Dr Ophelia Hart fell in love with all things eastern back in the Summer of Love, when she made love to a guru to the sound of a sitar. Well, he wasn’t really a guru. And they’d gone no further than petting. And the sitar was on a George Harrison Beatle's track.
They met at a party. The Party! The one where she drank her first glass of wine. (All because being teetotal wasn’t cool amongst the crowd there). One glass seemed reasonable: given how much everyone else was drinking or smoking.
It didn’t take long before she was tipsy and she was wondering whether to help herself to another glass. Perhaps it would give her courage to go up to the tall bearded stranger who so fascinated her. Ophelia had been looking at him all night. Sadly he was surrounded by adoring girls and boys and she felt completely invisible to him.
That’s when somebody put George Harrison on. Then, partly because of the wine, partly because of the atmosphere, she stopped feeling shy and started dancing.
She must have impressed him because he soon left his friends and came over to join her. Better still he told her she was beautiful. So much more beautiful than any girl or boy at the party that night.
His name was Dylan. He was only just back from India (where he had lived in an Ashram) and soon he would be hanging out at art school, doing something “cool. “ They became an item from that night and were together long enough for it to feel serious.
She was so impressed by him she read all the books he leant her on theosophy and the western occult tradition. She even read Madam Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled.
After just a few weeks of living together she discovered he was broke, but that didn’t seem to matter then, as he convinced her not to get so hung up on money or material possessions. Her entire generation knew Capitalism sucked!
Being part of the “in crowd” they got invited to parties and when they weren’t partying they slept under the stars.
She supported them both by doing a few modelling jobs. Some of the work she did meant she wore few clothes but Dylan told her not to listen to any objections from her feminist friends. They were only jealous. And he noted with approval how liberated she was becoming under his influence. She was no longer the shy girl he’d met and taken under his wing.
He told her she was happy, free and in love. Nevermind she gave up time, money, her body, even eating meat, she was rewarded with his love.
Her vegetarianism outlasted him. And it was his inconsistency there that first warned her something was wrong. She was shocked when she caught him stuffing his face with bacon at an open-air music festival. Dylan blamed it on the catering, muttering “Even vegetarians can lapse when they feel starved,” but there were some stony silences, on the brightly painted bus, on the way back from the festival.
That was the first lie and there were more to come. Her suspicions arouded she found herself doubting him more and more.
Was he really called Dylan? Just how did he get to India when according to her friends he didn’t even have a passport?
The relationship ended when she caught him cheating on her with two of her girlfriends. She had never been into free love and by now she had had enough of his lies, and like the Beatles was growing disillusioned with Gurus.
Well, middle-class white Gurus anyway.
She ran home to her parents and after weeks of anguish made an effort to get over him and to turn her life around, and while she never got over her first love, the sigh she remembered him with (whenever she thought of him) would not have flattered him.
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He’d promised to take her to India. His name was from a folk singer. He’d even stolen his persona from another culture. One that still fascinated her. She was well rid of him.
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Since his exile the Doctor had developed a passion (not always shared by his companions) for various primitive and often dangerous forms of transport. He loved fast cars, motorbikes, and hovercrafts. He liked nothing better than whizzing through the countryside in his vintage roadster Bessie, attracting amazed looks from fellow motorists whom he rapidly left behind. But one thing spoiled his pleasure. His car could do many things. But there was one thing she couldn't do. Bessie couldn't fly.
If only she could. If only she could slip the bonds of gravity and hover freely in the sky.
The Doctor had once rather reluctantly attended a performance of the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his companion Jo Grant. Much to his surprise, he enjoyed the film. He especially liked the songs in it, and he and Jo Grant would often sing them together while on adventures in Bessie. When Jo asked the Doctor what he most liked about the film, he simply pointed to the sky - before joining in the chorus with her.
So when the Doctor read about the amazing levitation experiments being conducted at the Pyschophysics Institute in London; he knew he had to meet Dr Ophelia Hart.
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Ophelia had inherited a first class brain from her scientist parents, and once free from Dylan did rather well for herself academically.
Not long after leaving University she started working in physics labs - but seeing no future for herself in physics - she made the switch to psychology. It seemed like a good move at the time though she still wasn't sure what she wanted to do.
Then after contributing a short autobiographical article to Science News, she was invited by that publication to finally visit India.The magazine wanted a piece on the miracles of a modern day saint.
The Swami she'd come to investigate was notorious for producing phenomena that defied scientific explanation. His miracles included “turning rocks into diamonds,” or “getting sticks to bear fruit in half an hour." But when Ophelia insisted on testing him “under controlled conditions,” the Swami got angry. He was angrier still when his “assistant” confessed to her that “it had all been a gigantic fraud.”
Her love of India and Holy Men remained intact; but some of the skepticism, she had acquired from her time with Dylan, transferred to the men and women she encountered who turned out to be no better than him.
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“A flying car! What a wonderful idea, Doctor”
“I'm glad you share my enthusiasm, Miss Hart.”
“But it would be difficult for us to manage the feat”.
"Will it? Even though it was this lab that got that frog to levitate! I was most impressed when I saw those pictures in Nature.”
“Ah but that was all thanks to molecular magnetism. By inducing diamagnetism in our subjects.There’s some interesting science behind those pics.”
“May I suggest something even more interesting could happen, if you’d only abandon that line of research and concentrate on the neutralisation of gravity instead.”
“You mean anti-gravity! But that’s impossible, Doctor!”
"Impossible is not in my vocabulary, Miss Hart "
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Although, it always disappointed the "scientist in her" to discover there was deception in India, and at home; Ophelia did catch glimpses of what she took to be a "genuine spirituality." She even started meditating and finally got round to re-reading her old books on mystical Theosophy.
Contemplating the alleged levitation of mystics, Ophelia wondered if there could be “levitation without meditation.”
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“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! Why, of course, I’ve read Ian Fleming’s one and only children’s story. But what a coincidence, Doctor. We've both found inspiration in a book and a film.”
The Doctor was the first person since Chakra who truly understood her and shared her dreams. She now had someone to talk to about them: instead of having to converse with a memory that had no reality outside her head.
A memory? Surely Chakra was more than that? She was more than memory. She existed as a pattern of information that had become part of Ophelia’s own Self Model.
Ophelia had been changed forever by the love they'd shared and a part of her would remain Chakra until she died.
Maybe it wasn’t so foolish to keep talking to her dead lover after all.
If only I could fly to you, Chakra. Rise into the air like the mysterious nanny with her magic umbrella; and walk upon the clouds. We could dance upon the rooftops of London together.
If Chitty Chitty Bang Bang met Mary Poppins what a wonderful match that would be.