Cedilla (48 page)

On our car trip I noticed that the rule of waiting until men had finished eating didn’t always apply. I assume it made a difference that we weren’t at table, in a formal setting, and also that the food was a gift from me. I couldn’t help feeling that I was derailing Raghu’s day, but Sumati gave every sign of having a fine old time. The expedition seemed to free her from the constraints of an Indian lady’s home. Unable to turn round and watch her, I sent out auditory antennæ instead, turning my ears backwards like a cat’s, cocked pockets of vibrating fur. I could hear the little snuffles of appreciation, almost guttural, which Sumati made while she ate.

A little later she spoke again, at greater length, and Raghu translated for my benefit. ‘Sumati is warning you against going on
pradak
shina
with Mrs Osborne late in the day. You understand
pradakshina
?’ I did.
Pradakshina
is the ritual clockwise circumambulation of the holy mountain Arunachala. It is to be done barefoot, and in a prescribed manner: ‘like a pregnant queen in her ninth month’. I didn’t know quite how I was going to manage that.

‘Sumati and Mrs Osborne started their walk round the mountain at about four or five, when the worst of the sun was over. She was worried that it would not be until late that they returned home. Mrs Osborne had not told her they would be sleeping by the roadside. When they started walking, she believed they would reach home that night. However, Mrs Osborne said that it was supremely beneficial to sleep while on
pradakshina
. She was remarkably insistent and Sumati had to give in.’ Here Raghu broke off his translating to make a comment of his own. ‘You will discover, John, that with Mrs Osborne it is usually better to give in.’

‘Sumati was terrified, because as is well known, there are snakes and scorpions on the mountain in great numbers. She mentioned this to Mrs Osborne who said that everything on the mountain was holy. She wasn’t worried, and indeed she was snoring within minutes, while Sumati was unable to sleep a wink. Sumati has never seen a holy scorpion. If she did drop off then her sleep was only jerky, but Mrs Osborne slept well and woke refreshed.’ He added in a tactful
undertone, ‘Sumati once expressed the opinion that Mrs Osborne was a
suunyakaari
. Literally it means she who manipulates nothingness – perhaps you can come up with an improved translation? I have found no English word better than
witch
…’

Sumati interrupted with a sharp question. It required no knowledge of Marathi to interpret it as meaning, ‘What nonsense are you telling him now?’

All the time we were driving I had been inspecting road signs for their correspondence with the Tamil hieroglyph which was written on the card and also, as the journey went on, imprinted on my mind. I took a certain amount of pride in having mastered a long foreign word in its original script. Our progress seemed to be rather wayward in terms of overall direction, however, and eventually we came across a sign where both directions seemed to point to Tiruvannamalai.

Under this sign of ambiguous welcome we decided to stop for refreshment. I was grateful for the rest. My bottom had started to ache unbearably on the journey. Now that Raghu had opened the car door, I could swing my legs round with his help, so that I was sitting on the edge of the seat. As I shifted round I could see that the canvas cover on the back of the seat had become drenched with sweat. Capillary action was assisting the process of cooling, at the cost of a slight embarrassment.

Sumati had brought a picnic. I don’t know where we would have got food anyway, but Raghu explained she wouldn’t willingly consume any food or drink not prepared within her own house. She had brought along sandwiches and a flask of coffee. I realised that she must have shopped specially for sliced bread and perhaps for the cucumber and tomatoes. I remember Dad telling me that the tomato was actually a native of South America, but it has turned itself into an exemplary world citizen, blending in with every possible cuisine, Mediterranean, Indian, even condescending to enrobe Mr Heinz’s baked beans and be rendered down for his ketchup.

I tried one of the sandwiches and pronounced it delicious. In fact it was a pretty fair imitation of a flavourless British catering sandwich. She had even cut the crusts off.

Raghu looked almost dismayed at my appreciation, and rattled off some Marathi words at Sumati. It turned out, when he translated her
reply, that he was asking if she had at least put some salt and pepper on them. (She had, of course.) Even properly seasoned they tasted of little enough, he thought, but without salt and pepper it was like chewing mouthfuls of air.

‘Aren’t you going to try one?’ I asked, and they rather despondently agreed, chewing politely and clearly despairing of understanding the insipid passions of the Raj.

It turned out that Sumati had also brought along a few samosas and
poriyal
and chapattis, in a much smaller bag. I felt almost ashamed that she had put my needs first, and also overestimated my appetite, so that the sandwich supply greatly outweighed what she had brought for her husband and herself. Politeness, though, demanded that I try a samosa when it was offered me, even though I was a sandwich millionaire and they had little of their own food to spare.

That samosa was a rite of passage in its own right. Nothing I had ever put in my mouth could have prepared me for the experience. It became painfully clear that Sumati had gone easy on me with her spices the previous evening. Now like some tribal teenager in an initiation ceremony my tongue had to run over hot coals without being blistered. My taste buds hopped and winced, dancing on the edge of pain. Even more than the night before I had the sensation of a hallucinated clarity, as my senses narrowed to a point and simultaneously opened up with an unprecedented freshness.

Yet even with the spices burning off my old habits of mind I could hardly register the landscape around us, let alone describe it. My mental vocabulary was so limited, and this country was neither lush nor bare, or else was both at once. It was green, but a green that was mostly blue and brown.

While we were eating our food, the fiery and the bland, a group of people had come up to see what we were doing. In great contrast to Mum on any comparable occasion, Raghu and Sumati seemed unperturbed by the uninvited company. The most inquisitive of the bunch was an old man with a lovely character etched into his features – his looked like a face from a documentary film. Perhaps the old
superstition is true, and the camera steals the soul, just not all at once, but in tiny incremental larcenies. Certainly it’s the faces that have never been photographed which have the strongest identities.

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.

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’.