Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

One afternoon how long the path between the main road and Clare Bridge seemed to me, waiting in the dark and cold for Savithri. Knowing she must be having some dubious and interminable discussion with her Communist comrades— for she saw a great deal of them, liking their sincerity, their disinterestedness, their cleanliness, ‘not smelly like the bourgeois’ was her definition — I began to think of bourgeois and Capitalist.

Nazism, I said to myself, must have been born of the He- principle: Nietzsche, that great ‘prophet of Nazism’, thought of superman because Lou Andreas-Salomé alas had jilted him. Refuting the she-world Nietzsche took Zarathustra to the top of the mountain, whence he imprecated the world. The Jews belong to the world — they are great world builders — hence the hate of the he-man for the Jew. More men marry Jewesses — Savithri’s best friend was a Jewess, daughter of a German refugee, and an Englishman from one of the best families, the bluest of blue blood, was in love with her — than Jews marry gentile women — in Cambridge at least, where Betsy once heard a Jewish boy say, ‘At least let us have some Jewish girls for ourselves! We might have to take to evil ways, if all the Cambridge Jewish girls fall in love with the sons of dukes and lords.’

That Marxism was born of a Jew seemed inevitable. That Marxism was succeeding in China also seemed inevitable — who but the Chinese accepted the reality of the world with such full authenticity? If the world is to be lived in, the world has to be accepted: woman has to be accepted. The quarrel between Nazism and Communism, between Hitler and Lenin, was one between the ascetic of Godsberg, and the little, heavy Slav, with bicycle and book, returning from the British Museum to the warm fire and Krupaskaya. Whoever talks of the wife of Danton, the purist, but who does not know the princess from Austria? Communism is the acceptance of life, the justification of life: Nazism the denial of life, its destroyer. I am sure more Nazis gloated at the thought of London on fire, than Communists on the burning of Hamburg. When the Germans entered France, there were still officers who made the Le Silence de la Mer possible: when the Russians entered Berlin they raped every woman they could. The one ran to the fulfilment of life, the other glorified himself by denial. Mephistopheles was a solipsist. Lenin was a Saint-Francis turned inquisitor. If I were not a royalist, I should have become a Communist. After all Stalin was an usurper, a Césarévitch who succeeded Rasputin. Ivan Karamazov was a fine disciple of Christ — an enemy of the inquisition. Alyosha was a true Christian. When the Mother of God replaced the Son of Man Catholicism became a universal religion.

How true, I thought, as still I walked backwards and forwards on the path — thinking of history was thinking of Savithri — how true that ascetic Protestantism, the Puritan spirit, was combatting feminine Communism. Communism, I concluded, would be defeated not because of the atomic bomb or the heroes of the Korean War, but because the civilization of America was changing over from its puritan background to the magnificence of women’s clubs. The American man accepted woman more deeply than did the European. To worship woman is to redeem the world.

She would come to me then, perhaps, like she had the other day, under the bare trees and the yellow lamplight, with a gesture of sari and books, her voice lilting up with excuses, with implorations of forgiveness. ‘Did I make you wait very long?’ she had asked, putting a warm hand through my overcoat arm, as when the sluices are lifted and the canal waters run back, gurgling and rolling, splashing their joy back to all the recurrent past, with a feeling of intimacy, a fervent churning prayer, saying man has no empty kingdom in himself, but all is true and reverential.

Yes, Savithri had such a sense of reverence for things— were she picking up a spoon, or holding your pen in hand to write an address (for she always forgot her pen and her glasses anywhere, in classes or digs or in a restaurant, and one of the most lovable things I could do for her, was to go back to Lyons or to Witfolds, and ask the management for Savithri’s glasses. ‘This Indian lady, forgot them in the afternoon,’ I would plead, and more often than not, they were found). Sometimes, too, sitting by her on a bench behind Trinity we would be talking away at some abstruse metaphysical subject, and there would come some elegant young Indian or Englishman (‘Your paramours’ I called them, mostly out of fun, but not without a touch of other feelings) whom she had sent searching for her glasses, lost at Heffer’s maybe, buying her Michael Drayton (for she was specializing in the early seventeenth century) or at the Copper Kettle (opposite King’s) where girls gathered together in the afternoon to talk shop. Sometimes these girls themselves, whether it were Betsy (whom I had met by now) or Lakshmi or Sharifa, two Indians, one a Brahmin from Trichinopoly, and the other a Lucknow Muslim, both of them seeking her warmth and intelligence, but each of them detesting her for their own feminine reasons — well, some boy or girl therefore would bring Savithri’s glasses or pen, or even her notebook, and say ‘Sorry to disturb you, Savithri’, or sometimes even ‘Sorry to disturb you, Princess, but we thought you might again get lost, and not find the doorway of Girton. You don’t want that to happen again, do you?’ ‘Oh, no, ‘Savithri would smile, ‘Oh, no, and thank you ever so much.’

My looks would not encourage any disturbance, thus our conversations on the Bogomol dualism or of the good Revolution of ‘48 would go on. She was not in fact, very much of a Communist, but she once said: ‘You know, Ramaswamy, if you’d seen the misery I’ve seen in north India, say, amongst the Pasies, a tribe where a man would murder another for five rupees, or if you had ever visited, as I often did in stealth, some village or home, when my father was away shooting a tiger, or having a huge assembly of notables coming to pay homage to him with sword and ashrafee; or, worse still, if you had been with me on that atrocious day when my father tied a miserable son of a clerk, a munshi’s son, to the middle post of the palace hall and took a whip to him just because he’d dared, like a true Muslim youth, write poetry in my honour and sing it below my window — and in all innocence; if you’d seen such things, and the way when the floods came, Mother Goomtie’s kindness brought such waters that in the middle of the monsoon, with blanket, cradle, and pot on their heads, man, woman and child had to mount up trees and live full fifteen days, as it were from moon to moon — for the river entered the huts and homes, and carried away cattle, boundary-stones and children; if you’d seen all that, you would know whence comes my Communism. My Communism is made of Mother India’s tears.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I answered, ‘but that is because you cannot weep yourself.’

‘You are right there.’ She was always willing to agree. I was her schoolmaster, and she liked to learn from me.

‘The fact is, for you, love is an abstraction.’

‘How right you are,’ she said, her eyes fervent as with a sudden illumination. ‘Lakshmi often says,’ she continued, ‘that Savithri can never love. All is given to her, money and adoration — those are her own words — so Savithri can never love.’

‘No,’ I protested, somewhat in selfish defence perhaps. ‘You can love. Or rather you can be love.’

‘Now, now, what’s that?’

‘For you love is not a system — a canalization of emotion, an idea. For you love is a fact, an immediate experience, like an intuition,’ I said.

‘Wonderful, wonderful. Go on.’