Cedilla (58 page)

The story goes that Vishnu and Brahma were once quarrelling over which was the greater, until Shiva was brought in to settle the question. He appeared as an infinite column of fire, a
tejolingam
, and challenged the rival gods to find its upper or lower extremity. Vishnu became a boar and burrowed down in search of the base, while Brahma became a swan and soared up in search of the summit. Brahma tried to cheat (he caught a falling flower and claimed to have picked it on the summit) and consequently Vishnu won. The column of fire was too bright to be looked at, so in consideration of the limitations of human vision, Shiva manifested himself instead as Arunachala, on the same spot. It’s the sort of lively story that monotheism rules out of bounds. I do like a large cast of characters, even if they’re only there on the stage, all singing, all dancing, to tell me that existence is one and indivisible.

There may have been some religious symbolism in Mrs O’s suggestion. Why are there many faiths, when there is only one truth? The mountain analogy again, with many routes to the summit, over different types of terrain. Ramana Maharshi’s way has always been
considered as a sort of direct ascent of a precipice, as simple as it is difficult. This accounts for the idea (mistaken, I’m sure) that the task is easier with lesser gurus – hence for instance, Raghu’s family’s adherence to Paramahamsa Yogananda. The
vichara
path being too ‘high’, too ‘exalted’, a ‘lower path’ is chosen until the disciple is ready. I’m truly sorry, but bollocks! It isn’t presumption that chooses the direct approach, it’s faith.

There’s an English climber called George Mallory who disappeared on Everest in 1924. His body has never been found, and it isn’t clear whether he got to the top or not. His is the famous remark about wanting to climb Everest ‘because it’s “there”.’ He did a celebrated bit of climbing in Wales once, nipping down a sheer rock face by the most direct route to retrieve his pipe, which he’d forgotten. And for exactly the same reason: because it was ‘there’, and he was desperate for a soothing puff of Mayan tobacco.

The climb is written up in all the books as Mallory’s Pipe, the descent of a sheer face undertaken in fading light in front of witnesses, with a note which adds, ‘This is impossible.’

Come to that, it’s impossible for an Indian boy mentally to live through his own death and to understand that it is nothing, but it had happened, which was why I was here. And it was also ‘impossible’ for a severely disabled twenty-year-old from Buckinghamshire to be spending a month as a guest of the holy mountain, but here I was. Once you enter the realm of the impossible, every possibility is equally likely.

The only thing which really did seem to be impossible was for me to find the concentration necessary to meditate – or I suppose the disconcentration. Willpower must step back from the event. I couldn’t make that direct descent into the Self, lacking the aplomb of a tweeded mountaineering genius, able to nip down and grab his favourite briar without giving it a thought.

Mrs Osborne arranged for two men to take me up Arunachala. She called them ‘coolies’. I suppose she must have paid them for their labour, though I didn’t think of that at the time. One of them knelt
down and carried me in a sort of fireman’s lift. As he clambered up the mountain I had an excellent view of his bobbing rippling muscly back as I looked down, and if I managed to raise my sights a little I could see not where I was going, which was a total mystery, but where I had been. Maybe it was just as well, since the rocky ground dropped away so rapidly it took my breath with it. I could also glimpse the second coolie lithely ascending, carrying the folded wheelchair on his head with no apparent effort.

Those two coolies were the only Indians I met in Tiruvannamalai who didn’t smile at any time. They hardly even looked at me. From their point of view I suppose I was freight rather than person, and you don’t smile at a parcel. I didn’t mind. I had understood on trains between Bourne End, Burnham and Slough the compensating privileges of being defined as luggage. Freight doesn’t ogle the porter, no one imagines such a thing is possible, and so I was free to let my gaze rove over their sinewy bodies, heated by the sun, cooled by the outflow of sharp sweat. The beauty of one body was visual, it glistened under my eye, while the other was tactile. It glowed with heat and effort as it carried me. And if I was treating them as less than fully human, then I could honestly say that I had pinched the idea from them.

I don’t know exactly what instructions the coolies had had from Mrs Osborne, but eventually they settled me on a suitable rocky ledge. They unfolded the chair and put me in it, without cosseting but with perfect efficiency. They left me pointing towards the peak rather than downhill. The only flourish was that one of them produced a handkerchief, shook it out and then draped it over my head to keep the sun off. This was clearly something that Mrs Osborne had stipulated, and I had time to notice, as the handkerchief was shaken out, the initials
A. O.
embroidered in red on a corner. Alpha and Omega? Arunachala Om? No, I was being shaded by Arthur Osborne’s handkerchief, an honour that made me feel foolish. Commode and hanky – the late Arthur was giving me the works. The coolies even knotted the corners to keep it in place, a technique which I had always assumed evolved only once in the whole of human history and geography, among English holidaymakers at seaside resorts.

I expected these paid companions to stay while I contemplated the mountain, chatting quietly perhaps, sharing a beedie, idling like
taxis between fares. Mrs Osborne’s instructions had been delivered in what sounded like very peppery Tamil, but of course I couldn’t really understand a word of it. I was busy wondering whether her Polish accent was as strong in other languages as it was in English, and if so, how they managed to make head or tail of it.

When I looked round the ‘coolies’ had disappeared. There wasn’t anything supernatural, I don’t think, about their vanishing. Looking round isn’t something I can do in a moment – I have to wriggle round first. If they hadn’t been absorbed directly back into the mountain, according to the etiquette for numinous emanations, then they had clambered down its sides as spryly as they had clambered up.

I was now in direct communion with Arunachala, while the ground dropped away behind me. There was nothing between me and the mountain. In a sense I had been riding on his back for weeks, but this was different. His eye was upon me, and though the experience was very unlike being Frodo Baggins writhing beneath the stare of Sauron it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Arunachala was unhostile, still residually hostly, but not (at this altitude) particularly indulgent. All my excuses went up in smoke under that gaze, like sweet wrappers on a bonfire.

Why was I here?

One answer would be that I had followed a trail from a library book to a crazy old lady with a handy verandah, but that wasn’t what the mountain meant. I tried one more time to concentrate, while the sweat started to trickle down my face. Enlightenment felt like the onset of heatstroke.

I had never to my knowledge dreamed of the mountain or the god (though who’s to say – how do you know when you’re dreaming of white light?), but I had experienced a puzzling dream about the man, about Ramana Maharshi. This was during my time at High Wycombe Technical College, but it was a dream entirely free of the daily grit whose rubbing sets off the nacreous secretion we call dreaming – the quotidian residues. Ramana Maharshi and I were sitting on a patch of sand, whether an area of desert or a specially contrived expanse I couldn’t tell, together with an Arab whom I didn’t recognise. I listened attentively to what Bhagavan was saying, but after a little while the Arab walked off in disgust, kicking sand towards us as he went.
At this Ramana Maharshi turned to me and said, ‘I would rather have your love than your anger.’ I woke up with a great sense of injustice, since I had been attending very humbly and hadn’t been the one who had kicked up all the fuss.

It took Mrs Osborne to point out the obvious – that since it was my dream, the Arab was as much me as ‘I’ was. The anger displaced onto him was really mine. At some level I was seething with resentment at my need of a guru. An understandable feeling, of course, since I was so comprehensively dependent in other areas, but hard to take into your heart (the only place where things can be fully owned and finally shed).

Gruffly Mrs O consoled me, pummelling antiseptic creams into the bruise which her unwelcome insight had made. ‘Progress is an illusion, my dear John. As is the absence of progress.’ By this time I was so used to her way with sibilants that I would only have noticed if the hissing stopped. These strange noises were like the multifarious knocks and rattles of an old car, and oddly reassuring. Only sudden silent running would announce the imminence of collapse.

‘It is disheartening for you, I know. You have brought your little radio to a new place,’ she would say, ‘where there is a terribly powerful transmitter. The strong signal overwhelms your little apparatus, that is all.’

Ramana Maharshi was very fond of taking parables from the wireless as well as that other high technology of his day, the cinema. He used the example of the radio (which a devotee had turned on, rather too loud) to show that there is no time and no space – here after all is a little box that says, perfectly truthfully, ‘Hello, this is Hyderabad’ one minute and ‘Hello, Bangalore here’ the next. Yet it never moves an inch.

I can’t say I was much consoled by this explanation. If my little apparatus was overwhelmed, what was I supposed to do about it?

‘Perhaps your little radio will tune itself to the new signal. You must learn patience from the mountain.’

I wondered if the problem was with my mantra, my regulation-
issue beginner’s-level
Om-Mane-Padme-Om
, so I asked her what she used to help her meditate. She seemed rather shocked by so personal a question. It was as if I had asked for the loan of some underwear. ‘If you need a new mantra one will be given to you in time, but you cannot simply borrow one from someone else on the Path.’ Then she relented a little. ‘You might try
Arunachala Siva
or simply
Om
. Perhaps one of those will help.’ In practice I didn’t get anywhere with either, and fell back on my old standby. It seemed silly to think that a mantra would need converting to cope with the vagaries of a foreign current, like an electric shaver.

Mrs Osborne must have realised that my distress was real. She unbent a bit. ‘It is sometimes easier for children to give full attention than adults. My daughter Catherine – Katya – was the first of any of us to enter Bhagavan’s presence, carrying the customary basket of fruit. He indicated the low table on which such things were put, but she misunderstood and hopped up there herself, cradling the basket.

‘The disciples nudged each other and said that she was making an offering of herself to Bhagavan. Certainly she had no difficulty communicating with him. You yourself are no longer a child, but you are younger than I was when I came here, younger also than Arthur.

‘When he came here at the end of the war, he experienced similar difficulties to yours. He said that the presence of Bhagavan was less real to him than the photograph which had given him such strength and serenity during the years of his internment.’

I perked up no end at this precedent. ‘So it’s a sort of test?’

‘It is no sort of test. There are no tests. What is it that would be tested? It is a stage merely.’ I must have looked crushed all over again, and her consoling instincts gained ascendancy. ‘A schoolfriend of Ramana Maharshi, visiting him here, once said, “If you stay with the
Jñani
he gives you your cloth ready woven” – meaning that you don’t have to find the thread and weave it yourself, as you do with other gurus. But that is not necessarily the case for everyone. Each has his path, but the mountain is the same goal for all.’

Drowsing beneath my folkloric hanky, I began to think that the mountain had taken his eye off me. The strangest aspect of my pilgrimage was that Arunachala, in Britain so absolutely steady a signal source, became when I was in such close proximity oddly inconstant.

Arunachala didn’t altogether compel my reverence as I had assumed in advance. Ramana Maharshi wrote in an evocation of the mountain that was himself, ‘Though in fact fiery, my lack-lustre appearance as a hill on this spot is an effect of grace and loving solicitude for the maintenance of the world.’

There were times when Arunachala really did look lack-lustre to me, just one more mountain, fit subject for a holiday postcard, to be sent to those people who are owed holiday postcards. Sometimes Arunachala could have been any hill that had seized my imagination when I read about it – the Wrekin, say, in the poems of
A Shropshire
Lad
.

At this point it would be hard to say that I was even trying to meditate. I was engaged in a rêverie which was the exact opposite of meditation, perversely imagining the Wrekin in mid-Shropshire instead of Arunachala in mid-Tamil Nadu. Behind closed eyes I was trying to subtract from my surroundings the Indian smells, baked earth, flower perfume, and spice, not to mention the Indian heat, and to replace them with genteel transient fragrances and parochial birdsong. Insipid scents and tweetings.

I tried to imagine church bells in a peal, the jangling overlapping changes which somehow spell out the opposite – changelessness. The acoustical shimmering which is the closest our ears can come to hearing eternity. It’s even possible that I was feeling homesick, though I was conjuring up a synthetic landscape rather than anything I actually knew.

It seemed to me that I could really hear bells, but not church bells – cowbells. I opened my eyes and saw, some distance away, a cowherd boy with some cattle. One of the cows wasn’t tethered and seemed to be free to wander where it pleased. It also seemed to see me, and as if acting from a sociable impulse it ambled my way. The bell round its neck was massive and made of some dully shining metal. It didn’t seem scared or suspicious of the wheelchair, as most livestock is (many pets have the same mistrust).