Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  If I could just have banished the final particle of fear, the ego might have melted for good, dissolving into Arunachala just as Parvati did, in the story told to me on my first walk round the mountain. I wouldn’t necessarily have died, although that isn’t out of the question. But the ego would certainly have burned away in its current form, persisting only as a wraith, the fabled moon in the daytime. A purely executive residue with no agenda of its own, directing my life without getting in its way, a policeman on point duty with no powers of arrest.

  For a long moment, the Cow on the Mountain stayed poised in entanglement with the wheelchair. Then she gently disengaged her horns, as if she knew exactly what she was doing. The film was run backwards frame by frame, and the raised wheel renewed its contact with the ground. At this point there was a subtle molecular change in the cow’s gaze. After a few moments it became clear that she was baffled by her surroundings. It wasn’t hard to see her as an audience member suddenly finding herself on stage at a hypnotism show, with no memory of what has been said or done while under the influence, unreassured by the welling of applause. She was definitely a cow at this point, not a deity, and as a cow she wandered off out of my line of sight.

  I was in a state somewhere between revelation and shell-shock. I remember nothing about the descent from the mountain. I assume the coolies rematerialised and carried me and the wheelchair down as briskly as they carried us up, but there is nothing in my memory to vouch for that. If I had floated down under my own power or been lowered smoothly by thousands of hands appearing out of nowhere, I hope I would remember, but I can’t be certain even so.

  The true mystical temperament is a well fed from springs beneath, indifferent to drought or flooding. My own state at this point was rather different – a bath so overfilled that even dropping the soap would make it slop over. The moment I had recovered my presence of mind I had to blab to somebody about the cow on the mountain. I couldn’t keep the miraculous to myself. I had to parade it. And even though I was always a little afraid of her, it was Lucia Osborne I was going to tell. The witch in the white sari had a knack of drawing the strangest confessions into her gnarled and Polish ears.

  She asked for a clear description of the cow, and nodded as I passed on everything that I could remember. I hesitated to mention the streak of shit on her flank, but this rather lowly detail didn’t make her stop nodding. ‘This is certainly a photism, a visual manifestation of Lakshmi the goddess, in fact of course – though the correspondence is not exact – of Lakshmi the disciple, an extraordinary cow who achieved enlightenment on June 18th, 1948.’ I didn’t quite see how Mrs Osborne could be so definite, but this was a lady pickled in certainties who could go for years without saying ‘perhaps’. I would have liked to quarrel with that rather gossamer word photism, since the massive presence of the cow, the overwhelming likelihood that it would send me flying, were not things registered by the eye alone.

  ‘We have no choice but to call her a disciple of Bhagavan. Even as a calf she would come and place her head at his feet. That was before I came here, of course, but I was there on the day that Sri Bhagavan held her head in his hands when she was in the throes of her death. He watched over her almost as he had done with his own mother when she shed her body. Her samadhi is at the ashram.’

  Samadhi meaning resting-place. By etymology a putting together, joining, completion, and so either the state of bliss or a place of rest. The actual cow festival is on January 15th, but I didn’t think Lakshmi should be made to wait. Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll, I would celebrate her unbirthday. Mrs Osborne helped me prepare a puja for Lakshmi. Puja is I suppose the elementary form of worship in Hinduism. Chanting is more abstract, and meditation still more so. That’s the order in which they are ranked for the benefit of those who think in terms of progression. But physical puja has its place, there’s no doubt about that.

  Mrs Osborne gave me guidance about the offering I should make: a miniature meal for the god, laid out on a banana-leaf. A few grains of rice, a little pile of vegetables, a dab of sambhar. Mountain banana was particularly pleasing to the Lakshmi she knew, she said, the historical one. This foreshortened feast appealed to many deep memories – it was a snack of savoury reminiscence in itself. I remembered Mum’s doctrine that every forkful I put in my mouth should ideally contain each element of what was on the plate, the meal in microcosm.

  We discussed whether the offering should be taken to the shrine in the ashram. Eventually we decided that it should be fed to an actual cow. Mrs O brought out an image of Lakshmi onto the verandah for my benefit. An image wasn’t strictly necessary, since the real shrine is in your heart. We waved joss-sticks around – always a pleasure in its own right. Then we entrusted the little meal to Rajah Manikkam, who took it away and fed it to the cow of his choice, a white cow if he could find one, shit-streak not required.

  Bloated with a pilgrim’s blood

  At night I pondered the difficulty of my quest and prayed for softness in that awful bed. My compassion for the mosquitoes biting my toes had lasted all of a day. I had given them a good night’s feed, with a willing heart, but enough was enough. There’s such a thing as taking liberties. After that, I was all in favour of squashing them and bother the karma. I even wondered if we could get hold of some poison somehow. Wouldn’t the mosquitoes be likely to be reborn in better lives, rewarded for dying while bloated with a pilgrim’s blood?

  Then when Peter came, I acquired a secret weapon in the fight for a good night’s sleep. A dog followed us home from the market. We fed it on vada scraps and anything else that came to hand. It wasn’t a house dog but a street dog, wily and craven. Peter had named him Yogi Bear, after the cartoon character, a sweetly clueless creature to whom he bore no resemblance whatever. I’m sure Peter really chose the name out of fond mockery of my religion, but it stuck even after he had gone.

  The dog was skinny, he was fidgety and his fur was as coarse as a wire brush, but he was an absolute godsend in the night. I could lean on him just enough to change the position of my spine, and get a little relief from the ordeal of the bed. In the mornings he would make himself scarce, though I expect Kuppu had spotted him and was turning a blind eye.

  Even with the dog in place my sleep was fitful, and I would take in impressions which fully registered only later. Sleep is a mist subject to intermittent thinning, with occasional patches of clear visibility. So I was dimly aware that in the early hours Mrs Osborne had crept out onto the verandah, carrying a kerosene lamp of some sort, and crept away again. It can’t have been long after three. Time for Lucia’s morning meditation, before the abrupt arrival of dawn stacked the odds against inwardness. Like any good hostess she was quietly making sure that all was well with her guest. Did I have everything I needed?

  Then she crept back holding something just out of sight. In my half-sleep I registered that this hunchback was suddenly growing very tall, and then that she had produced a very nasty-looking stick. Without a word she brought it cracking down on the dog, on my innocent bedmate and physiotherapy cushion. Who yelped and ran. I was shocked, frightened and in my bleary-eyed way actually very angry that this vegetarian devotee of a religion of respect for all creation should harbour such a core of rage and cruelty. What sort of person gets up early to meditate and casually brutalises an animal before she starts?

  This demonic incarnation of Mrs Osborne gave a nod of satisfaction and returned to the house, so that the conversation which I so badly needed to have with her about how she squared such behaviour with her faith had to wait till morning.

  After those few hours’ delay, though, I felt awkward raising the subject, which was dishonourable and absurd. It wasn’t that my feelings had eased, but the good manners in which I had been brought up intervened, and I was very aware of feeling rude and disobliging. I gave less good an account of myself in the argument than I should have. I don’t think I was ever fully rested during the entire five weeks of my stay in India, but that morning broken slee
p and emotional upset conspired to make me ineffective.

  I pleaded that the dog was helping me sleep, and got the usual reply of Nonshenshe, and the familiar boast of how well she slept, despite her age, on a bare floor. I tried to explain one more time that our situations were different, but she obviously concluded that I was a softy. Even after the initial conjuring of the bed by her and Rajah Manikkam I hadn’t been satisfied – the drawback of that kind of bed being that the knots loosen unevenly, so that a few stay taut and dig into you while the others start to lower you to the ground. More than once she and the gardener had made adjustments, winding tapes round the bed to reinforce the slackened ropes and hold them in place.

  I had no alternative but to bring up matters of doctrine. ‘Didn’t Bhagavan warn us never to abuse animals round Arunachala, since they might be siddhas in animal form?’

  ‘You forget, John, that I have seen that scabby dog hanging around and scratching itself for months. A siddha might take the form of a dog’ – and here her delivery became positively venomous – ‘but would certainly be immune to fleas. On the other hand it might very well be a demon.’ She regarded the matter as closed, and moved away before I could remind her that Bhagavan himself in states of extreme inwardness had been infested with worse things than fleas – his flesh had been eaten by ants.

  It points to my oddly intermediate state of mind that summer that I could accept a cow on the mountainside being a goddess, but not a dog on the verandah being a demon.

  I didn’t mention that Peter had adopted the dog (or he had adopted Peter), that we had fed him on vada scraps and kept him out of sight. That we had named him in honour of an American cartoon. The scrawny dog with the sidelong grin never came back, and nor did my full fondness for Mrs Osborne. I asked myself what Peter would have made of her cruelty. Could he have hung on to his dependence on Mrs O, his sense that he was safe with her, if he had seen her as I had, as a witch with a stick?

  It was a jolting experience, though it also provided a moment of breakthrough in translation from the Tamil. After seeing Mrs Osborne assault a defenceless animal, I had found what Raghu Gaitonde had asked for, a passable English translation of the word suunyakaari, ‘she who manipulates nothingness’, so meagrely rendered as ‘witch’. Wielder of the Void. That was her secret identity.

  The whole incident with the dog cast a pall over my relationship with Mrs Osborne and made me doubt whether we really shared a faith. If we did, she was no sort of advertisement for it. It was Ramana Maharshi’s practice to feed dogs before people, and though I didn’t want to be the sort of Englishman abroad who makes the treatment of pets his yardstick for everything it was certainly a point of affinity between guru and disciple. I was only a visitor but Ramana Maharshi was much more than a resident, he was the quintessence of this landscape, and between us we outnumbered the Polish suunyakaari.

  What I had seen in Lucia Osborne as she brought the stick down on an innocent animal was exactly the sort of pattern which conditions karma, a vasana, a rut of cruelty, a stuck groove in the human record, even if she saw the action as either entirely trivial or else disinterested, as if she was only ridding my bed of a pest. She was deceived. Altruistic deeds release the Self, egotistical ones imprison it.

  Later that day she came out onto the verandah with an armful of books, proper Western hardbacks even if they were falling apart and had been eaten by every kind of insect. She dumped them on the table in front of me and said she’d like me to bind them professionally for her. I was utterly dismayed. They were completely unmanageable, the sort of book I would have to wrestle with to show it who’s the boss before I could read a single word. I bleated something about the small size of my arms and the large size of the books, but she said coldly, ‘You told me you were a bookbinder, so I had some jobs lined up for you. Whether you keep your promise is up to you.’ Then she made her exit into the house, leaving the stack of moth-eaten tomes on the table for me to look at, since there was nothing else I could do with them. I had plenty of time to regret the hollow promise I had made in the hope of making myself useful and not being a burden to the household.

  Even with Yogi Bear sharing the bed, my sleep had been fitful, but after he had been driven away I had hours of that insomniac awareness that is the opposite of meditation, waiting for sunrise and the relative comfort of the wheelchair. I had plenty of time to grapple with my spiritual impasse. Willpower had brought me to a place where willpower stalled.

  Pradakshina had become part of my routine without quite seeming to winch me, as planned, into the centre of my Self. It was something like a sacred constitutional. The beginning of the pradakshina road was remarkably peaceful. The surface of the road was mud, with an almost antique patina and a scattering of sand on top. The accumulated compressive effect of thousands of devoted bare feet on pradakshina had somehow lightened its texture, giving it a sort of upward spiritual thrust that could be felt unmistakably rising up through the wheels of the chair. The ground had a delightful soft feel and released a seductive sifty-tilthy sensation. It transmitted shimmering spiritual tickles.

  At this point on every pradakshina I would feel as if I was trembling on the brink of enlightenment, as if light was being born inside my eyelids. Spores of self-realisation drifted around me like flour particles on days when Mum got busy baking. Yet however fiercely I stoked my inward fires, I couldn’t burn off from the unfolding experience a certain gross residue of sight-seeing.

  For one thing I had become something of a connoisseur of mantapams, those structures which Ganesh had identified for me on that first night. When I had mentally compared them with bus shelters I wasn’t too far off the mark. A mantapam is no more than a consecrated roof. Ideally a mantapam would simply float above the heads of pilgrims, keeping the rain off. Not practical in structural terms – but that’s the simplicity that mantapams start from.

  A roof without a wall would only provide shelter from rain falling in an obliging vertical, and we know how rarely that happens. So a mantapam will have the concession of a back wall, and four pillars to hold the roof up. It’s usually possible to find a dry spot under the roof somewhere. The sacred element in a mantapam is variable, but it’s definitely there. A mantapam is the bud of a temple, which can sprout very vigorously under the right conditions. An unsponsored, unloved mantapam remains dormant in its shelter form. And of course the bud can be blighted. At one point on the pradakshina circuit was a mantapam whose roof was falling in. Grass and weeds were taking over underneath, and an enterprising tree was tapping into the unused vitality of the edifice by growing out of the top of the dilapidated wall. I couldn’t quite see where it was getting its moisture, unless as a sapling it had sent rooting fingers into an unsuspected reservoir of nourishment, some little yolk-sac of grace.

  A molten yo-yo looping

  Just as a mantapam can blossom into a temple, I suppose a temple which fell on hard times might eventually decline into a mantapam. But there are more possibilities than these in mantapam evolution. A mantapam may grow at an oblique angle into a choultry, which is only a mantapam with a little kitchen attached. The presence of food, whether donated or begged for, changes everything. Once cooking has come into the picture it’s only a matter of time before music gets in on the act, and soon food is being offered to hungry pilgrims at the choultry to the accompaniment of bhajans, special songs.

  I had even made my peace with the tea-shop which I had scorned so bitterly earlier on. There was no resemblance, as it turned out, to a cathedral gift shop or cafeteria, unless those places recruit their staff from the circus. There was a strong element of showmanship involved. The hissing noise I had heard (which reminded me of the auto steam-engine I wasn’t allowed to have as a child because it wasn’t safe) came from something that can only really be called a samovar, despite the distance from Russia. I had seen its domestic equivalent at Mrs Adcock’s in Bourne End, but this one was in constant use. Next to it was another pot, one that apparently had milk in
it, simmering over glowing embers of charcoal. Hot water would be dispensed from the samovar and poured through a net bag the size of a man’s sock containing tea dust. Then hot milk was added with a ladle.

  It was the next stage of the operation that seemed to call for a drum-roll in the background, and occasional gasps from the crowd. I made sure I had a good view. This was juggling with tea, not with cups of it but the liquid itself. The juggler would pour it from one beaker into another to cool it off to the ideal temperature. Naturally enough, he started to show off, grinning broadly, pouring the tea faster and faster from an increasing distance until it looked, as it flowed from beaker to beaker, like a molten yo-yo looping between expert hands, or a Slinky miraculously promoted from mimicking fluidity with its soft metal coils to partaking of the real thing. At last the beaker was presented to the customer ready to drink, the swirling ribbons of liquid reassembled into one, the colour of caramel and tasting as sweet as it looked.

  By this time I had weaned myself off taking sugar in tea (coffee was more of a challenge), but it would have been missing the point to have clung to my preferences now. The tea flowed across my tongue differently from any Western preparation. It positively sauntered down the digestive pathway, and of course there’s a reason for this. The local cows (species Bos Indicus, breed most likely Kangayam) produce a sleeker milk. There’s an inverse relationship between milk yield and fat content, so Daisy (species Bos taurus, breed perhaps Jersey) outproduces Lakshmi in volume but can’t compete in richness.