Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Once the vegetables and honey and butter of Normandy were spread out on the kitchen table — the kitchen being on the ground floor was the coolest room in summer — and while Marie was taking up the luggage, Oncle Charles told us of family matters.

‘Mother thinks you’ve married a Maharaja, Mado,’ he said, looking at me, ‘else there were no reason why you should marry a man from les Indes. “Mon auteur dit,” she would say, and then go on to tell me about the castes and the kings, and of the Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva that some school books of the fifties of the last century had taught her in her convent. But she cannot believe India is no more British India, nor you, Rama, dark as a Negro, and that you will not make Madeleine one of your concubines — for you must have a palace — and then make her mount your pyre and be burnt with your dead body. She’s not so much worried about the marriage, but she’s worried about burial and resurrection. Poor woman! Let her be what she is.’

Oncle Charles was not a man to say things inconsequently: he was too much of a notaire to say the first thing that came to his tongue. There was much in his mind that Madeleine started guessing almost immediately.

In the afternoon, when the sun was already slanting towards the Pyrénées, we took our hats and our country canes and walked down the hill to the cool of the river. Oncle Charles, as he walked in front of me with Madeleine, talked of many things. He was anxious about her future: whether she would stay in France or in India. Now that my father was dead it seemed inevitable to him that she should go back with me. True, of course, now with the air services distances were abolished; ‘… but yet, a heart is a heart, and there’s Grandmother at Arras. She’s been asking strange questions too. Before she dies, she wishes for the peace of her soul to know many, many things. And she wants to make a gift to us all, Madeleine. The curé has been worrying us a great deal about the growth of the city. He says that since the cemetery of St Médard is so near the city, the Government is bringing in all sorts of restrictions. Before the Municipality brings the new law into action land must be bought. They are damn’ Socialists, you know, at St Médard. The Municipality is playing on speculation. Prices are going up. So far, there have been only seven places in the caveau,’ said Oncle Charles, and suddenly added, ‘Look at the swallows, I never saw such beautiful blue wings ever in my life.’

There was a long silence. Then he added, ‘Mado, Grandmother is very old. To give pain to her is like giving pain to God.’

Madeleine answered that she had nothing to say.

I said to her that evening, as she came to the room before going to wash, that I did not have anything to say either. To belong for ever to this Christian earth of this Christian land was no doubt a privilege and a mark of honour. But for some reason Madeleine put her face against my cheek, and a tear from her eye fell on my face. She wished I would say ‘No’ for her. So I simply said, ‘Tell Oncle Charles we’re soon going back to India.’ She replied, ‘No, that is not true.’

‘Yes, it is true. For me India is Freedom.’

‘And to me,’ said Madeleine, ‘India is Paradise.’

Oncle Charles in the house was like an elder brother, and Tante Zoubie looked after us as though we were too young to look after the cruder things of life, such as washing and the market, and getting the house cleaned.

‘There, Marie, on that staircase, there’s a cigarette butt which must come from the time of Henry the Plantagenet,’ she would say, and Marie had never been so active.

Marie had grown somewhat sad since Lezo had left, for he must have made her many grand promises. She had grown lazy and rather irritable. But with the good humour of Zoubie she worked like a happy slave. Besides, Tante Zoubie made such nice cassoulets and boeuf saignant, it wasn’t like being with us poor vegetarians—’les herbivores’, she called us. Servants like to obey those who really know what is right and what is wrong. I cannot make a pankha-boy obey, for I cannot understand why anyone should obey anyone. They should do their duty, their dharma. This is true obedience.

Oncle Charles loved to ride Blanche in the evening, and how the mare neighed as soon as she saw him. Sometimes of an evening when we three were too lazy to go down to the river, and just walked down to the clairière behind the house to sit among the thyme and the marjoram, Aunt Zoubeida would tell us fantastic stories of her travels with her first husband. He had been a professor, whom the other war, the war of 1914, had turned into a minor diplomat, and we rolled and rolled in laughter at the pomposity of the Germans, the stupidity of the Poles and the Ruthenians, the backwardness of the British. ‘They never wash their back,’ she said; ‘they wash their shirt fronts. So that if you want to smell, le Comte de Saint-Simon, you have only to sit next to an English diplomat!’ And so on, and so on. When we returned home, and Marie brought the lantern and gave us home-made gin from the choicest of juniper, there would be Oncle Charles riding up the hill, his portly figure somewhat softened by the gentility of the moon. No, Oncle Charles could never look anything but a notaire, and he could only smell of hay and honeysuckle, and acrid French tobacco. He had given the horse a nice wash, and she seemed so much the wiser for it. She stood above us silent, as Oncle Charles, who loved to study birds, told us of the trees he had climbed to watch the nests of swallows and blackbirds.

Pierre, the peasant boy, came to take the horse away, and Oncle Charles of a sudden looked paternal. He was worried about my cough, and was happy I was going to Pau for three weeks. There was no better place for weak lungs than Pau.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘we must be weak somewhere. I am weak in the liver, and that is why I go to Vichy once in three years. Yet I can eat a huge gigot as you see, and can sleep like a barn.’ It is difficult to say what it was that made me happy, whether it was the happiness of Madeleine or my own. But now and again when I was alone in the bathroom taking a shave, I would look at my eyes and see that there was something velveteen, something ringed, as though deeper down was sorrow.

Letters that came from India did not brighten me either. Saroja was not too happy at home. Now that father was dead, and with Little Mother not really so much older than herself, she felt she, too, was the mistress of the house. Little Mother never spoke to me of this, but Saroja’s temper was revealed in her letters. ‘The forces at home are not meant for peace. I long for the day when I can follow Father,’ she wrote. On the other hand Sukumari was full of vitality. She had been elected secretary of the school debating society, and wanted to become a second Mrs Pandit. Meanwhile she asked me to send her books on Marxism. ‘The poverty of our Motherland could only be eradicated with the abolition of every form of caste and distinction. I have read some Marx. But you, brother, who know so much about all this, tell me what to read.’ It was strange for me to think that my sister was reading Karl Marx.

But life is so much more intelligent than we care to understand. Marxism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Hitlerism, the British Commonwealth, the Republic of the United States of America; all are so many names for some unknown principle, which we feel but cannot name. For all the roads, as the Gita says, lead but to the Absolute.

I was also anguished, I think, for my Christian becoming.

In the recesses of our being there are great tracts of the unknown, pastures of the invisible, in which we the familiar, the sons of the family, go driving our cattle. The land knows it is us not from boundary-stone to boundary-stone, but as it were from bush and boulder and tree, so that even the evening birds know where to roost, and in which register of God their names be writ, for their nesting and for the birth of their young ones. Civilization is nothing but the familiarity with which we go into this inner property, cultivated and manured from age to age. The rivers have washed alluvial soil to it and the rains have poured and gone down to the sea, and brought back, as it were, the perfume of the same land; so that when our mangoes fall and we eat, we know it is the product of a thousand years. Wars may have come and famine, the Muslims may have conquered us and after them the British, but there is a common area, an acknowledged landholding, that is forever ours, so that when we carry the harvest to our village temple, Kenchamma Herself knows we bring Her Herself — She Herself seen as the many, many. The gods that reside in us are of an ancient making; age after age our ancestors have copulated, and a bit more of each god grew in us as we grew up, like someone in France saying, ‘I’m a Montmorency,’ makes you think at once of St Louis and the Templars of Malta. It saves time and education to know what your kingdom, is rather than measure the frontiers of another, however noble. To bring in a new god is like creating a new pine tree. The grafting of many an age could never give you the larch of the Alps. The Brahmin, the Brahmin, I said to myself — and to convince myself of familiarity with myself I chanted Sri Sankara again.