Cedilla (52 page)

Under Mrs Osborne’s direction, Rajah Manikkam practised the drill for getting me on and off the verandah. She was well used to correcting (without expense of tact) the shortcomings of the locals, and her analytical eye had seen that there was no point lifting me anywhere if I didn’t have my shoes on. Without them I could hardly stand at all. She gave him the order to hug me and lift me up or down the three steps, and showed him which uprights were strong
enough to let me lean against them while he fetched the wheelchair, and which would let me down.

Perhaps Rajah Manikkam was nervous about being entrusted with these intricate tasks. The procedure, which had gone smoothly during its first execution, became problematic the moment we started practising it. At the point when his arms were wrapped round me, he would be overwhelmed by a laughing attack. Suddenly it struck him as the funniest thing in the entire world that he should be lifting John up and down the steps to the verandah. His movements became less controlled, the functional hug developed tremors and spasms. He began to sway as if he was drunk, and there was a real possibility of him falling over or else simply dropping me.

It was in the nature of our position that he should be looking me almost directly in the face, but of course I knew not a single word of Tamil, except possibly the name of a spicy appetiser served in Madras. I never saw him with a beedie in his hand or between his lips, but at this range his was unmistakably a smoker’s breath, nutty and corrupt. All I could do to steady him was to
change Eyes with a basilisk
(as described in
The Duchess of Malfi
, which I had read at Burnham), hoping to freeze the laughter at its root. Of course sometimes, although this doesn’t usually happen in
The Duchess of Malfi
, the change-Eyes-with-a-basilisk routine just makes things even funnier.

Much of the day was spent in a battle of wills between me and Mrs Osborne about whether I would go to the ashram first or around the mountain. She said that Rajah Manikkam was at my disposal as wheelchair-pusher, whenever I wished to go to the ashram. To which I replied, why not then put him at my disposal to take me round the mountain? Mrs Osborne, though, was not to be got round in that way. ‘He is unsuitable for that purpose, since he is no devotee and can neither identify the mountain’s features nor explain their significance.’ Even if he possessed such knowledge he lacked any English in which it might be embodied. As if it was the dutiful parroting of a guide for which I had travelled, and not direct contact with the mountain, the divine presence expressed in geology.

To show willing (or to protect my stubbornness from a flanking attack, which is what ‘showing willing’ normally means) I had let Rajah Manikkam give me a test ride for a few yards. Even then I wasn’t
convinced that he was up to the job. His technique was very jerky and approximate – gardeners in Tamil Nadu don’t have wheelbarrows to practise on. When we came to rough terrain I would be asking for trouble.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I will wait for a suitable pushing-person to become available.’

‘Such people gather at the ashram. Lunch is also served. Why not make enquiries there?’

‘After that delicious breakfast I am in no hurry to eat again. I will try to match my patience to the mountain, as you advise.’ That was telling her, all right. I closed my eyes.

Any time I closed my eyes at home, or kept them open but withdrew into the practice of meditation, I would be accused of ‘woolgathering’. It would have been handy to be able to dramatise my need for privacy by locking a door behind me, or hanging up a sign saying,
SPIRITUAL EXERCISE IN PROGRESS – KEEP OUT – THIS
MEANS YOU, MUM,
but that wasn’t a possibility. ‘You were miles away,’ Mum would say when I had picked up the threads of mundane life, as if holding the mind stilled in quest of itself was only a form of absent-mindedness, a failure of concentration, and I would say, ‘More than miles, Mum … light years’.

Doing
pradakshina
was of course my ambition. In Rome you are photographed standing next to the Colosseum, in Paris you climb the Eiffel Tower and in Tiruvannamalai you walk clockwise round the mountain. It’s not a sacrament but a ritual stroll. The limbs move but the mind is silenced.

There are numbers of
siddhas
and sages on Arunachala even now, similarly perambulating in invisibility. It’s correct to walk on the left side of the road so as not to obstruct them, thereby gathering additional blessings.

Pradakshina
is beneficial even in the absence of faith. There’s a lovely image used for the process: just as a cow, wandering aimlessly round the post to which it is tethered, finds that the rope inexorably shortens, so by each circuit the
sadhaka
will be drawn nearer to the
Heart-Self centre. The captivated cow is not required to understand the principle of the winch.

In my case, though, it wasn’t easy to disentangle theory and practice. What constituted
pradakshina
for me? I couldn’t expect to reap the spiritual benefit if someone was pushing me – going barefoot was no hardship when your feet didn’t touch the ground. But if I did it myself, surely the ritual had to be scaled down in some way, and doing it without shoes wasn’t an option. The last time I had done any walking without shoes had been at the bidding of a sadistic physiotherapist. My guru would not make similar demands.

In religion I seemed to be re-experiencing what I had encountered in terms of my education. It stung me with a sense of unfairness. Once again it required special measures for me to participate on equal terms, schoolboy among schoolboys, devotee among devotees. My guru had walking difficulties, as I did, though admittedly his rheumatism required the help of a stick and not a wheelchair. And still I didn’t fit in here. Ramana Maharshi didn’t need to walk round the mountain because, for all practical purposes, he was the mountain. There was no call for him to walk round himself, he would reap no benefit thereby, and
pradakshina
as a sacred practice had nothing to teach him. If I, on the other hand, couldn’t walk round the mountain, that would knock the stuffing out of my pilgrimage and my vain discipleship. All Air India’s generosity, for which Dad had done such stalwart wheedling, would be a waste of grace.

When I opened my eyes again, Mrs Osborne was sitting there in front of me, with her elbows on the table, resting her austerity of a face in her hands. She looked oddly beautiful, as if her head was a flower resting in a vase designed for the purpose.

‘John,’ she said, ‘when I think of the difficulties your body has put in your path, I think that simply making your way to Tiruvannamalai must count for half a
pradakshina.
’

This was the kindest thing Mrs Osborne had said to date, even if the sentence began more promisingly than it ended. She seemed to be able to look into my heart more easily when my eyes were closed (and my mouth also). I wondered if I had really been meditating, or only sneaking in all innocence a restorative nap.

‘I have sent Rajah Manikkam to the ashram with a note. If all goes
well, a brahmin from the ashram will escort you on
pradakshina
later in the day. The brahmin will explain the spiritual significance of the mountain’s features as you pass them.’

This was a good start, or so I thought while I waited for the brahmin to arrive from the ashram. In England
ashram
was a highly unusual word, like
ankylosed
and
epiphysis
, needing to be explained and apologised for. Here it was an entirely everyday word and thing, like ‘school’ or ‘library’. I loved that.

The brahmin was a bright-eyed fellow, whose greeting was merely to fold his hands in silence. This should hardly have amounted to a greeting, yet its meaning seemed clear. There was a semaphore twinkle in his eye which transmitted the message ‘I bid you welcome, pilgrim.’ ‘Pilgrim’ was the word I was anxious to supply, since it turned my restlessness into a virtue.

This wordless welcome made a pleasant change from Mrs O’s original ‘Imposhible, imposhible!’ But after that things didn’t quite go according to plan.

It was already late in the day. The evening insects had begun their thrumming song. Before the brahmin had finally turned up I had a conversation with Mrs Osborne about them, asking whether they were actually cicadas or some other variety of insect. She said, ‘Strangely enough, that was a question I once put to Arthur. My husband’s general knowledge was very wide. It was his opinion that they were not “strictly” cicadas, so we always just called them Hoppy Things.’

It had not been explained to me that my first
pradakshina
was to take place in dying light, in what (given the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it quality of the Indian dusk) was pretty much darkness. When I protested to the brahmin about the timing of so important an event, he simply said that vision was an unimportant factor in the doing of
pradakshina
. I needn’t worry about being able to see the mountain – the mountain would be able to see me without difficulty.

I felt like one of those people in Greek mythology who are granted their greatest wish, with a hidden flaw that turns it into punishment – becoming immortal, say, without having remembered to ask for eternal youth. Or like a bride on her wedding night, forbidden to set eyes on her beloved. Was it for this that I had travelled so far, a mystery tour in the dark with some parables thrown in at no extra charge?
Of course I couldn’t make any real protest – my bluff had been called by the brahmin’s greeting. To hang on to my status as pilgrim I had to go along with the idea that vision was an incidental part of this body’s operation, of no spiritual significance. If I set too much store by actually seeing things I was pretty much begging to be reclassified as a tourist. With any luck at least we wouldn’t be bivouacking on the mountain.

Once we had set off, I had to admit that the brahmin was very sure-footed. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s extraordinary how hands on the wheelchair can transmit along the handles the competence or ineptness of the pusher. I felt that I was as safe with this man as Hillary was with Sherpa Tensing, on his own rather hum-drum mountain quest. The air was certainly cooler than it would have been by day. Even when my eyes had adapted to the dark, though, I couldn’t make out more than the vaguest shapes.

The voice behind me murmured, in a very educated English, ‘Arunachala is the oldest mountain on earth, older by far than the Himalayas …’ I managed to keep my mouth closed and not to murmur in my turn, ‘Oh I know
that
,’ in a voice that would have been to all intents and purposes Granny’s. Then I wondered a little uneasily if he had picked up my thoughts about Hillary and Everest, as directly as I had picked up a confidence in his wheelchair-handling. Wheelchair handles can be very good conductors.

‘In spiritual terms Arunachala is the South Pole of India, Mount Kailas being the northern one. There are three main peaks to the mountain,’ he went on. ‘They correspond to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.’ That was something I didn’t know, so I made attentive-schoolboy clucks. If people can’t read your expression they tend to repeat what they’ve said until they get an acknowledgement. Dealing with the disabled makes people’s IQ fairly plunge. ‘There is another tradition which numbers the peaks as five. Opinions vary. There is much to be said on this issue. There may be three peaks or else five – but not four. Definitely not four.’ Mentally I plumped for five, not wanting to have travelled half-way across the world only to bump into the Trinity in native costume.

At one point I noticed a mysterious shape looming by the road. It looked like a bus shelter – at least that’s what it would have been
by a suburban road in England. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘
Mantapam
,’ said the brahmin, and I didn’t want to advertise my lack of ability to concentrate on the mountain by asking anything else. Similar shapes loomed up at intervals, and I was fairly sure that they were
mantapams
too, whatever a
mantapam
was.

Finally there was a light, and also a strange hissing-puffing noise, like something a tiny steam-engine might make. ‘Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?’ asked the brahmin politely. No I would not! I was scandalised that there was a tea-shop brewing up in the middle of the night on the holy mountain. I felt as if I was being nudged if not positively funnelled towards the cathedral gift kiosk, in a way that slighted my piety. Did I want to look at some postcards, perhaps a calendar? Not on your nelly. Full steam ahead, please, brahmin driver. Step on the gas.

The warm glow died away behind me. It was frustrating not to be able to see the object of my pilgrimage, when I might actually be passing right beneath the rock where Bhagavan would sit in the morning, cleaning his teeth with a twig from the toothbrush tree, as he did even in bad weather, with an arthritic lady down below drinking up the
darshan
as it splashed down the slope.

Anecdotes of that sort were rather more real to me than my closeness to the mountain which had inspired them. Perhaps that was the lesson intended behind taking me on
pradakshina
in the dark, to show me that there was still plenty of baggage to be shed, trunk after trunk of it. The mountain was blazing with realised Selfhood, and my little mind clung to its cone of dark. The dunce’s cap of unenlightenment.

The brahmin told me about Parvati and her penance on Arunachala. I didn’t catch exactly what she was atoning for – if I was truly attuned to sin and atonement I’d have stayed at home. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Parvati went on
pradakshina
, her devotion was so strong that she simply melted into the mountain, but her shape – her bosom, in fact – can still be traced at this very point on the slope.’ Not by me it couldn’t. I hadn’t flown above the clouds with the hiccups to end up playing I Spy with divine body parts and the local rocks.

I might as well not have been on the mountain at all. Our promenade, though sacred and circular, was unleashing no inner change. Even before I finished my first
pradakshina
I began to pin my hopes
for breakthrough on the ashram rather than on the mountain. Despite the antiquity and power of the mountain, after all, it was in the ashram that the transcendent powers of Bhagavan would be at their strongest. In the Old Hall above all, which must have absorbed the purest energy from his presence,
darshan
in a concentration approaching critical mass, radiant core of spiritual fission-fusion. To that fizzing sherbet fountain of anti-matter I transferred my hopes.