miranda allowing herself to be absorbed… so unsure of where she ended and someone else began that it was only the fashion advice from women’s magazines – ‘for sitting in cafés in the evenings a light shawl is a pretty alternative to the Englishwoman’s ubiquitous cardigan’ – that created some basis for her existence…
I had written four novels before I felt able to go to Pune and meet Osho. The second one, Lord Jim at Home was republished a couple of years ago. When it came out I made sure to insist that on the cover they used my sannyas name and mentioned Osho. I wanted to be OK with the Sangha. And in a newspaper interview I spoke a lot about the ashram, and said at one point, talking about my life, that I would not change anything.
When my daughter read that article, she was terribly hurt and upset. It wasn’t until I saw Children of the Cult about a year later that I suddenly realised that I was indeed in some sense brainwashed – trying to make sure that I was ‘OK’ with the Osho publicity machine, and totally unaware of how my own children felt.
Since then I have been trying to come to terms with how leaving my two children with their father while I went to Pune, my total abandonment of any attempt at fulfilling the role of mother, and my behaviour towards them when I did come back – still in the mindset that the sannyas way of life was in some way ‘better’ – affected my children.
It’s true that this book is semi-autobiographical. The birth of my twins allowed me to access a burst of creativity. But I really don’t think Miranda would have been a very nourishing mother, even if she had stayed. As Emma Cline, the American writer who wrote the foreword put it, ‘Miranda’s psychic turmoil is jarring, contagious… The distress is so alive. It’s no surprise that Dinah Brooke turned to a guru for some peace.’ … ‘Sure, this misery becomes raw material you can shape into a narrative… But wouldn’t you rather be happy? Free at last of ambition and costuming and artifice?’
What I’d really like to do is to turn it into a film, a comedy. Maybe a black comedy? A couple making love as the ancient paraffin heater gently showers the lovers with clouds of soot? I’d change the ending though.
Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady
by Dinay Brooke
Foreword by Emma Cline
Paperback and Kindle
McNally Editions, Nov 2025, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1961341646
ISBN-13: 978-1961341647
ASIN: B0DS3P7GCY
Available in all bookshops and via mcnallyeditions.com – waterstones.com – guardianbookshop.com – Amazon *
Related article
- Under my alias: Lord Jim at Home – Pankaja on the discovery that one of the novels she had written pre-sannyas is now being republished, receiving accolades the likes of “a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal.” (September 2023)
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