I got my camera and, after taking a few pictures through the chainlink fence, I opened the gate and joined them.They were strumming their Martin acoustic guitars, singing fragments of songs, musically meandering through some of my favorites: "Michelle," "All You Need is Love," "Norwegian Wood," "Eleanor Rigby," and others.

Ringo was dressed in his favorite heavy, gold-brocade Nehru jacket and jeans, with his ever-present black bag over his shoulder and his silver 16mm camera case nearby. He was calm, quiet, almost motionless. Of the four Beatles, he appeared the most serene, the most grounded, the most at ease with who he was. John and Paul wore white cotton kurta pajamas, the most comfortable clothes to wear in India, and leather sandals, or chuppals, in Hindi. And John, it seemed, never took off the leather talisman he wore around his neck.

Having been photographed so often, and in the completely informal ashram setting, they paid no particular attention to the camera. They paused for a moment as I approached. John scratched the inside of his ear with a slightly faraway look in his eyes. I snapped a picture. Then Paul started strumming again and John joined in. Paul had a pad of paper sitting on the step beneath him, and he started to sing the words that he had scribbled down. It was the chorus to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." They repeated it over and over again, and when they stopped Paul looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes and said, "That's all there is so far. We've got the chorus but no words yet."

John chuckled with pleasure at his new folk guitar picking technique he said Donovan had been teaching him. As they played, some of the men who worked at the ashram came over, listened for a while, then went back to their work. Some time later Ringo mentioned dinner was ready but as John got up, Paul started to sing and play "Ob-La-Di" again. John couldn't resist and fell in with him, playing and singing very upbeat. An old friend of Donovan's named Gypsy Dave and his Swedish girlfriend, Yvonne, wandered over and as the tempo picked up, Gypsy Dave clapped along, bringing in a rhythm line. By then the sun had dropped behind the hills. A gentle aroma of evening jasmine drifted over the grounds and a peacock shrilled off in the woods, and after a while we all headed off to eat.