Will thought of Babs's strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously. "And free above all," he said, "to do what he doesn't like." He looked from one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, "But I'd forgotten," he added. "One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this mental case from the outside is talking about?" And without leaving them time to answer his question, "Tell me," he
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asked, "how long is it—" He broke off. "But perhaps I'm being indiscreet. If so, just tell me to mind my own business. But 1 would like to know, just as a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends."
"Do you mean 'friends'?" asked the little nurse. "Or do you mean 'lovers'?"
"Why not both, while we're about it?"
"Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we've been lovers—except for that miserable white pajama episode—since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen— just about two and a half years."
"And nobody objected?"
"Why should they?"
"Why, indeed," Will echoed. "But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected."
"What about other boys?" Ranga asked.
"In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice . . . Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?"
"Of course."
"I'm surprised."
"Surprised? Why?"
"Seeing that girls aren't out of bounds."
"But one kind of love doesn't exclude the other."
"And both are legitimate?"
"Naturally."
"So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?"
"Not if it was a good sort of relationship."
"But unfortunately," said Radha, "the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn't be interested in anyone but her— and, of course, himself."
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"No boys?"
"Maybe now. I don't know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State."
"Three weeks ago," said Ranga, "he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan's ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit."
"Did he make any converts?"
Ranga shook his head. "Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don't feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, vour revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of maithuna?" he asked.
"Maithuna? What's that?"
"Let's start with the historical background," Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. "Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we're Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?"
Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.
"And to tell you the truth," said Ranga, with a laugh that broke irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, "I don't really know much more than you do. Tantra's an enormous sub-
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ject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition—not worth bothering about. But there's a hard core of sense. If you're a Tantrik, you don't renounce the world or deny its value; you don't try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself."
"Good talk," said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.
"And something more besides," Ranga insisted. "That's the difference," he added—and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful proselytism—"that's the difference between your philosophy and ours. Western philosophers, even the best of them—they're nothing more than good talkers. Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that doesn't matter. Talk isn't the point. Their philosophy is pragmatic and operational. Like the philosophy of modern physics-except that the operations in question are psychological and the results transcendental. Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the universe; but they don't offer the reader any way of testing the truth of those statements. When we make statements, we follow them up with a list of operations that can be used for testing the validity of what we've been saying. For example, tat tvam asi, 'thou are That'—the heart of all our philosophy. Tat tvam asi," he repeated. "It looks like a proposition in metaphysics; but what it actually refers to is a psychological experience, and the operations by means of which the experience can be lived through are described by our philosophers, so that anyone who's willing to perform the necessary operations can test the validity of tat tvam asi for himself. The operations arc-called yoga, or dhyana, or Zen—or, in certain special circumstances, maithuna."
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"Which brings us back to my original question. What is ntaithuna!"
"Maybe you'd better ask Radha."
Will turned to the little nurse. "What is it?"
u Maithuna," she answered gravely, "is the yoga of love."
"Sacred or profane?"
"There's no difference."
"That's the whole point," Ranga put in. "When you do maithuna, profane love is sacred love."
"Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansritan," the girl quoted.
"None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?"
"How would you translate Buddhatvan, Ranga?"
"Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened."
Radha nodded and turned back to Will. "It means that Buddhaness is in the yoni."
"In the yoni?" Will remembered those little stone emblems of the Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office, from a hunchbacked vendor of bondieuseries at Benares. Eight annas for a black yoni; twelve for the still more sacred image of the yoni-lingam. "Literally in the yoniV he asked. "Or metaphorically?"
"What a ridiculous question!" said the little nurse, and she laughed her clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. "Do you think we make love metaphorically? Buddhatvan yoshidyonisan-sritan" she repeated. "It couldn't be more completely and absolutely literal."
"Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?" Ranga now asked.
Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in nineteenth-century communities. "But why do you know about it?" he asked.
"Because it's mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy. Basically, maithuna is the same as what the Oneida peo-
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pie called Male Continence. And that was the same as what Roman Catholics mean by coitus reservatus."
"Reservatus," the little nurse repeated. "It always makes me want to laugh. 'Such a reserved young man'!" The dimples reappeared and there was a flash of white teeth.
"Don't be silly," said Ranga severely. "This is serious."
She expressed her contrition. "But reservatus was really too
funny."
"In a word," Will concluded, "it's just birth control w
ithout
contraceptives."
"But that's only the beginning of the story," said Ranga. "Maithuna is also something else. Something even more important." The undergraduate pedant had reasserted himself. "Remember," he went on earnestly, "remember the point that Freud was always harping on."
"Which point? There were so many."
"The point about the sexuality of children. What we're born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up. Maithuna is the organized attempt to regain that paradise." He turned to Radha. "You've got a good memory," he said. "What's that phrase of Spinoza's that they quote in the applied philosophy book?"
" 'Make the body capable of doing many things,' " she recited. " 'This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God.' "
"Hence all the yogas," said Ranga. "Including maithuna."
"And it's a real yoga," the girl insisted. "As good as raja yoga, or karma yoga, or bhakti yoga. In fact, a great deal better, so far as most people are concerned. Maithuna really gets them there."
"What's 'there'?" Will asked.
" 'There' is where you know."
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"Know what?"
"Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not," she added, "tat tvam asi—thou art That, and so am I: That is me." The dimples came to life, the teeth flashed. "And That's also him." She pointed at Ranga. "Incredible, isn't it?" She stuck out her tongue at him. "And yet it's a fact."
Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched the tip of her nose. "And not merely a fact," he said. "A revealed truth." He gave the nose a little tap. "A revealed truth," he repeated. "So mind your P's and Q's, young woman."
"What I'm wondering," said Will, "is why we aren't all enlightened—I mean, if it's just a question of making love with a rather special kind of technique. What's the answer to that?"
"I'll tell you," Ranga began.
But the girl cut him short. "Listen," she said, "listen!"
Will listened. Faint and far off, but still distinct, he heard the strange inhuman voice that had first welcomed him to Pala. "Attention," it was saying. "Attention, Attention ..."
"That bloody bird again!"
"But that's the secret."
"Attention? But a moment ago you were saying it was something else. What about that young man who's so reserved?"
"That's just to make it easier to pay attention."
"And it does make it easier," Ranga confirmed. "And that's the whole point of maithuna. It's not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it's the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one's sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation."
"What's a not-sensation?"
"It's the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with."
"And you can pay attention to your not-self?"
"Ofcourse."
Will turned to the little nurse. "You too?"
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"To myself," she answered, "and at the same time to my not-self. And to Ranga's not-self, and to Ranga's self, and to Ranga's body, and to my body and everything it's feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And to the mystery of the other person— the perfect stranger, who's the other half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one's paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and gross and sordid even. But they aren't sordid, because one's also paying attention to the fact that, when one's fully aware of them, those things are just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful."
"Maithuna is dhyana," Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt, would explain everything.
"But what is dhyana?" Will asked.
"Dhyana is contemplation."
"Contemplation."
Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter's Gin were alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately, alienations from all the rest of his being—alienations from love, from intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest, vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha's shining face. What happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr. Bahu was so determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere—it was a categor ical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.
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Smiling at his own little joke, "Were you taught maithuna at school?" he asked ironically.
"At school," Radha answered with a simple matter-of-fact-ness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.
"Everybody's taught it," Ranga added.
"And when does the teaching begin?"
"About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That's between fifteen and fifteen and a half."
"And after they've learned maithuna, after they've gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?"
"Oh, we do, we do," Radha assured him.
"Do they still practice it?"
"Not all of them, of course. But a good many do."
"All the time?"
"Except when they want to have a baby."
"And those who don't want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from maithuna—what do they do?"
"Contraceptives," said Ranga laconically.
"And are the contraceptives available?"
"Available! They're distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes."
"The postman," Radha added, "delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month."
"And the babies don't arrive?"
"Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two."
"With the result," said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, "that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang's increase is as big as Ceylon's—almost three percent. And China's is two percent, and India's about one point seven."
"I was in China only a month ago," said Will. "Terrifying!
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And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?"
Ranga nodded affirmatively.
"Three days in Rendang," he explained. "If you get into the Upper Sixth, it's part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like."
"And what did you think of the Outside?" Will enquired.
Ranga answered with another question. "When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?"
"On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip."
Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian r
epresenting a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month's shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda. "And these are the people," he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, "these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor."
After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapes and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly
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dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried hack, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.
"Keeping babies alive," he said, "healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It's the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy."
He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins. "God has nothing to do with it," Ranga retorted, "and the joke isn't cosmic, it's strictly man-made. These things aren't like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics; they don't have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven't allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn't been played on us. We've had good sanitation for the best part of a century—and still we're not overcrowded, we're not miserable, we're not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way."
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