Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

A signal, a flag, and the clang of the train carried us towards the holy, thrice holy Himalayas. It was thither, when the work in the plains was over, or when one needed the integrity of selfness, that my Ayran ancestors went up the Ganges to seek the solitude of the snows and the identity of Truth. Somewhere over against the sky should Kailas stand, and Shiva and Parvathi besport themselves therein, for the joy of mankind. Nandi, the vehicle and disciple of Shiva, that bull without blemish, would wander round the world, hearing the sorrows of this vast countryside, hearing of painful birth and death, of litigation, quarrel, and paupery. Parvathi would know of it, for Nandi would never dare tell his master in speech, and Parvathi would plead with Shiva that orphan, beggar, and widow should have the splendour of life given unto them. You never knew when the door would open, and the sack of gold be found at your threshold.

The whole of the Gangetic plane is one song of saintly sorrow, as though Truth began where sorrow was accepted, and India began where Truth was acknowledged. So sorrow is our river, sorrow our earth, but the green of our trees and the white of our mountains is the affirmation that Truth is possible; that when the cycle of birth and death are over, we can proclaim ourselves the Truth. Truth is the Himalaya, and Ganges humanity. That is why we throw the ashes of the dead to her. She delivers them to the sea, and the sun heats the waters so that, becoming clouds, they return to the Himalaya. The cycle of death and birth go on eternally like the snows and the rivers. That explains why holy Badrinath is in the Himalaya: it proclaims the Truth.

Sri Sankara again came to my mind.

Shines forth does the Devi, born in the snowy mountains;

Her beautiful hands are like a red leaf.

It is She with whom Shiva seeks shelter,

Who stoops from the weight of her breasts,

Whose words are sweet;

Tender creeper of intelligence and bliss.

Reciting the hymn I slipped into one of those curious moods that fill us in the vastness of India; we feel large and infinite, compassion touching our sorrow as eyelashes touch the skin. Someone behind and beyond all living things gave us the touch, the tear, the elevation that makes our natural living so tender. If there were no barbarian beyond our borders the Hindu would have melted into his nature, grown white as some women in the zenana, and his eyes have seen the splendour of himself everywhere. He might have grown emasculated, but he would have played in the garden of the Ganga.

My thoughts were, as you see, very Indian, and I thought it right, now that the evening was slowly stretching itself down, that in this atmosphere I should read the letter from Madeleine.

‘M’ami, my friend,’ she wrote. The letter was dated the 29th of March, 1951.

‘M’ami, my friend. Will I give you pain if I told you I went down last weekend to Bandol? Somehow I had to visit it. You could never understand what Pierrot’s birth was to me. You in your masculine isolation — I could almost say your Indian aloneness — can never understand what it is for a mother, and a French mother, to bear a child. It is the birth of the god in a chalice, the Holy Grail; you know, Christian or not, one feels the birth, and even one who is not a Christian would almost look around and see the stable and the Rois mages bringing offerings to the Lord.

‘I bore him, your son, with such love, for he was a child of love; but you were more interested in his sonship than in his being my son. The feminine to the Indian must always be accessory, a side issue. Yet I loved my son from the time I felt him kicking inside me, for he was your son. You thought of his future: I thought of the present. You told me how in India you had to have different hymns and diet according to whether you wanted the child to be a hero, a wise man, a doctor, or a grammarian. I just wanted a man: my son.

‘Your impersonal approach was strange to me, you yourself so impersonal. I loved you for it, for in touching you I smelt, as it were, some mountain air, the honey-pine of the heights, the smell of incense while the mist rises. Your heart was so like a mountain stream, its tenderness so pure. I loved to bathe in it. But how cruel it can be, how exasperating for a European. You people are sentimental about the invisible, we about the visible. And to me you were the invisible made concrete, so visible, incarnate, beside me — and my husband.

‘You will never know, m’ami, dear husband, what it was to have your little child beside me; how, as he lay against my breast, I told him a million silly things that I always wanted to tell you, but could never tell you. You make the simple too big, and everything human seems ridiculous before you. You remember how we laughed one day when you told me, “Madeleine, why put that nasty powder — some chemical — on your skin; it cannot make the skin more beautiful than it is. I hate to touch the chemical; I want the true.” Then I told you a feminine lie, I said it protected the skin in our climate; and how satisfied you were with my answer. You were cruel, as you would have been to a Hindu wife. But months later, when I told you the truth, instead of becoming angry you laughed and laughed at yourself. It is so easy to fool you: you have no understanding of woman at all, dear Rama. I thought I was the innocent one, but you are more foolish than me. No wonder Oncle Charles thinks it served me right to have married such an outlandish creature.

‘The child in the cradle. And the cradle against the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean the cradle of our civilization. I slept, Rama, night after night in the nursing home, not thinking of Pierre or of you but of Demeter and Poseidon and the voyage of Ulysses. In fact at first I thought a second name for Krishna would be Ulysses. How I rounded the names on my tongue: Krishna Ulysses Ramaswamy. Absurd, absurd, said something to me, but I repeated them so often together, thinking that with familiarity it might become natural. No, the name seemed so absurd. Then I thought of Achille, as I told you; Achille was the name of one of the servants in the clinic, but I thought it too heroic for the son of a Brahmin. Well, there was no hurry and Krishna was Krishna. Krishna. Krishna, Krishna, I said to myself, as one repeats a mantra, and I was so filled with delight. He would be copper-coloured, and with your eyes. He would have your limbs, but not your heavy lips or your big nose. A little bit of my nose might not do him any harm. And I prayed and I prayed to some unknown divinity that he should be just a son — not yours or mine, just ours.

‘One night, the night before his birth, a great sweep of mistral cleared the air, and we could see as far as Corsica. Far away against the horizon lit boats went across the Mediterranean — to Africa perhaps, and to farthest America. The world moved. Fishing boats were all about the place, for the fishes come up to the surface on moonlit nights; and as the hill went rolling down with the olives and the lone cypress stood against the tower by the Hotel de Ville I wondered who I was: what I was doing there? You were away in the hotel, but I told you later of the vision I had that night. Demeter, with fruits and stalks in her hand, rose out of the invisible sea, as though she were made more of silken thread than of substance. It was as if you could see beyond her and she could vanish into herself, as some birds hide their faces in their down. Do you know that beautiful Homeric hymn? Demeter Kourotrophos, I thought to myself, and she not even the daughter of Poseidon. But the sea was auspicious and the whole world bathed in simple delight. There was no sorrow, no place for imperfection, no death or misery for man. The corn grew, the gods played, the fife filled the valley, the girls danced before the altars and flowers grew everywhere — roses, crocuses, violets, narcissus. Beauty filled the magnanimity of creation and I was happy, Rama, happy as I have never been.