As was customary on Friday nights at the Mada Center, after the Kundalini Meditation, the fun continued with an hour or two of dancing to popular music. That night the meditation room had been packed with fifteen or twenty naked meditators who got up from their blankets or cushions to get ready for the dancing. About an hour into the action, Walter suddenly noticed a woman he had seen before.
She had shoulder-length brunette hair, blue eyes, a slim upper torso and butt, and very muscular, impressive upper thighs. Occasionally, he had seen her briefly sitting in the courtyard after the evening meditation, smoking a cigarette, and then she disappeared. When Walter spotted her on the dance floor, she noticed him at the same instant. Both began orbiting each other while dancing.
For another hour, they danced with and around each other, like magnets spinning all over the place, sometimes attracting, sometimes repelling. Their bodies shimmered in the dim light of the meditation room as a result of profuse sweating. Walter could have danced the night away, but the event facilitator closed the session down for the night. Walter had not exchanged a word with his energetic dance partner.
Everybody hit the showers, and there was a lot of laughing, singing, and chatting going on while they washed themselves. He hoped very much to meet the mysterious woman outside. This time, as luck would have it, he found her sitting on a bench with a cigarette. He sat down next to her, lighted up himself, but said nothing.
They looked at each other through the darkness, illuminated by sparse light from a streetlamp. He could make out her sparkling eyes, and from then only those two eyes existed in his vision. It appeared to Walter as if the area around her face turned into a small movie screen as the expressions on it and her appearance changed frequently, from old to youthful, from austere to passionate and adoring. Suddenly, both of them jerked at the same time. Their bodies twitched and trembled as Walter and the woman gazed at each other, but nobody interrupted the stare. At last, she spoke, shivering in the night. “My name is Chandra.”
He became aware of the mala around her neck, resting neatly on a silky red sweater. “Would you like to have dinner with me?” he asked without hesitation, hoping to gain some time together with her. “How about the Greek restaurant nearby?”
Chandra thought for a moment, still recovering from the previous experience and said, “OK.”
They gathered their belongings, went to Walter’s Volkswagen parked around the corner, and drove for ten minutes to the restaurant.
He introduced himself and told her that he was impatiently waiting for a response from the master. She laughed aloud when she heard that. Walter noticed she had a squint, a gleam of silver in her look that added to her intensity.
Chandra told him that she currently stayed with a woman physician in a small town not far from Frankfurt, to serve a required practical residency with the homeopathic doctor for her studies. She said she studied medicine in Hamburg and was halfway through her second semester.
Time passed quickly in the restaurant; they drank a second glass of beer and smoked another cigarette, and then the waiter announced it would be closing time soon.
Walter asked her, “Do you want to come over to my place?”
“I knew you would ask that,” she replied. “Every man I meet here in the center asks the same question. But, yes, I would like to come to your place.”
At his apartment, they settled down in his room with a bottle of beer and talked for a while. Whenever they gazed at each other, the phenomenon of jerking bodies reoccurred. Sometimes the shaking became so intense, they just let it continue while they lay next to each other on the bed with their clothes on. It turned into a long process, interrupted by repeated twitches, to touch each other with their hands and get naked. When Chandra and Walter accomplished the deed and kissed for the first time, they needed to be careful not to collide with their teeth.
She had an athletic, trimmed body with small breasts and wide nipples. There was not a gram of fat on her, only muscles that Walter began kissing from the neck down. He kept on going down past the hair, massaging the huge thighs all the way down to a pair of exceptionally stiff feet. He asked her what she had been doing in the past. “Ice skating,” she whispered.
He smelled her musky sexual aroma, which intoxicated his senses as Chandra lifted her upper torso to grab his behind and turn him toward her. The couple started oral pleasures. When Walter could not take it any longer, he moved around into position to enter her sacred triangle.
Next morning, when they woke up and stretched lasciviously, she asked him if he would drive her to the closest railway station where she could catch a local train to her temporary domicile. In the car for the brief ride, she told Walter how the current work in the elderly physician’s practice impressed her.
They did not exchange any phone numbers nor make further appointments, leaving it up to fate whether they would see each other again. Walter knew, however, that her obligations with the doctor would last another six weeks and expected to see her eventually at the Mada Center.
Returning to his apartment for breakfast, he felt as if he had lost his mind. There were two conflicting feelings in progress: one of them the forceful sexual attraction, the other a more concealed sentiment that was pure fear. Instinctively, he knew that a relationship with this woman could destroy him. He had felt that Chandra carried this power inherently within herself.
There had been no indication in the brief period he met her that she had an ability to love. Many brusque, direct responses that indicated her personality was drained of gentleness. It triggered an alert signal in his brain. Until the night before, Walter had never been so intimately confronted with a person of such caliber. On the other hand, he was happy with the current developments in his life. With his own activities in connection to what existence offered him. He would not have conceived it as possible a short while ago.
Walter did not meet Chandra for the next two days, but did receive a phone call from Kavita, who surprisingly wanted to get together with him. She came to his apartment and asked him if he wanted to take some portrait shots of her; she had seen some of his travel pictures, as well as his work with Margaretha. Of course, he said yes since taking pictures had been his special interest for some time. The two spent a few hours in his room, where he tried to create the proper lighting and positions to show Kavita at her best.
By the time the photo shoot ended, it was late, and since both were hungry, they walked together to the Chinese restaurant next to the Mada Center and had dinner. Certainly, many changes had occurred since the two had last seen each other. They caught up with her journey to India and sitting in front of a living master, how it felt to change names and wear orange-red-colored clothes all the time.
Walter realized that Kavita wanted to make sure that he was OK after his Encounter group and the separation from Margaretha. She took his hand, reaching over the table in the restaurant, and said, “I really like you. You are a good person.”
Kavita’s statement touched Walter. He had always respected her highly and thought only the best of her. She was someone with integrity and a lot of truth that could cut right through an issue. It had always been easy to forgive her tendencies toward mulishness.
“I would like to stay the night with you, is that OK?” she asked him and he agreed immediately. Physically Walter had never been attracted to Kavita, but he accepted her wish as an honor to comply with; it was like enjoying time with a sister.
“I wonder what name Bhagwan will give to you,” she said when they had cuddled up in his bed. Shortly thereafter, they both fell asleep.
On the third night after the event with Chandra, Walter spotted her in the Kundalini Meditation crowd as soon as he entered the room. Like the first time, she sat outside on the bench after the meditation. Walter placed himself next to her, standing beside the bench because all the seats had been taken. She looked up at him and held his gaze for a few seconds, and then the identical phenomenon began to happen again as it had last time: trembling, jolting, and jerking of the entire body and a contraction of vision, which allowed seeing only a constrained area around her face and a fading peripheral view. Images of Chandra transformed into various appearances as old men, women, and characteristics resembling asceticism or gentleness.
By then, Walter had familiarized himself with the condition and could think while the show unfolded in front of his eyes. “You want to come to my place?” he asked.
“I have to be at the practice tomorrow morning,” she said after a delay.
“I can take you there; I have time.”
When the couple reached the apartment, Rudi opened the door for them and Walter introduced Chandra to him. They proceeded without delay into the kitchen for a dinner of sandwiches and beer. Almost relieved that Rudi was home, Walter enjoyed the time without further twitching. Simply sitting at the table and looking at Chandra from the side while she talked animatedly with Rudi about social work assured him that there might be a normal faculty within the woman.
As soon as the dishes had been cleared and everybody retreated to their rooms, however, the condition reoccurred. Walter and Chandra stood in the middle of his room, neither moving an inch. They gazed at each other while jerking. One expression Walter had recently heard a lot was surrender. Sannyasins used it frequently to describe situations where one had to let go of something or someone. It went through his mind now in his room, and suddenly, the experience had no more connotations of something discomforting. It actually represented a special event that could be enjoyed, a release or an exchange of energy comparable to continuous orgasms.
Once the two vibrating human beings succeeded in undressing and were stretched out on Walter’s freshly dyed linen, he asked her, “Would you like to taste a bit of what I learned in my massage training?”
“Oh yes, how could you even ask such a question?” Chandra replied, smiling broadly.
Walter really enjoyed that moment, seeing her relax and smile. It moved a dial within him one more degree to being in love with her, after he had lost his wits already. As per instructions of the neo-Reichian technique he had learned, Walter worked his way down, starting at the head to relax her and ending at her feet, which had previously caught his attention. While he carried out the routine on her body, he was amazed at how sensitively Chandra reacted to his most gentle touches and pressures. He finished his session with her feet and looked at them from above, as he noticed their posture. They were pointing straight up at the ceiling and the toes toward her body. When he touched them, it felt as if he were fingering a pair of shoes from the outside. He began to work on them lightly but soon increased the pressure, feeling he had to crack something open. As he cradled one of the feet with both hands, tenderly shifting the ankle joint to enable some flexibility, Chandra’s upper torso suddenly bolted into a sitting position, and she shouted aloud.
“Did I hurt you?”
“Yes and no, please continue, you are on track of something.”
After a few more minutes, Walter ended the session and told her it needed to be continued. He was very much rewarded when he stretched out next to her and she opened her arms to hug and kiss him and then her legs to wrap them around his lower back.
She introduced him to the very friendly, wise, old female doctor at the homeopathic practice where she interned. Chandra thought her time spent there was the most interesting and valuable of her medical studies so far, and she did not want to miss a minute of it.
Before Walter left her, the two exchanged their phone numbers and promised each other to call when they wanted. He knew that a fresh relationship had begun to emerge, and his previous concerns were temporarily suspended.
As Walter continued to visit the Mada for the Dynamic in the morning and nearly every night to do the Kundalini, he never forgot to check for mail from the master in the USA. One day, he discovered a color, high-gloss flyer in the reception announcing an event in Berlin called the Orange Connection Event. All the famous Sannyasins—names of therapists, musicians, and inner circle around Bhagwan—would be there in person; he had to go.
Walter asked Chandra whether she wanted to come along, but she needed to be with her doctor. He called Johann, an old friend, an artist painter who had visited Hohenhausen a few times, and asked if he could stay at his place for a couple of days, and Johann said yes. Walter took his Volkswagen on the long trip to Berlin and then to the huge, modern steel-and-glass Congress Centrum where the visitors were greeted by many red flags.
The closer he came to the location, the more people in red and orange walked on the streets. It turned into a sea of orange. Somendra, Teertha, and Veeresh were among several group leaders who participated. Chaitanya Hari and friends played music. Aneeta and Anubhava led Sufi dancing. Workshops and meditations were scheduled around the clock, including a talk show or two. They were the talk of town, and Walter met all of them.
The event turned into a forty-eight-hour affair. He could hardly wait to meet Teertha at last—for Walter, the representative of Bhagwan in absentia. Teertha had been on the cover of the news magazine, shown with a group of nude people. Once it was Walter’s turn to participate in one of Teertha’s short sessions, he managed to attract his attention.
Teertha came to him, sitting on the floor, and Walter asked him the only question that came to his mind: “Am I a good person?”
The therapist put his hand on Walter’s head, smiled, and walked away. Walter felt as if god himself had blessed him.
Somendra did not impress him that much, but once he listened to the voices of Aneeta and Anubhava during their Sufi dance, shivers went down his spine, and tears rolled down his cheeks. He dissolved in bliss.
On a more worldly level, the most interesting individual for Walter was Veeresh. When he met him during one of his sessions, he got to know his approach, and later when Walter learned personal details about the therapist, he knew he had found a teacher.