Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

On the way home she started beating her feet to some ditty, and I felt I did not know what to do, for neither did I know this Tino Rossi nor did I think I should know him. I was a provincial Brahmin from Mysore, where everybody learns marriage songs of Rama and Krishna, or Sanskrit verses for banquet competitions. I had come with that background to France, where I fell among the group of Madeleine and her friends, almost all Catholics, or serious Communists. But this world of, ‘The sky is blue and I love you,’ was completely irrelevant to me. I probably knew more of Bernard de Ventadour or of Marie de France and her

Belle amie si est de nous

Ni vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous,

than of the jazz masters.

Besides, I thought, amongst those olive trees which rolled like age after age before me, that had seen Roman consuls, bishops, crusaders and princes, and perhaps Napoleon himself as he came back from St Helena before his Hundred Days of Glory, I wondered whether before the antiquity, wisdom, and the majesty of Mont Ste-Victoire, some Haarlem ferial piece were not a lack of piety. Maybe to a true Negro such jazz would have sounded like an adoration of the Invisible, but to an Indian it seemed a lack of respect to the earth, to those fervid hills — to France. We can only offer others what is ours, were it only a seed of tamarind, Grandfather used to say. Let us Indians then give France, if we would, Mira or the glory of Sankara, but let us not offer her, for her hierarchy of riches, for the generosity of her rivers, for the purity of her poets, such tam-tam. Does he who sets foot on the soil of France know he treads where Saint Louis trod, walks where Henry IV rode, goes where the great Mistral walked? Or that he looks at Mont Ste-Victoire which Cézanne made famous, in violet and silver, in Venetian green and in mud-red? Or that Péguy walked eighty-eight kilometres from Paris to Chartres, to carry the homage of the country of Beaune to the queen of France?

Etoile du matin, inaccessible reine,

Voici que nous marchons vers votre illustre cour

Et voici le plateau de notre pauvre amour

Et voici l’océan de notre immense peine…

Much as I spoke these words to myself, Savithri must have felt it, for her jazz waned away into a more lovely lyric, and thence to an abrupt silence. Mont Ste-Victoire rose before us with the familiarity of an acknowledged elder, not a father but a younger uncle; we were to be his wards. As the car tuned herself and ran uphill, I could see the lights of Villa Ste-Anne, and by the time Savithri stepped out of the car, Madeleine had run down the steps to bid her welcome.

Months later, Madeleine said to me that Savithri was just as she had imagined an Indian woman should be, gentle, simple, and very silent.

‘You are thrice welcome to our little home,’ Madeleine said, standing near the bull, ‘the more welcome, because you are a woman and an Indian. Come in!’

As I laid the luggage on the floor, Savithri threw open the window and looked out and said, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful here, look at that Moon of Shiva!’ And she added, ‘Just like in Naini Tal.’ As she went up the steps to the landing above, she felt it was a palace — and so did we. We make objects — objects do not make us. Madeleine could no more have made it a palace than I a home. For Madeleine it was a villa, and I always felt I was her guest. For me Villa Ste-Anne should have been a sanctuary— and like all sanctuaries it would then have belonged to the gods, and to my ancestors. The Brahmin is never contemporary — he goes backwards and forwards in time, and so has a sage to begin the genealogical tree, and a guru to end the cycle of birth and death. Where, I ask you, where was I to build a house, a home? By what river or tank or temple corridor?

The garden of Provence is like some Chinese fableland, with bishops, prelates, princes of the Church; snuffboxes, concubines and Chateauneuf-du-Pape, bastardy; the monster of Tarascon to keep treasure, the dungeons of Montmajour for prisoners; and some Faerie Queen, that one may not win with a sword or a look, but by some subtle poem that she has to unweave and see the meaning of in a pool of clear mirrors. But where a Chinese queen would be young, full and ripe, the Provencal one would be lean, proud and virginal. There would be a donkey to have a jolly ride on, to go to a tavern and hear someone talk of the wisdom of birds, or of the knowledge of navigating stars; and when the moon shone, as in Sze-Chwan, would not the whole country look as though Wang-Chu or Chang-Yi had, while pounding rice (though in Provence of course, it would be pressing the wine) with pestle and drink, sung up a kingdom to live in.

And Wang-Chu says to Chang-Yi, ‘The moon will fill the valley as on the night of the ninth dragon, and from the potion made of the nine butterflies of the four valleys we can ride on moonbeams to the castle of Changto. And there the Princess will receive us, with bamboo-wine and hemp-liquor, and the girls will come dancing round us, and we shall have a nice time, hé, Chang?’ Just then, as in the good story of the Mule du Pape, some conceited servant of the prince would lead the donkey to the top, to the very top of the castle, and when it has looked at the river, broad as a washerman’s pool, it sees mounting chariots, and busy merchant-men and horses that gallop; it sees sword and buckler and young sunshine, with ladies to the left who pay homage to a duke, and ladies to the right who kiss the hand of a yellow monk or Mandarin — till three white geese come flying from Mount Wu, and a dark, blue wind rises and sweeps the castle and the moon away. Then Wang-Chu will say to Chang-Yi, ‘We have had a marvellous trip, haven’t we— and the moonbeams were so nice to ride on,’ and Wang, laying the pestle against the wall, will say, ‘Chang, can’t we make a cobweb, large as these four palms, thine and mine, and hold the kingdoms in our waistband?’ Chang thinks for a long time and says, ‘Maybe, maybe, but now take this pinch of snuff,’ and as he says so, the morning bells ring from tower to tower of the temple, and Chang and Wang are found sleeping by their pestle. The bailiff of the house kicks them on the flank and says, ‘Hé, wake up, you! We do not give five pan-liangs for nothing — or do you think we grow pan-liangs on grass-stalks,’ and they wake up and see it is broad daylight.

It wasn’t broad daylight for us, anyway, for the round full moon shone over us with the shadow of dark cypresses, now with the silver on the plane trees, now with pools and ruins of an abandoned Roman town or castle, now with vines and now with the long-going railway line — the whole night had a hum and a woof that seemed like a world built by fireflies. Some fairy tale had come true; some princess had indeed woven a world from her bonnet, and had spread it out for her own enjoyment, as if she were looking at her own face in the melody of the bamboo flute. And she awaited the coming of the Knight of Jerusalem.

Del gran golfe de mar

E dels enois dels portz

E dels perilhos far

Soi, merce Dieu, estortz…

I knew I talked nonsense. I could not talk anything else. Savithri was made of such stuff that for her the real had to be clothed in terms of the illusory to make it concrete; truth was to be made the revelation of a puzzle, a riddle, a mathematic of wisdom. For her, I could see, everything was gesture and symbol, and time had been abolished, that the river might run through the night, the tree rise high, the mountains move as on themselves; that words be spoken as though left behind, and the body itself be a casket in which one sees oneself, not as limb and form, but as light cooled into space, as a gift, an object, a truth. All was secret to her but herself — so all was a legend, and every event a wonder. Every man — the peasant on his horse, going back to his home at midnight, hay-rake on his arm, or the driver of a stopped lorry from whom I asked about some country road, his red light singing and chirruping — all, all were like a land seen from a palace, that some mysterious father had named, but would not let you go anywhere near. The world was like the beggar at the palace gateway, and everything was fascination. And I was the father, the storyteller, the schoolmaster. What a job, I said to myself, and I was fascinated.