Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I stayed at the Hotel d’Angleterre. It opened on to the north, and from my room the Pic du Midi seemed but a leap, a touchable stretch of murmuring, unsubsiding green. From the mornings the mist rose and floated about the sun, then hid itself like a serpent, and by afternoon great big trails of cloud coloured the sky. The evenings were intimate — and as September was cold, there were not too many people on the Promenade des Pyrénées. Life seemed as though reality had spread itself out with a pneumatic curve, and I and the mountain were points in some known awareness. The sun, when he did set, had a familiarity that I had never observed either in the Himalayas or in the Alps, as if he was a private planet that revolved at our command, for our benefit, and to our entire knowledge. The sun knew you and you knew the sun, and when he set it was just like a father, a friend leaving you, telling you you had just to call and he would come, if you needed him. No wonder that under this familiar sun Don Quixote thought the windmills were knights or that d’Artagnan was the valiant knight of France.

By day my lungs were filled with the sun’s kindness, but when night came, and in the darkness the valley rose and filled the air, there was a sense of immensity, of a truth that was hid but too long; one felt that the sun indeed had cheated us, had made us characters of a commedia dell’arte, that night was a vacancy which no sun could ever fill, no valley ever bear. There was an absence that seemed familiar; known, seeable but not with these eyes, knowable but not with the mind; something young, and of a single elevated melody. The chateau of Henry IV might be early Renaissance, but there was a Rajput touch about Pau, something of Chitor, and a queen that would sing of a Rathor. Dreams, too, I had, wonderful muslin-like dreams, made of purest cotton white, and beneath which shone breasts like the down of doves. I could hear the whole night full of song, and sometimes I would wake myself beating time with my hands, and feel warm with the coming sun of India.

Khelatha, nanda kumar—

Kumarare

He plays, does he, son of Nanda

He plays in Brindaban.

How very far seemed Madeleine at such moments. In fact she had said to me that if the X-ray were unsatisfactory and the doctors had the slightest fear it was serious, I had just to send her a wire and she would come down immediately. Otherwise, she was going to be driven to Paris by Oncle Charles — for Catherine was now to think of getting married. She had to be taught how to dress, and even how to use lipstick, and how to make up; and Madeleine was supposed to buy her the right dresses, take her to the right hairdressers, and buy her the right handbags and earrings. There was to be a ball at the Hotel de Ville, and Oncle Charles wanted her to be beautiful for the occasion; he himself had a special suit made. For nothing in the world would I have liked Catherine to miss her ball — or not to be pretty enough for she was a lovely girl — and have her possible marriage put off because one piece of my body, and a small portion of it, round as a lamb’s head, would not pump properly. Therefore when Dr Drager gave me the result of the X-ray I was so happy I almost sang with the sun, and wired Madeleine that the report gave no need for alarm; good luck for Catherine’s ball!

Two days later there came a beautiful letter from Madeleine. She had had terrible dreams the first few days — of serpents and elephants and of India, and she was saying to me, ‘Take me away from here, away to Grandmother!’ And when she went to Arras, it was not the same house, nor was it Grandmother there but her father standing, dressed as an Indian soldier. The whole thing was terrible, and someone was cremated somewhere, and Madeleine left the cathedral a well- dressed Hindu bride with kunkum on her forehead and her ear pendants touching her jaws. But my wire had put an end to her worries: she immediately started thinking of the ball, and she and Catherine drove down in Oncle Charles’s car to Arras and paid a visit to Grandmother.

Grandmother had treated Madeleine as though she had never left Rouen and as if Madeleine had never been married. ‘When do you go back to Paris?’ she had asked. She wanted to believe that nothing had changed. She gave Madeleine a chain that her father had had made when he was engaged, and which was to be given at Madeleine’s engagement. ‘Take it, my child, and be happy. I am old, and one never knows what can happen to an old thing of eighty-seven.’ After a moment’s silence she had added: ‘And when you get married, there’s that diamond brooch that your father brought when he came back from Turkey, after having constructed some railway there. It is Arabian, and they say it brings happiness to the wearer.’

‘Grandmother showed it to me,’ continued Madeleine. ‘Oh, it is so lovely, Rama, with black beads at the bottom, and a half-moon diamond and sapphire setting at the top. How I wished I could have worn it immediately for you. I will at Aix. The days are so long without you, my love, and during the nights for some reason I have wanted to howl, to cry. Maybe it was only an anxiety, a feminine anxiety about your state of health, for last night I had such wonderful sleep. All evening I had talked of you to Tante Zoubie and to Catherine. I spoke especially of the respect you show to me — for you, a woman is still the other, the strange, the miracle. You could never show the familiarity European men show towards their wives. You worship women even if you torture them. But I like to be tortured and to be your slave.’

No, of course I did not want a slave. I wanted a companion of pilgrimage, for if you gaze long at the mountain, where after twist on twist of the bridal path the bells ring and the evening of worship has come, you want to lie at the feet of God together and unalone. Oh, to go to God and alone…

During the day I often worked on my Albigensians. Strange, so strange it seemed to me, that after Indian non-dualism had passed through different countries at different epochs of history men came to affirm just the opposite — that instead of Advaita, where both duality and contradiction are abolished — men affirm that purity is not of the flesh, and so leap into the flame like Esclarmonde de Perelha. For in denying the flesh you affirm its existence. Just as thought cannot be transcended but has to be merged in that which is the background of thought, neither can evil be destroyed, but can only be merged into that from which it arose; the essence of evil, the root of evil, can only be the spring of life. Dostoevsky said that the tyranny of two and two making four was terrible — to think man could never escape it! But if Dostoevsky had studied the theory of numbers he would have known how all numbers merge into Zero, from which they arose. There cannot be — how could there be? — a tyranny of Zero. The absurd is the escape, the escape into phenomena of an urge for the noumenal. You cannot be happy and be a man. You can be Happiness or be Man. For Man and Happiness, these be One.

To be pure in the world is like being a human being when you are Man. It is like when India was under British rule and Indians carried British passports — Indians, I was told, had to say they were British at every European frontier. Sometimes an ignorant policeman would stop and say: ‘But you can’t be British,’ and tried to find the meaning of his statement in his book of rules. Finding nothing there, he would say: ‘You can’t be britannique,’ and yet he would let you go, for his rules never told him what to do. What is beyond logic must be the truth, thought Dostoevsky, like that frontier guard. But Truth may be simpler. You can never be a Cathar, a pure; you have to be purity. When there is purity there is no you. That is the paradox, and neither Christianity nor Islam have ever been able to transcend it.