Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Saroja was a strange sensation for me. Here was a mystery which I had never observed before: the girl becoming woman, and the thousand ways it shows itself, in shyness, in language, in prime presence. I had left India too young to know the sensibilities of a Brahmin girl. Saroja was thirteen when I left, and Sukumari but nine years old. Saroja’s presence now obsessed me sometimes, like one of those nights with the perfume of magnolia. Rich and green seemed the sap as it rose, and it had a night of its own and a day. That Saroja was my sister made the knowledge of her womanhood natural to me— natural to see, to observe and even to breathe. I would myself pluck flowers for her hair and take her out on long walks and speak to her of Europe and of Madeleine. She too wanted to come and study in Europe; she would be a doctor, and later she would get Little Mother to live with us, she said. I was intoxicated with Saroja’s presence, like a deer could be before a waterfall, or an elephant before a mountain peak; something primordial was awakening in a creature, and I felt that maturity in a girl was like new moon or the change of equinox, it had polar affinities. There was something of the smell of musk, of the oyster when the pearl is still within, of the deep silent sea before the monsoon breaks. There was, too, a feeling of a temple sanctuary, and I could now understand why primitive peoples took the first blood of menstruation for the better harvesting of their fields. And why the Indians gave such beautiful names to their women, and told us how Malavika when she poured water made the Asoka flower, or Shakunthala the Karnikar blossom. What a deep and reverential mystery womanhood is. I could bow before Saroja and call her queen.

She gave me one of her own saris for Madeleine as I left. I prayed for Saroja, and knew in the eye of my eye, somewhere in the interstices of my being, I had named something I had not known yet — it was the absence that had become presence again; it was not Saroja I felt and I smelt, but something of the Ganges and the Jumna that rose into my very being. Benares was indeed nowhere but inside oneself: ‘Kashi kshetram, shararam tribhuvana jananam.’ And I knew: all brides be Benares born.

The trip back to Aix started somewhat inauspiciously. My plane, after being five hours in flight and almost halfway to Cairo, returned to Bombay airport with engine trouble. Here they tinkered away on the tarmac, but somewhere in the middle of the night they put us into a new plane, and off we were again. We did not land at Cairo till midday, and at Rome I missed my connection for Nice. I sent a cable to Madeleine immediately — I had begged her anyway not to come to the airport, for I wanted to see her first against the Vénitienne in her own room, in her beige-green suit, with her hair falling on her shoulders and the back of it seen in the mirror. I took a plane straight to Geneva, and finding nothing there to take me to Marseille went on to Paris. Here, there would be a plane, only not until the morning, so leaving my baggage I wandered from midnight till five of dawn aimlessly by the Seine, absorbing Paris into my being.

Paris somehow is not a city: it is an area in oneself, a Concorde in one’s being, where the river flows by you with an intimacy that seems to say the divine is not in the visible architecture of the Orangerie or the presence of the Pont des Arts, but where the trees would end; and even when the lorries have trundled over the cobbled streets — with potato and onion, geese, lard, margarine and cows’ flesh; oranges, birds, Roquefort; poireaux de St Germain, carottes de Crécy, petit pois de Clamart; bottes de persil, romarin d’Antibes; sugar, mint, and pepper — there opposite, begirt in her isle of existence, is the Mother of God, to whom man has built a sanctuary, a convocation of stone, uttered truly as never before. For it was the Word of God made actual, in prayer and fast, in dedication and in pain, that raised layer after layer of that white intimacy of thought, and this once made high and solid and pointed at space, man wanted to withdraw, to gaze inwards through tower and arc-boutant to see how the Virgin sat the Son of God on her lap. I might have led a cow to her altar had I been in Benares.

Dawn was already breaking over the city, and from bridge to bridge one could see the awareness of oneself made more acute, and that the day would soon hide from our own immaculateness. Paris is a sort of Benares turned outward, and where but in Benares would Baudelaire be more real, more understandable, more perfect, and in every dimension.

Insouciants et taciturnes,

Des Ganges, dans le firmament,

Versaient les trésors de leurs urnes

Dans des gouffres de diamant.

I sat among workmen in some bistrot, drank hot, steaming coffee, stood up and walked again. Where was I? Once at Le Bourget and in the plane I was happy again. France seemed such a rolling garden of carrots and turnips, of plane trees that made diagonal approaches to river and castle, and of long, white roads that went to the infinity of the three seas. For all roads in France, I remembered, started from Notre Dame.

Beyond Lyon the weather was rough, but at Marignane it seemed as though I was returning home from one of my usual trips to Paris. Henri the taxi-driver recognized me, and remarked, ‘Monsieur has a lot of luggage.’ I told him I had been to my country. ‘It must be a beautiful country,’ he said, with the same feeling as once before, when seeing a bunch of flowers at some tram station he had stopped the car, bought them for fifteen or twenty francs, and offered them to Madeleine saying, ‘These azaleas will go with Madame’s grey-green suit. We call them the flowers of the queen, for they say Azalais des Baux wore one on the day she saw Gui Guerjerat.’ Everywhere in the south you meet with this civilized attention, which shows how man has been informed of the sainthood of natural living. Those who live truly are the pure of heart.

Strange, I thought to myself, as the car twisted and roared through the hills of the Alpilles, that I seem to be returning not to my home, some spot of earth known and felt with limb and breath, but to some quarter in myself that, as in a psychoanalyst’s chamber, shows itself with such foreknown unfamiliarity. It is as though somewhere I had stored away impressions of a possible becoming, and that on finding this the day had changed its dimensions — the sun had hidden himself and let shadow play on the hills, or the mistral bent the cypress so, and a curve of pain had managed to steal itself into my being. Yet there was in me the awareness of a new continuity, as though now that I had seen India and had told her of Madeleine, and now that Little Mother had given me, as her parting gift and as her blessing to her daughter-in-law, two little toe-rings of my own mother’s—’From mother to daughter-in-law, as from father to son, is the race created,’ she had said, quoting some verse — I felt at last I was going to make Madeleine mine.

Jewels bear a lore of one’s genealogy, and you know when the gold and diamond mango-garland is hung round the neck, or the ruby ring has been passed on to her finger, how you have invaded a new area of her presence; and how, like some old eunuchs in the palace, the ruby and the moonstone looked after your beloved, and gave her sweet thoughts and obedience to her Lord, once the right jewel shone at the parting of her breasts. Thus the king gave jewels to his vassals, and the kingdom was run on the power of the seal.

The toe-rings, I thought; what a sweet thought of Little Mother’s! My mother had them from my grandmother, and when my father married Saroja’s mother the toe-rings went to her. They had to be enlarged, for she was a big woman. When Little Mother was brought to the house they were naturally given to her, and now they would go to her who bore Krishna to me. Would not Pierre have loved the bells that sounded with each footstep, and would he not have known they spoke of things his own and so old?