Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

What happened afterwards is still very hazy in my mind. Little Mother and I left the mountains and the Ganges with immeasurable pain, as though we had been visiting some venerable relations and had to leave them, with a broad kunkum on our faces and their hands on our heads, the perfume of their feet in our nostrils. Mother Ganga had her feet all yellowed with turmeric, and she carried the flowers of our evenings in her hair. The Himalaya was like Lord Shiva himself, distant, inscrutable, and yet very intimate there where you do not exist. He was like space made articulate, not before you but behind you, behind what is behind that which is behind one; it led you back through abrupt silences to the recesses of your own familiar but unrecognized self. The Himalaya made the peasant and the Brahmin feel big, not with any earthly ambition, but with the bigness, the stature of the impersonal, the stature of one who knows the nature of his deepest sleep. For in the deepest sleep, as every pilgrim knows, one is wide awake, awake to oneself. And the Himalaya was that sleep made knowledge.

Coming down the ravines by the silent rivulets that ran with us one had the sense of innocence great mountains never give. One felt indeed that neither tiger nor scratching bear, neither python nor porcupine could ever do the smallest hurt; as the epics say, here in this auspicious refuge the deer and the lion drink of the same waters, and the jackal and the elephant are friends. However, one could not forget, for newspapers never let you forget, that not far from Dehra Dun, in the Tarai, the maneaters still roamed, and villagers were just caught in their fields and taken away with the ease that boys catch wagtails in spring. You shoot the tigers, so the Government said, and get five hundred rupees. And yet how tame and wise-eyed the deer under the trees looked, and when the peacocks danced the world seemed touched by the music of the flute.

Oh where shall I go, Oh where, thou source of virtue,

Kanhayya;

Oh where when the flute plays, and the cattle come to thee?

Mira the poetess is so northern. She a Rajput princess could treat God, could treat Sri Krishna, her Kanhayya as she, would Rathor. She could count the jewels of his howdah, admire the rings on his fingers, whisper that the cavalry move quicker and the drums beat as Royalty advances. And by pool and archway would the women await, with kunkum water and coconut and flower in hand, to welcome this great God, this Principle, this Presence amidst them. The pools suddenly grew lotuses, the parrots suddenly sang, ‘Hari is come. Sister, Hari is come,’ and the peacocks would pull their tails and offer that he wear a crown of their feathers. The black deer, hearing the sound of music, came to him as in the Rajput paintings, their heads lifted and their ears laid back, listening to the music that came from the flute.

Muraré, I have brought thee the butter of my heart,

And when the pyre is ready, Lord, light it thyself;

Let my ashes serve as tilak on thy brow.

At Muradabad on the way back the train jerked away from the main line and took us down to Delhi. There the green, virginal Jumna greeted us not as sister of the Ganga, but as it were her daughter, Kalindanandini. Delhi was so sad, with the refugees and the dirt on the streets and the stories one heard of what had happened on the border. Mothers had lost their daughters and fathers their wives, but when the Women’s Commission went to recover the abducted women some of them laughed. ‘Sisters, you call us. What sisters are we to you, oh respectable ones? The Muslims took us and here we are of their harems; they treat us better than the cowards that left us and ran for their lives. Tell my daughter, I am happy. And tell that man called my husband I spit on his face…’

Some women that were brought back had no tale to tell: they never opened their mouths. They spun cotton, or made baskets at the refugee centres, past thinking. Some had left their fathers behind, some their husbands. Once in a while someone escaped from Pakistan and told tales that could never be heard to the end. Some, too, there were, the true Gandhians, who spoke of the horrors we had committed on the Muslims, and pointed at the fanaticism that led to the sacrifice of him whom we so tenderly called Father of the Nation.

Little Mother naturally wanted to visit the Jumna Ghat, where the last mortal remains of the Mahatma were cremated. She did not weep, she did not even pray. She went down to the Jumna and washed her feet and face. She just could not understand what death was. And yet death was everywhere about — a fanatic shoots a saint, a tiger carries away a peasant woman cutting grass in the fields, or the Muslims kill a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, on the banks of the Ravi, for their God, they say, is different from our God. It is good, Little Mother must have told herself, to belong to the far south. No barbarian will ever come to us.

The train ran straight down south, and looping through the Vindhyas brought us directly to Bombay. By now Sridhara had too much of travel and he developed a slight fever. Our friends in Bombay — we stayed in Mathunga, and with south Indians of course — were most kind to us. We had a car to go about in, but this barbaric city simply had no meaning for a Brahmin like me. It spoke a language so alien, had a structure so improper, made a demand so vehement and secondary, that one had no business to be there. Bombay had no right to exist. Marseille is certainly horrible, with its wide dark windows and its singsong tramways, its underground world of ruffians, quemandeurs, bicots, and its sheer smelly natural vulgarity; but at least it has the old port and the beauty of Notre Dame de la Garde. Once you go up the hundred and seventeen steps and see the majesty of the sea from the portico of the cathedral the whole of the Greek conquest comes to your mind, and not far from there one can almost see to the right Stes Maries-de-la-Mer, where the first Christians landed in Gaul.

Alas, nobody landed in Bombay but merchants and the vulgarity had no naturalness about it, save it were in the Hindu area, where you almost felt you were back in Benares. Somebody suggested we go to Bhan Ganga, and the idea that the Ganga had arisen even in this unholy territory gladdened the heart of Little Mother. ‘Look, look!’ she cried, showing the sea behind Bhan Ganga. ‘It’s just like Benares.’ Beyond was the burning- ghat, of course, and a little farther away Little Mother and I sat by the sea and spoke of family affairs. She was worried about Saroja and Sukumari. One was seventeen years of age and the other fourteen.

‘You, Rama, though borne by another woman and a blessed soul at that, you are like my own son. But they are different. Their mother was different, too, and they still have strong links with their mother’s family. And after all what am I? A poor court-clerk’s daughter. I am twenty-six, and these girls are already taller than me; they go to school and college and know more than I do. As long as He was there, there was someone to look after the house, and now I ask and wonder what will happen to everything. Night after night I cannot close my eyes, and your cough worries me even more. How can men understand the pained heart of woman.’

In between the smells of the sea there came sudden wafts of incense, as though absence was no more an absence, but just a presence invisible, unincarnate. Little Mother blew her nose, and I said: ‘I am your son. It is for you to say, and for me to obey.’

There was a small clear moon and I can still feel the auspicious sense of the evening. We had just rung the bells at the Shiva temple and had put flowers on the Three-Eyed’s head. The Walkeshwar temple was filled with the smell of sandalwood and camphor. Women were saying prayers in a corner; the sadhus were lost in their sacred books. Little Mother knew I spoke the sacred truth. I could hear her weep into the edge of her sari, gently and undramatically. She put her hand on the head of Sridhara, as though now she was sure he was protected. I can still remember how immediately her trembling voice became steadier. Then after a long while of silence she said, ‘Promise me one thing, Rama?’