Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘God, that invisible force in man, seems to have given the Brahmin a whip, a trident, with which invisibly he plays his chess. The elephant goes in and out of the jungle at the invisible magician’s command. The king falls or moves according to a silent imprecation or a mantra. Words are made inwardly, and a pressure here or there makes the smile, the anger, the tear. No man should have so much power over a woman.

‘But woman has no morality in this matter. For her the beauty of this earth, the splendour of houses and parliaments, the manufacture of sword and of brocade — be it even from Benares — the pearl necklace, the lovely cradle, the cinema, the circus, the church — all, all is a device for copulation and fruition, of death made far, of famine made impossible, of the smile of child made luminescent on the lap of her, the Mother of God. Perhaps as civilization grows more and more terrestrial — and civilization, as against culture, is terrestrial — the feminine permanence will grow, as in America. Death will be abolished, through the funeral parlours, and love will be made into the passion of the bed. Man is a stranger to this earth — he must go.’

October 29. ‘Today, how nearly I was on the verge of tears myself. We had gone up to St Ophalie with the young moon (Madeleine has her own astrology). Slowly and as though by accident she drew me into an olive orchard to seek, she said, some mushrooms. Georges, of course, could not follow us into this world of thickets and low branches, and Catherine and he were left to themselves. Evening fell, and Madeleine found a new path for us to make our way down.

‘I found it the other day,’ she lied. ‘And Rama, I wanted to show it you. You cannot imagine how beautiful our house looks from the bottom of this hill. Rama, I’m happy,’ she said, and kissed me on the cheek. She knew I knew that her thoughts were elsewhere.

‘The young moon slid over the olives as though he, too, were in connivance. But “Mado, Mado!” Catherine started searching for us. Madeleine did not answer, and put her hand against my mouth. “Sssh! Please do not answer.” Soon the moon would go down. And Georges had, in addition to his half-paralysed hand, very bad eyes. I always led him about on our walks.

‘Madeleine and I sat on some rocks and talked of insipid things. She was not interested in what I was saying — something about my family and India, and a letter from Saroja. Madeleine talked to me of her collége.

‘It is always a subject of major importance to her, especially her Headmistress, who is anything but a saint, and fears Madeleine for being the steadiest of all of them. They are mostly old maids, who not having enough money were not able to marry whom they wanted; the men who did not have much, mainly teachers or municipal clerks, had courted them, in the days when Madeleine’s colleagues were still quite young — and a professor is a professor after all, and they thought of their education and their future family and children, so they married no one. How Madeleine shows off before them her matrimony and her joy! Sometimes, I almost said, joy is needed for official purposes: you do not go so far and marry an Indian, however clever and well-to-do — and in the eyes of many I must at least have been a minor prince for all Aix believes it — unless you can prove on your face that joy is not a by-product, but the very stuff of your daily existence. For a woman her joy is a social quantum, a proof of her truth.

‘Georges must have been unhappy, as the wind was still quite strong — not the mistral, but the wind from the sea. He must have limped down, almost like the donkeys, with ears laid back, as they carry the olive barrels from the mountains. Catherine cannot have been happy either — she must have been shy. This was perhaps the first time she had ever been with a man alone, and of an evening. She must have been frightened too — he might have done something. But as we came down both he and she were seated on the elephant, like two children who had quarrelled over dolls, waiting for their mother to come and settle the dispute. Thus no sooner did Catherine see us, than joy rose to her face — even her voice changed, and she started blubbering like a schoolgirl.

‘“We went in search of some champignons du pays — they’re so delicious. I wanted you to taste them before you go,’ Madeleine shouted. The last sentence was for Georges — better know Catherine is not going to be here always and for ever. Catherine and Madeleine both begged Georges to stay on for dinner, and he reluctantly agreed. We made rice and curry — at least, I and Catherine did — while Georges and Madeleine were in the drawing room, talking away about Buddhism. Georges is never so happy as when he is talking abstract things, and especially if Madeleine is about. To him somehow Madeleine is the proof of recognition, the touch on the shoulder that says, “Yes, it’s perfect,” and the world then looks not so much bright as right. For Georges purity is everything in its place, like the bell, the candle, and the censer; the glory of God can thus be celebrated. Georges, in fact, is a holy bureaucrat.

‘In this again, for law is but the continuance and the determination of the Law, Catherine and he have much in common. Only the hierarchies vary — Georges’s dominion is the Heaven and Catherine’s the earth. All that one needs is a ladder, a golden ladder.

‘I am becoming a cynic — so I must stop. I am angry against someone. I must remove it in the seed, or like a cactus it will grow all over the place, and it then would need a superior intervention to clear my land. Oh, the rice-fields, the yellowing green that flows from canal to the tankbund, from the tankbund to the jackfruit-tree fields across the Himavathy, and the coconut garden of Mada above; and Grandfather Ramanna reading the Upanishads to old fogeys, who come and listen, afternoon after afternoon, saying “Oh yes, Maya, it’s like the son of a barren woman or the horn on the head of a hare”, and the shaven widows and the tufted heads say, “So it is indeed, Rammanoré.” I should have been a Bhatta, and looked after my rice-fields; should have read the Mandukya Upanishad with Gaudapada’s Karika, and then Sankara’s commentary on it; should have read the Ramayana and the Uttara Khanda especially for the villager’s benefit; carried my copper tumbler and spoon to funeral feasts, with the shawl on my shoulders, and with betel in my mouth (not to forget the fee, the silver tucked at the waist in the dhoti fold); belching and spitting would I have come home to have a Kaumudi or a Rukmini press my legs and sit beside me waving the fan: “Ah! how cool the breeze is.” The Lord sleeps, come cattle for water, come peasant for astrology. They gave one rupee eight annas today, did eight-pillared house Nanjundiah. Ramappa is having his nap after the funeral feast.

‘The peasant would leave his cucumbers and the snake- gourds at the door, “Mother, tell the learned One, Timma, the left-handed, will come tomorrow. We’ve to let down a new boat on the river.” Rukmini, or Kaumudi, would give warm coffee on waking, and once the evening prayers were over, and the betel leaves eaten, and the vessels in the kitchen washed, how wondrous it would be to have a cup of warm milk, and the beauty of Rukmini’s young body beside one. It smells of musk and of the nest of birds…

‘No, I shall never be a Brahmin — I should be such a poor eater at a funeral feast. I shall tear my clothes, and set off to the Himalayas. Something hypostatic calls me. Mother mine, I will go.’

November 1. ‘I must talk less: talk less even to myself.’

November 3. ‘Once again it happened last night — that same emptiness, that mango-seed-like kernel that lay within me, and I remembered what grandmother had said of the mango-seed: “My child, if you swallow it, it will grow and grow within you, put out its branches, through your nostrils first, then through your ears, and then through the mouth, and it will become so big that it will grow out of you a tree.” The whole night I lay with it in me, and I could not go to sleep till the early hours of the morning. Madeleine, too, I could hear, rolled about in bed for a long time. Then she went to sleep and spoke in her dream. I could not make out what it was, but she was not happy either. There should be nothing in an act but the act itself. But if the mango-seed enters into it, then it becomes three acts: one before and one after, and in between is the space of no one, which no one wants. It is like a dead rat in plague-time — you throw it opposite your neighbour’s door, and he throws it opposite his, and this one slings it on to the veranda of widow or concubine. These lift it up by the tail and with mosquitoes, fleas, and all, throw it neatly into the right dustbin. Till the municipal cart comes and takes it away — it lies there, a reminder of our infection. And some, of course, may die of this too…