My Days (19 page)

In these twelve weeks, a voluminous quantity of paper had grown out of the sittings, which Mr. Rao gave me when I took my daughter back to Mysore. I never met him again. We corresponded for a few months. We tried remote sittings—that is, on a certain day and hour I sat alone, a couple of hundred miles away at Mysore or Coimbatore, and linked to Rao mentally, and he sent me the writing that resulted from this effort. After some time even that amount of dependence on the medium became unnecessary. I felt able to manage for myself independently, since psychic experience seemed to have become a part of my normal life and thought. In a few months I became an adept. That psychically I had developed became evident in course of time. One night, during a subsequent visit to Madras at my sister's house, I heard strange tappings on the window-pane, repeated exactly at a particular spot, at twelve-thirty in the night, which continued for ten minutes, ceased, and were repeated intermittently until two a.m. My sister was scared; she switched on the lights and shut herself in another part of the house; but I drew up a chair and watched the window-pane. Although I felt slightly nervous, I was determined to sit through and understand the message. At five a.m. the telephone rang to tell us of the passing of a close relative (of whom we were very fond) exactly at twelve-thirty in the night when the tapping had started.

I could catch telepathic messages or transmit my thoughts to others; and I could generally sense what was coming ahead or anticipate what someone would say. On another occasion, I was again at Madras, spending a night at a friend's house in Nungambakkam. I saw a ghost enter my room when I had just gone to bed and was not yet asleep. I heard the latch rattle, and I looked at the door, saw the ghost glide in, go past my bed, take a couple of turns in the room, and vanish. I felt a sudden chill in the air. . . . But for it, it might have been just someone coming in to pick up matches. . . . I didn't feel frightened but only slightly shaken and found it difficult to compose myself to go to sleep again.

Following the directions given, I practised psychic contacts regularly for some years, almost every night. I found it possible to abstract myself from my physical body (a process taught by Paul Brunton) and experience a strange sense of deliverance. And then gradually the interest diminished when I began to feel satisfied that I had attained an understanding of life and death.

Thereafter I resumed my normal life and activities. I wrote my fourth novel. That was
The English Teacher
, published in 1944 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, where Graham Greene was now a director. The Second World War was raging, and paper shortage and all kinds of shortages had disrupted the publishing world, but Greene managed to find the quota of paper for an edition of 3800 copies, and the book has been in print ever since.

Out of all this experience a view of personality or self or soul developed which has remained with me ever since. “Now we know in part, then fully, face to face . . .” said St. Paul; our faculties are limited by “now” and “here.” The full view of a personality would extend from the infant curled up in the womb and before it, and beyond it, and ahead of it, into infinity. Our normal view is limited to a physical perception in a condition restricted in time, like the flashing of a torchlight on a spot, the rest of the area being in darkness. If one could have a total view of oneself and others, one would see all in their full stature, through all the stages of evolution and growth, ranging from childhood to old age, in this life, the next one, and the previous ones.

Somehow, for the working out of some destiny, birth in the physical world seems to be important; all sexual impulses and the apparatus of sexual functions seem relevant only as a means to an end—all the dynamism, power, and the beauty of sex, have a meaning only in relation to its purpose. This may not sound an appropriate philosophy in modern culture, where sex is a “fetish” in the literal sense, to be propitiated, worshipped, and meditated upon as an end in itself; where it is exploited in all its variations and deviations by movie-makers, dramatists, and writers, while they attempt to provide continuous titillation, leading to a continuous pursuit of sexual pleasure—which, somehow, Nature has designed to be short-lived, for all the fuss made—so that one is driven to seek further titillation and sexual activity in a futile never-ending cycle.

Paul Brunton, who came to India to study Indian philosophy and mysticism, stayed in Mysore for two years in order to complete a book he was writing. He had taken a house in Vontikoppal, at the northern section of the city, a couple of miles from my house. One or two evenings in the week, I took a walk to his place, and dined with him. His dinner invariably consisted of a boiled potato, a slice of bread, and a cup of yoghurt. He abstained from meat and alcohol, and found this diet appropriate for his life of meditation and yogic practices. We had kindred interests. When he had arrived from Egypt he had just published a book,
A Search in Secret Egypt
, which I had reviewed for
The Hindu
in sceptical and tongue-in-cheek style. But when I met him, I found him to be a genuine person. I found that many of his experiences, which had sounded improbable, were true. He had spent midnights in the chambers of Pyramids and had had strange psychic encounters and visions. Under the guidance of certain practitioners of the esoteric arts in Egypt, he had attained mastery over deadly serpents, scorpions, and wild animals, the power to view the past and future, and various miraculous and magical powers
*
of not much value in one's evolution. A sixteenth-century Tamil mystic had sung, “One may learn to walk on water, mesmerize a mad elephant, muzzle a tiger or a lion, walk on fire, and perform other feats, but yet the real feat would be to still the restless mind and understand one's real self.” Every spiritual seeker acquires at some stage occult powers but ultimately gives them up as being unessential. Paul Brunton abandoned all his earlier practices when he came to Mysore, and, having had the guidance of Ramana, a savant who resided in Thiruvannamalai Hills, he meditated on the question “Who am I?” The enquiry “Who am I?,” he explained, eliminated the self-conscious framework limiting one's personality, and one attained a great spiritual release. When we met, we exchanged our experiences, analysed and evaluated them. Off and on he would disappear for a few months, going in search of some mystic in the Himalayas, and would return as suddenly to Mysore.

By about 1942 our home was richer by the addition of two sisters-in-law, both my elder and my younger brothers being now married, the latter having a son, too. Our house had become full and lively. My sisters-in-law relieved my mother of a lot of housekeeping duties, and also practically adopted my daughter, who went to a school in the mornings but spent the rest of the day in the company of her aunts. I was left very much alone to go about my searches and researches. But she expected me home at nine in the evening, and felt uneasy if I stayed out late. When that happened she would be watching at the window, slightly red-eyed. At such times my mother would chide me, “Have some thought for the child and come home early. She has some curious misgivings if you are not home early.”

T
he disruption caused by the Second World War had its repercussions in my career too. We suffered black-out, food rationing, alarums and excursions even in our distant corner of Mysore, but in addition to what the public suffered, I had my own personal losses to count. My agent, David Higham, now perhaps a major general, was away on army duty. The British publishers were nowhere to be seen, all copies of my books, waiting to be sold, were destroyed in a London blitz, and the little royalties trickling in half-yearly were gone.
The Hindu
could not take in as many contributions as it used to owing to newsprint shortage, printing-ink shortage, and god knew what else. It was necessary for me to do something else to keep myself going. No way left for a writer to reach a public. Journalists and writers who could get into the propaganda organization were saved, but I was outside such activity. Neither politics nor the war were of any interest to me.
The Hindu
provided a little space for my contributions, but I was getting tired of recording my observations of the life around. The constant state of receptivity and then the eight-hundred-word expression thereof were becoming tiresome—I wanted to put an end to this activity before the readers of
The Hindu
should also begin to think likewise. I had written at this period mainly on the difficulties of the common man—how he had to stand in a queue morning after morning, at the ration shop, bus stand, and cloth shop, unfamiliar with the devious paths to the black market, and struggling through life in his effort at maintaining himself and his family. It had no doubt a relevance to the days we lived in, but I felt tired of this and similar themes. A time came when I could not bear to put pen to paper or go through anything I wrote in manuscript or print. Nor could this weekly grind leave me any time or energy to plan major writing. Every sentence that I wrote seemed to be taking me away from something more important. I was racked with a feeling that I ought to be doing something else.

Our meeting-ground nowadays was a doctor's shop on Hundred Feet Road. It was called Narashimha Pharmacy and was presided over by our family doctor, who was an all-rounder—interested in tennis, cricket, and politics. He attended on my daughter and kept her in good health. It was my habit to drop in at about seven in the evening to report to him on our welfare generally or to ask if some tonic should be continued. The business part of the visit was secondary, as he had provided several rows of chairs facing his table and enjoyed company. My friends gathered there every evening, and we sat around and discussed life and literature. During one of those sessions, I cannot say whose idea it was, but the idea was born that I should start a publication of my own. I rejected the proposal for obvious reasons. Purna, who used to float in and out of this group constantly, suggested puckishly, “Why not call it ‘Indian Thoughtless'?”

“Let us call it ‘Indian Thought,' which will amount to the same thing,” said another.

It was agreed that this was a good title. We began to talk out the details. It was to be a quarterly publication devoted to literature, philosophy, and culture. The doctor promised to get all his sick clients to subscribe for the journal. Purna again promised government patronage in the form of advertisements and library orders. Another friend promised to write the accounts. My own business would be to gather material and see that it was printed.

I could hardly sleep that night. My head buzzed with plans and calculations. The first thing I did on the following morning was to compose a manifesto to be circulated widely, announcing the inception of the journal. I shut myself in my room after persuading my daughter to go to the neighbour's house and play with their children. I did not want to be interrupted while performing editorial tasks. I packed into the manifesto all my ambition: to phrase our culture properly; to utilize the English language as a medium for presenting our cultural heritage—Indian classics and philosophy from Sanskrit and a score of other regional languages, modern writing included; and to encourage original English writing of the highest quality. My ambition could properly have been realized if I had had planned a cultural encyclopaedia of five thousand pages, but within the dimensions we had set, one hundred and twenty pages once a quarter, it would have seemed madness to try it, more like packing an elephant in a demy-octavo carton. I wrote numerous letters each day to possible contributors and well-wishers, the letter always beginning pompously: “Now I am writing to you as the editor of a literary quarterly, whose scope the enclosed pamphlet will explain. I should indeed be delighted to consider . . . and I can offer a small honorarium of thirty rupees per article. . . .” My tone suggested that the editorial rank had been thrust on me by a vast, stubborn committee; there was nothing to indicate that it was a self-imposed honour. I felt I had all along missed my true vocation, which was to be an editor. I remembered J. C. Squire and other editors of my “Divine Music” days, and decided that I would not be like them. I was destined to discover and nurture a whole school of young writers. If I were to reject an article, I'd write a letter more in sorrow than in arrogance, and never send a printed rejection slip under any circumstance. Being an editor, I could be sure of finding a place for my own writing. (I realized in due course that it was more profitable to sell my pieces to other magazines.)