Cedilla (54 page)

I sat in the wheelchair looking at the two couches and the single guru, but my mind was straying to other rooms, other images and times. It was almost worse to be sitting in the Old Hall thinking of the New Hall than it would have been to be thinking of Bourne End. I seemed to be more attuned to anecdotes and the past than to the numinous room in the present. My attention wandered, and my reverence had no focal depth.

If anything preöccupied me, it was some of the words Ganesh had used while we were approaching the ashram. Strength of devotion. Determination. My determination was really only passive resistance, though some people (such as Dawn Drummond) had run a finger along its militant edge and left a little trace of blood there.

Those qualities had brought me to this place, but now they were blocking my path. Passive resistance was the parachute which had allowed me to descend safely into these new surroundings, but now it was entangled in a tree and had become a threat. I must free myself.
If only there was a quick-release mechanism on the harness of the ego, one which would let me drop into freedom with a single decisive click! I had the sense that I would be dangling there for some time in the breeze, while the leaves yellowed, fell and renewed themselves, without their meaning any reproach by it.

Of course Ganesh had referred to Mrs Osborne’s determination as well as my own. She was calm as well as determined, certainly calm rather than frantic, but it was a sort of steel calm, lacking flexibility. I couldn’t honestly say that I thought her ego functioned as it does (by all accounts) in a realised person, persisting merely as the moon does in the daytime – the ego emeritus, performing little administrative tasks, pottering in its contented retirement.

Far from it. Her ego seemed robust, even fierce. Sometimes it positively spoiled for a fight. It was strategic even in its retreats, as when Mrs O had given way on the
pradakshina
question so as to get her own way about my meeting Ganesh. If Mrs O’s ego was mere executive moonlight, then why was it so hard to look at directly? Still, the state of her ego was really none of my business. I must mind my own.

When Ganesh came back to find me, it was actually a relief to be interrupted. He had left me alone for a good stretch of time. I wasn’t getting anywhere with meditation, with stilling my thoughts and holding my mind alert in quest of itself. Altogether self-enquiry seemed to have reached a dead end. The whole idea seemed impossible, like using the light of a candle to make out the silversmith’s mark on the base of the candlestick. Meditation solves the problem by detaching the flame from the wick, letting its light float free, but currently I seemed to have lost that knack.

Ganesh was too tactful to ask if I had profited from my first encounter with the ashram, but I said something about finding the presence of other devotees distracting. Instead of pointing out that I was a hopeless case if I couldn’t ignore such irrelevancies he offered to have me brought back at a time of day when it would be quieter.

I began to feel a little flattered qualm about Ganesh’s obligingness and approachability. He was making time for me in a way which
could hardly be standard practice. He was certainly easier company than Mrs Osborne, though of course we only really discussed one subject, and that subject was the reason for my being in India in the first place.

His face too held a fascination, being full of light and kindness. It gave the effect of constant smiling, and yet it was hard to be sure there was a smile there at all. If it was a smile, it was as different from Western smiles as a pearl lightbulb is different from a clear one. It was all glow and no dazzle. Perhaps it was as close as I would get in mere life to Bhagavan’s radiant gaze and piquant serenity, his personality the embodiment of acceptance but also an agent of change.

Then Ganesh quoted a saying of Bhagavan’s to me, which was not only stirring in itself but had some sort of eerily glancing connection with my disordered thought-stream in the Old Hall: ‘He who is in the jaws of the tiger cannot be rescued; so also a person who has fallen into the grace of a guru cannot escape from it …’

Mrs Osborne too had powerful jaws, though I suppose she was more terrier than tiger. Soon she organised a schedule for me, saying, ‘I thought you might like to go to the Old Hall to meditate for an hour from nine o’clock every morning, and from five in the evening.’ If Mrs Osborne thought you might like something, it was best to start liking it right away.

My second visit to the Old Hall was no more rewarding spiritually than the first. There where I had counted on coming into blossom I experienced a withering. I was forced to face the fact that my pilgrimage was deviating from its planned form. Of course if you issue enlightenment with a timetable you are asking for trouble.

As it turned out, I wasn’t going to leap into self-realisation the first time I entered the sacred spaces associated with my guru. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life there, teaching people how to meditate and realise themselves. That had been my underlying hope, that I wouldn’t have to return to the West at all, to the ordeals of my independence, but could simply be absorbed into the fabric of a less material society. When I had said goodbye to Mum and Dad at the airport, it was with the feeling that I might not see them again. I was conscious during the leave-taking of a finality that I welcomed with at least half my heart. But now it was becoming clear that I would be
going back to them. The spiritual pull of Arunachala was still there, it never stopped even when I was at my most frustrated, but somehow the flow was blocked. It refused me, which must mean, mustn’t it, that I refused it without knowing what I was doing.

I was pushed over to the Old Hall to meditate on most days. I almost began to dread those visits, not because there was anything unpleasant about them, but because they reminded me of my failure to make progress. After the initial rush of mystic bliss, meditation had become homework. While everything else in India seemed colourful and immensely interesting, sitting in the Old Hall trying to get some self-enquiry started was distinctly depressing. My mind seemed jumpier than ever, which wasn’t at all the plan.

Of course self-enquiry is a drastic exercise. To make a change in your behaviour is like grafting new fruits and flowers onto a tree, to understand why you have particular desires is to lop off a few branches, but full understanding recognises that the I-tree, stubborn bole, must be pulled up by its root. The ego is a decorative feature that passes itself off as structural. It’s a pillar suspended from the roof it claims to hold up.

It was strange how much at home I came to feel on Mrs Osborne’s verandah. An environment which was announced as fatally hostile turned out to be highly congenial, almost tailor-made. The smell of green breakfast figs cooking, the call of the commode, the lustre of Kuppu’s smile, the tiny mystical pill dissolving on my tongue, all this made up a routine rather sweeter than any I had experienced before.

Every few days Mrs Osborne would have Rajah Manikkam carry out a wind-up gramophone to the verandah. It was like a flashback to CRX, only without the operatic arias, surplus to requirements, so kindly passed on to sick children by the Decca company. Mrs O’s taste was for Bach, which she explained was the Western music which Indians liked best, especially Bach in one of his twiddly moods, where ornamentation seems to stand proud of any melody. I can’t say that the expressions on the faces of Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu backed her up in any definitive way.

Sometimes Mrs Osborne asked me about my dreams, which I wasn’t in the habit of remembering unless they forced themselves on me. ‘One of Arthur’s first discoveries,’ she said, ‘after he embarked on his Quest was to do with dreams.’ It gave me an English qualm and a Hindu thrill to hear her use the word quest, with its unmistakable capital. Since she had ended up living on a holy mountain whose antiquity made the Himalayas seem like teenagers, I felt she had earned the right to the holiness of the upper case. ‘He realised that whenever he had experienced fear in a dream, his instinct was to make himself wake up. As an adult he decided to override the impulse to escape which had ruled his night thoughts since he was a child. Instead of waking he decided to follow the thread of fear to its end within the dream. Invariably the source of fear when revealed lost its power over him. It was frightening only so long as it was viewed as something to run from. This was an important clue on his Path.’ I wondered if I myself would ever be confident enough to capitalise ‘path’ in conversation.

Mrs Osborne kept a cow in the garden, and that was the milk we would drink, unboiled and unpasteurised, merely chilled in her little fridge. It makes me shiver to think about that now, the blitheness with which we drank untreated milk. One day I was about to pour some over my puffed rice, and decided to taste a bit first. Not nice. It had started to turn and I told her so.

‘Absholute Nonshense!’ she shrilled. ‘There is nothing wrong with my milk. Nothing whatshoever!’ And she looked at me so fiercely that I poured the rest of it onto my cereal and swallowed it down under her unrelenting gaze. Every taste bud in my mouth protested against her doctrinaire clean bill of health. Even so, contradicting Mrs Osborne on any sustained basis was something that called for major resources of willpower. It was necessary to throw all your resources behind your audacious tongue or be annihilated, and at that stage I didn’t feel strong enough.

In the mornings fruit sellers would do the rounds selling their produce – ladies who carried it on their heads in baskets. Guavas, grapes, apples. They came to me on the verandah. At first I was alarmed by
this tide of small businesses sweeping across the verandah in their bird-of-paradise colours, smiling and chattering softly to each other, but it wasn’t long before I was looking forward to it. I struggled to master the currency, remembering what Raghu had said about its recent decimalisation. Of course I didn’t have a word of the necessary Tamil, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t haggle. It’s amazing how much economic leverage you can pack into a doubtful frown. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I enjoyed bringing to the transaction some of the grave tempo of chess. One particular woman would call my bluff, shout scornfully, pack up her wares again and walk off across the verandah – and then slow down, shrug and return to the struggle, settling very happily for a sum that differed by a single tiny coin from the amount that she had found so insulting.

One day I heard this fruit seller talking to Mrs O. Afterwards she said that the conversation had been about me. All the time I was in India, I’m ashamed to say, I had at the back of my mind the thought that someone was bound to ask what I had done (in a previous life) to earn the body I was in. But this discussion was all compliments. ‘She loves dealing with you,’ Mrs O was saying, ‘because you always haggle, and you know how it’s done.’ In other words she preferred to spend more time than she might, and to receive less money than she might, just for the tiny drama of the bargain, the human contest finally resolved in smiles.

Later in the morning Mrs Osborne might come out onto the verandah with some sweet-lime juice. She always gave the impression of being very busy – she could only spare me a moment. It’s true that she had taken on co-editorship of the ashram publication
The
Mountain Path
from Arthur after his death, and there were editorial duties to be performed. I remember her opening a letter and saying, ‘I detesht Wei Wu Wei’ – Wei Wu Wei being a contributor to
The
Mountain Path
– ‘I have to rewrite every shingle shentensh.’ I had begun to think that Lucia Osborne enjoyed choosing words with a strong sibilant element – otherwise why not say she hated or loathed this strange being? ‘Wei Wu Wei’ is actually a phrase meaning ‘action without action’, all very Zen. She told me Wei Wu Wei was an Irish aristocrat, born Terence Gray, whose passion was the theatre until he became an eccentric sort of Buddhist. His favourite saying was
that ‘everything is a case of mistaken identity’, but Mrs O seemed to have got his number.

Arthur Osborne had left ten editorials prepared, but Lucia was working on one of her own, about Arthur and his shedding of the old coat. She read parts of it to me as she composed them. She called it ‘What is Death if Scrutinised?’ I was moved by it.

Sometimes we talked about spiritual experience. Mrs Osborne told me, as if apropos of nothing, that it was very common for devotees planning to come to Arunachala to have obstacles placed in their way. Sometimes the seeker would find another person actively attempting to prevent the pilgrim from making his journey. At this point I indicated that this was true in my case. I decided to leave it at that, though, and not to go into detail.

Mrs O asked me, ‘Was that person called Mouni Sadhu, by any chance?’, so I saw no point in denying it. I’m sure I got Mouni Sadhu into a lot of hot water spiritually, with Mrs Osborne stoking the fire beneath the cauldron, and I can’t really say I’m sorry. Was I ‘telling tales’, the great crime of my early schooldays? Hardly. I was only answering a question.

When Mrs Osborne sat down and kept me company, she would always let me understand that there were plenty of other things she needed to do. I was slow to detect the element of pathos behind this, that despite her daily dynamism she was a widow struggling to cope. If I was lucky that Arunachala had sent me to her, perhaps there were some fringe benefits for her. She had someone new to cater for and talk to, and isn’t distraction the core of consolation? I provided my fair share of that.

More than once she promised to make me rock cakes, which seemed a baffling ambition. If I was homesick for anything it wasn’t rock cakes. But then it turned out that she wanted to make them for the same reason that riders who have been thrown want to get back on the horse, as a way of defying fate. She told me she was sorry to be weak, but she didn’t feel up to making them just yet. ‘Arthur was so fond of them,’ she said, and her voice shook while a little tear came from her eye. Although I was sorry to see her distress, I was also relieved because it was proof that she wasn’t a real witch. Witches can’t cry – the literature is definite about that. As a child I had loved the witches
in stories and had always wanted to meet one, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that last step.

One day the weather turned so cool it felt almost English. For once there was no sign of the sun. Rajah Manikkam put a shirt on and Mrs O even wore a jersey. Over breakfast she announced that someone had died – did I want to go to the funeral? I might find it instructive. Rajah Manikkam had got used to pushing the wheelchair, though I hadn’t yet got used to his style of propelling it. He would bump up and down changes of level without slowing down, having no regard for the occupant of the wheelchair, someone who might have received enough jolts in his life already. If he had been employed to push round trolleys of ripe fruit instead, his employers would have insisted on more considerate driving, or the loss of revenue would have been alarming.

Rajah’s pushing became more and more tentative, and he stopped some way short. To my surprise, Ganesh came to meet me and took over. He said I must forgive the superstitiousness of the locals. Rajah’s caste buried their dead, although he and his wife were terrified of corpses, ghosts and spirits, while this was a Brahmin funeral.

When we arrived, the corpse was being put on the pyre. It was all a little undignified, and not just because I could see its shrunken willy. Dried cow-pats were placed over it and then they poured on some kerosene. I say ‘poured’ but that sounds too reverent. Kerosene was simply sloshed over the pyre and the body. The procedure was more than undignified, it was downright unfeeling, but then people are so solemn at Western funerals because nobody actually believes in the effectiveness of the ceremony. It was because the ceremony was trusted, here, that I got the impression of unceremoniousness. There was no emotion surplus to the event. The action was adequate to what it marked.

Ganesh gave me a lesson in last things. While the fire took hold, he explained the different colours of flame which issued from the body as it burned, and what they represented in spiritual terms. Vital airs were streaming from the sutures of the skull. The various sheaths of
the physical envelope, the gross body, the causal body, the subtle body, were all returning to their source. All the different elements were rejoining the void. Absence was their destination. It was fascinating to hear his description, in the way that it is fascinating to hear anyone knowledgeable discoursing on a technical subject, even sport or cars.

It was a sort of treat, though an unsettling one, to be invited to look at a corpse in its fiery transition – with roasting smells beginning to break through the stink of kerosene – rather than being told to avert your eyes from the whole subject of death. Then quite abruptly Ganesh summoned Rajah Manikkam, who grasped the handles of the wheelchair and lurched off with me. All Ganesh would say was, ‘You must leave now. The next part is not suitable for you to see.’ We were back in the realm of taboos without explanations. Naturally being told that it wasn’t suitable made me want to see it all the more, on the same principle governing the desirability of X-certificate films back in Britain. No history of disappointment could stop me hankering after the forbidden.

There is no arguing with the pusher of a wheelchair. I tried to feel privileged by what I had seen rather than tantalised by what I had not. As we left the scene a breath of wind brought thick black smoke our way. Ganesh coughed, my eyes streamed and my clothes held the smell of the various shrivelling sheaths for the rest of the day. I felt that these mild inconveniences had a symbolic aspect, though if I was receiving spiritual instruction it was slightly disheartening. Hadn’t we been scrutinising death with exemplary calmness? Yet tears pursued us, even while we strove to rise above their causes.

Installed back on the verandah, I tried to find out from Mrs O about the local funeral rites, and specifically what I had missed by being hustled away from the pyre at a crucial juncture. I got the brush-off, with Mrs O sternly saying that if Ganesh had wanted me to know he would already have told me. She wasn’t going to expose me to unauthorised knowledge herself. Ladies weren’t allowed to attend such events anyway – though I’d like to have seen someone try to stop her if she had put her mind to it.

I tried to generalise my line of questioning. Was it a matter of caste who was buried (like Arthur, as I didn’t quite say) and who was burned, or could people exercise their own discretion?

‘Are you a journalist, John? Is that why you are here, to find out about the ways of the local people, these funny Indians?’

‘No, Mrs Osborne, I’m here as a devotee, to practise self-enquiry.’

‘Then stop asking questions that face outwards and turn your questioning inwards, since that is what it means to be a devotee.’

I had always known I would love Mrs Osborne, but I hadn’t realised how long it would take. If there is no idea more fully grasped by the Indian Mind than ‘scolding’, then people like Mrs Osborne are largely responsible. The scolding must be done with love or it would be easy to reject, but love is not what registers first. The love only reveals itself over time. If it was so with Sister Heel at CRX – and wasn’t she one of the great love-scolders of all time? – then it was true of Mrs Osborne also. Kuppu and Rajah Manikkam were veterans of long campaigns of such scolding, who had come through with their smiles intact.

In fact Mrs Osborne rather enjoyed filling me in about Tamil culture and traditions, as long as she didn’t feel pressurised, as long as it was on her own terms. She told me that Tamil was an ancient and elegant language, with structural similarities to both Latin and Welsh, although modern speakers had rather an inferiority complex about it, feeling that it was a degenerate descendant of Sanskrit.

Tamil had contributed quite a number of words to English, including cheroot, catamaran (literally ‘tied trees’), mango, pariah and mulligatawny, whose literal meaning is ‘pepper water’.
Curry
was another gift, even if the British had firmly seized the word by the wrong end.
Kari
means a vegetable dish, not the spicing that made it so remarkable to a sheltered palate. She taught me the proper pronunciations of the original words,
curuTTu
,
kaTTa maram
,
kari
,
mang kay
,
paRaiyaar
,
miLagu taneer
.

At night rains would sometimes crash onto the roof – rain so intense that it required the rather Biblical plural form – and drown out all other sound. At night the mewing screams of the peacocks, both eerie and homely, were replaced by the shrieks of owls. No trace of the genteel quizzical Tu-Wit Tu-Woo of the British owl. These ones sounded as if they were being done to death.

There is something oddly comforting about the acoustics of a downpour, as long as wind plays no noticeable part. It seems to confer a privacy. It builds a whole room of rain, but the effect is necessarily spoiled if the body itself becomes wet. When the rain was at its most torrential I would sometimes be splashed a little from the side, which was rather exciting, but the rain never penetrated the roof of the verandah.

On Mrs Osborne’s verandah I was further from being able to summon human help than I had ever been since I became ill. Yet I wasn’t anxious or afraid, even when I was very far from sleep. I was beginning to understand what it meant to be the guest of the mountain. His hospitality was very subtle. Solitude, something of which I had gone short for so many years, was somehow the cornerstone of it. He didn’t overwhelm me with attention.