God, I mean, if I’d say, if I would have grown up that way and stayed that way up until my adult years, I’d be telling a different story and be all about Sikhism and Kundalini yoga, probably. But who knows how a cult leader alters course.
But the first sign of it was when women, every summer, women were instructed to go to a camp, their own women’s training camp. And when women were going to these camps, they would last about eight weeks long. They were in New Mexico, so the children would go to children’s camp. So we went to long, really eight weeks of children’s camp out up in the high desert in northern New Mexico in a completely undeveloped area with no, there might have been running water but no hot water. Tent, living in tent for, I mean, that’s, and I was as little as 5 when we started doing that. And the point of these camps were that we needed to detach, that the words started going out there that attachment to parents was wrong, that being attached to your children, especially the message was going out to the parents, not the children. But that if the parents were creating an atmosphere of attachment, that they would make us all neurotics. So they, it’s, they just sort of programmed in these really exhausting, long camp, children’s camps that, you know, we’d even see our mothers sometimes and we wouldn’t get to say hi to them or hug them or tie. We’d seem in a bus and the bus would drive by and they’d all be waving happy, happily at us, and we’d be in tears cuz why is harmatoji driving by?
And then midway through 3rd grade, it was decided that we were all to go to India to boarding school instead of swapping kids around. Cuz I assume this child swapping was a disaster around all over and it just abruptly came to a halt. It was like, nope, that experiment didn’t work. So the next experiment was to send us all to boarding school in India, to a Sikh boarding school, where we would learn about Sikhism and we would absorb the Sikh culture and Indian culture. And that was kind of about it. That was about, I’m sure the attachment thing was still being hammered into our parents, but for us, we were sold a Bill of goods. All the parents, all the three ho parents had to do some major convincing to get their kids on board with going off to India. What did they tell you? They told us there would be horses, there would be swimming pools. We would learn Garmoki, which is the language, Punjabi. Basically, we would be walking in the footsteps of the gurus, which are the Sikh prophets. They said we would get to go to the Golden Temple all the time, which is the main holy site. They just said everything was gonna be perfect. And so, you know, for I think for me as a child, I would have been 8 at the time. I was, I think I was numb. I was kind of like, I didn’t care. Like, I don’t care if it was true or not. There was a part of me that was just like, tell me whatever you want. You’re making me do this. I wasn’t pushing against it. I wasn’t fighting it. But I also wasn’t saying like, oh, yippy, we get to go where there’s horses and pools and yeah, in a weird kind of way, I didn’t. I was numb. What was the camp like itself? I mean, where were their horses waiting for you when you got there? No, there were no horses swinging there. Oh, gosh. It was like, it was a boarding school. It was full of gravel and it was like a very rigid, traditional Indian boarding school. It was structured. It was rigorous. It was authoritarian.