Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

All these thoughts I knew were only subterfuges for some other predicament. I thought of Ville Ste-Anne with the spreading pine tree, under which opened like two frank eyes the two rooms of Madeleine and myself. Behind the house beside the high pinewood was a grove of mirabelles, and beyond, against the blue sky, Mont Ste-Victoire itself. There was a sainthood about that elevation of the mountain, not for any sanctuary of saint or martyr but because the good Cézanne saw it day after day; and it carried such a message of strength, and of the possible, that it was something of a Kailas for us. Often on walks when the air was very still and not a leaf moved, and a strange note of music seemed to fill the valley, I would say, ‘Madeleine, there, there! Parvathi is singing to Shiva.’ And Madeleine would burst out laughing, as if her unbelief itself was the proof of my truth.

Madeleine had never participated at first in my superstitions, though I had in hers. We used to go up the Hautes-Alpes, and would lie in the sun amidst the pines somewhere on the Durance. One day I started building a miniature temple, stone laid beside stone in respectful uniformity, and when the three outer walls had been built and the inner sanctuary made I said, ‘And now I must find a statue of Shiva, a linga.’ I told her how in the city of Belur, when the god’s image comes floating down the river, the whole town hears the OM as though sounded on a conch, and men and priests go with fife and drum and palanquin to get him to his sanctuary — and of course he is there, the Channaa Keshava, the god of Beautiful Hair. So would the Durance, I said, give me my linga. And one morning as we wandered on her banks in search of gems for the temple — jaspar and agate and marmoreal stone — there he was, our round and oval linga, on the bed of the river, and though I could not give him moon — flower and tulsi I gathered marguerites and harebells and installed him with Madeleine pouring holy water on Shiva’s head. ‘Here is your Ganges,’ she said, ‘Shiva, Shiva, Hara, Hara,’ and she trembled as she had that day on the Seine at Rouen, saying she loved me. On the way home that evening through the Gorges du Loup, with the swish of the river, she said, ‘You would make me a Hindu would you, my Love? I tell you that if marriage to you meant only the wearing of a sari I would still have married you.’ I told her the gods were neither Hindu nor Greek; being creations of your own mind they behaved as you made them — if Shiva was what I wanted, Shiva himself would come to the Durance. After all, I said, the Greek gods were made by the Greeks, but when the Romans and the Christians came they often metamorphosed into Saints of Christ. The world, I told her, was as you made it. She was lost in thought; she could not understand this anthropocentricity.

When we reached home I said, ‘Look, here’s Shiva’s bull at our door!’ and I showed her the huge flat stone that lay like a squat Nandi at the edge of our garden.

‘True, how very like a bull he is. You thought of Shiva, and so here is Nandi,’ she said, with unconvinced assurance. And she plucked some grass and gave it to him, saying, ‘Now, Bull, eat!’

And from then on Madeleine never passed by the door of the garden without either touching the huge hump of the bull, or caressing him and saying, ‘Here, Bull, here is your feed today.’ Sometimes coming from the market she would lay a flower or two on his head and add, ‘Be happy, Bull.’ Seeing it from my window, the Hindu in me used to be so happy.

Then there was the elephant too at the top of the hill. A huge, gently curved rock lay almost flat on the ground, and if you sat on him of an evening, very still, you could hear him move: You could actually feel him shake and change sides, one foot first and then the other. When Madeleine and I had questions we could not solve, and she wished to avoid getting irritable and angry, she would say, ‘I will go and consult the elephant.’ Half an hour later there she used to be, her face beaming with wonder that man and woman could live in such harmony. Sometimes as I trudged my heavy-breathing way upwards she would shout and say, ‘Rama-Rama,’ like cow calling to calf at the fall of dusk, when the lamps are just being lit. There was not one question the elephant did not answer. When rarely we saw some schoolchild on a Thursday or Sunday seated on our elephant, or some soldier resting before he reached his barracks, how unhappy we used to feel. On such days we did not give him grass or pine-fruits, but flowers. I have never heard the resonance of Sanskrit so noble as on the back of the elephant. The Ganges flowed at our feet, and Krishna would soon be born.

It was one day almost a year later, as we came down from the elephant that a telegraph-boy ran up our goat-path bringing us the wire to say that Father had been struck with apoplexy, and that I should come home at once. How tender Madeleine was to me that evening! Despite my lack of love for Father, tears came to my throat; I felt the beginnings of my biological presence on the earth disappear one by one. Not that he was my father, I felt; but like the wine in the cellars of Champagne that ferments when spring comes to the vineyard outside, and sinks and bubbles back at the fall of autumn, the sap in me, the continuity in me, was being strained, was being broken. I would be an orphan again.

That evening Madeleine was like my own mother. She said had my mother still been alive she would have flown with me to be beside her in her pain. Death and birth mean different things to different peoples of the earth; to me Madeleine’s presence would have meant the daughter-in-law coming home, the division of family responsibility; truly it would have been ‘the crossing of the threshold’. I almost felt if she came Father could not die, he would not die. How, when the first daughter- in-law came home, could the father die?

Auspicious, so auspicious — with kunkum, coconut and choli- piece, bangles on the arm, the necklace of black beads — is life.

Once again my thoughts had wandered away. ‘Voici, we’re already at Brigonne,’ said Henri, and I woke up to the sudden reality that Aix was indeed there down in the valley. There was the cathedral, proclaiming not that Christ was the Son of God, but that the king of France was the Son of Christ.

This old royalist city, with its spread, low trees, and inward hotels with narrow, decorated entrances — this city of flowers and music was somehow not frank and open, but as if any day Zola’s sans-culottes would invade her Place Publique again, and dragging her countesses on to the streets, not shoot them but make them dance, as if it were the 14th of July, curtseying to them each time and saying, ‘Pardon, Madame la Comtesse, we are the shepherds of the mountains; we have beheld the Magian kings and we come down the valleys that King Christ be anointed and crowned.’ For the Provençaux all is a festival of joy, and they live by the stars.

Madeleine was not at home. The house was securely closed, the blinds drawn; how anxious it looked. I could see from the grass which had fallen down the back of the bull that Madeleine must have gone the previous day; the grass had turned yellow under the sun. Neither did the house allow any mistake; it spoke to me and gave me the same information.

When I went down to the garage the assistant, Hector, said ‘Oh, Monsieur’s car has not come back since yesterday evening. Madame has probably gone out somewhere.’

The postman gave me two letters, one from Oncle Charles, the other from an Indian friend in London. I told Henri to take me to the Hotel du Roi Jean. When Madame Patensier saw me, how she beamed.

‘Madame must have gone to Nice to meet me,’ I told her. ‘And I missed my connection in Rome.’