Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

A hazy moon rose over the hills, but the stars right above us were very gay. We laughed to each other like children making up after a lost quarrel. I tore thyme as we went up, just to smell it, I a Brahmin from south India; Madeleine gathered hyacinths among the rocks and poured them over my head. We could be happy again.

We sat on the elephant and I told Madeleine all the inconsequent things — about Venktaramiah’s daughter, Kaumudi, who wondered how we could live without an aunt or a mother-in-law at home, or about the Benares Brahmin who asked what sort of hymns the Brahmins in Europe chanted.

‘He did not ask what they get paid for a funeral; nor would I know.’

‘A funeral is a costly business,’ said Madeleine knowingly. ‘I am happy I shall die in India. You will burn me, won’t you, Rama? But not by the Ganges, for I hate the thought of the dogs that wait to gobble you before you’re burnt up fully.’

‘I’ll burn you on the Himavathy,’ I said, ‘like we did Grandfather. I shall pile up pieces of sandalwood one over the other, and I shall sing a special hymn for you. It will be called “Hymn to the Goddess of the Golden Skin”. I will have carried some special heather and thyme from this elephant’s back, and I shall perfume the river so that the fishes and the deer will come to see what is happening. Once you have been reduced to white ash, the river will rise and carry you away — as it did Grandfather. Thus you will become a Brahmin at last.’

But Madeleine was away, her thoughts were far away, and we fell into an easy, a distant silence. The elephant did not seem to know anything or say anything. The stars were perfect: they were so beautiful you wanted to count them, just to cool your heart. Man is so far from perfection that all that is far seems wondrous bright to him.

We came down slowly and as we opened the door my half- opened case still lay there with its question unanswered. We could tell lies to people, but we could not tell lies to animals or things. When we went to bed we were so tired that I only said, ‘So, Madeleine, tomorrow the prince will bring the professor her coffee.’

‘Don’t you be silly,’ she said, ‘you must be so tired. Now that the holidays are soon coming I have little work. Besides, tomorrow is Friday, and my classes begin at ten.’

Next morning, when Madeleine had gone to college, I closed my case and left it at the other end of the corridor. Neither of us spoke about it, and when Madame Jeanne came to faire le ménage’ she dusted it and put it into the cupboard.

In the afternoon Georges came to have tea with us, and we had many interesting things to tell each other. His Chinese had made progress, and he was in contact with some Jesuit Fathers in Belgium about the exact philosophical equivalents of certain Chinese metaphysical expressions. Georges had a congenital contempt for Orientalists, and all unreligious writers as such: thus he hated Gide and loved Claudel. He read Romain Rolland, however, because he wanted to know more about India. How he wished some more well-informed and balanced mind had written about these great saints of modern India, Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Dayananda.

A little later, Lezo joined us. Lezo was a clever young Basque refugee who knew some eighteen languages. He had been the youngest elected president of the Basque Academy, but when he made his first inaugural speech about the need for teaching in the mother tongue, and substantiated it with multiple quotations from the Church Fathers, Franco’s henchmen were there to listen. After three months of prison he was given liberté surveillée, but he escaped and was now doing Linguistics at Aix University. His father sent him a little money in secret, which he supplemented by giving lessons in languages. He it was who taught Georges Sanskrit.

Lezo was deeply interested in Buddhism. He had been to Heidelberg to study Sanskrit, and there he had come under the influence of Badenspeizer, who preferred Buddhism to every other religion in the world. During the war Badenspeizer was a prisoner of war, first in Shanghai and later in Ceylon. He preferred the Little Vehicle, and so did Lezo. Of Vedanta Lezo knew but the name of Sankara.

The Sanskrit language has a gambhiryatha, a nobility that seems rooted in primary sound. For hour after hour I chanted verses, especially those of Bhartrhari, Kalidasa, or Sankara, which created, as it were, an aura of emptiness around one and one felt the breath of oneself, saw the sight as it were of oneself. Even Georges, who seemed so angry with Indian incursions into Christendom and with Massis and others was frightened of this new Catharism, even he used to sit lost in this primordial rhythm. Lezo, to exasperate his friend, once said, ‘You can hear how your church services came from this rhythm, just as the Christian monasticism of the Thebaid hermits rose in Alexandria at the same time as Buddhism was being preached. ‘Since the time of good king Antiochus, and yet beyond Antiochus from other kings, to wit, Ptolemy, Antigone, mages and Alexander, thus too in the Empire of the Greeks, everywhere they follow the law and the friend of the Law, that is to say the Buddha Sakyamuni’, and so on, he would quote abstruse, and often absurd, texts. He was at once so learned and boyish that nobody could take them too seriously or not give them any consideration at all. When someone quotes an unknown Nestorian text in Pahlevi and links it up with a more ancient tablet in Kharosthi; and when, coming down through the Greeks, he talks to you of the school of Alexandria and of Apollonius of Tyana, who went to India to meet the Brahmins and returned with his belly full of Vedantic wisdom; and when he concludes by saying that St Ambrose of Milan (333—97) wrote a treatise De Moribus Brachmanorum addressed to a certain Palladius, a Greek; you feel convinced that even if all this were true it should not be true. Georges, on the other hand, would rather, it might have seemed, go upward, vertically — for he was hungry for God, and this he preferred to the three-dimensional and historical excursuses of his colleague. It was Vedanta that really attracted Georges, the Neti-Neti, the ‘not-this, notthisness’, as he called it. Some of my most memorable experience of France is having sat hour after hour before this nervous, indrawn, grey-blue-eyed Georges, with his lone hand always trembling as if he held the sword of the crusader and his, ‘But God, but God, where is He, when Sankara says, “Shivoham, Shivoham; I am Shiva, I am Shiva”?’

‘There is no one to say anything then,’ laughed Lezo. Though that was the only answer, coming as it did from Lezo, it gave one the impression he was quoting an author. And of course to prove that it was true he quoted some Buddhist saying of Vasubandhu or Nagarajuna, as if it were an answer from the Vedanta of Sri Sankara himself. The trouble with Lezo was he knew too much, and he understood little. I think the person who learnt most of all during these discussions was Madeleine.

For Madeleine knew the time had come for an important decision: there were many roads out of the forest — which was the one that led most naturally to where she should be? The war had given her the feeling that change is inevitable for man, and that whether you took one road or the other, whether the Germans were behind this hill or in that hamlet, lying beside the broken bridge and the river down below, the chemin de cristal, as she called it, depended not on some preconceived logic but on the logic of the moment: a strange, almost pure reasoning power, that gave you the answer and commanded your step. All it needed was to stay time for a while, and then walk down to your clairière.

So this Sanskrit recitation was like hearing one’s own silence. Madeleine spoke little, partly from timidity, partly in pride, and whatever she said would always be the unexpected. In this she resembled Lezo, for both spoke from an irregular sense of logic, an inaccuracy not of knowledge but of decision.