Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Savithri came with that sweep and nervousness of the modern girl and sat near me. She was fascinated with the idea that I was working on the Albigensians; she would herself have taken History, but her father had recommended English. So she was doing the English Tripos, and asked if I knew Cambridge. I told her I did not, but would take the earliest opportunity to go there when I was next in London. I also invited her to Aix- en-Provence, showed her a picture of Villa Ste-Anne and spoke feelingly of Madeleine. I never mentioned the child. And the only curious thing I remember about Savithri that day was — I said to myself: Here is a very clever person, but she never says anything that really matters. We had one thing in common: we both knew Sanskrit, and could entertain each other with Uttra Rama Charita or Raghuvamsa.

Her presence never said anything, but her absence spoke. Even when she went to speak on the telephone one felt she had a rich, natural grace, and one longed for her to be back. I felt I did not like her, she was too modern for me; she had already started smoking. If I remember right she was fixing up a dance engagement on the telephone. I could not understand these northerners going from strict purdah to this extreme modernism with unholy haste. We in the south were more sober, and very distant. We lived by tradition — shameful though it might look. We did not mind quoting Sankaracharya in Law Courts or marrying our girls in the old way, even if they had gone abroad. The elder brother still commanded respect, and my sisters would never speak to me as Savithri spoke to her father — the Raja Sahib had just come to say goodbye and he felt his future son-in-law and family were in good company.

When I went back home, what could I tell Little Mother? I told her I saw a strange family and dropped the subject there. We spoke of other and more urgent things. I told her about going to Hardwar and described to her the beauty of Dehra Dun and the foothills of the Himalayas, whence Mother Ganga surges out to purify mankind. You cannot have so much Sanskrit in your being and not feel,

‘ Devi Sureshvari Bhagavathi Gange. ..’

Saviour of the three worlds of restless waves,

Clear is thy water circling upon the head of Shiva,

May my mind ever repose at Thy lotus-feet.

Venktaraman spoke of the past and of Father. He said how much my father had loved me, and how he had wept showing him some of my letters from Europe. I tried to be sincere and told him I had a great respect for Father, but that somehow since Mother’s death he could not inspire my love. Venktaraman knew some of my former sentences by heart and I could have wept for such brutality of language. Partly it was a defence of Madeleine; I think Madeleine hated my father because she wanted all of me. She loved India, for India was a cause to love. My father? Oh, no, why should one love him? She had a veneration for my mother, and hung her picture in my bedroom, my mother with her thick black hair and the central parting, and the big round kunkum on her forehead. It was already when the disease had eaten deep into her that the picture was taken. She was beautiful even so, and you almost felt that for her breathing’s sake at least her nose-pendant should be removed from her face. It seemed heavy, incongruous, and somehow very self-conscious.

But Father had died now, and Mother was dead long ago. ‘You must remember his mother,’ said Little Mother to Lakshamma when they were praising me for things I did not possess: dignity, deference towards elders, and a deep seriousness towards life. ‘Only such a mother could have borne such a son,’ added Little Mother again, and Sridhara looked at me as though he recognized my own mother in myself.

I laughed and recited, ‘Kupathu jayathā, kachadapé kumāta nachavathu: A bad son may sometimes be born, but a bad mother never.’

On the morning of our departure for Hardwar I received via Cooks in Delhi a letter from Madeleine. I did not open it. I knew: one can know in the moment of any event the whole nature of that event, if only we let our minds dwell upon it— meaning, in fact, is meaningful to meaning. I put the envelope into my right pocket, where I kept all her letters.

When we had said goodbye to the Venktaramans — the father and Kaumudi had come to see us off at the station — and Little Mother had wiped her tears, Sridhara began to look out and see the girders of the Ganges Bridge; he looked back at his mother to ask what it meant. Suddenly, without reason, Little Mother shook with sobs. She shook and shook with such violent sobs that I sat there, hands on my knees, with no understanding. Long after the bridge had passed it was that I guessed: perhaps for the first time she realized, Little Mother realized, that Father was really dead. Something in the big look of the child perhaps, or perhaps it was the Ganges, with her sweet motherliness that one was unhappy to quit who said it, for she it was, from age to age, who had borne the sorrows of our sorrowful land. Like one of our own mothers, Ganga, Mother Ganga has sat by the ghats, her bundle beside her. What impurity, Lord, have we made her bear.

I sang the Gangāstakam again. Little Mother was very sensitive to Sanskrit hymns, being herself brought up the granddaughter of a learned Bhatta.

‘ Kāshi kshétram, sharîram tribhuvana jananîm …’

And nigh the riverbank Thy water is strewn

With kusha grass and flowers,

There thrown by sages at morn and even.

May the waters of the Ganges protect us,

I chanted. Then it was I understood: Little Mother must have remembered the ashes and bones of Father that we let down into the Ganges at Benares. The Ganges knew our secret, held our patrimony. In leaving the Ganges she felt Sridhara was an orphan.

After the next station she looked towards me reassuringly. I was there, heir and protector and companion. By now a common pain had knit us together, and in the daily pressure of the unexpected, in which two humans thrown together have to live side by side, Sridhara became our means of understanding. We both of us played with him — what a lovely child he was! — and in that common language we communicated with each other. Little Mother was a shy and silent person. I used to say she spoke as though she were talking to the wall or to a bird on a tree. She always spoke to herself as it were. She spoke to me sometimes, with long silences, in simple sentences that she could not formulate, for her education was meagre. But her voice was infinite in accent and tone, as though it were some primitive musical instrument, that made some noise, which having been used from age to age had learnt the meaning of sound. And sound is born of silence.

So rich and natural was Little Mother’s silence that she often lay with her eyes closed, almost motionless. She now stretched herself out on the berth, for we were alone in the whole compartment, and with Sridhara against her breast she lay almost asleep. Only when the child moved you could see her hand cover its head with the fringe of the sari. Little Mother must later have fallen sleep, for I heard her snore once, and then she did not wake for many hours.

Meanwhile Manduadih, Balapur, Hardatpur, Rajatalab, Nigatpur passed by; little hamlets with green all around and clusters of ancient trees by pond or on mound, that seemed to guard the tradition of the race. One remembered that it was here that the Aryans, when they first entered the country, camped under the ancestors of these trees, and the Ganges flowing by brought them the richness of green wheat stalks, the yellow of sesame and the gold of sugarcane. It was somewhere here, too, that Gargi and Yagnyavalkya must have walked, and out of their discussions by wood-fire and by river-steps was our philosophy born, and that noble, imperial heritage of ours, Sanskrit, the pure, the complete, the unique. He who possesses Sanskrit can possess himself.