The childhood it recovers is genuinely golden, and Osho knows the irony of saying so. He was the firstborn of an ordinary Jain couple — his father, Babulal Jain, a cloth merchant he called “Dadda” (who would later take sannyas as Swami Devateerth Bharti), and his mother, Saraswati Bai Jain, later known as Ma Amrit Saraswati. They were business people with no time to raise a child and handed him to his childless, adoring maternal grandparents.They raised him on a country estate of fields, woods and a lake, a landscape he describes with the sensuousness of a man who spent a lifetime trying to return to it. His grandmother, his Nani, is the book’s quiet hero. She did not tell him stories; she demanded them, waiting all day to hear what he had invented, and so made him the storyteller the world would later either revere or distrust. The seed of the preacher is a grandmother who refused to be bored.
