Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

So when my father had said he was very ill, and wished I could come, she said, ‘Go, and don’t you worry about anything. I will look after myself.’ It seemed wiser for me to go. Madeleine would continue to teach and I would settle my affairs at home. Mother’s property had been badly handled by the estate-agent Sundarrayya, the rents not paid, the papers not in order: and I thought I would go and see the university authorities too, for a job was being kept vacant for me. The Government had so far been very kind — and my scholarship continued. Once my doctorate was over I would take Madeleine home, and she would settle with me — somehow I always thought of a house white, single-storeyed on a hill and by a lake — and I would go day after day to the university and preach to them the magnificence of European civilization. I had taken History, and my special subject was the Albigensian heresy. I was trying to link up the Bogomolites and the Druzes, and thus search back for the Indian background — Jain or maybe Buddhist — of the Cathars. The ‘pure’ were dear to me. Madeleine, too, got involved in them, but for a different reason. Touch, as I have said, was always distasteful to her, so she liked the untouching Cathars, she loved their celibacy. She implored me to practise the ascetic brahmacharya of my ancestors, and I was too proud a Brahmin to feel defeated. The bridge was anyhow there, and could not be crossed. I knew I would never go to Spain. India was wonderful to me. It was like a juice that one is supposed to drink to conquer a kingdom or to reach the deathless — juice of rare jasmine or golden myrobolan, brought from the nether world by a hero or dark mermaid. It gave me sweetness and the délire of immortality. I could not die, I knew; and the world seemed so whole, even death when it was like my father’s. So simple: when it came he said, ‘I go,’ and looked at us, with just one tear at the end of his left eye; then stretched himself out, and died.

The smell of India was sweet. But Madeleine was very far. Little Mother when she saw the photographs of Madeleine and the baby did not say anything, but went inside to the sanctuary to lay flowers on her Ramayana. She never spoke about it at all, but whenever she saw me sad she said, ‘Birth and death are the illusions of the non-Self.’ And as though before my own sorrow her unhappiness seemed petty and untrue, she seemed suddenly to grow happier and happier. She started singing the whole day; she even brought out her vina from the box where it had not been touched for three years, and started singing. My father who was still alive then said, ‘Oh, I suppose you want to show off your great musical learning to the Eldest.’ Even so he laid his book aside, a rare act for him to do, and started to listen to the music.

My grandfather said Father had such a wonderful voice when young — just like a woman’s voice. ‘Later, when that Mathematics got hold of him — for figures are like gnomes, they entice you and lead you away, with backward turned faces, to the world of the unknown—’ he continued, ‘your father never sang a single kirtanam again. Oh, you should have heard him sing Purandaradasa.’ I never heard my father sing, but this I know, he had a grave and slow-moving voice such as musicians possess. His mathematics absorbed him so deeply that you saw him more with a pencil — his glasses stuck to the end of his nose (he had a well-shapen but long and somewhat pointed nose)— than with a vina on his arm. Father was a mathematician, and when he was not able to solve a problem he would turn to Sanskrit grammar. Panini was his hobby all his life, and later he included Bhartrhari among the great grammarians. Father had no use for Philosophy at all — he called it the old hag’s description of the menu in paradise. For him curry of cucumber or of pumpkin made no difference to your intestines. ‘The important fact is that you eat — and you live.’

Father’s greatest sorrow was that I did not take his mathematical studies a little further. He would say, ‘The British will not go till we can shame them with our intelligence. And what is more intellectual than mathematics, son?’ He worshipped Euler, and quoted with admiration his famous saying on the algebraic proof of God. That Father’s work on Roger Ramanujam’s identities or on Waring’s problem were accepted by the world only made him feel happy that it made Indian Freedom so much the nearer. He was happy though that I had taken the Albigensian heresy as a subject for research, for he thought India should be made more real to the European.

He had never been to Europe. First, Grandfather was against the eldest son-in-law going across the seas. Then when Grandfather was reconciled with the changing values of the world there were too many responsibilities at home. And Father, in any case, did not care for travel. Like many persons of his generation I think he could not forget his bath and the Brahmin atmosphere of the house — the ablutions in the morning, with the women singing hymns, the perfume of camphor, and the smell of garlic and incense when the daughter came home for childbirth. He disliked my marriage, I think chiefly because my wife could not sing at an arathi; but before the world he boasted of his intellectual daughter-in-law, and had a picture of me and Madeleine on his table.

He never thought he would die, so he never thought of the funeral ceremonies. Grandfather must have thought of it, for when I went to ask his advice as to where and what should be done Grandfather had all the answers ready: the ceremony had to be in Benares, and it had to be in my brother’s name. ‘Not that I do not love you, Rama. How can I not love my daughter’s own eldest born? But that is what the elders have laid down; and it has come from father to son, generation after generation. Why change it today? Why give importance to unimportant things? God is not hidden in a formula, nor is affection confined to funeral ceremonies. Be what you are. I like the way you go about thinking on the more serious things of Vedanta. Leave religion to smelly old fogies like me,’ he concluded, and I almost touched his feet. He was so noble and humble, Grandfather was.

It was not the same thing with my uncles, but that is a different story.

Thus Benares was predestined, and as I went down the river with Little Mother, Sridhara on her lap, I could so clearly picture Madeleine. She would be seated at the left window of the Villa Ste-Anne, patching some shirt of mine, and thinking that as the sun sets and the sun rises, she would soon have the winter out. Then the house had to be got ready, and before the house was ready I would be there, back in Aix. Not that it gave her any happiness — but it had to be, so it would be. I was part of the rotation of a system — just as July 14 would come, and she would spend the two weeks till the thirtieth getting the house in order before we went to the mountain for a month. After that we would go to see her uncle for three days on a family visit, take a week off in Paris, and then come down to Aix before the third week of September. On October I term begins and on waking up she would see my face.

Affection is just a spot in the geography of the mind.

For Madeleine geography was very real, almost solid. She smelt the things of the earth, as though sound, form, touch, taste, smell were such realities that you could not go beyond them— even if you tried. Her Savoyan ancestry must have mingled with a lot of Piedmontese, so that this girl from Charente still had the thyme and the lavender almost at the roots of her hair. She said that when she was young she loved to read of bullfights, and the first picture she had ever stuck against the wall of her room was of Don Castillero y Abavez, who had won at the young age of nineteen every distinction of a great torrero. She hated killing animals, however, and I did not have to persuade her much to become a vegetarian. But sometimes her warm Southern blood would boil as never my thin Brahmin blood could, and when she was indignant — and always for some just cause — whether about the injustice done to teachers at the Lycée de Moulin, or the pitiful intrigue in some provincial miners’ union at Lens or St Etienne, she would first grow warm and then cold with anger, and burst into tears, and weep a whole hour. This also explains how during the occupation she was closer to the Communists than to the Catholics or Socialists, though she hated tyranny of all sorts. What I think Madeleine really cared for was a disinterested devotion to any cause, and she loved me partly because she felt India had been wronged by the British, and because she would, in marrying me, know and identify herself with a great people. She regretted whenever she read a Greek text not having been born at the time of the Athenian Republic; which also explained her great enthusiasm for Paul Valéry. I, on the other hand, had been brought up in the gnya-gnyaneries of Romain Rolland, and having read his books on Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, I almost called him a rishi and a saint. Valéry seemed to be too disdainful, too European. For me, the Albigensian humility seemed sweeter, and more naturally Indian.