Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘What woke you up — and so early?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘I had a rare and sound sleep. You know, they say round people like me sleep like a pumpkin,’ and she laughed at herself.

It was true she was rounder than she — or maybe even I— might have liked, but one forgot it, one knew she had some wisdom of herself that made her voice so intimate, so sustaining, and so pure.

‘What a country!’ she continued. ‘I have marvelled at these dragonflies. I played with one, all about the garden. It’s a pity I must be going away so soon.’

‘Villa Ste-Anne does not go anywhere,’ I answered. ‘Nor do Ramaswamy and Madeleine. Everything will be here when the princess wants to be here.’ Covering my lie with a barbarous joke I bowed, Savithri no more felt the princess than the poppy felt she was the poppy. Savithri just was, it was only me that had the Brahmin, with the Brahmin and the I as separate points of reference. Having only one point of reference, it seemed to me she had no problem, no equations. For her, marriage would be to wed anyone, for whatever happened would just happen, and the wedding too would be a happening. He alone acts who is a stranger to himself.

Innocence, I thought, was like her breaking into song. And seeing a jasmine in my garden — though she could scarcely believe that Europe could ever have jasmines — Savithri sat on the stone seat and said, ‘Shall I sing? I feel like singing,’ and like a seagull that leaves the waters and goes slowly upwards, she started,

Asuwanajana seejá seejá,

Préma bōla bōyi

With the water of my tears I sprinkled it,

And I reared the creeper of love.

with her eyes closed, and the swallows in the olives above us making quite a fuss about it all. I felt it was somehow improper for me to stay, and I slowly left her to her song, and went up to make coffee for Madeleine. Being a Thursday, she did not have to go to college, and so I went about my job quietly. Once the table was laid and the coffee ready, I went to wake Madeleine, but she was already lying with her eyes wide open. She said the song had woken her up.

‘What a melopée! And what sadness there is in your people. That is why, Rama, I always ask you when you laugh, why is there such an acute sorrow behind it?’

‘Existence,’ I answered her, ‘is a passage between life and death, and birth and death again, and what an accumulation of pain man has to bear. Is it then a wonder the Buddha, with palaces and queens, with a kingdom and an heir, left his home to find that from which there is no returning. Suppose, Madeleine, you were always and always travelling: from hotel to hotel, from Hotel du Midi to Hotel de Venise, from Pension Mimosa to the Hotel Baltimore, through mountain, sea, and air, you could travel — yet where would you live. You could only live in Life, and to find what that means is to know the whole of wisdom.’

‘Sometimes, Rama, I want to run away from you, run far away from you, just to listen to stupid innocent laughter, like Tante Zoubie’s, or go to a circus and see the clown make everyone laugh — this high seriousness reminds me of poor Werther. I am not serious you know, Rama, and one day, perhaps, I shall run away.’ She laughed, but I knew she said it in no fun — I could see the curve of her thought. ‘Yesterday I felt lost without you,’ she continued. ‘You had left early in the morning, and I knew you would not come till late at night, and I felt utterly lonely, and so lost. I went to the hairdresser after college to have my hair done — I was a week too early, but I told them some lie. Then I went to buy some papers for you. It was only six o’clock. I saw the Grands Magasins open — so I went into one and wandered. And what do you think I bought myself? A moulin a poivre, just a wee little thing, that would serve no purpose; but it could be there all the same, and maybe one day it will yet come in handy. Then I bought the pepper for it. I must use it some day — you know, I am French, and nothing should be useless; everything must have a function, a right to exist. Thus instead of curry I will now and again grind you some pepper,’ she said, and rose to have a wash.

I laid the table on the veranda, so that we could all have breakfast together, and when I went down to call Savithri, I found her doing her hair.

‘Come in,’ she said un-self-consciously, but I did not go in.

‘Breakfast ready!’ I shouted. In a minute she was ready too, her braid in her hand, and she ran up with the hairpins between her fingers. She sat at the table while I brought the coffee, and when I returned I found Madeleine fixing up Savithri’s hair. Women have intimacy with each other in the things of the body — in face — powder, shoes, disease and underclothes — that men could never have with one another. That is why women have to speak of frocks and frills, of jewels, medicines, and gynaecologists, as though it was their algebra of living, and men have no more to do with them than the hog with the lotus.

Life is made for woman — man is a stranger to this earth. We are all bodhisattvas, and one night we, too, will leave the wife, lying by the newborn one with the lamp lit behind her, and the curve of her eye folding life itself into its depths. And while Kanthaka wakens to this tiding, and sends the neigh that would awaken the citizens of Kapilavastu to the news of departure, the awaiting angels will close keyhole and tile- edge, that none be awakened, and Channa the appointed groom brings the horse to the door, while the sentries sleep. As door after door of the city opens, the sentries sleeping at their seats, the angels shutting the noise of hinge and lock, Kanthaka flies to the frontiers. Cutting his hair, the Buddha sends it to the very skies, for the gods to receive in homage and devotion. And when they reach the River Ganges, Kanthaka kneels to the Lord and says, ‘Lord, may this poor creature, too, be permitted to come?’ And the master says, ‘I go thither, Kanthaka, whence there is no returning,’ and then he departs on the journey from which there is no returning. Kanthaka goes back to Kapilavastu and dies immediately, to be reborn and return to the Compassionate One, a disciple, an arhat. ‘For all that is created, Ananda, is composite. And the composite knows decay and death. There is a point in one, a centre, a knowledge, touching which there is no becoming; there is only the end of the quest, the desperation, the Truth.’ All men are but pilgrims of the Tree.

Savithri, like most Indians today, knew little of the Buddha. In fact, Madeleine was astonished at this strange ignorance of so great a wisdom. I explained that Buddhism had merged into Hinduism so that today we cannot distinguish one from the other — just as in south India you cannot distinguish the Dravidian tradition from the Aryan tradition, and truly speaking Aryan wisdom seems to have found a more permanent place in south India than in the Aryan north.

‘India absorbs everything and makes it her own,’ I repeated a banality, and Madeleine looked at me with an almost desperate irritation.

‘India makes everything and everywhere an India. But if anything does not achieve Indiahood, it is the untruth, the lie, the Maya, the British,’ she said and laughed.

‘Why, the British are very much loved today,’ I said, knowing what she meant. ‘Isn’t that so, Savithri?’

‘So much so indeed, Sister,’ said Savithri, ‘that when Mountbatten left, we all wept. We are a set of sentimental fools,’ added Savithri very wisely. That was not her phrase, I thought; it sounded like the adage of a politician.

‘The French haven’t left Pondicherry yet,’ said Madeleine. ‘The old French peasant does not leave anything. He also absorbs — in terms of dividends…’