I offered him a sandwich, but he seemed afraid of it and reared back suspiciously. He started addressing words to Raghu, whose spoken Tamil was reasonably fluent. He could hardly have been able to run a business in Madras without being able to get by in conversation.
Raghu retailed the conversation to me. Apparently the old man had asked where we were from. ‘He’d love to know where we’re going, too, but he dare not ask that. These country people are very superstitious. It’s considered very unlucky to ask anyone making a journey where they are going – if he’d done that, then according to their rules of life we would have to go back to our starting-point, drink a glass of water, and set off again! Not very up-to-date, these people. Widows also can blight a travelling party by crossing its path.’
The old man was apparently wondering if I was real. ‘Why don’t you tell him,’ I said, ‘that he is welcome to touch me, if that will help him make up his mind.’ Small talk in these parts seemed to be on a satisfyingly intense philosophical level. No beating about the bush here! Heirs to a long tradition of enquiry, the locals came straight out with, ‘Are you a part of Reality?’
The old man came close and put out his finger very carefully, as if prepared to jerk it back at a moment’s notice. He touched my arm. I was of course very hot, but this rural Indian’s flesh felt cool. I noticed the fine tanned skin on his arm, faintly reptilian in its visual texture, and I touched it in return. He pulled back for an instant, but then consented to this reciprocation of contact. A few other people in his party came forward and had a touch of me as well. I was quite the craze for a little while. It wasn’t clear, though, that touching me had settled their doubts about my existence. The looks they exchanged were still puzzled.
The oldest member of the group started talking to Raghu again, and I noticed that he was now pointing up to the sky. Raghu passed on what was said without my having to ask. He seemed to be getting into the swing of this new job of translating. Raghu explained that the elder was talking about the stars which come out at night after the sun had gone down. ‘He wanted to know, which of those stars was your home, and why had you decided to leave it?’ At my prompting, Raghu told him that I wasn’t doing interstellar travel – ‘at least not at the moment,’ I said, but I don’t expect he passed on that silly flourish – and that I was from this very planet itself. From England in fact.
The look of puzzlement on the elder’s face only deepened, and then he shrugged his shoulders decisively, and his whole little party sloped off. I waited till they were out of earshot before I pestered Raghu for translation – what had he said? What was the verdict? Raghu gave a broad smile. ‘He said, “If that’s what he thinks, he is mad – mad beyond prayer. Mad beyond the hope of cure.”’ To such a connoisseur of Maya it was more likely that I’d flown in from the Crab Nebula than from London Airport.
I’d been rather enjoying the conversation with this elder, relishing my ownership of an unfamiliar kind of strangeness, until the turn it had taken at the very end. Then it knocked me off my perch surprisingly much – being dismissed as insane. Perhaps I can blame the effects on morale of jet lag, which is only a special case of the need for sleep, brought on by the additional effort of maintaining more than one ‘reality’ in the course of a day.
In my history I have noticed that on the threshold of a new stage of life there is often a figure of two-faced welcome, half ushering me in, half keeping me at bay. On the way to CRX it wasn’t a person but the train itself, specifically its lavatory, which first terrified and then thrilled me. On the way to Vulcan it was a yokel who was unable to give my party directions until he realised we were looking for the place for ‘them plastics’ (spastics).
Of course there were more formal welcoming committees at those institutions, the three fateful girls with Still’s come to assess me at CRX, the Grey Lady with her terrifying rhyme come to test me at Vulcan. But the outriders were just as significant. Perhaps the old countryman who thought I was from the stars was serving the same function as the train lavatory and the sardonic yokel. The place where the encounter took place was in its own way almost excessively symbolic, under a signpost that gave too much information or too little, with samosas pointing east and sandwiches pointing west.
I hope the mountain doesn’t take my shoes
My trip to India was purely volitional, unlike my moves to CRX and Vulcan (CRX for treatment, Vulcan for something approaching education), and I very much wanted good auspices and a successful outcome. Still, I don’t want to make too much of the incident. I’m necessarily a sort of lightning rod for little discharges of eccentricity, even a lot closer to home.
On the other hand, the holy mountain Arunachala, towards which we were driving, has his own reputation for a certain amount of caprice. He can be downright curmudgeonly. There’s a legend of a wedding party on its way to pay respects to the mountain, bearing lavish gifts, who were waylaid and robbed before they reached their destination. Even the shoes of the party were taken. The groom was a child saint, Sambandhar, who was being conveyed to his nuptials in a little chariot, adorned with bells to announce his arrival. Eventually it turned out that the thieves weren’t actually human. They were emanations of the mountain, sent to teach an important lesson. Pilgrims should approach Arunachala in simplicity, and barefoot. Ideally, skyclad – stark naked.
I could only hope the mountain would not take my shoes. Having to approach Arunachala without them would inspire dismay rather than reverence, and result in complication rather than simplicity.
When we resumed our journey again I recovered my composure and even worked out why we had been going wrong. I had been paying too much attention to the first half of the elegant arabesques on the card. In unfamiliar language and an unknown script there’s no way to sift out irrelevancy. The meaningful elements don’t stand out.
Now I asked Raghu if the word ‘Tiru’ had an actual meaning in Tamil, and he replied, ‘I believe it means “Sacred”.’ So! In this spiritually irradiated territory I was behaving like a visitor to Cornwall confidently following any sign with ‘St’ written on it in expectation of reaching St Ives. Raghu and Sumati shouldn’t have given me so much credit as a pathfinder, but I think in those days Westerners in general were assumed to excel in practical matters.
From this point on I started to give a more intensive attention to the right-hand portion of the place name on the card. Things started to look up. I persuaded myself that the shapes at the end of the word resembled a cobra raising its head to strike, and that I would be able to recognise it immediately the next time I saw it.
Soon we came to a town which was familiar to Raghu, which was three-quarters of the way to Tiruvannamalai. It was called Sen-Jee, though also known as ‘Gingee’, which was as close as the lazy British vocal apparatus could get to the Tamil name. The imperialist approximation was still current locally – not all relics of the Raj could be eradicated as easily as an alphabet from a signpost. Sen-Jee (as I tried to call it right away, anxious to show that my post-Imperial tongue was ready for any and all flexing) must once have been enclosed by its wall, and still boasted a magnificent fort, on top of a scrabble of rocks that Raghu said had been ‘cast by a giant hand’.
On the way out of Sen-Jee the wall persisted across the road itself, so that we drove through a gate. It did my heart good to know that we had broken the back of the journey, and I started to scan the horizon for the shape I had seen in so many dreams. Soon I felt a jump in my heart. I sang out, ‘Oh look! Arunachala … There it is!’
Raghu chuckled indulgently at my beginner’s mistake. ‘No John, that is not Arunachala. We are too far away. It is very similar, though, as a lot of these mountains are. You do not need to be on the edge of your seat just yet!’
It was a mortifying moment. I hated to be playing the part of the Credulous Tourist, who on first seeing the White Cliffs of Dover exclaims that he can make out the spires of Harrods twinkling in the distance.
Sumati said something fr
om the back which Raghu didn’t translate but which I heard as the equivalent of ‘Have a heart, Arthur! Don’t throw cold water on the poor boy’s faith!’
I accepted in my social self that what I saw was not Arunachala, although its contour fitted my dreams so well. I believed Raghu because he was Indian and this was his country, not mine, but in spite of his authoritative Indianity, I had some irrepressible instinct of recognition.
The feeling grew as we continued our journey, and the supposed not-Arunachala grew bigger and bigger, and again I piped up: ‘But it must be Arunachala! You said it wasn’t, Raghu, but I’ve kept my eye on the outline all the time, and it got bigger and bigger and look!’
I had by now grown used to the strange curls which spelt out ‘Tiruvannamalai’. Three times we had gone astray to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of ‘Tiru…’, but now the ‘…vannamalai’ with its rearing serpent had fully lodged itself into my brain. In front of us another signpost loomed, with the swaying cobra rising up at the end of the word, looking as if it was about to swoop down at us and spit.
When Sumati spoke again from the back of the car I felt certain that I could follow the gist of what she had been saying. I knew no Marathi but I could tune into her heart. It was something along the lines of, ‘There, didn’t he tell you so? True faith sees further than the eyes can …’
A welcome mat the size of the sky
The town was indeed Tiruvannamalai, and we had arrived at Arunachala, but I don’t mean to say that Raghu was wrong. Our perspectives are perfectly compatible. Nothing could be easier for Arunachala than to project himself a little further on that day, for the benefit of a pilgrim who was beginning to despair of his welcome and, as it turned out, would still find some obstacles put in his way. The mountain can be a perfect gentleman.
Sermons in my schooldays had never satisfactorily explained the Trinity, except by way of a solar analogy (the Sun, the Sun’s light, the Sun’s heat, triple and indivisible). Yet I didn’t have the slightest difficulty in understanding the guru, the God and the mountain, Ramana Maharshi, Shiva and Arunachala, as emanations of each other. What was true of one was true of all, and I knew that Ramana Maharshi would sometimes take great pains to offer a devotee darshan, the word which denotes a formal manifestation of presence, spiritual grace as it is offered to the eye.
There was one occasion, for instance, when it was noticed that Ramana Maharshi had changed his morning routine. He no longer brushed his teeth in the same place, but moved, while he agitated the appropriate twig in his mouth, a little distance away.
It was a minor mystery, with the disciples wondering why he had changed the pattern of his days. (‘Disciple’ seems to outrank ‘devotee’, but their relative status is unclear. The greater susceptibility to ego tends to mark the disciple down.) Only much later did it become known there was a devotee who had sought her guru’s presence on a daily basis but was no longer able, by reason of age and bodily stiffness, to climb the mountain to where a view might easily be had. It certainly seemed to her that Ramana Maharshi took those few steps to supply the darshan she so much desired. He himself, as befits a mountain, made no comment.
So if Arunachala graciously bowed in my direction, it had nothing to do with merit on my part. It was the apotheosis of good manners, a welcome mat the size of the sky.
Somehow we found our way to Mrs Osborne’s house, which Raghu said was called ‘Aruna Giri’. There was a strange pale-skinned figure on the verandah, leaning over something with a tool in her hand. She didn’t look round at the sound of the car, or even when we pulled up by the house. She seemed to be in a trance. Then a young woman ran up from the garden and pulled at her sari, and she looked round rather abstractedly.
When she came towards us it gave me a real shock. Could this really be Mrs Osborne? Surely this twisted old lady, this hunchback, must indeed be a witch rather than a beacon for spiritual travellers. She seemed better suited to manhandling lost children into ovens than helping pilgrims to their destination. She was wearing a white sari rather than a black cloak, but that seemed a minor detail, the witch’s summer plumage. The servant girl ran into the house.
When the old lady spoke she made it worse. She came awkwardly down the steps of her house and peered into the car. I suppressed my fear, made myself perk up and stretched out what I could of my hand with a well-brought-up ‘How do you do?’ I was trying to mimic Granny’s technique of imposing herself by manners.
She completely ignored my gesture, and then exclaimed, almost with disgust, ‘But Raghu, you have brought ush a child! Look at him! How can I poshibly cope with a shituation like thish?’ Mrs Osborne had seemed completely English on the page, in the letters she wrote to me, but when she opened her mouth she had one of the thickest accents I had ever heard. Thanks to my experience talking to Barbara Broier’s gruff dad in Cookham, who pronounced r as g, I was able to work out that she was Polish, but her accent was thicker even than Barbara’s dad’s. These were not by any interpretation the sounds of welcome. All those hostile sibilants, those eshesh, made me forget how much I actually liked snakes.
We were behaving with symmetrical shallowness, equal disgraces to our faith and the arrangements we had made. Neither of us corresponded to the other’s cosy image, built up over months of letter-writing, and we reacted with horror.
Gloomily I remembered that I had written to Ganesh at the ashram that he could prevent me from coming to the ashram, but not from coming to Tiruvannamalai. If necessary I would sleep at the side of the road. Unless Mrs Osborne took me in, I would have to make good on that threat.
Feeling that Arunachala might be testing my reactions and my sincerity, I started looking at the hedges around the little house. They had prickly pear cactus mixed in. Hedges with spikes were not something I’d reckoned on. It began to look as if I should have asked Mrs Pavey at Bourne End library to find me a copy of Hedges of India.
Mrs Osborne motioned Raghu to climb the three steps on to the verandah, and then disappeared with him into the house. She took herself off but then raised her voice so much that she might have dispensed with the fiction of withdrawal. From my seat in the car, I could hear her shrieking to Raghu: ‘Imposhible, quite imPOSHible for him to manage here!’
Behind me in the car Sumati was singing to herself in a way that I did my best to find comforting. I hadn’t forgotten what Sumati had said, though, about the eight-legged and no-legged inhabitants of the region. If I slept under a hedge then scorpions also and serpents would be my portion. I would have ample opportunity to test my understanding of a classic Hindu parable: At dusk a man sees a snake at the side of the road and is frightened. By daylight he sees that it was only a coil of rope. The snake standing in for ‘reality’, dusk for perception without enlightenment.
The moment I read this parable I realised how right I was to be transfixed by Mum’s description of the Indian Rope Trick while I was bedbound. Of course the business of the fakir climbing up the rope and disappearing is a fable or a misunderstanding. But properly understood, everything we see around us is an Indian Rope Trick.
A good breath of Arunachala
Then Raghu and Mrs Osborne came out of the house, and he spoke, though it was at her dictation. He was like a politician reading a prepared statement with stiff composure, saying that war had been declared or that his wife was standing by him. ‘I’m sorry, John, but it really is impossible for you to stay here. I know your ways and your needs a little by now. Even if you could manage to get through to the bathroom somehow, I don’t see how you could manage there on your own. And as you can see Mrs Osborne is not hale enough to help you.’
Indeed she was not, and I felt a little betrayed by her physical state. It’s true that I had delayed any revelation of my disability until I had been accepted in principle, but that was to keep the two things separate, the general possibility and the particular difficulties. Mrs Osborne hadn’t said a word! She was pretty much helpless, but she had kept it to herself. She couldn’t
have pushed the wheelchair a yard, even on the flat. How and when had she managed to do pradakshina with Sumati? Even with a snoring break in the middle of the eight-mile trek, the task looked to be beyond her.
Now I broke down and wept, but only on the inside, having come all these miles and braved so many hardships only to be met by this. Yet something held this vehicle of skin and blood and bone together. The body twitched its little arms in a helpless jerky gesture, while its face put on the most appealing and childlike expression it could muster.
Mrs Osborne looked exasperatedly at Raghu, as though the whole situation was somehow his fault, and Raghu looked at me. I kept up the look of supplication in the direction of Mrs Osborne, inwardly wondering whether Mum wasn’t right all along, about the entire idea being crazy from start to finish. My mother thought I was mad, and so did a nameless elder in provincial Tamil Nadu. Nobody much was standing up for my sanity.
We seemed to have reached an impasse. I could feel my supplicating look beginning to run out of steam. I had never played so nakedly on my helplessness and I was becoming horrible to myself. Was this really what the mountain required?
Raghu broke the deadlock. ‘What we should do next, I think, Mrs Osborne,’ he said, and I blessed him for it, ‘if you agree, is to get John out of the car. His joints are playing him up. We could at least give him a good breath of Arunachala, possibly on the verandah. Would there be a possibility of rustling up a cup of tea from somewhere?’
Cedilla Page 39
