Cedilla (56 page)

I had time on the verandah that night to consider the impurity of my emotions. I felt a certain amount of annoyance at seeing Peter in this setting. Travelling to India had been my project, and truly a vast project it was. To achieve my spiritual objective I had been forced to mount something like a military campaign. Now Peter seemed to be casually horning in on my territory. What was a pilgrimage for me wasn’t much more than a lark for him. In the night I examined
these feelings and repented of them. Peter’s constitution was perhaps not as strong as I assumed. He had always suffered from sore throats, and had been prescribed many courses of antibiotics over the years by Flanny.

The next day Peter was already amazingly better. He had slept well. The resilience of youth had done the rest. He did say, though, that the roof seemed to breathe out during the night all the heat it had absorbed by day.

Peter still didn’t have the strength to lift me down the three steps from the verandah, and that remained Rajah Manikkam’s job. Once I was installed in the wheelchair Peter could manage me on the level. In fact he grasped the handles as if it had only been a minute since he had last let them go, and he powered me away from Aruna Giri. There was a definite feeling of nostalgia about being pushed by Peter again, even if he couldn’t keep up that initial burst of energy. It was as if we were off exploring round Bourne End again, irresistibly drawn to the woods we thought were haunted.

I was torn between shyness about my spiritual false starts and eagerness to share my experiences, not sure whether to suggest a visit to the ashram or to keep that at least for myself. Peter had his own ideas anyway.

With a tourist’s hands on the handles rather than a devotee’s, the wheelchair began to find its way to more secular places. I had hardly noticed that a mundane town even shared the sacred geography.

Not that Peter would have cared to be labelled a tourist, nor even a traveller. He thought of himself as an explorer, and I had my own mild claim on that title. It was a significant expedition for me to go into Bourne End to buy a clandestine tube of depilatory cream from a chemist’s, and here I was sleeping on a verandah, serenaded by the anguished voices of Indian owls.

The exploring we did after Peter arrived was of a particular kind. I swear that boy had a sixth sense for snacks. He could detect the smell of garlic frying from a mile away, and track it down infallibly, although Tamil Nadu was a mass of smoke and promiscuously pungent aromas, both secular and sacred. He was a teenager, after all, voracious and splendidly undiscriminating. He liked food that was meant to be eaten with the fingers – in that respect India suited him very well.

This prejudice against knife and fork may have had something to do with his work as a waiter. A day spent reverently cradling between a pair of spoons (the absurd rigmarole of ‘silver service’ which boosts waiters’ earnings) the very potato croquette he had seen dropped by chef, picked up and dusted off, was reason enough for preferring food that wasn’t turned into a fetish. He liked food snatched on the hoof, eaten without ceremony.

We discovered a stall selling little fried dumplings, crisp on the outside but soft inside, and took some home with us. Mrs Osborne told us they were called
vadas
– she pronounced the word to rhyme with ‘larders’ – and that we shouldn’t eat too many of them. They were made from pounded lentils, onion, and curry leaves with a bit of cumin. And garlic of course. The scolding she gave us for buying them was a gentle one by her standards, no more than Force 2 on the Osborne Scale of reproach-rockets, a very mild flare.

I don’t even know whether Mrs O’s warnings had to do with the Hindu dietary laws which classify onion as a
darkness food
, or with common-sense ideas about the unhealthiness of frying. Whichever it was, we disregarded her. Whether she was speaking as a Hindu or as a moderate adult, she was wasting her breath. There weren’t many areas of life where I could compete on equal terms with Peter, and eating snacks was one of them. I wasn’t going to give it up.

On one of our early expeditions I felt the urgent need for a pee. Peter pulled the wheelchair onto some waste ground and helped me to stand sufficiently upright to accomplish my purpose. I became aware of voices behind me, and then of a boy standing in front of me, staring. He wasn’t looking at my face but at the humble piece of plumbing currently in use. Soon he was joined by others, all equally mesmerised and calling to their fellows to see the show. Peter helped to zip me up as quickly as possible and we moved on, rather shaken by the extreme response to what we had imagined to be a very minor transgression.

Hadn’t I seen plenty of people peeing in the street in the previous weeks, without embarrassment or much in the way of discretion? But
perhaps Europeans were barred from such casual customs. ‘What was that all about, Jay?’ Peter asked, bewildered, but I was as much in the dark as he was. The strange thing was that the crowd didn’t seem angry or disapproving, just gripped by a strange fascination.

When we had arrived back at the verandah, there was no alternative but to ask Mrs Osborne. It was either that or cling to our ignorance. I decided on a cautious approach. ‘Mrs Osborne, is it taboo in these parts to urinate in the open air?’

‘Not at all. Males do this freely, though it is polite to step away from the road. What makes you say so?’

‘Well, I had to go by the side of the road, and for some reason we gathered quite a crowd. They were all very excited, in fact they were talking at the tops of their voices.’

Mrs Osborne’s flinty face took on a look of sly amusement. ‘I think I can solve the mystery. It is certainly not that they are shocked by your use of the outdoors. In fact it is indoor excretion which is a puzzling novelty in Tamil culture. Even evacuation is performed out of doors, in designated places to which Tamil gives the charming name
pii kaadu
. Meaning
excrement forest
. No, these spectators who so unsettled you were taking the opportunity to satisfy a natural curiosity about your parts.’

This was worse than anything I could have imagined. ‘What about my parts?’

‘They are under the impression that Europeans are only furnished with white skin on the parts that show – hands and face. This would certainly explain the white man’s unwillingness to bare his skin to the sun. If he did so – what is the phrase? – the jig would be up. By producing your private parts you have provided an
exsh
ellent opportunity for them to test this theory and perhaps even to settle some longstanding bets about the pigmentation of Western anatomy.’ And she produced a decidedly dirty-sounding laugh. If she gave vent to merriment on any other occasion that summer I don’t remember it.

As for whether her humiliating account of what we had experienced was truthful or not I really couldn’t say, since for the rest of my visit I made myself ignore the demands of the bladder until I was safely in reach of that providential piece of sanitary furnishing, the late Arthur Osborne’s commode, come all the way from Bangalore.

Peter’s presence transformed my relationship with Kuppu. Before he arrived she and I had enjoyed a warm friendship, as free and easy as any relationship can be that is based on one person’s perpetual need to be cleared up. Often she would speak to me in Tamil, starting every speech with ‘Amma, Ammaaa!’ Eventually I realised from her gestures that she meant Mrs Osborne by this, but I couldn’t follow the rest of what she was whispering so urgently.

I didn’t think she was telling me that pale children kept arriving at Aruna Giri in pairs, hand in hand, the boys in shorts, the girls in pigtails, while nothing ever came out of the house except the smell of roast meat. But it was worth bearing in mind.

Soon after he arrived, Peter exercised his able-bodied privileges and went through my little suitcase. He came upon the tin of Cadbury’s Roses, the chocolates deformed by the heat but still viable, and started doling them out to Kuppu – one every time she freshened me up, another every time she freshened the commode. This miniature bounty was enough to transform her attitude from obligingness to stark devotion. The tin was a little pharmacopœia, full of medicinal powers individually wrapped in cellophane and foil. I had to contemplate the possibility, not quite that Mum had been right all along when it came to my packing priorities, but that her hand had been guided by the guru she so resented when she had sneaked the tin back into my luggage.

Then one day we bought a dozen bangles from a stall in the town. They were ridiculously cheap – a rupee for the dozen, at a time when there were seventeen or eighteen rupees to the pound. That evening I gave them to Kuppu, thinking she should be compensated by something more lasting than chocolate for her willingness to cross caste lines and keep me clean. Her expression was unreadable as she grabbed the bangles. She simply disappeared, as if she was running for her life. She sprinted from the verandah, and we didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I tried not to be put out by the absence of a show of thanks. ‘It’s probably not the custom here,’ I told Peter uncertainly. ‘She can’t be offended, can she?’

‘At least she didn’t leave the bangles behind, unless … do you think it’s unlucky to give jewellery here? Perhaps that’s why they were so cheap.’

It was certainly a possibility, but there were others. ‘Perhaps in this culture,’ I wondered aloud, ‘I just proposed to her?’

‘A dozen bangles – that’s twelve proposals! She must think you’re head over heels.’

‘I don’t think we’re ever going to understand how things work over here.’

‘How are you going to explain her to Mum? Rather you than me. But at least she’s pretty.’

‘She’s married to the gardener already, idiot.’

The next morning, early, there was an outburst of screeching from the gardener’s hut, the one which Kuppu shared with Rajah Manikkam. Peter and I were quite alarmed, until Mrs Osborne came out of her house, rolling her eyes in exasperation, as she so often did when dealing with the locals.

‘Are they frightened of something again, Mrs Osborne?’

‘No, John, it’s not that. Kuppu has invited all her friends round to show them her new treasures. I hope you haven’t spoiled her for good with your lavishness.’

Spending one rupee on someone who made a hygienic life possible didn’t seem like lavishness, exactly. But at least we had our explanation for her rapid exit when I handed over the bangles. Kuppu had legged it before I had a chance to change my mind.

Peter didn’t react at all to Mrs Osborne as I would have expected. He hero-worshipped her more or less from the start. He said that wherever he was in the world, he would never be afraid of anything as long as Mrs Osborne was there. This from the fearless world traveller, who collapsed on Indian railway stations just to see what would happen! He wanted to ask her advice about things that were close to his heart, things (in fact) that we had never discussed with anyone.

First on the list was what happened in our room after Gipsy died. How was it that Gipsy had breathed by my bed as usual on the night after I took my Spanish oral in 1968, though she had been lethalised earlier in the day? It was as if she had forgotten she was dead. She even gave those sighs that dogs make in their sleep, aware
even in unconsciousness of a job well done, the pack protected. The same thing happened every night for a week, and then the ghost breathing had simply stopped. Now it was time to take the mystery to Mrs Osborne.

She started nodding vigorously. Almost before we had finished explaining she said, ‘It was burned into her
jiva
that she must look after you. That was her purpose in life. When her body died, she had to be sure you were all right without her. I have no doubt that she will be as devoted in the next life as she was in this. May her rebirths be few!’

This wasn’t the wisdom I had come to India to find, but it was a pretty good explanation all the same, of something on the borderline – the melting film – between the ‘real’ and the Real.

Peter wanted to ask Mrs O about Mum’s increasingly erratic behaviour. She would go very barmy over the smallest thing. A dropped piece of cheese could easily lead to a major row, with no end of screaming. Sometimes Mum would be shaking with rage. Peter and I dreaded the evenings when we ate fish, because that always seemed to trigger a mighty fight afterwards. The best we could do was anticipate trouble and shelter as best we could.

I very much didn’t want to consult the Osborne oracle about the mundane miseries of the Cromers. She might have special insight into the behaviour of dogs after death, but she was not the guru I had come to India for. I had come to bask in the presence of Presence, not to have my questions answered. I wanted something that was equally far from a question and an answer.

I persuaded Peter that as a good Hindu Mrs Osborne would treat family itself as a source of distraction and entanglement. She really wasn’t cut out for the rôle of agony aunt – of the sort that Mum so addictively sneered at in the
Daily Mirror
. At the hairdresser’s in Bourne End village she would ‘tidy up’ the cluttered magazine table, and somehow the problem page would always fall open in front of her eyes.

Peter was slow to recover full strength after his illness. Much as he would have loved to, he still wasn’t able to lift me up or down those three steps onto Mrs O’s verandah. Rajah Manikkam continued to take care of that bit. Peter’s stamina was poor, and he needed a lot of sleep, some of it in the day, so we rarely stayed out late. When we did,
we went to the hut that Rajah Manikkam shared with Kuppu so that he could load me into the wheelchair, now that his giggling fits had been more or less exorcised.

One day Mrs Osborne announced that there was a famous Tamil singer giving a concert in the Temple that night. We should all go (though ‘all’ did not include Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu). The Temple was an extraordinary setting, and the concert should have something to offer both pilgrims and tourists. She looked at Peter and me when she said this, and for a moment I wondered if she was really registering a distinction in our status as travellers.