5 Indian Masters

by Welknow Indian

  I could not forget Madeleine – how could I? Madeleine was away and in Aix-en-Provence. Madeleine had never recovered in fact she never did recover from the death of Pierre. She had called him Krishna till he was seven months old. Then when he begain to have those coughs, Madeleine knew; mothers always know what is dangerous for their children. And on that Saturday morning, returning from her college Madeleine knew, she knew that in four weeks, in three and in two and in one, the dread disease would take him away. That was why from the moment he was born – we had him take birth in a little, lovely maternity home near Bandol – she spoke of all the hopes she had in him. He must be tall and twenty three; he must go to an Engineering Institute and build bridges for India when he grew up. Like all melancholic people, Madeleine loved bridges. She felt Truth was always on the other side, and so sometimes, I told her that next time she must be born on the Hudson. I bought her books on Provence or on Sardinia, which had such beautiful ivy-covered bridges built by the Romans. One day she said, “Let’s go and see this bridge at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port,” that she had found in a book on the Pays Basque. We drove through abrupt, arched Ardèche and passing through Cahors I showed her the Pont de Valentŕe. She did not care for it. It was like Reinhardt’s scenario at Salzburg, she said. When we went on to the Roman bridge of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port she said, “Rama, it makes me shiver,” She had been a young girl at the time of the Spanish Civil War, so we never could go over to Spain. Then it was we went up to some beautiful mountain town perhaps it was Pau, for I can still see the huge chateau, the one built by Henri IV – and may be it was on that night, in trying to comfort Madeleine, that Krishna was conceived. She would love to have a child of mine, she said and we had been married seven months.

  At that time Madeleine was twenty six, and I was twenty one. We had first met at University of Caen. Madeleine had an uncle – her parents had died leaving her an estate, so it was being looked after by Uncle Charles. He was from Normandy, and you know what that means.

  Madedeine was so lovely, with golden hair – on her mother’s side she came from Savoy and her limbs had such pure unreality. Madeleine was altogether unreal. That is why, I think, she had never married anyone in fact she had never touched anyone. She said that during the Nazi occupation, towards the end of 1943, a German Officer had tried to touch her hair; it looked so magical, and it looked the perfect Nordic hair. She said he had brought his hands near her face, and she had only to smile and he could not do anything. He bowed and went away.

  It was the Brahmin in me, she said, the sense that touch and untouch are so important, which she sensed; and she would let me touch her. Her hair was gold, and her skin for an Indian was like the unearthed marble with which we built our winter palaces. Cool, with the lake about one, and the peacock strutting in the garden below. The seventh-hour of music would come, and all the palace would see itself lit. Seeing oneself is what we always seek; the world, as the great Sage Sankara said, is like a city seen in a mirror. Madeleine was like the Palace of Amber seen in moonlight. There is such a luminous mystery – the deeper you go, the more you know yourself. So Krishna was born.

  The bridge was never crossed. Madeleine had a horror of crossing bridges. Born in India she would have known how in Malabar they send off gunfire to frighten the evil spirits, as you cross a bridge. Whether the gunfire went off or not, Krishna could never cross the bridge of life. That is why with some primitive superstition Madeleine changed his name and called him Pierre from the second day of his illness. “Pierre tu es, et sur cette Pierre…” she quoted. And she said – for she, a Frenchwoman, like an Indian woman was shy, and would not call me easily by my name – she had said, “My love, the gods of India will be angry, that you a Brahmin married a non-Brahmin like me; why should they let me have a child called Krishna? So sacred is that name,” And the little fellow did not quite know what he was to do when he was called Pierre. I called him Pierre and respected her superstition. For all we do is really superstition. Was I really called Ramaswamy, or was Madeleine called Madeleine?

  The illness continued. Dr. Pierre Marmoson, a specialist in child medicine especially trained in America gave every care available. But bronchopneumonia is bronchopneumonia, particularly after a severe attack of chickenpox. Madeleine, however, believed more in my powers of healing than in the doctor’s. So that when the child actually lay in my arms and steadied itself and kicked straight and lay quiet, Madeleine could not believe that Pierrre was dead. The child had not even cried.

  We were given special permission by the Prefet des Bouches-du-Rhône to cremate Pierre among the olive trees behind the Villa Sainte-Anne. It was a large Villa and one saw on a day of the mistral the beautiful Mont-Sainte-Victoire, as Cezanne must have seen it day after day, clear as though you could talk to it. The mistral blew and blew so vigorously; one could see one’s body float away, like pantaloon, vest and scarf, and one’s soul sit and shine on the top of Mont Sainte-Victoire. The dead, they say in Aix, live in the cathedral tower, the young and the virgins do – there is even a Provencal song about it – so Madeleine went to her early morning Mass and to vespers. She fasted on Friday, she a heathen, she began to light candles to the Virgin, and she just smothered me up in tenderness. She seemed so far that nearness was further than any smell or touch. There was no bridge – all bridges now led to Spain.

  So when my father had said he was very ill, and wished I could come, she said, “Go, and don’t you worry about anything. I will look after myself.” It seemed wiser for me to go. Madeleine would continue to teach and I would settle my affairs at home. Mother’s property had been badly handled by the estate agent Sundarayya, the rents not paid, the papers not in order; and I thought I would go and see the University authorities too, for a job was being kept vacant for me. The Government had so far been very kind and my scholarship continued. Once my doctorate was over I would take Madeleine home, and she would settle with me – somehow I always thought of a house white, single-storied, on a hill and by a lake and I would go day after day to the University and preach to them the magnificence of European civilization. I had taken history, and my special subject was the Albigensian heresy. I was trying to link up the Bogomilites and the Druzes, and thus search back for the Indian background – Jain or may be Buddisht of the Cathars. The “Pure” were dear to me. Madeleine, too, got involved in them, but for a different reason. Touch, as I have said, was always distasteful to her, so she liked the untouching Cathars, she loved their celibacy. She implored me to practice the ascetic Brahmacharya of my ancestors, and I was too proud a Brahmin to feel defeated. The bridge was anyhow there, and could not be crossed. I knew I would never go to Spain.

  Walking back and forth in my Kensington room that day – it was a Thursday, I clearly remember, the day of Jupiter – I thought of the letter I should write to Pratap. For how could I have gone to Cambridge and seen so much of Savithri without dropping him a line, some concatenation of words (and images) that might give him hope? For hope he certainly could have. Savithri always talked of Pratap as one talks of one’s secretary – it must have come from the atmosphere of palaces – as an inevitable support in all contingencies, a certainty in a world of uncertainty. If she talked of him with a touch of condescension it was not because of social differences; it was just because she liked being kind to something, something inevitable, unknown, such as a lame horse in the stable or it might be an old bull, fed in the palace yard till it die; but meanwhile being treated as an elder, a palace bull, given the best of Bengal gram and the choicest of green grass. And when it died, for it would “die”, it would be given a music and flower funeral and have orange trees planted over its grave. And one day some virgin would light a lamp and consecrate it, and every day from that time on the sanctuary would be lit with an oil lamp, as dusk fell over the palace grove…

  The excerpt which follows occurs towards the middle of The Serpent and the Rope and describes, among other things, Savithri’s ritual “marriage” with Ramaswamy.
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  To speak the truth, I hated this attitude of Savithri’s. I felt she was so truly indifferent, so completely resigned to her fate like all Hindu women – that for her, life was like a bullock-cart wheel: it was round, and so it had to move on night after night, and day after day, smelling chilli or tamarind, rice or coconut, over rut and through monsoon waters purring at the sides to the fairs in the plains; or to the mountains, high up there, on a known pilgrimage. What did it matter, she would ask, whether the sun scorched or the rain poured, or you carried tamarind or saffron? Life’s wheel is its own internal law. Nobody could marry Savithri, nobody could marry a soul, so why not marry anyone? And why should not that anyone be stump Pratap? It certainly could not be Hussain Hamdani; and thank heavens his vanity and self-interest took him to Pakistan and a good job – and Pratap was, anyway, so very clean, so gentle, so sincere. If one should have a husband at all, said Savithri, Pratap was the very best.

  “What do you think” she had asked me one evening, a day or two before my departure from Cambridge. We were not by the river, which was reserved for us, for our conjoint intuitions of poetry and history – of a song of Mira’s and again may be of some historical character from Avignon, Nimes, Carcassonne, Albi or Montpellier. But when we came out into the open street light we could talk of anything, of Nehru’s Government, of father’s despair at having three elephants instead of eight, a tradition which had come down from Rajendra Simha III, in the sixteenth century. Finally, in the heart of this extrovent world one can always dig a hollow, make oneself comfortable in a bus shelter, an ABC, or with hot coffee at the Copper Kettle one can sit and talk of Pratap.

  “There’s such goodness in him. I have never seen anyone so good in life. Not even you,” she had said, in mock severity.

  “I never said I was good.”

  “Of course not,” she teased, “but you want to be called a saint.”

  “You say so,” I laughed, “and that is your responsibility.” I could hear the bells ring the hour on Trinity Tower, so gathering her notes we had jumped into a taxi at the Market Square and rushed off to deposit her safely at the gate of Girton.

  “It’s me,” she said, with that enchanting voice, and even the gatekeeper did not seem to mind very much. “Am I very late?”

  He had looked at the clock first, and then at me. “Well, Miss Rathor, the world does not always function by the clock, does it?” he said with a wink.

  She laid the red rose I had bought her on his table, saying, “This is for Catherine,” and turning to me she had added, “She’s such a nice girl, seven years old; we’re great friends. Good night, Ramaswamy, good night, Mr. Scott. Good night.”

  Back in the taxi I said to myself, “Catherine or Pratap, for Savithri it makes no difference. Both are dear because both are familiar, innocent, and inevitable in her daily existence.”

  Thinking over all this, my letter to Pratap never got written. It was a damp day and I did not go to the British Museum for my work, but as it was already long past three, I took a stroll by the river.

  What an imperial river the Thames is – her colour may be dark or brown, but she flows with a majesty, with a maturity of her own knowledge of herself, as though she grew the tall towers beside her, and buildings rose in her image, that men walked by her and spoke inconsequent things – as two horses do on a cold day while the wine merchant delivers his goods at some pub, whispering and frothing to one another – for the Londoner is eminently good. He is so warm, he is indeed the first citizen of the world. The mist on the Thames is pearly, as if Queen Elizabeth the First had squandered her riches and femininity on ships of gold, and Oberon had played on his pipe, so worlds, gardens fairies and grottoes were created, empires were built and lost, men shouted heroic things to one another and died, but somewhere one woman, golden, round, imperial, always lay by her young man, his hand over her left breast, his lip touching here in rich recompense. There’s holiness in happiness, and Shakespeare was holy because Elizabeth was happy. Would England not see an old holiness again.?

  For me, as I have said already, the past was necessary to understand the present. Standing on a bridge near Chelsea, and seeing the pink and yellow lights of the evening, the barges floating down to some light, the city feeling her girth in herself, how I felt England in my bones and breath; how I reverenced her. The buses going high and lit; the taxis that rolled about, green and gentlemanly; the men and women who seemed responsible, not for this Island alone, but for whole areas of humanity all over the globe; strollers – some workman, who had stolen a moment on his way to a job, some father who was showing London to his little daughter, two lovers arm hooked to arm – how with the trees behind and the water flowing they seemed to make history stop and look back at itself.

  London was esoteric and preparing for the crowning of another Queen; and Englishmen felt it would be a momentous insight of man into himself. The white man, I felt, did not bear his burden, but the Englishman did. For, after all, it was the English who founded the New World, yet now it was America that naively, boastfully, was proclaiming what every English man and woman really felt – that the dominion of man, the regulation of habeas corpus or the right delivery of some jute bales on Guadalcanal Island in the Pacific, was the business of these noble towers, clocks, balances, stock-books, churring ships, and aeroplanes above, and that there would be good government on earth, and decency and a certain nobility of human behaviour, and all because England was. That I, an Indian who disliked British rule, should feel this only revealed how England was recovering her spiritual destiny, how in anointing her Queen she would anoint herself.

  It was nearing six by now and knowing that about this hour Julietta would be at the Stag, I dropped in, took an orangeade and sat waiting for her. Julietta was a great friend of Savithri’s. She had left Girton the year before and though I had met her only once I felt I could talk to her about anything.

  Julietta and a whole generation of young English people who had either fought in the war or matured during it – Julietta was eighteen in 1945 – were fascinating to me. That is why for an outsider pub life seemed so valuable – he saw the new England, even when the English men and women he met were not particularly young. But England herself had become young and sovereign. Young Englishmen looked so open, so intellectually keen, and the girls seemed so feminine, so uninhibited. It was all so far from the world of Jane Austen of Thackeray, or even from the world of Virginia Woolf. Boys and girls met and mated and helped each other through life with, as one girl remarked to Savithri, the facility of eating an apple. “In fact I was eating an apple,” said Marguerite Hoffiner,” when he did it to me. What is there in it, anyway, to talk about so much? Indeed it was explained to me that the coupling of male and female had gone on more and more normally, and that a modern Lady Chatterley would not have to go so far as a gamekeeper, but would find her man beside her in a theatre, on Chelsea Bridge, or in a pub. I only knew the foulsmelling bistros in France, and almost never went to any – could you imagine Madeleine at the Café des Marroniers or in the Rencontre des Pecheurs? – but the pub, the Stag, was so civilized.

  Julietta came in, accompanied by Stephen, a Logical Positivist with a curve of sparse golden hair, a high forehead and lilting green eyes. In his opinion Aristotle had proved that the world was very real; he could not understand how one could doubt one’s self.

  “And who doubts the doubter?” I asked.

  “The doubter.”

  “Who sees the doubter?”

  “My mind,” he answered.

  “Can my mind see itself?” I pressed.

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “Can you have two thoughts at a time?” I continued.

  “Come, come,” he said, waving his glass and feeling very happy, “you don’t want me to grow mystical, do you?

  “No,” I said, “I am talking to Aristole.”

  “Well, Aristole has decided on the nature of syllogisms.”

  “Why, have you never heard of
the Nyaya system of Indian logic?”

  “Nyaya fiddlesticks,” said Stephen good-humouredly.

  “Come, come,” said Julietta, with womanly tenderness, pushing back Stephen’s golden hair. Her hands, I noticed, were not as elegant as the sensitivity of her face.

  “Can light see itself?” I asked.

  “Obviously not,” said Stephen.

  “Then how can the mind see itself”?

  “I told you,” shouted Stephen, “not to talk mysticism to me!”

  “He’s talking sense – and you, nonsense,” said Julietta, chivalrously.

  “And you my love.” He said, kissing her richly before everyone, “you own the castle of intelligence, and I am the Lord.” He was obviously getting drunk. I stopped, bought them each a drink and sat down. There was by now a gay crowd of artists in patched elbows, old stockbrokers with indecipherable females, landlords with their dogs, writers who talked, their noses in the air, as though publishers belonged to the tanners’ or the drummers’ caste-writers, of course, being Brahmins – and there were silent, somnolent painters carrying the tools of their trade, with canvases hidden under some cover, chatting with the bartender. “Half of bitter, please,” came the refrain, gently and gruff, elegant and cockney, and the whole place filled with smoke, silence and talk. The smell of perfumes mingled with other smells of females and men, making one feel that the natural man is indeed a good man – lo naturale e’ sempre senza errore – that logic had nothing to do with life. Life was but lovely, and loveliness had golden hair and feminine intimacy, while the Thames flowed.