Near-death experiences notwithstanding, there seems to have been hardly any religious instruction for the Ashram’s smallest members: you get the impression that Guest knew little more aboutmeditation and Hinduism than the average white Western child. He shows how a spiritual approach possibly appropriate to adults was damaging to children who had built up no neuroses or false selves.Some anecdotes are perhaps a little too psychologically neat. Food came from the canteen, clothes from the communal laundry, where everything tended to end up maroon. The quality of the schooling can perhaps be gauged by the teacher’s comment: “I grew up really quickly and missed out on that childish stage, and the kids give me that space where I can be a child again.”Guest’s own childish energy seems to have been channelled into monotonous destruction – whipping all the flowers off a plant, breaking things – and pointless activity, like leaping off furniture on to piles of meditation cushions. A group leader told her: “You have two millstones around your neck: your lover and your son.

All you have to do is get rid of them, and you will fly.”Mother and son went to live at Medina, a large Tudorbethan mansion in Suffolk which was the UK headquarters of the cult. PS I want to keep my name, please.’”The first sign of trouble came shortly after that, when his mother, at the age of 30, was sterilised on the advice of the Ashram Spiritual advancement took precedence over reproduction. In December 1979, with my mum’s help, I wrote my own letter to the Ashram ‘Dear Bhagwan, I want a mala please I am four Love Tim. There’s a heartrending picture (reproduced on the cover), taken by a photographer for a local paper: “Dreams take flight: Tim Guest, Chapeltown, Leeds, has a great time at the Children’s Charities Fair at St Chad’s Centre, Headingley.” The clipping was sent out to India. “When my mother saw the picture of me holding my balloon and with missing teeth she decided to come home.”Arriving at Leeds station, his mother wore flamboyant orange robes and a mala – meditation beads – with a portrait of Bhagwan attached “I wanted a mala too. Yet this is a sad book; and all the sadder because Guest’s parents were kindly and well-meaning, not the figures of evil they would be in a more conventional memoir of a difficult childhood.

Tim Guest had it lucky in some ways: an enormous house to run wild in; children of all ages to play with, all day, every day; clothes and food available when needed; little supervision or punishment; no formal schooling; and overseas travel, including extended stays in India and Germany. And though Daily Mail columnists might take a dim view of his dropout mum and her casual approach to parenting, in some ways the Guest family structure was a secure and loving one. When Guest was six months old, his mother began an affair, though the term is much too bourgeois for such free spirits. Eventually she went to India with another lover, Sujan, leaving her child behind. Cozarinsky writes superbly of exile, love and death in the Argentine capital, and we are lucky to have him He has been beautifully translated by Nick Caistor. With his dark sense of the absurd and quietly incisive wit, Cozarinsky is drawn irresistibly to European capitals with a guilty past.