Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘The next morning at five the pain started, and by eleven the little baby was born. I was neither happy nor sorry to see him, and when I saw your glowing face I wondered why such a lump of flesh which gave me so much pain should give you so much joy. For you it was not a child, a son, your son, and my son; but your heir. For me it was just a something — but then suddenly when I took him in my arms and held him against my breast the whole of creation shone in a single second — the nativity, I repeat, the first and only birth, the proud proof of happiness. Yes, for me Pierre was happiness, he did not make me happy. He was proof that man is, and cannot be happy but be happiness itself.

‘The olive trees still go down to the sea. Achille is still at Bandol, but he’s become a gargon-de-café. There are no rich English people coming to have their babies in the South of France. I went down to the port; the jetty was still unrepaired, as it was during the German-Italian occupation. I bought flowers chez Henriette, where you said you bought me fresh tulips every morning. I wanted to sleep again in Bandol, so I went to your hotel, the Hotel des Pêcheurs, and got the self-same room. The patron did not recognize my name; he probably thought it was Russian. I put the tulips into a vase, put the car in the garage, and went out again into the night. I was not sad, I was just empty. Would I see Demeter again?

‘The moon was still in the sky. I felt so pagan. I wish there were an Aliscamps, as in Arles, and that I could write a beautiful epitaph to my dead son. It would read something like this: “He was born to the cypress, he was born to the syllable, he the child of silence and of Woman.” Or some such thing. He had your silence, Rama, and his hair smelt of thyme.

‘The Greek gods are jealous. They are jealous of happiness. My votive offerings brought no answer. No Demeter came in vision with Polos and veil, nor did the sea throw up a broken raft on which was to be found the golden child. Like Penelope I sat on the seashore, weaving my web. When will you come, O Ulysses?

‘Strange, Rama, nowadays I often go to church. I love ruins, and especially the ruins of cathedrals or chapels. On my way here I passed by St Maximin and visited the Dominican monastery. That is, I went to the chapel for Mass, and Oh, how deeply it affected me, that Regina coeli, laetare. I wandered all over the place, visited the crypt and saw the relic of holy Mary Madeleine. The smell of incense that used to hurt me now gives me a pained delight. I hate to kneel and yet sometimes I half bend my knees and remember what my mother always said: “Never kneel without cotton on your knees; God knows what infection may lie there.” I still have such a fear of bacteria — how shall I ever stand India?

‘You say you are going to Benares with your mother. Of Benares all I know is the bits of floating human flesh and the pyres of the dead, and that the Ganges water when chemically examined shows no bacteria. We Europeans are not yet holy enough to have crypts with no bacteria.

‘I hated going to St Maximin, though. I could not visit the church without you; I almost felt you by my side and often turned back to see if by chance you had not suddenly come back, and missing me in Aix had followed me by that terrible intuition of yours. These days with aeroplanes everything is possible. And how sad, Rama, is a lonely woman. Without a man she can see nothing great or holy. There the Hindus are right. Man must lead woman to the altar of God.

‘I love you, Rama, with a strange, distant, impenitent love— as though in loving you I say I do not in fact love you. I wish I had an assurance of love, that I did not love you for your purity, your inner strength — the wall, the stone wall that will never yield, “celui qui ne décevra jamais,” as the astrologer in the Boulevard St Germain told me. I wondered whether I could really love you — whether anyone could love a thing so abstract as you. Sometimes you seem almost here, and I have such delight that I think I will go down to teach at the college, almost singing, when you have given me my morning coffee. You the most choice, the most noble, the most unhuman husband. I wonder if Indians can love.

‘I can. And therefore I await you, you my young love.

Mad.

‘P. S. How Indian sometimes I have become — I see and I wonder. India is infectious, mysterious and infectious.’

Even the Indian trains seem to chant mantras: ‘N amasthethu Gangé twadangé bhujangé; Hari-Hari-Ram-Hari-Ram, Ram-Haré’; and going uphill, ‘Shiva-Shiva, Hara-Hara, Shiva-Shiva-Hara’; and so to the morning. The night was quickly over; the child woke up only once or twice, and Little Mother said something incomprehensible in sleep. ‘Saroja,’ she seemed to say, ‘bring me a glass of white water.’ Then came the silence, the long empty silences of the stations, the cry of hawkers, the sound of pilgrims, and then up again, and towards the mountains. The compartment was getting cold. I rose up to cover Little Mother’s uncovered feet. She was awake, and said, ‘Oh, I cannot bear to hear you cough like that.’ Was I coughing?

The morning mists were already against the windowpane when the restaurant-car boy came to wake us up. The coffee was warm but very bad. The birches and the deodars of the Himalayas spread before us. Isolated forest bungalows came, and now and again a whole tribe of deer jumped away across the pools of the forest, so frightened were they of the train. The parrots had slender and very lovely yellow rings round their throats, and the Himalayas shone above them, simple, aware, vibrant with sound. The Ganges, a small stream, flowed gently against us, but her freshness was so mature. Whether young or older in years the Ganges is ever so knowing, so wise. If wisdom became water the Ganges would be that water, flowing down to the seven seas.

Somewhere between the interstices of those trees, somewhere in the movement of the hinds, in the mountain stillness of Hardwar did I feel a new knowledge. I felt absence.

The mountains must know, I thought, and so I looked up towards the bridge and mountain path that, winding through the pines, led to Rishikesh and Badrinath. There beyond the folds of the snow was Gangotri, where the holy mother took her birth; and the barbarian began where she started. Tibet lay beyond, where Sister Brahmaputra cuts herself gorges in the Himalaya to feed the barbarian; then mingling with the Ganga and become holy she enters the sea conjointly. Duality is antiIndian; the non-dual affirms the truth.

I dipped in the Ganges and felt so pure that I wondered anyone could die or go to war, that people could weep, or that Hindus and Muslims had cut each other’s throats and genitals. Indeed the refugees in Hardwar, innocent creatures, had seen the barbarities of an alien religion. One could expiate for the kidnapped and the forsaken, dipping and dipping in the Ganges by the Himalaya. One could expiate also in the Ganges for the dead. Pierre was never dead: I could feel him in my loins.

There is no absence if you have the feel of your own presence. The mountain echoed an absence that seemed primordial, a syllable, a name.

We went to Dehra Dun in the evening. Next morning I took Little Mother to Mussoorie, and showed her the snows from the Hamilton Point. White and beautiful in their simplicity were they, peaks, bare glaciers, and the sounding emptiness of sky. Sridhara clung to his mother as if he saw something too big to understand, and Little Mother simply muttered away some prayers. When she was moved she always understood herself reciting a hymn. Ultimately the far and the awesome is Divine, it destroys the barriers of body and mind, no, rather of mind and body, and reveals the background of our unborn, immaculate being. That is why Shiva lives in the Himalaya.