“One last question,” I said, bringing more beer to Julietta and Stephen. “The brain is made of matter….” “That is so, my inquisitor,” said Stephen, laughing.
“…so the brain is made of the same stuff as earth?”
“That is so, my Indian Philosopher.”
“Then how can the earth be objective to the earth – understand the earth?”
“It’s just like asking—I beg pardon, Julietta – If I copulate with Julietta, as I often and joyfully do and the nicer, the better when there’s drink – then how do I understand Julietta? The fact is I don’t understand Julietta. I never will understand Julietta. I don’t know that I love her – even when I tell her sweet and lovely things. I’m happy and that’s all that matters. I’m a solipsist,” he concluded laughing.
Julietta was pursuing her own thoughts, seemingly undisturbed by his statements. “I’m reviewing a book on the subject,” she broke in, “which says God is because evil is. Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t know what you mean by God. But it needs a pair of opposites to make a world. Only two things of different texture and substance can be objective to one another. Otherwise it’s like two drops of mercury in your hand, or like linking the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea – they are both water and the same. I ask you, how can the mind, made of the same stuff as the earth, be positive about the earth? Water is not positive to water – water is positive to nothing. Water is. So something is. And since is ness is the very stuff of that something, all you can say is, Is is.”
“I knew Indians were mad, that Gandhi was mad. And now, now I have the proof,” said Stephen. “I’m an old anarchist. I believe that matter is true, that Julietta is true, that I am true, and you also my friend, who stands me drinks, and spends nine pence each time on me and nine pence on Julietta. Now, go and get me another. This time I don’t want a half. I want the whole damn thing, and long live Pandit Nehru.”
People from the counter turned to look and lifted their glasses to India, to me. How wonderful to be in an English pub, I thought. Such humanity you would get in France only amongst the working classes, never among the dark-faced, heaving, fingering bourgeois. The sensuality of the bourgeois is studied, it is a vice, because he was defeated before he went to it: Baudelaire was already defeated by his stepfather and his smelly mother before he went to his Negress. You see the dark because you want to prove yourself the light; dialectic is on the lip of the rake. But in this young England, which I knew so little, I felt man was more primary and innocent, more inexhaustible. He did not have a “judas” on his door – he did not cultivate the concierge yet. Flowers grew in his gardens, red fluorescent lights lit the top of the buildings, and beneath them, the Thames flowed. White cliffs of chalk begird the isle at the estuary, and you could see seagulls rising with the ferry lights and returning to the night. Soon I’d have to be back in France, and I shivered to the bottom of my spine. Lord, would that I could make the moment stay, and make the world England.
Walking beside Savithri the next day, towards the evening – we were on the Embankment – I told her of my premonition of England, of this new island, knowing she was going to have a Queen: the King was already a little not there, he was so ill, and the leaves and the water in Hyde Park, the very sparrows and doves and dogs seemed to feel that there was something new happening to England, that the Regency was going soon to end.
“What Regency?” asked Savithri, with the air of a pupil to her teacher.
“Why, don’t you see, ever since the death of King George the Fifth. Ever since the abdication of Edward the Eighth – that new King Hal who could have created his own Falstaff, and which a fat and foolish bank clerk civilization drove into exile – this country, which chose her own church because her King preferred to choose his own wives – having become big, with an Empire and all that involves: and she became so afraid of the Stock Exchange, and of what Mrs. Petworth would say in Perth or Mr. Kennedy would say in Edmonton, Alberta – for remember it’s all a question of wool shares or the London-Electic – this mercantile country drove away what might have been her best King, or at least the best loved, since Henry the Fifth. Do you remember those broken French sentences addressed to his Kate: Donc vostre est France, et vous estes miennes? And England put in his place of noble Bharatha who apologized every time he spoke, saying. You think I am your King, but I am only brother to the King; I tremble, I hesitate, I wish my brother were here. And he ruled the land with the devotion of a Bharatha, worshipping the sandal of his loved brother placed on the throne.”
“Kingship is an impersonal principle; it is life and death, it knows no limitations. It is history made camate, just as this Thames is the principle of water made real. And when a king apologizes for being a king he is no king; he establishes a duality in himself, so he can have no authority. The King can do no wrong, comes from the idea that the Principle can do no wrong, just as the communists say, the Party can do no wrong. Talking of the communists the other day in Cambridge, I forgot to say that communism must succeed; happily for us, to be followed by kingship. Look at the difference between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin, the man of iron, the mystery behind the Kremlin, the impersonal being; to whom toture, growth or death are essentials of an abstract arithmetic. As the Catholics looked for omens in the Bible, Stalin looked to impersonal history for guidance. Stalin lives and dies, in history as history, not outside history. Hitler, on the other hand, lived in his dramatic Nuremberg rallies, visible, concrete, his voice the most real of real; his plans personal, demoniac, his whims astrological, his history Hitlerian-Germanic, if you will – dying a hero, a Superman; Zarathustra. Duality must lead to heroism, to personality development, to glory. The dualist must become, saintly, must cultivate humility, because he knows he could be big, great, heroic and personal, an emperor with a statue and a pediment.”
Here, silently Savithri led me on to Chelsea Bridge; and looking down at the river, I continued:
“But the impersonal is neither humble nor proud who could say whether Stalin was humble or proud? But one can say so easily and so eminently of another Cathar, another purist, Trotsky – that noble revolutionary of perfect integrity – that he was vain. He would gladly have jumped into the fire, down the campo di cremates, smiling and singing, I am incorruptible, I am pure, I am the flame. Stalin would have the Kremlin guarded with a thousand sentries, a few thousand spies, killing each one when he knew too much, first a Yagoda, then a Yezhov. For him history killed them, just as an Inca chief believed his god, not himself, wanted a sacrifice. Stalin bore no personal enmity to Trotsky, for this was real history. Even if Stalin the man was jealous of Trotsky, the flame of pure Revolution (and Stalin might have admitted this), Stalin who is history, had to kill Trotsky the anti-history. The pure, the human, the vainglorious leader’s personal magic was an unholy impediment to the movement of history. In the same was Marshal Toukhachesvsky had to die – the impersonal cannot allow that any man be a hero. Stalin was no hero: he was a king, a god.”
“How well you hold forth,” teased Savithri, tugging my arm. She wanted me to look at the barges as they floated down, or at the clear moon that played between the clouds and delighted Savithri as it might have a child.
“Moon, moon, Uncle Moon,” I chanted a Kanarese nursery rhyme, “Mama, Chanda-mama,” and then we went back to history.
“The Superman is our enemy. Look what happened in India. Sri Aurobindo wanted, if you please, to improve on the Advaita of Sri Sankara – which was just like trying to improve on the numerical status of zero. Zero makes all numbers, so zero begins everything. All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are possible in and around Vedanta. But you can no more improve on Vedanta than improve on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya, is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are all dualistic. One always implies many. But zero implies nothing. I am not one, I am not two, I am neither one, nor two: Aham nirvikalpi nirakara rupih. I am the I. So, to come back
to Sri Aurobindo, he shut himself in Pondicherry and started building a new world. If you can build a house of three storeys, you can build one of five, eight, ten or twelve storeys – and go as high as the Empire State Building or any other structure, higher and yet higher. And just as aeroplanes at first went fifty miles an hour, then eighty, then a hundred, two hundred, three, and now go far beyond the speed of sound, similarly you can build any number of worlds, can make the mind, the psyche so athletic that you can build world after world, but you cannot go beyond yourself, your impersonal principle. And just as the materialism of Stalin and not his impersonal sense of history, but his material interpretation of history made him end up like the Egyptians in being embalmed and made immortal as history, Sri Aurobindo tried to make this perishable, this chemical, this historical body, this body of eighteen aggregates, an Nagarjuna called it, permanent. Moralism and materialism must go together. The undying is a moral concent – for death is a biological phenomenon, an anti-life phenomenon, against the nature of the species. Not to die, to drink the elixir of life, is moral it is to transcend the phenomenal as celibacy is the transcending of nature. The moral end in mummification and the pyramid.”
“I am breathless,” said Savithri, “you take me too far and too quickly.”
“Just a moment,” I begged, “I’ll soon finish. The Superman is the enemy of man – whether you call him Zarathustra, Sri Aurobindo, Stalin, or Father Zossima.”
“That’s a new gentleman in history,” laughed Savithri.
“Oh,” I remarked, a little irritated by her disturbance, “it’s a saintly character in Dostoevsky: he smells – he decomposes – when he dies, and thus disturbs the odour of sanctity his miracles had brought to him. When Sri Aurobindo died his disciples must have felt the same: the deathless master, who wanted to consecrate his body, consign it to immortality, died like any other. His breath must have stopped, his eyes must have become fixed in their sockets, but being a Yogi he may have been sitting in a lotus posture, and that would have given him beauty and great dignity.”
“And now?” begged Savithri. The damp of the river was rising, “I am a biological phenomenon, and food and warmth are necessary. Besides, “she added, pulling her sari over her breast as though it was she who would suffer, “besides, I am terrified of your lungs.” So I obeyed and we slowly strolled along the Embankment.
“You know,” I said, “Julietta is probably at the Stag.”
“Ah,” she burst out laughing, “so you remember geography and biography, do you? Come, let us go.”
“Oh, never never!” I shouted. “You, Savithri, in a pub?
“Pub or no pub, take me anywhere, my love,” she said, so gently, so dedicatedly and with such a pressure of her fingers on my arm that the whole world rose up into my awareness renewed; “take me anywhere, and keep me warm.” Was it I, the foolish schoolteacher, this miserable five foot eleven of Brahmin feebleness, this ungainly, myopic over-bent creature to whom she had said those two tender, commonplace but perfect words? It was the first time she ever said them to me, and perhaps she had never said them to anyone else. History and my mind vanished somewhere, and I put my arms round that little creature – she hardly came to my shoulder – and led her along alleyways and parkways, past bus stop, bridge and mews to a taxi.
“Let’s go to Soho,” I said, and as I held her in my arms, how true it seemed we were to each other, a lit space between us, a presence – God. “Dieu est loge dans I’intervalle entre les homes,” I recited Henri Frank to her.
“Yes, it is God,” she whispered, and we fell into the silence of busy streets. After a long moment, she whispered again, “Take me with you, my love.”
“Will you come, Savithri?”
“Take me with you my love, anywhere.”
“Come,” I said “this minute, now…..”
“No, I cannot. I must go back. I must go back to Pratap.”
I pressed her against me ever more tenderly. “Come, I’ll take you,” I persisted.
“To God,” she said and fell into my lap. I touched her lips as though they were made with light, with honey, with the space between words of poetry, of song. London was no longer a city for me, it was myself: the world was no longer space for me, it was a moment of time, it was now.
At Barbirolli’s I ordered a Chianti, and said, as though it had some meaning,” And now you must learn Italian.
Io ritornai dalla santissima onda
Rifatto si come piante novella
Renovellate di novella fronda
Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle,”
I recited, “You must learn Italian, for God has texture in that language. God is rich and Truscan, and the Arno has a bridge made for marriage processions.”
“So has Allahabad,” she added, somewhat sadly. “And appropriately it is called the Hunter Bridge.”
“May I go on with my Superman?” I begged.
“The biological sense of warmth having come back to me and how nice this Chianti is” – she raised her glass – “I can now follow any intricacy of thought. I like to play chess with you in history.”
“The Minister is the Superman,” I started.
“And the King?”
“The Sage. The Vedantin, himself beyond duality, is in himself, through duality and nonduality.”
“That’s too difficult with Chianti. I wish, Rama – shall I call you that from now? I wish you could sing me a song, and I would lie on your lap, far away where there is no land or road, no river or people, no father, fiancé, filigree, palace or elephants – perhaps just a mother – and on some mountain….”
“In Kailasa….” I said.
“You would sit in meditation”
“And you?”
“Pray, that you might awaken and not burn the world with that third eye-that eye which plays with history,” she laughed.
“And parrots would sing, and the mango leaf be tender, be like copper with morning sunshine.”
“And I would go round you three times, once, twice, thrice, and fall at your ash-coloured feet, begging that the Lord might absorb me unto himself….. I am a woman,” she added hesitantly, “a Hindu woman.”
Meretho Giridhara Gopala….,
Mine the mountain-bearing Krishna,
My lord none else than He.”
History, Stalin and the Superman had vanished. Trying to solve the puzzle of history, like some hero in a fable, I had won a bride. A princess had come out of the budumekaye, but the moment I had entered the world of the seven sisters the Prime Minister’s son had led a revolution in the palace, had imprisoned the other six, and put us two under arrest. King Mark of Tintagel awaited his Iseult. I would have to give her to him, but having drunk the potion the potion of Granval I would meet her by brooks and forests; I would be torn by dragons, but someday we would lie in the forest, the sword between us. Some day love would be strong enough to shatter the rock to fragments, and we should be free to wander where we would, build an empire if we cared.
“And we shall have a bambino,” she said, and laughed as though she had caught my thought.
‘Two,” I added. “One is Ganesha and the other Kumara.”
“And we shall throw colours on each other at Holi under the mountain moon. Our Indian Eros shoots with a flower, so why burn him?”
“Why not?” I asked. “The third eye opens when the attraction has ended. I hope you are not attracted by me?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “If I were attracted by attraction, there would be no one like Hussain. He looks like someone from a Moghul painting, lovely with a long curve of eyebrow, a thin waist, very long gentle hands and inside here,” she pointed to her head, “all empty. His heart is filled with popped rice, curly and white and isolated. Muslims know how to please a woman,” she finished, rather sadly.
“And a Hindu?”
“A Hindu woman knows how to worship her Krishna, her Lord. When the moon shines over the Jumma and lights are lit in the households, and the cow
s are milked, then it is Janaki’s son plays on the banks of the Yamuna in Brindavan. The cattle tear their ropes away, the deer leave the forests and come leaping to the groves, and with the peacocks seated on the branches of the asoka, Krishna dances on the red earth. What Gopi, my Lord, would not go to this festival of love? Women lose their shame, and men lose their anger, for in Brindavan Krishna the Lord dances. We women are bidden to that feast. Come,” she said, as though it was too much emotion to bear.
As we wandered down the streets, Piccadilly with its many coloured lights, the Tube entrances and the bus queues gave us a sense of reality. Finally I took her to some women’s hostel off Gower Street – where she always had rooms reserved for her and where she was looked after by her friend Gauri from Hyderabad, round as Savithri herself, but loquacious, big and protective. I was always so afraid of Savithri getting lost. It was not only a matter of bringing back her glasses or pen, but one always felt one had to bring Savithri back to Savithri.
“Ah, I m very real,” she protested. “And tomorrow you will see how clever I am at taking buses. I’ll jump into a 14 at Tottenham Court Road and be in Kensington at ten precise,” she promised as I left her. I knew that at ten she would still be talking away to Gauri about some blouse pattern or somebody’s marriage in Delhi. I knew I would have to telephone and ask her if she knew the time. “I promise you, you need not telephone. Tomorrow I will be punctual as Big Ben.” With Savithri the profound and the banal lived so easily side by side.
5 Indian Masters Page 3
