The Fakirs. The ceremony took place in a Moslem cemetery where one of the saints of the order had been buried some centuries back. The head of the order was a full-bodied man with a hooked nose and a clever, commanding expression. He wore an Arab cloak of fine brown stuff and on his head a neat white turban. In front of where he sat was a small brazier containing burning charcoal into which he constantly dropped incense, and the various instruments the dervishes were to use in their display.
They were seated in a row opposite him and about four or five yards away. They were of all ages; one could not have been more than fourteen, some were young men; the most important were, from the Indian standpoint, old, with great beards and grey hair. They were a wild-looking lot with their long hair, the coloured voluminous rags they wore, their ear-rings and chains.
The proceedings began with a prayer which the head of the order chanted and in which at intervals the others joined with cries. Then one of them advanced and took a skewer, perhaps two feet long, passed it over the incense and had it touched by the head man, then he put it through his cheek and pushed it through till it came out for at least two inches on the other cheek. He walked round to show himself and then with precaution took it out. He lightly rubbed the places where the skewer had gone in and come out and not only was there no blood, but there was no wound. Another came forward, took another skewer, passed it through his neck, behind the windpipe, and withdrew it. Then one took a short blunt dagger and after certain extravagant gestures and shouting gouged his eye out. He walked around with the ball of the eye hanging down his cheek, a revolting spectacle, then replaced it, rubbed it a little and appeared none the worse. Another passed a skewer through the skin of his abdomen, and still another through his tongue. They seemed to suffer no pain. The performance went on for perhaps half an hour and ended with another long prayer. One or two bled a very little, a drop or two, but the bleeding quickly stopped.
The occultist. He was a little man with a round face and bespectacled round eyes, very fluent in conversation. He had been in the war and emerged with the rank of major. He had travelled a great deal. He was a Christian and a student of Paracelsus and of Eliphas Devi. He distinguished between white magic and black. He had a contempt for miracles, but claimed to be able to levitate. His contention was that any demonstration made merely to satisfy curiosity lessened the agent’s powers. His were purely spiritual. He asserted that he could heal the sick, but said that his wife (who came to my house with him) had much greater powers than he. She was an Indian in a sari, not quite young, silent and watchful. When they left she told me that I would sometimes see her and that when she appeared to people it was always in a dark blue sari.
It may be that it is the I in us which is the cause of all our wickedness, but it is the cause too of our music, our painting, our poetry. And so what?
Ahmed Ali, Sir Akbar’s secretary, told me the following story. He said that a woman who had been bitten by a scorpion was brought to him and he was told that if he wrote the number 16 on the ground and rubbed it with a shoe she would be healed. Not believing in it, he did so and nothing happened. She went away and then someone pointed out that he had written not 16, but 13. Since then he had written 16 and had cured several people.
A Yogi wanted to cross a river and had not the penny to pay the ferryman, so he walked across the river on his feet. Another Yogi hearing of this said the miracle was only worth the penny it would have cost to cross by ferry.
A Yogi wanted to go somewhere by train, but having no money, asked the station-master if he could go for nothing; the station-master refused, so the Yogi sat down on the platform. When it was time for the train to go it would not start. It was supposed that something was wrong with the engine, so mechanics were sent for and they did all they knew, but still the train could not go. At last the station-master told the officials of the Yogi. He was asked to get in the train and it immediately started.
The occultist and Ahmed Ali both agreed that there was a station-master on the line who could heal snake bites, and they said that if anyone was bitten he had the right to telegraph free of charge to the station-master, who telegraphed back and cured the patient.
I gave a small dinner party. Six people. They were philosophers, pundits and scholars. The conversation turning on the power a Yogi can obtain by discipline and mortification, they told me of one who had let himself be buried at the bottom of a dry well and had told people to open it in six months. If the top of the head was warm they would know he was alive and should revive him, if it was cold they would know he was dead and could burn him. They did this and found he was alive. He soon revived and is now living hale and hearty sixteen years later. They had all either seen him or known people who had. They accepted the incident as certain.
The peacock. We were driving through the jungle. It was not thick and presently we caught sight of a peacock among the trees with its beautiful tail outspread. It walked, a proud, magnificent object, treading the ground with a peculiar delicacy, with a sort of deliberation, and its walk was so elegant, so wonderfully graceful that it recalled to my memory Nijinsky stepping on to the stage at Covent Garden and walking with just such a delicacy, grace and elegance. I have seldom seen a sight more thrilling than that peacock threading its solitary way through the jungle. My companion told the driver to stop and seized his gun.
“I’m going to have a shot at it.”
My heart stopped still. He fired, and I hoped he’d miss, but he didn’t. The driver jumped out of the car and brought back the dead bird which a moment before had been so exultantly alive. It was a cruel sight.
We ate the breast for dinner that night. The flesh was white, tender and succulent; it was a welcome change from the scraggy chickens which are brought to the table evening after evening in India.
Benares. Nothing can be more impressive than to saunter down the Ganges by boat in the evening just before the sun sets. It is thrilling to look at the city with the two minarets of the mosque standing up against the pale sky. A wonderful sense of peace descends upon you. There is a great silence.
Then in the morning before the sun rises you drive through the city, the shops still closed and men under rugs lying asleep on the pavement; a scattering of people are going down to the river, with brass bowls in their hands, for their prescribed bath in the sacred water. You get on to a houseboat, manned by three men, and slowly row down by the ghats. It is chilly in the early morning. The ghats are unevenly peopled. One, I don’t know why, is crowded. It is an extraordinary spectacle, the throng on the steps and at the water’s edge. The bathers take the ritual bath in different ways. For some of the boys it is a lark and they dive into the water, come out and dive in again. For some it is a ceremony that must be gone through as quickly as possible, and you see them make the motions of devotion mechanically and gabble through their prayers. Others take it solemnly. They bow to the rising sun and, their arms outstretched above their heads, utter their prayers with unction. Then, the bath over, some chat with their friends and you guess that the daily obligation offers an opportunity to exchange news and gossip. Others sit cross-legged in meditation. The stillness with which some of them sit is strangely impressive: it is as though in that throng they sat in a temple of solitude. I saw one old man whose face was decorated with great rings of white ash around his eyes, a broad oblong patch on his forehead and square patches on his cheeks, so that he looked as if he were wearing a mask. Many of the bathers, having taken their bath, carefully scrubbed and polished the brass bowl in which they were going to carry back to their houses the lustral water.
It is a moving, a wonderfully thrilling spectacle; the bustle, the noise, the coming and going give a sense of a seething vitality; and those still figures of the men in contemplation by contrast seem more silent, more still, more aloof from human intercourse.
The sun rises higher in the heaven and the grey light which had bathed the scene grows golden, and colour clothes it with a motley radiance.
&
nbsp; He was a sturdy little man, who walked with a jaunty perkiness, with a round bald head, bright blue eyes, with a lot of wrinkles round them, and a cheerful expression. He was the Government engineer. He built roads, dams, bridges. His bungalow faced the river. The drawing-room was furnished with comfortable arm-chairs and a carved Indian table in the middle; on the walls were fussy carvings in wood of mythological scenes, heads of animals he had shot, and framed photographs. There was a little strip of garden between the veranda and the river, and one tree grew in it that struck me by its beauty. Its leaves were not dense, so that you saw the branches very plainly and they made an exquisite pattern against the sky. I remarked on its loveliness, but the engineer had evidently never noticed it; I think he thought it rather funny of me to speak about it.
We were talking of shooting and he mentioned that he had once killed a monkey. “I’ll never shoot another,” he said. “I was making a road and all the coolies struck, there were six hundred of them; the foreman was ill and they were afraid he was going to die; they’d made up their minds to go away and leave the work. I did everything I could to get them to stay, and at last they said they would if I’d kill a monkey so that they could have the blood in its heart, because they could cure the foreman with it. Well, I couldn’t have the work stopped, so I took my gun and walked along the road. There were generally a good many monkeys playing about, black-faced ones, and after a time I saw one. I aimed and fired, but I only wounded it. It ran up to me for protection, crying, crying just like a child.”
“Did the foreman recover?” I asked.
“Well, in point of fact he did. Anyhow I got the road finished.”
Van H. He is a man of about sixty, a big fellow with a big stomach, a large fleshy face and a large nose, a grey beard and grey hair. His eyes are blue. He speaks willingly, correctly, but with somewhat of an accent. His voice is loud and he has a jovial manner. He can never have been good-looking as a young man and now, in his shabby, careless clothes, with all that fat, though a man of some presence from his size, he has no dignity, nor is he striking or impressive. He has been in the East for over thirty years. He went out first to Java. He is a considerable linguist, a Sanscrit scholar; he is widely read in the religions of the East and in the philosophy of Greece. Here, not unnaturally, he is chiefly interested in Heraclitus and on his shelves is all the extant literature concerned with him. The flat is filled with books. On the walls are Tibetan banners and here and there pieces of Tibetan brass. He lived for a longish time in Tibet. He is a man who likes his food and enjoys his glass of beer. Under the influence of Leadbitter he became a theosophist, went to India and was for some years librarian at Adyar, but then quarrelled with Mrs. Besant. When I asked him what he thought of the notion of Mahatmas he said that he thought the evidence in proof of their existence and of their non-existence was about fifty per cent on one side and fifty per cent on the other. Though he has long since lost his belief in theosophy, he has still a great admiration for Leadbitter and believes that he had supernatural powers. I think he has now a real faith in Buddhism.
When in Java as a young man he engaged a servant. He travelled with him for nine months and then the boy told him his story. He was a descendant of one of the Javanese sultans, married, with a child; his wife and child died and, heart-broken, he retired into the jungle to lead the life of a Sadhu. He eventually joined a company of charcoal-burners and lived with them for several months. At last they said to him that this was no life for the descendant of a prince and persuaded him to go and see a strange man. This was a tea planter, a Javanese, of about forty, who was generally believed to be, not a reincarnation of a celebrated rebel who had vanished into obscurity on defeat (as Nana Sahib did), but the man himself, still alive after more than a hundred years. This man had told him to go to Batavia, where he would find a white man whom for the nine months he would be there he was to serve. He told him on what day he would arrive. The fact that all this turned out exactly as the tea planter had foretold interested van H. and he went to see him. He found an ordinary-looking man, who was greatly revered by the people, but who would say nothing about himself; he would neither confirm nor deny that he was the ancient hero he was thought to be. When van H. asked him what had made him say the exact things that had made the servant come to Batavia and take a place with him, the answer was: “There is a knowledge that comes from the head and there is a knowledge that comes from the heart. I looked in my heart and told what I saw there.”
A young officer on a P. and O. on the way home was seen on deck busily reading books on the Taj Mahal. He was asked why and he answered: “Well, I was stationed at Agra for four years and I never saw it, but I know that when I get home everyone’ll ask me about it, so I thought I’d better mug it all up before I got there.”
Taj Mahal. Notwithstanding my expectations and all the pictures I had seen of it, when I got my first and proper view of it, the view from the terrace of the gateway, I was overcome by its beauty. I recognised that this was the authentic thrill of art and tried to examine it in myself while it was still vivid. I can understand that when people say something takes their breath away it is not an idle metaphor. I really did feel shortness of breath. I had a queer, delightful feeling in my heart, as though it were dilated. I felt surprise and joy and, I think, a sense of liberation; but I had just been reading the Samkhya philosophy in which art is regarded as a temporary liberation of the same sort as that absolute liberation in which all Indian religion ends, so it may be that this was no more than a reminiscence that I transferred to my actual feeling.
I cannot enjoy the same ecstasy over a beautiful thing twice over, and next day when I went to the Taj again, at the same hour, it was only with my mind that I enjoyed the same sight. On the other hand I got something else. As the sun was setting I wandered into the Mosque. I was quite alone. As I looked from one end along the chambers into which it is divided I had an eerie, mysterious sense of its emptiness and silence. I was a trifle scared. I can only put what I felt into words that make no sense: I seemed to hear the noiseless footfall of the infinite.
Sundaram. It is terribly difficult to describe an Indian. Perhaps because you know so little about his antecedents and environment, perhaps because you know so few Indians, relatively, so that you cannot compare your impressions of one with another; or perhaps it is because their personalities are fluid, as it were, without marked idiosyncrasies; or it may be, of course, that they only show you what they want to, or what they think will please and interest you. Sundaram was a Madrassi, a thick-set, plumpish man, of the middle height for a European, not very dark in colour; he was dressed in a dhoty, a white shirt and a Ghandi cap. He had a short, thick nose and a rather large mouth with fleshy lips. An engaging, ready smile. I had a notion that he was a little pleased to talk of all the very grand people he had known, but that seemed his only vanity. He was most kind. He was a puritan and he told me he had never been in a theatre or a cinema in his life. He had poetic sensibility; landscape and rivers, flowers, the sky by day and the sky by night were a delight to him. He had no logical sense and no interest in discussion. He had accepted his beliefs from the heritage of India and directly from his Guru and was glad to discourse about them at length, but was not concerned with their reasonableness. He did not mind if his ideas contradicted one another. He took his ground on feeling and intuition. In these he had implicit trust. He carried out rigorously all the precepts concerning food, bathing, meditation and so on of the orthodox Hindu. He nourished himself chiefly on milk, fruit and nuts. He told me that once when he was occupied on a serious piece of intellectual work he had lived on milk alone for six months and had kept silence. He talked of renunciation, of the Absolute and of the God that is in all of us—God is everything, we are all God—with intense sincerity. He had at his fingers’ ends a number of convenient metaphors, the metaphors that have been current in India for centuries, and used them effectively; it was clear that to him they were an adequate means of reasoning. A be
autiful image about the Ganges had for him all the force of a syllogism. He was evidently devoted to his wife and children and proud of them. The children were beautifully mannered. He gets up at five every morning and meditates. He considers this the most propitious hour. I saw him with some of the students of the university. He was extremely nice to them, but not with the slightly cloying affectionateness that you sometimes see in missionaries with their converts; he was natural and human.
The Empire Maker. He was a general, white-haired, with a white toothbrush moustache, tall, well covered but not fat, with a red face, blue eyes and an egg-shaped head. Every morning he went out at six for a ride, and he had a rowing-machine in his room so that he could take some exercise when he came in before he had his bath; as soon as the heat had a trifle diminished he was on the tennis court, and he played strenuously, a very good game (his boast was that he could hold his own against fellers half his age and he preferred singles because they gave you more exercise), till the darkness made it impossible to see the ball; then he went back to his room and rowed on his rowing-machine for a quarter of an hour before bathing. “You have to keep fit in this country,” he constantly said and complained: “I can’t get enough exercise.” He had been in India for thirty years. “The only thing that makes India possible is the shootin’. I’ve had a lot of Shikaris who were first-rate fellers, I mean you could trust them as much as if they were English, first-rate sportsmen, keen as mustard, I mean, except for their colour pukka white men. I’m not exaggeratin’, you know. It’s a fact.”
A Writer's Notebook (Vintage International) Page 29
