Tim Parks - The Server

Marcia sighed heavily. Opening my eyes I saw she had stuck the little finger of her right hand way up her left nostril. She was absorbed, listening to Dasgupta and exploring her nose. Without thinking, I jumped to my feet, dragged the door across the carpet, slipped out and shut it behind me.

Damn!

I stood in the porch. I was trembling. Why? To my right was the corridor and Mi Nu’s sitting room. I suppose it’s her sitting room. A small Buddha sat by the open door. It was faint, but there was definitely a smell. Of jasmine? Definitely an aura, a dim green light, like under leaves in a wood. A special stillness. It was drawing me in, the way, when you finally get close, your mind is drawn towards jhana , you can feel the stillness pulling, the emptiness pulling. So I could walk down there right now and ask Mi Nu that question. Why can’t I be good, Mi Nu? Was that the question? Why can’t I be happy? Or, Why do I want to be good, when I’m obviously not? What was I thinking of when I ran into the sea? Why didn’t I die, Mi Nu? Why didn’t I die? Why can’t I die? Now.

I stood in the porch. There was no need for me to sit with Marcia. Why had Mrs Harper asked me to do that? As if a practising lawyer couldn’t listen to the Dhamma Service talk on her own. Teach me to be like you, Mi Nu. How can I be like you, how can I live in your world? Maybe that is the question.

Is it?

Then I heard a strange sound. Someone was wailing. Or whimpering. Very softly. What was it? I advanced a step. A seagull? A kettle? Now there was a chuckle. Weird. Definitely a low chuckle. A growl!

I turned and walked out.

I walked out of the bungalow, past the Metta Hall, along the ivied fence that divides the sexes, down to the dining hall, through the female side to the kitchen, then back through the male side, out into the male compound and straight to Dormitory A and the diarist’s room.

I didn’t plan to go. I went.

I acquiesce to my punishment. I can’t help it. I’m trapped .

THE GUIDED SESSION was about halfway through when I arrived. I had time. Mrs Harper thinks I am with Marcia. I settled on the bed.

I never realized how futile my mental life was. An endless loop, disconnected from reality .

One moment I had been planning to ask Mi Nu how I could become like her — there was that inviting light, that whiff of incense where the passageway opened into the stillness of the bungalow’s main room — and now I was stretched out on a man’s bed in a room that definitely had that smell: the socks, the smoker’s overcoat, the slept-in sheets.

I took off my shoes and lay down. God. It was so like old times. ‘I’m modelling for a painting,’ I told his wife, when she found me there. I heard the key turning and saw a boyish haircut on an ageing head. ‘And he lets you stay in his studio and sleep in his bed?’ She seemed tired, not angry. ‘I was feeling cold,’ I said. Jonathan was shocked that his wife had come round without warning. ‘We haven’t lived together for years,’ he protested. ‘She only has the key for emergencies.’

I turned a page.

Just a disturbance, milling round and round, an eddy in a backwater, the same water turning round and round with the same dead leaves. My thoughts .

Why am I reading this old guy’s guff? I flicked here and there through the notebook. What was the cry I had heard from Mi Nu’s room? The growl? Does she keep a dog?

What if Dasgupta were dead and we were listening to the voice of a dead man?

That was a funny idea.

Every night, every session, he speaks to us on the video. When in fact he’s dead. Decades ago. Would it matter? Is the message any different because the person isn’t physically there? Because the person isn’t alive? What if they had recorded Christ, Muhammad, the Buddha? The Sermon on the Mount. On DVD. Listen to your Saviour’s voice in the original Hebrew with English subtitles (choice of King James Version or the Revised Standard) .

Imagine Dasgupta’s recorded voice going on for centuries. It’s possible. Maybe he is dead .

The Fire Sermon, on CD. Ideal when driving in heavy traffic .

St Paul Preaches to the Athenians, available as an MP3 download. Take it on your trip to Greece .

Would everyone be Christian?

Would everyone be cured of their Christianity?

Some of the handwriting was tricky. The man was scribbling fast. It was getting more and more slanted, more and more windblown. For a moment I thought I could hear him. It was Jonathan’s voice when he got on a roll. Gravelly. Jonathan hated religion. How we made fun of my mum for doing the flower arrangements in church. Of his wife for teaching in Sunday School. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jonnie, how did you marry someone who teaches Sunday School?’

I turned a page. It was strange being here on this man’s bed, like I wasn’t in the Dasgupta Institute at all. I’d hopped over the fence and walked two miles to the Barley Mow and now I was sinking gin and tonics, listening to Jonathan. It was a different world.

Mi Nu’s room was a different world too. But that would be like when faces appear in the darkness, eyes calmly finding yours, drawing you down the tunnel to bliss. Instead I came to the pub. This diary is at least a fifty-fifty gin and tonic. I should check to see if he keeps a flask in his overcoat.

Perhaps that’s how I could have saved the company. A box-set of the great religious speeches of all time .

If we had the Buddha in person pronouncing his Fire Sermon, what room would there be for Dasgupta and his unctuous smile? Imagine a man with huge charisma, a huge ego — Christ, Buddha, Muhammad — he fears that ego, he knows it’s trouble. He preaches against egotism, he erects a religious system against egotism, satisfying his ego as he pulls in the disciples and demands total surrender .

The ringed fingers, the white cushions, the big belly wrapped in clean cotton. My friends this. My friends that. I CAN’T BELIEVE WE ALL SIT THERE EVERY EVENING LISTENING TO THIS JERK .

If we had Jesus videoed on the cross (adults only), the Resurrection on streaming, the Ascension captured on St Peter’s mobile, where would that leave the popes, the heresies?

Revelation on record. Where would that leave history? Or science?

How can the idiot preach anicca anicca anicca all is flux, feel the flux in your fingers, in your toes, and then fix his words for ever on a DVD, for ever the same, every Dasgupta Institute all over the world, retreat after retreat, the same recordings and video discourses day one day two day three day four five six seven, with translations in this language, translations in that, and the course leader actually present reduced to slotting a disk into a machine. How humiliating .

Dasgupta arises but he won’t pass away .

I should go forward tonight at question time and ask the bloke, Harper, How do you feel about all the preaching being done on DVD? Wouldn’t you like to preach a bit yourself? Since you’re here .

Plot. A secret society of frustrated priests schemes to destroy the videos of their deceased religious leader so as to make space to preach themselves. But the religion’s followers believe the dead man is God and tear the priests to pieces .

The blockbuster that could have saved Wordsmith .

Why oh why did my writers never write a blockbuster?

Just one Harry Potter. One!

Because you chose crap writers .

L .

Because you were scared of success .

L .