After several years of working as a graphic designer, translator, editor, and production manager – all  in one – for a monthly magazine for the Italian printing trade, I was employed by a German import-export company in Milan. With my Portuguese boyfriend, João, I shared a flat in Viale Bianca Maria, where, on the same landing, he had opened his graphic studio. It was a posh address, but our flat was in an old block close to Piazza Cinque Giornate, a square which was going to see violent demonstrations by the communists against the fascists who had their quarters a few streets behind us.

The lunch breaks in typical Italian fashion were so long that I had time to go home by tram, do the shopping and cook for João, the sales manager of the studio, Vittorio, and my sister Kätti, who had a hard time with the canteen meals of close-by Ciba-Geigy where she worked.

Being a good cook and enjoying the compliments I got for it, our dinners too were rarely a tête-à-tête. The regulars were artists, decorators, mechanics and the freelance photographer of the studio. Needless to say, a great attraction was also the tasty, still natural, Vino Barbera which we managed to buy from a traditional wine merchant in a back street. Everybody smoked either the Gauloises Bleues or the Gitanes.

Other guests we occasionally entertained were João’s friends who had escaped with or after him from Salazar’s fascist regime. Some were even organizing, from other locations, the printing of communist flyers to be shipped to Portugal in trucks, hidden beneath crates of fruits and vegetables.

On Wednesdays João waited in a restaurant with other friends for me to come out of the Raja Yoga class. He was proud that his girl was modern and was going her own way, although it was obscure to him – and to his friends – why I had chosen to go to those classes.

Every few years, usually in the month of January, an urge overcame me where I had to look for something ‘more’; this time around I experimented with Raja Yoga, but already sensed that it would not last long as I always felt nervous and irritable after the meditations. The teacher was amazed that I managed to do one of the exercises which consisted of becoming aware of the whole body. This came very natural to me, something I had always done as a child.

In grammar school when everybody was busy planning their future I knew that behind all my dreams of becoming a mime, a photographer, an artist – all professions which later in life I had started successfully but which somehow ended for one reason or other – was lying a deeper wish of becoming something I did not even know how to name (or did I hear myself saying “to become a holy person?”).

During Greek lessons I had come across Socrates’ ‘Know Thyself’ and had written it unconsciously in neat letters onto the title page of my student’s song book. Also reading a book on Yoga for the first time I had come across the concept that God was living inside us (as opposed to somewhere high in the sky) which I gladly accepted from then on as the truth.

In those days I also carried in my mind a detailed vision of a place – it was a big yellow house somewhere in France – where people lived and worked together with the aim of discovering who they really were. I would not have known where to start looking for such a place but this vision helped me focus on my deepest wish year in and year out. I have no idea where this picture had come from as information in those days travelled very slowly – but decades later I saw a photo of Gurdjieff’s house near Paris which looked a bit like it.

Every now and then I became aware that my search had come to a halt but felt trusting enough to know that I would stumble on the right thing sometime or other.

When João and Vittorio realized that their graphic studio was not able to support both of them, Vittorio found a job with Air India. Shortly afterwards a new manager came straight from India and the two became such good friends that João and myself were soon included in the circle. We showed Saeed around town and introduced him to the Italian way of living, mainly to Italian food to which he took a particular liking. We discovered many expensive restaurants thanks to his ‘PR business meals’, and when his wife and daughters joined him we were introduced to the taste of Indian food, which was my very first taste of a curry.

João was asked to make a plan for a new interior design of Air India’s office for which Saeed eventually did not get the budget for. To make up for the trouble Saeed gave him a free flight ticket to Bombay. But João, still living without a passport and India not being particularly friendly to Portuguese nationals because of the Goa issue, passed the ticket on to me.

To visit India had always been one of my dreams. As a child I had made myself a precise picture of how it would look like to be there. Now a free ticket, which was worth twice a month’s salary, was more than I could ever have hoped for. Because I had started night classes in biology at the University of Milan – was this maybe another way of getting closer to the truth? – I had asked to work part-time to get ready for the exams. This change brought about the possibility of taking a holiday even in the middle of winter and the pay-out of a very well-timed lump sum. I was up and running, or rather flying, and started to feel shaky as everything was so easily and elegantly falling into place.

The day before I left, while packing, I received a phone call from our neighbour’s friend who had heard from them that I was flying to India and he wanted to give me an address in Bombay. It was that of a ‘guru’ and he promised to me that “your life will never be the same again.”

With the free ticket came also the invitation to stay with Saeed’s mother-in-law in Colaba, Bombay, and so I received a wonderful introduction into day-to-day life in India. After having well explored the khadi markets of Bombay, met the friends of the brother-in-law who was still a student, and admired the creativity of the sisters-in-law who were both in a thriving garment business, it was time to explore the rest of the subcontinent.

After a day’s travel by train I reached Ahmedabad in the North where I visited Kirtidev, an old pen pal with whom I had corresponded in my teenage years while he was a medical student in London, at a time when having pen pals from many different countries was the only way to know what the world out there looked like. On his ‘puja’ table was a black and white photo of his guru and I thought how nice it would be to have someone who could guide me in the search for that truth of which I smelt the scent from time to time. I remembered the note I had in my diary and promised myself to visit the address in Bombay as soon as I was back there.

Saeed’s personal connections with many travel agents throughout India facilitated my further travels. After Jaipur, I visited Delhi and then Agra, and stood for hours in awe in front of the Taj Mahal. I imbibed the vivid colours of the silk saris, the smells in the spice markets, the cold of the nights in the North and then again the warm days back in Bombay.

On what was planned to be my last day in India, with my address book in hand I drove up to Woodlands, a high-rise flat of apartments with a couple of cedars in the front yard. The door on the first floor was answered by a small lady dressed in orange. Already accustomed to the Indian way of life, I left my Kolhapuri sandals at the door and entered the pleasantly cool flat. The cook offered me a cup of chai and, coming from Italy, I was introduced to two young women called Lalita and Deeksha who were also from Italy. I received a lively introduction into the man they called Bhagwan (I had this name totally wrong in my notes) and the meditation he taught which they called Dynamic. There would be a discourse on Yoga that evening at 7 in Woodlands and in the morning at 6 the Dynamic Meditation would be held on Chowpatti Beach, a leisure place at night to where Saeed’s brother-in-law Kabir had taken me for milk shakes and pakoras.

As I had learnt to read numbers in Hindi, I felt confident enough to take a bus to attend the lecture, but was not aware that the bus took a loop on its way North which delayed my arrival, so much so that I found the door of the Woodlands apartment locked and had to return home. But certainly, I would not miss to wake up at 5 the next morning to get to the meditation and my poor hosts were involved in helping me to wake up with various alarm clocks scattered around the house.

In winter at 6 it is still dark also in India and I was glad it was so. It made me feel more comfortable to go through the vigorous stages of the Dynamic Meditation as nobody could see us, although any passer-by could have heard the noise of the heavy breathing and the screaming happening during the second stage of the meditation. While shouting and crying into the dark, I suddenly heard in my head: “This is it! You have found it!” After the meditation I met up with the two Italian girls again who invited me to have breakfast with them in a primitive but lovely chai shop and explained to me why they were wearing orange clothes and had these Indian sounding names.

Checking in at the Air India office I came to know that the reservation for my return flight, which was scheduled for that day, had been cancelled for some reason. Had I forgotten to confirm my return flight? Not much ‘forgetting’ but rather ‘not knowing I had to’. This was my first flight ever. The news was not distressing me much as it would allow me to go to the lecture that evening and see the man who was behind this terrific meditation and stay longer.

“He is so young,” was my first impression and I carefully listened to what he had to expound over Patanjali’s Sutras, even taking notes. I was a bit disappointed that I had to sit in the back. The front was only for the people wearing orange, Deeksha said. I wanted him to see me; I wanted him to know that I had arrived.

My first close-up of ‘Bhagwan’ was during an interview Deeksha had arranged for herself and I was allowed to go along. We both sat on the stone floor at his feet while he smiled down at us – “strange arrangement,” I thought. She had brought a letter of her lover and was reading a few passages to him which he commented upon; all the while he held my left hand and was swinging it from side to side. It felt odd at first, but the rhythmical movement made me feel very calm, but also made me giggle inside.

When we got up and left with a namaste, he smiled at me and in his smile I could read what still brings tears to my eyes while writing: “You are accepted the way you are.” We had connected wordlessly; through body contact and through humour.

Everybody was talking about a meditation camp in the mountains in Gujarat which was going to be held the following week and Deeksha was urging me to participate, even taking me to a homeopathic doctor to get a medical paper testifying a bout of ‘amoebic dysentery’ to justify my absence from work, as well as organizing my train tickets to Abu Road and the reservation to stay at a guest house at Mount Abu itself.

Osho had asked me in a second interview if I wanted to take sannyas and I had said: “I think, after the camp,” but had not managed to wait that long. The day before we left, on 10th January 1974, I came to Woodlands in tears. We talk about tears of joy, tears of sadness, tears of excitement, but I think these we need to call: tears of ‘yes’, tears of ‘coming home’ or tears of ‘surrender’. I asked Laxmi, the small lady in orange, if I could see Bhagwan to be initiated. While entering his room, I had a quick, intimate glimpse of him closing a book and putting it on a shelf nearby.

I seated myself on the floor in front of him, still sobbing like a child. I should have been embarrassed, but felt very calm inside and was listening attentively to what Osho had to say to me. “Your name will be: Ma Yoga Punya. Ma means mother and for me all women are mothers and so I call all my female sannyasins Ma. Yoga means Union and Punya means Virtue.”

“Virtue is the opposite of Sin, this is the meaning,” I remember him replying as I was not quite sure what virtue meant or did not much like the implication of morality it had in Latin. Still crying and sobbing I left the room and expected to have to pay for the necklace which I had received and was now hanging around my neck. But I was lead to the library downstairs where a cup of hot chai waited for me, as well as a book by Bhagwan: I Am the Gate. “I am glad I can now write your new name into it,” Deeksha said, while inspecting the initiation certificate to check on the spelling.

The meditation camp was for me a major revolution in body and mind through the Dynamic Meditation, the Kirtan dancing and Tratak jumping on one side and the two daily discourses, which I kept commenting in my head with: “Of course, I knew that all along, why hasn’t someone else said that before?” I travelled back to Bombay with the rest of the group (Osho had his own carriage on the same train which gave me a warm feeling) and felt so light in my body that it was easy to rest on the hard metal rack high up in the compartment. The night before the return flight my body reacted with a violent and heavy fever, maybe in the hope to postpone my return even further. But I stood firm in my decision: it was now time to get back home.

A few months later, after João had stopped looking suspiciously at Osho’s photo I had cellotaped to the wall and my mother had resigned herself to the fact that from now on my wardrobe was to be orange with an “at least it is not black,” and a “you have always been different”. Deeksha came to visit me with her new American boyfriend Krishna Bharti. For the occasion she had also invited the only other sannyasin in Milan, Prabhudas, for lunch at my place.

Only when I saw Prabhudas did I remember that I had already seen him quite a while before I went to India. He had been visiting our neighbours and was just stepping out of their door when I had opened mine: a tall, skinny young man with long hair and a wild beard, wearing a bright orange cotton shirt and pyjamas. On his chest dangled a wooden necklace with a pendant. I had grabbed the pendant and inspected it carefully and was intrigued that the photo was on both sides. It showed a bearded man with a bald head.

I had asked him if he had met that man in person and he had said, “Yes, of course.”

And the same answer came when I asked, “And can you talk to him?”

“But, where does he live?”

“In India.”

“India, so far away, I will never get it together to go there, better put all this in the basement,” my unconscious must have said, as I had completely erased the memory of that encounter. It did not even re-surface the day I saw the same locket hanging around my own neck….

Addendum:

A couple of years later, Saeed Sattar became Swami Krishna Mohammed, after I had given him a book by Osho, My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, as a thank-you gift for all the free tickets I had received in exchange of referring to Air India all the new meditators in Milan. His wife became Ma Radha Mohammed independently after she had met other sannyasins on a holiday with the girls, but at exactly the same time as he. The whole family lived for many years in Pune, he still working for Air India but living in the ashram, and finally retiring to Pondicherry where they run a strawberry farm. And the brother-in-law is now Farid, often seen nowadays at the Pune Meditation Resort.

The photographer of the studio received from me a mala to help him survive the military service. Later he received the name of Swami Deva Muni and became one of Osho’s photographers.

My father called me for the first time ‘Punya’ after twenty years of my being a sannyasin, i.e. the same year he died in 1993. My sisters still steer the conversation away if it gets close to the subject of India, but my beloved nephew is doing the Dynamic on the beaches on the Canaries, between one music score and the next.

“The fragrance of a blue lotus or jasmine or sandalwood is fine, subtle, but compared to the fragrance of virtue it is very gross. Virtue really has a fragrance, and it travels to the farthest corners of the world.

How have you come here to me? From different corners of the world you have travelled, sometimes not even exactly clear as to why; but something has been pulling you, some unknown force has moved your heart, something has been felt by the deepest core of your being. Sometimes you have come even against yourself. Your mind was saying,

‘Don’t go! There is no need to go anywhere.’ Still you have come. You must have smelled a perfume – a perfume which has nothing to do with the visible. It is an invisible phenomenon. Many, many more people will be coming soon. The fragrance is reaching them, is bound to reach. Anybody anywhere who is really in search of truth is bound to come. It is irresistible, it has to happen.”

Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Vol 2, Ch 5

From the book, Past the Point of No Return by Ma Anand Bhagawati