by Ted Simon
I sat on a bench in the garden close to the door of the house. There was an area of crazy paving and, rising from the middle of it, a big mature tree with fine leaves called the Neem tree. My friend's father, a retired colonel, told me it was sacred and I did not doubt him. In it lived small squirrels, chocolate brown with light yellow stripes along their backs where, it was said, the fingers of Brahma had caressed them. One of them came down to the paving in front of me to see what else the hand of God might have provided.
Near the tree was a stone pedestal and on it stood a pot with a sacred plant directly facing the door. On the flagstone outside the door was chalked a design which was also sacred. It was renewed every morning by the housekeeper, and there were several patterns she could choose from. They were quite complex and were drawn in a continuous line round rows of dots with swift confidence. Inside the front door was a small reception area and on the wall, looking out to the sacred plant, were portraits of Sai Baba, for the Colonel was a devotee of Sai Baba, the holy man. Between the plant and the pictures the daily pujas or services were performed, and these few yards were the axis of the spiritual life of the Colonel's household.
I sat in this shaded pool of faith under the Neem, looking along the path to the garden gate and at two women who were standing there and talking about the arrangements for a wedding. They wore saris of course. I was trying to decide what it was about this garden, this light, these women, that made the sari look so. natural.
The women were the mother and the sister of the bride-to-be. The young woman wore a pink bodice under her sari, but the older woman just draped the loose folds of cotton over her breast. The temperature was such that all clothes were mere decoration.
Nothing changed. Time passed. The squirrel nibbled, ran up the tree, came down again. The women talked, and I heard the rapid syllables of Tamil spurting out, each spurt ending on a tantalizing drawn-out vowel sound. Behind the leaves of the Neem the sun broke into a thousand glittering fragments and moved slowly towards evening.
The Colonel's house was humble. Once the family had lived in a big house and owned a sizeable piece of Madras, but times had changed and anyway the Colonel had found satisfaction in simplicity. The house was a bungalow with a flat roof. At one end was the Colonel's bedroom. At the other end was an office cum spare room where I now slept. Between the two were the little hallway and the kitchen.
The kitchen was mysterious and dark, with little furniture and a stone floor. The housekeeper, a tubby determined woman, sat on the floor to chop food on a board and grind the spices in a mortar. At night she slept on the floor behind the front door. She was a very religious woman and sometimes went into a trance, singing and dancing and twirling rather dangerously, and then it took the strength of several men to restrain her.
There were several smaller buildings around the garden. My friend was housed in one. At the other end of the garden near the gate and beyond the women who were still talking, was another abode attached to a garage. That was where the father of the bride-to-be lived. He was a Brahmin called Rajaram, who had appeared by chance in the Colonel's
life some years before and had stayed to become the resident spiritual adviser.
He was coming towards me now, past the women and the Neem tree, a small thin figure, perfectly erect, with a striking head and prominent features. His eyes were large and luminous, and his mouth was poised always on the brink of mirth, for the world was to him a source of constant amusement.
He wore an open shirt revealing a string of brown beads and the knotted cord of his caste. Round his waist was tied the usual cotton skirt called a lungi. His chest was nut brown, hairless, very spare and scarcely wrinkled at all, though he was certainly over seventy years old. There was a little wispy white hair on his head, and rather more in his ears. He was almost deaf, and I got the impression that he was quite glad to be spared from hearing so much nonsense. It certainly saved him from a lot of the fuss to do with the wedding, and he joked about the cost of it and the ceremony attached to it.
The guest list had grown to over a hundred and everyone had to be fed, with many dishes served on banana leaves.
'There are four thousand people coming,' he said, spluttering with laughter. 'Each one is getting a tamarind leaf with one grain of rice.'
His wife scolded him for not taking it seriously, but fortunately he could not hear her. He came up to me now and greeted me gravely. Then pointing to the motorcycle standing near his room, he held his hands out in front of him as though grasping the controls and pretended to roar off into the sky, grinning like a child.
'You are flying through the world,' he said. 'You must be going at two hundred miles an hour.'
I laughed to see his enchantment. It was wonderful that this tiny old man could imagine himself rushing through the stratosphere, bow-legged and beads flying, astride a great machine. The bike was so familiar to me, in its capacities and limitations, that I was surprised when others saw it as a symbol of great speed and power.
The Colonel came out of the house carrying a silver platter. During the day he wore English clothes. When going to town he put on his polished brown shoes and his solar topee and carried a cane. Now he was wearing alungi also, and the Indian shirt. He came to me and showed me the grey powder on the plate.
'This is vibuti,' he said. 'It is holy ash. It is the custom to put this on our foreheads when we worship God.' He put his finger in the ash and drew a line over my nose, like an exclamation mark. I shuddered slightly to the touch, and then felt calmed by it. There is great power in such deliberate touching of another human being, and I had been experimenting with it, trying to recognize the force that lay in my hands.
Rajaram went through the ritual of the puja in front of me with the Colonel standing solemnly by. The plant and the tree were part of it, and then, still chanting, the Brahmin walked to the pictures in the house and chanted in front of them too, 'Hare, Hare, Krishna, Krishna,' and so on, the Colonel following and standing by. It was businesslike but not at all perfunctory, as so much Christian ritual seems, and as the Chinese had seemed in their temples. My friend stood by, rather detached with his arms folded, looking as English here in India, as he had looked Indian in England.
With no religion of my own, I had always been embarrassed when others tried to draw me into their religious exercises, saying 'grace' for example at Lusaka, even making a circle of hands at the ranch, the least of statements. Yet here, I already felt that I was living as much in a temple as in a house; merely by being here I was engaged in some kind of worship, and it did not offend me at all. What I objected to, what had always seemed awkward and artificial, was the separation of God from the world. 'And now, a brief word to our Sponsor . . .', that kind of thing. If there was a god at all, then wherever he was would have to be in everything all the time, especially in me. After only twenty-four hours in India I could already feel that presence, in the tree, the plant, the animals, in Rajaram. It was the living belief of others that conjured up this feeling in me. I was excited and curious to see how it would affect me in the long run. As faith, or superstition?
'Sai Baba is quite a remarkable man,' said the Colonel. I could see his problem. How do you talk about such things to an Englishman? The word 'remarkable' has a nice understated honesty about it. Might do the trick? He looked at me through his dark brown eyes, trying to gauge whether it was worth going on. The Colonel was a very straightforward man, without guile. I tried to be encouraging.
'He does certain things which can only be described as miracles. For instance this holy asfh now, you see, this vibuti. He can produce it from his hand. He will walk among his devotees and distribute the vibuti. In considerable quantities. I myself have seen it literally pouring out.'
This is the turning point, I thought. He has committed himself now, by the evidence of his own eyes. I nodded enthusiastically.
'That is the sort of thing I have been looking for all along,' I said. 'In Brazil I heard about something similar .
. .' I stopped. The Colonel was listening politely, but I could see that he did not want to hear about Brazil.
'Of course, many holy men can produce vibuti’ he said. 'That is nothing special. Now Sai Baba does other things much more remarkable. He can produce objects such as jewellery, and precious stones. There are recorded instances of him taking a broken watch from a devotee and
returning it in perfect order after holding it in his hand. I will give you a book to read. There are many examples.
'Sai Baba has encouraged me to do my own work here. I had the idea of building a small temple devoted to him, and a hall where people may come to hear about different religions. You see, there is only one God. Christ, Buddha, Brahma, Mohammad, it is all the same.
T asked Sai Baba, and he gave me his blessing. Every year he produces alingam from his mouth. It is an important event at Whitelands, where he has his headquarters. It is quite extraordinary. The lingam is very big. It is impossible to see how it can pass through his throat.
'There is always a great throng of devotees and Sai Baba passes among us, talking to some, stepping over bodies to get past. At one point he stepped on my back to pass across and you know, a quite remarkable thing, he was weightless. He had his foot on my back but there was absolutely no weight at all.'
We walked through the gate and along the pavement, and then turned back behind the garden wall to where the temple was, a simple square building with a wooden floor, and at the back a shrine with two portraits of Sai Baba. In one he was garlanded and smiling, and the picture was rather faded with brown marks at the bottom edge. In the other he was standing at the top of a flight of stone steps in a vivid crimson robe. He was a small dark-skinned man with a round face appearing at the centre of a mass of fuzzy black hair. The portraits were in silver frames. Beneath one was a silver bowl and beneath the other was a tray.
'Now I have brought you here to see this,' said the Colonel, 'because it is proof. From this portrait, you see, ash falls into the tray. The vibuti you have on your forehead came out of this picture. Every morning there is more ash on the tray. And from the other picture honey runs into the bowl. It is quite amazing.'
There was ash in the tray, but the bowl was empty.
'During the last few days, the honey has stopped, I think it is a sign that something is not right. There are certain problems. I am planning to ask Sai Baba's advice.'
Just suppose, I said to myself, that I crept out here at midnight, and hid. Would I be likely to see old Rajaram slip through the window with a syringe and inject honey into that photograph? Or would the Colonel appear furtively in his nightgown and shake ash into the tray? It was preposterous. I imagined myself devoting a lifetime to experiments with carbon-dating and isotope-tagging, infra-red cameras and laser beams to prove that the Colonel and the Brahmin were true or false. And never would I know any better than I knew already after only twenty-four hours, that it could not be in them to deceive me in that way. Or even if I showed them false today, what is to stop them being true tomorrow?
Let the ash pour, and the honey drip. What do they prove after all? That the world is full of marvels which I don't understand? I have known that for a long time. There are subtleties here to be penetrated, but not by scientific experiments on the composition of honey and the origins of ash.
Still, I thought, I shall go and see this Sai Baba. It would be something to be present at a miracle.
My friend introduced me to the more mundane aspects of life in Madras. I tasted again the strange pleasure to be had in visiting institutions created by the British in another era, and maintained by the Indians in their original form for their own use. There was squash and ginger beer at the Madras Cricket Club, for example, and there was still a faint but original odour of memsahib drifting in the air of Spencer's store. All of it, though, was transformed for me by the calm of the Colonel's garden and the aura of Rajaram. I was easy with the climate, hot as it was, and happy with the food. After four days I felt rested and secure, and the wounds of Penang seemed to have finally closed. I was ready to set off into India, like a ship well rigged and provisioned, with a rested crew, a good wind and nothing but fair weather ahead. The blow fell that morning. A telegram arrived to tell me that my stepfather had died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I wrestled with the problem for hours. Many times I had asked myself what I would do if my mother were to die while I was away. The answer was always: keep going. I was obsessed by the idea that to break the journey might somehow destroy it. But it had never occurred to me that it might be Bill, so much younger, who would die first. The very fact that I should have got the news in Madras, where every day planes took off that could get me to England, seemed significant. What if it had happened while I was on the altiplano? In my heart I knew I could not leave my mother alone at such a time.
I asked Rajaram, writing my question down on a scrap of paper:
YESTERDAY MY STEPFATHER DIED. WHAT SHOULD I DO FOR MY MOTHER?
and he replied in writing too:
1’8 or 1’5 your profit income you may help her. It is bounden duty of human being if she helpless.
MONEY IS NOT THE PROBLEM. I WANT TO COMFORT HER.
There is a doctor already to look after her.
BUT WHICH WAY SHALL I GO?
(We are gifted a compass in our heart) your prayer will guide you, right direction; for your all success in life.
Following my compass, it took me thirteen hours to fly back to the place that I had spent three years travelling away from. I was sucked up by the silver tube and spilled out on London Airport. Within no time I was standing next to my mother at the crematorium chapel, as the remains of
her husband were consigned to the flames. I was so sickened by the soulless mechanics, the hideous insensitivity of the whole affair, that his loss did not strike home to me until weeks afterwards. With the feeling of India still strong in me, I felt I would rather be tossed out on a charnel ground for the vultures than be disposed of by remote control behind I nylon curtains in a gas oven, dispatched by the rounded insincerities of a mass destruction priest.
The flight back to Madras was tedious. Police searched the 747 at Tel Aviv and again at Teheran. I missed the connection at Bombay and had to spend a night there in the monsoon. Next day the plane was delayed at take-off. Engineers rooted about on the flight deck while we roasted in the cabin.
I sat next to a Professor at Madras University returning from a spell in Germany. He was good company, but the remark I treasured most was about the water in Frankfurt.
'We always boiled the tap water,' he said. 'It is polluted and quite unsafe to drink. Fortunately in Madras we don't have this problem. Our river water is quite pure.'
By coincidence, some ten days later the Bombay-Madras plane blew up, killing everyone on board.
Madras, when I got back there, felt like a different place. I was plagued by minor irritations and discomforts that I had not even noticed before, if indeed they had existed. I was bothered by the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes. I felt weak and jet-lagged. My friend had long since left, and I imagined myself less welcome than I had been before. I found people ambiguous and inefficient, waggling their heads in the absurd way they do as though the gesture alone would make everything turn out fine.
Eating with my fingers was disagreeable, and forced me to wonder why I should feel so vulnerable sitting at table with sloppy food all over my right hand. I felt a craving for meat, thinking it might restore my morale, and I bought a chicken and asked the housekeeper to cook it.
It was a bad mistake. The Colonel liked meat, having been raised in an English tradition, but he was now convinced that it was wrong to do so. Rajaram would never touch it, though he sweetly ignored those who did. The housekeeper was thoroughly disapproving and I could see I had made the Colonel feel very guilty. What was worse, when the chicken appeared on the table in a small bowl, there seemed to be nothing left of it but the beak, neck, claws and ribs. I naturally assumed tha
t the thrifty housekeeper was planning to stretch it over several meals, and in all innocence I asked in what way she planned to prepare the meat.
I thought Kali, the Goddess of Destruction, was going to leap at me from her eyes when the Colonel translated the message.
'She says the chicken is all there’ said the Colonel. I was wise enough to keep quiet, but I thought I had better leave their house soon before I blundered into even deeper trouble. It was a classic example of the danger of flying between different worlds and cultures.
Obviously it was I who had changed, and not India, and I longed to feel the satisfaction and calm I had known before. Perhaps, I thought, I will find it in the temples as I ride south to Sri Lanka. There was one only fifty miles away at Kanchipuram. I said goodbye to the Colonel, feeling very grateful to him and miserable at having even doubted his hospitality. I feasted my eyes on Rajaram one last time and, receiving his tranquil farewell, I rode into India.
Riding the Temple Trail is like riding into a Black Hole. Everything rushes in, squeezing, condensing, more of everything than you ever thought possible. You have only to pronounce the names to know:
Ekamboreswara temple at Kanchipuram, Mahishisuramordhini cave at Mahabalipuram, Arunachala temple at Tiruvanamalai, Tiruchchirapalli and Brihadeeswarer temple at Thanjavur, more syllables per word than the Western tongue can roll round, more people per tourist than the eye can see, more distance per mile, more surprises per minute, more carvings per square yard. Everything in profusion and superfluity, and somewhere in the middle of this crush, they say, is calm. So find it!
Not easy. A sign points down a narrow street of shops and stalls, a milling confusion of people, animals, bicycles. The bazaar. Above the seething mass, appearing to rise right out of it, a towering wedge of masonry completely obliterated by carved figures, as though squeezed up and petrified by the pressure of the bazaar itself. The temple. What causes these people to compress themselves like this? I used to think, in my airy Western way, that it was because there were so many of them. Every question about India was so easily answered by 'over-population'. Now I remember the insane knots of people round the counter of an otherwise empty shop or post office, the steady pressure of the man behind me in the queue, forcing his body against mine, drawn by a mindless magnetism. I call it insane because my sanity flourishes with space and distance. India seems like a giant condenser, everybody streaming towards the centre to fuse.
