Not long after the young married couple Dev and Meera (names changed) committed themselves wholeheartedly to Gyan (the Knowledge and conventions taught as Raj Yoga by the Brahma Kumaris) and the ‘pure’ (ie celibate) life that came with it, it became apparent that Dev Bhai (Brother Dev, that’s how we addressed each other) was having problems. Not necessarily or specifically with the Knowledge and concomitant disciplines, although they were a strain for any young person to adopt in the 1970s, but it was readily apparent that Meera’s enthusiasm for her reborn life was greater than Dev’s. Much of this had to do with the different institutional attitudes towards men and women. The very few men at the top of the hierarchy were the exception that proved the rule – men were most decidedly second class citizens. No man lived inside the walls of a Raj Yoga centre, in or out of India; it was taken as a given that men were the originators and perpetrators of the thought crime of sex lust, and that women (kumaris, or virgins, in the case of young Indian women), were inherently pure and under strict instruction of purity in thought word and deed. Men were subject to the same discipline, but the accepted understanding was that we were not inherently pure.

Which is background, rather than direct cause, of Dev Bhai’s deteriorating mental health. He began to appear reluctant and quarrelsome in early morning daily classes; sloppy in his dress, manners and timekeeping; from impolite to rude to downright insolent to the senior sisters, one in particular, whose round face and cheerful demeanour was but the front of a strict (and shrilly expressed) disciplinarian. Us boys – the ‘Pandavs’ (a reference to the five warring brothers of the Hindu epic Mahabharata), kept on call, over the road from the centre, in an evil smelling collection of rooms above a West Indian grocer specialising in dried fish – were expected to look after Dev, succour him and keep him on the straight and narrow.

His unpredictable and disruptive behavour continued to worsen. I remember watching out of the upstairs window as he set out on his way from ‘Pandav Bhavan’  the 50 yards across the road to the Centre. He stopped and stood stock still in the middle of the road in a sort of tortured stasis, arguing with himself and shaking his head, obviously unable either to go back or go forward.

Clearly the boy was in pain.

Next stage was Dev’s adoption of a fictional – that is to say, non-existent – mouse which he would cradle in his hands and address as if it were the sister aforesaid, parroting the daily lessons and exhortations of the Brahma Kumari teaching and daily disciplines. A couple or three brothers, me included, were called in to the presence of ‘Big Dadi’, the sister in chief (‘Dadi’ means elder sister in family-level Hindi), and told that Dev’s presence was disruptive and dangerous to the community (it was), and that we must take him back to his home up north. There to do what, we didn’t know. I don’t recall if there was a centre in his town at the time. What was very clear was that the sisters in London wanted him out of the way.

Thus it came to pass that myself and Ken Shane (we somehow didn’t use ‘bhai’ for him), a burly red headed Irishman with his own particularities when it came to BK discipline, bundled Dev into his own car – an Austin Marina, one of those ghastly 1970s BLMC monstrosities –  and set out up the M1. Ken sat in the back with Dev, who by now had become violent and aggressive, throwing himself around in the back of the car while Ken tried to subdue him, first with kind words and then with his own brute strength.

At one point we discussed whether it wouldn’t be altogether safer and better if Ken just hit him on the chin to knock him out. And there was I, hands on the wheel, sitting nervously in the driver’s seat, watching in the mirror this bizarre scene unfold behind me, keeping to the speed limit and hoping that no one in a passing car would notice something strange and call the Police.

Did we get Dev home? Presumably. Nobody died. What did we do with him when we got there?  I don’t recall.

I lasted another four years.