Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Loving Valéry, Madeleine, who taught History at the college, loved more the whole of ancient Greece. And when I introduced her to Indian History her joy was so great that she started researching on the idea of the Holy Grail. There is an old theory that the Holy Grail was a Buddhist conception — that the cup of Christ was a Buddhist relic which the Nestorians took over and brought to Persia; there the legend mingled with Manichaeism, and became towards the end of the Middle Ages the strange story of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail also gave Madeleine’s sense of geography a natural movement. She loved countries and epochs not our own.

Whereas I was born to India, where the past and the present are for ever knit into one whole experience — going down the Ganges who could not imagine the Compassionate One Himself coming down the footpath, by the Saraju, to wash the mendicant-bowl? — and so for me time and space had very relative importance. I remember how in 1946, when I first came to Europe — I landed in Naples — Europe did not seem so far nor so alien. Nor when later I put my face into Madeleine’s golden hair and smelt its rich acridity with the olfactory organs of a horse — for I am a Sagittarian by birth — did I feel it any the less familiar. I was too much of a Brahmin to be unfamiliar with anything, such is the pride of caste and race, and lying by Madeleine it was she who remarked, ‘Look at this pale skin beside your golden one. Oh, to be born in a country where tradition is so alive,’ she once said, ‘that even the skin of her men is like some royal satin, softened and given a new shine through the rubbing of ages.’ I, however, being so different, never really noted any difference. To me difference was inborn— like my being the eldest son of my father, or like my grandfather being the eight-pillared house Ramakrishnayya, and you had just to mention his name anywhere in Mysore State, even to the Maharaja, and you were offered a seat, a wash, and a meal, and a coconut-and-shawl adieu. To me difference was self-created, and so I accepted that Madeleine was different. That is why I loved her so. In fact, even Little Mother, who sat in front of me — how could I not love her, though she was so different from my own mother? In difference there is the acceptance of one’s self as a reality — and the perspective gives the space for love.

In some ways — I thought that day, as the boat, now that evening was soon going to fall, was moving upstream, with a fine, clear wind sailing against us — in some ways how like Madeleine was Little Mother. They both had the same shy presence, both rather silent and remembering everything; they loved, too, more than is customary. Both knew by birth that life was no song but a brave suffering, and that at best there are moments of bridal joy with occasionally a drive over a bridge — and then the return to the earth and maybe to widowhood.

I remember very well that day, just three days before our marriage. We had been to Rouen, just because we had nothing better to do, and Madeleine seemed so, so sad. She said, ‘I have a fear, a deep fear somewhere here; I have a fear I will kill you, that something in me will kill you, and I shall be a widow. Oh, beloved,’ she begged, ‘do not marry me. Let us part. There is still time.’ She was twenty-six then, and I twenty- one. I did not care for death and I said to her, as one does with deep certitude at such moments, ‘I will never die till you give me permission, Madeleine.’ She stopped and looked at me as though she were looking at a god, and turning laughed, for we were by the statue of Henriette de Bruges, who for the birth of her son Charles, later to become the Dark Hero of the Spanish Wars, had a statue erected to herself. The child Charles, with the crown of Burgundy already on his small plump head, was lying on her lap. The statue was stupid, but it seemed somehow an answer. And when we got back to Paris and were married at the Mairie of the VIIth Arrondissement — for I then lived in the rue St Dominique — we bought ourselves a book on Bruges that is still with me. It is one of the few things I could save for myself when the catastrophe came.

Bruges must be beautiful though. I have never been to that city of canals and waterfronts, but the ugly, fat face of Henriette de Bruges will always remain a patron saint of some mysterious and unperformed marriage.

Little Mother, having recovered her peace, started reciting as at home Sankara’s Nirvana — Astakam. I have loved it since the time Grandfather Kittanna returned from Benares and taught it to me. I would start on ‘Mano — budhi Ahankara …’ with a deep and learned voice, for after all I had been to a Sanskrit school. Little Mother followed me, and verse after verse: ‘Shivoham, Shivoham, I am Shiva, I am Shiva,’ she chanted with me. All the lights in Benares were by now lit, and even the funeral pyres on the Ghats seemed like some natural illumination. The monkeys must have gone to the tree tops, and the sadhus must be at their meals. Evening drums were beating from every temple, and one heard in the midst of it a train rumble over the Dalhousie Bridge. It was the long Calcutta Mail, going down to Moghul Sarai.

On the other side lay Ramnagarh — a real city for Rama. Every year people still came down to see the festival of Rama, and men and women and the Royal family with horses, fife and elephants enacted the story of Rama. Little Mother felt unhappy we were too late for it this year. I told her I would soon come back to India and take her on a long pilgrimage. I promised her Badrinath and even Kailas. I knew there would be no Himalayas for me. Sridhara woke and as Little Mother started suckling the child again, I chanted to her the Kashikapuradinatha Kalabhairavam bhaje:

‘I worship Kalabhairava, Lord of the city of Kashi,

Blazing like a million suns;

Our great saviour in our voyage across the world,

The blue-throated, the three-eyed grantor of all desires;

The lotus-eyed who is the death of death,

The imperishable one,

Holding the rosary of the human bone and the trident

Kashikapuradinatha Kalabhairavam bhaje.’

Benares is eternal. There the dead do not die nor the living live. The dead come down to play on the banks of the Ganges, and the living who move about, and even offer rice-balls to the manes, live in the illusion of a vast night and a bright city. Once again at the request of Little Mother I sang out a hymn of Sri Sankara’s, and this time it was Sri Dakshinamurthy Stotram. Maybe it was the evening, or something deeper than me that in me unawares was touched. I had a few tears rolling down my cheeks. Holiness is happiness. Happiness is holiness. That is why a Brahmin should be happy, I said to myself, and laughed. How different from Pascal’s ‘Le silence éternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie’ .

The road to the infinite is luminous if you see it as a city lit in a mirror. If you want to live in it you break the glass. The unreal is possible because the real is. But if you want to go from the unreal to the real, it would be like a man trying to walk into a road that he sees in a hall of mirrors. Dushasana 1is none other than the homme moyen sensuel.

For the bourgeois the world, and the Bank, and the notary are real; and the wedding ring as well. We spent, Madeleine and I, the last few thousand francs we had, to buy ourselves two thin gold wedding rings the day before our marriage. I still remember how they cost us 3700 francs apiece, and as we had a little over 9000 francs we went up the Boulevard St Michel to eat at the Indo-Chinese restaurant, rue Monsieur. We had rice for dinner and Madeleine felt happy. It was her recognition of India.

The next day at eleven we went up to the Mairie with two witnesses. One was Count R., an old and dear friend of Father’s who had worked with de Broglie; unable to go back to Hungary because of the Communist revolution there, he had settled in Paris. The other, from Madeleine’s side, was her cousin Roland, who was an officer in the French Marine. Having seen a great deal of the world, an Indian was for him no stranger — he even knew Trichinopoly and Manamadurai — and he came to the marriage in his brilliant uniform.