Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I knelt, I do not know for what, and hid my eyes from myself. I did not weep, I did not sing, I did not know. I knelt that happiness might be. That the dead might pardon us for our mistakes, for we are poor fools, thinking that the Rhone divides mankind. Love was born on those garigues of Provence, and love lights us when we pray.

Love shines as the instinct in the step, where we move. The snow has fallen again. We leave our footsteps behind telling love we have loved. The post office may be there and may not take letters — for someone, they think, has cut the bridge on the Rhone— but where chevaliers have walked, and have conquered kingdoms for their ladies, why could not a Brahmin, a simple foolish soul, go up the steps and see the light on the second floor of Villa Ste Cécile? I go up the steps, I the husband of Madeleine.

There were irises on both sides of the pathway. The snow had bent them, the snow overflowing the orange trees. I rang, where my name still was, ‘K. R. Ramaswamy,’ and Madeleine came down the staircase. She was light of foot, though she was still round; her fat had not diminished. Like the moon in a theatre, there was a crescent somewhere in the sky, and an abundant purity about the stars. Madeleine opened the gate.

‘It is I,’ I said. ‘C’est moi, Madeleine.’ She did not seem surprised. She did not look happy: she did not look hesitant. ‘May I come in?’ I said, as she walked back up the garden. I closed the gate behind me. She held the door wide ajar, for me to come in.

It was a strange house, it was someone else’s house. There were wheel-barrows on the landing, and bottles and two bicycles. I went up the stairway. The rooms were bare. Almost all the furniture was gone, it seemed. There was the same low bed, covered with a yellow bed-cover. There were many chakras and mandalas on them, like one sees on Tibetan tanakas. The table was richer with a few more vajras, a few more demons, and a very beautiful big Avalokiteshwara. There were red hibiscus in the water, and at the foot of the Avalokiteshwara. I sat in the only chair in the room, still one of the plush chairs that had come from her mother. She sat on the floor, squat like a Hindu, and took the rosary from the table. The room smelt of something familiar — it smelt of sandalwood.

‘Why did you come?’

‘To see you.’

‘You cannot see anything but the eighteen aggregates.’

‘But eighteen aggregates can see eighteen aggregates,’ I said, laughing.

‘Then it is no business of mine,’ she said, and started counting her beads. I sat there, in the smell of sandalwood. In the inner picture, of Indra and Prajapathi, of the Buddha that was, and the Buddha to be, I saw mountains, rivers, and snows, animals and mankind walking backward through history, as in a film, as in some ancient story. I could see Madeleine kneeling before an ascetic and saying, ‘My Lord, are you a man or a divinity.’ And the yellow-robed one answered, ‘May I know what I am, lady? I am but a wanderer, a minstrel, a mendicant.’ And she gave him, she in the infinitude of her compassion, a home and a bowl, hot water to wash in and cold, cool water to drink. She rubbed him, did the lady, with many sweet-smelling unguents, and bathed him in the love of her tears; her hair grew long and curled and black, for her love was so simple in devotion, and she rose and she sat, as though love was a gesture, a genuflection, and she parodied herself out of existence, remembering the love she bore the ascetic. And she lived a long and intent life, in world after world, bathed herself and combed her hair, washed herself and prepared herself, as though for a wedding; but when the earth came and the light of trees and rivers, the intelligence of Plato, the directness of Descartes, she gave herself a name and a station, and prepared herself for a festival.

Festival is only the commemoration of what is not; you worship the non-existent to prove that you exist. You worship yourself in your birthdays, saying time is eternal. You worship your son knowing you will die. You worship your husband the Lord, knowing he is a fool, a thief, a non-existent Brahmin, ‘made of the eighteen aggregates of Nagarjuna.’ True, the snow is pure and white in the garden outside, true that the sun must shine some day on the footsteps that have been left behind; true, too, that the Buddha has passed this way, and that elephants have knelt; and that the Black Virgin of St Ouen still cures dread diseases — three circumambulations with a stick of oak, and four ‘OM — JRIMs’, and a draught of the juice of red dandelion with honey, and eight narrow nights on the white carpet asleep — and the next morning, what you give cures, what you say heals. But love, my love, cannot be healed, cannot be said. It must go as it came. It must not linger, it must not name, it must die; for it was made of the eighteen aggregates. Love that is love remains, like those hibiscus in the crystal; the water reflects them, as my eye reflects God. Look, look into it, my Brahmin, and see me. ‘Apri gli occhi e riguarda qual son io.’

There was no word spoken, and all was said. You just see the counting of beads. Then you ride and say to God, even unto the Buddha Himself, many, many angry things. ‘Lord Buddha, my Lord, O you abode of Compassion, O you who talked even unto the courtesan Ambapalli and partook of the meal of Chunda, the untouchable, do you hear me? May love be as fat-bosomed as the olives in Aix be ancient.’ (‘Ah, cela vient du temps des Romains,’ said Scarlatti, as though, being Italian, he still was a Roman, and as though he had conquered France.) Lord Buddha, did you make the cypress grow grey, and the skin so pale? Must one shine only because one is desperate, that man and husband had to take the steps out of the garden, counting the marks he’d made, on the pure winter snow? Must the bead be the ladder of intelligence? Must truth grow fat with fasting? It smells bad, Lord Buddha, it smells very bad, that the kingdom of earth be shut in with a garden gate.

India, my Lord, is a vast and lost land; a beloved land of many mountains and cliffs, of cedars and deodars, of elephants and tigers, of pigeons that sing and owls that hoot. We grow mangoes in India, Lord Buddha, and the women of my country worship trees. Buddha, Lord Buddha, quit the sanctum, come through vision and dream; come like that statue of you, brought to London in some British Governor’s box, which came night after night with tears in its eyes, and body grown fat with fasting, saying, ‘Send me back, send me back, send me back to my own Land’; till one day the lady sent the Buddha away and all was peace and brilliance in the air of Brighton. Buddha, Lord Buddha, do not traffic with the Black Virgin; do not sing those Tibetan mantras; do not fast, do not preach, do not count beads; open the door and walk out to the India that is everywhere about, marking the footsteps on the snows.

The river Rhone flows like the Ganges, she flows does Mother Rhone into the seven seas, and she built herself a chapel, that the gay gypsies might come and sing and worship Sarah in her sanctuary. Ships go, rushing ships go now to India, to far India, to quick India. Go there Mother Earth, go there Mother Rhone! Do not devastate your being with fast, tear, and prayer. India is the kingdom of God, and it is within you. India is wheresoever you see, hear, touch, taste, smell. India is where you dip into yourself, and the eighteen aggregates are dissolved. Even Bertrand de Born I take with me. I would take even Péguy to my India. Come… Mother, Mother Rhone…!

I must have gone round and round the post office six or seven times, then I went down to the Place de la République and jumped into a taxi. I said ‘Tarascon’—and what a night of love it was, with the moon and the snow, and then the Rhone.