Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘How do you explain that?’ asked Savithri, thoughtful.

‘The impersonal alone could be the Truth because he, Sri Rama, was the Truth.’

‘How can one be the Truth?’ asked Swanston with a silly little laugh. The elementary minds which go to make the majority of Communists are exasperating.

‘How can one not be the Truth, sir,’ I asked a little angrily. ‘Standing where do you judge falsehood?’

‘In truth, naturally,’ Hollington said.

‘And can truth judge truth?’

‘No,’ said Savithri.

‘Then when truth sees truth, as it were, what happens?’ Everyone was introspective — they were trying to understand.

‘One is truth,’ said Savithri, almost in a whisper, as though she feared others might hurt the Truth by saying things irreverent. And we fell into a large-eyed silence.

Meanwhile, the food came, and the drinks, and the function of masticating took a lot of our time. Savithri fiddled away with her bit of lamb or veal, for when she was thinking food did not go easily down her gullet.

‘So you say Communism is inevitable.’

‘Yes, like smallpox innoculation is inevitable.’

‘That’s new.’

‘Between the normality of birth and the normality of continuous existence there’s a difference,’ I continued. ‘In one you are given a chance to live, and in the other you are prevented from dying for a certain time, for the normal length of time; and so you take innoculations.’ Swanston looked at me, not knowing what I was driving at.

‘History proves Darwinism,’ I went on. ‘Just as there is a biological Darwinism — the survival of the fittest, which Marx affirmed was one of the greatest truths in the history of humanity — so there is a psychical Darwinism. You survive because you want the race to continue? But why, may I ask, should continuance be so important?’

‘That’s not a question,’ spat Swanston, as though I were being childish. His system of logic had not foreseen such an argument.

‘Yes, it is possible to explain. You do not only say light travels at such and such a speed, you also inquire if it goes in pulses or in waves, and why it does so.’

‘And so?’ asked Savithri. She wanted me to go to the end of my argument. The fact however was, Savithri knew, as I knew, that I spoke from a knowledge, a conjoint discovery, that came of her.

‘The why is the most important of all questions. If there were no why, there would be no dialectic, in fact there would be no Marxism. The only trouble with Marxism was it ended with itself. The dialectic, unlike the parallel, must meet somewhere. It had to end in some Spartacus of history, or in the Paris of 1871, or in Moscow: 1917. And thus Paradise came into being; God, the Angel Gabriel and the Generalissimo.’

Swanston, by now, had nothing but contempt for me, Jack was thinking of other things — it was soon going to be half past eight and they would have to get ready for the dance. But Savithri sat there as though time had been absorbed by her, as Shiva had absorbed his poison; as though she had made of it a jewel, to be hung at her neck. Her breath became deep, and her whole body had a quality, a tingling quality of crystal, which almost made sound unto itself inwardly. It had become a musical instrument, the jaltarang.

Thoughts intoxicated Savithri as nothing did: men for her were just givers of thoughts. Her maidenhood had no physical basis. It existed, just as in fairy tales you cannot win a princess unless you solve a riddle. For her life was such a riddle, and she rejected man after man — not because she found them tall or lean or fat or too rich, or even learned or boring — but because she fed, as it were, on life itself; meaning consisted of food, breath, sensation. She was restless because nothing, no nothing at all, could fill her — save a steady, self-sounding but unrippled silence. Who gave her silence gave her life. Sometimes I did, I think, so she liked to be with me. I once teased her, saying, ‘You function according to the endocrinology of semantics!’ And she laughed approvingly, letting fall the flower from her hair.

Communism she understood that evening. She understood it for she acted rightly, if often for stupid reasons. She might say, ‘I like being a Communist because Swanston is so nice,’ or ‘I like to dance with Jack because his father is a great friend of my father’s’, not seeing that both reasons were false. She just fell on the right thing — she took the English Tripos only because somebody had said, ‘It’s a nice discipline; take it.’ But actually she spoke an English albeit with an Indian accent, of a beauty that was gentle, unobtrusive, indrawn, as though it was her most intimate breath, each word seemed created, as it were, at the moment — coming from the depths of sound and meaning at once. That was why, when I had quoted to her Kalidasa’s first verse of Raghuvamsa,

Vāk arthah vyava gampruktho,

Just as word and meaning are binomial

Indeed be Parvathi and Shiva himself,

she had stood there that day in Avignon with wonderment, that someone, even such a great poet as Kalidasa, could have formulated her own intimate apperception so completely, explaining Savithri Rathor to herself.

Communism for her was also an explanation, a fact of history, with a meaning. What was irrelevant turned itself away from her by some power of simple negation — like water on a swan or on a lotus leaf. Not that ugly smearing things did not come, near her — they just did not reach her. There was no one to receive, at the other end. So passions fell with a gesture, vulgarity swallowed itself, and the aftermath of silence cleansed everyone, gave purity back to every decadent undergraduate.

I remembered how one evening, when Savithri had had to go back early to college to see her tutor about something, Lakshmi had come to dine with me at the hotel. No different from other girls of her age, Lakshmi, who swore such undying affection for Savithri (‘She’s here, in my belly, like my own child,’ she used to say) — well, Lakshmi had said, ‘I cannot understand how Savithri can go about with so many men at the same time. You’ll hate me for saying it, but she’s such a flirt.’ I had looked at Lakshmi with the look of a Brahmin at a bird-catcher or barber. Brahmins don’t need words to say anything.

‘I don’t mean she does things,’ Lakshmi had continued. ‘But whether they are Socialists, Communists, Conservatives, or anything else they all have to dance round her. Indians are shocked at this freedom. It comes from going straight to liberty after centuries of zenana life.’

‘It’s like young puppies or birds — when they open their eyes and try to walk they fall anywhere. Isn’t it such joy, Lakshmi, to have so much innocence before one? You and I, who come from the south, we know too much: we shall never have such innocence. Savithri is a saint,’ I had said, and closed the discussion. After that Lakshmi had not been so free with me. She was just jealous. Jealousy with women is a greater biological quantum. We go to another woman — but they eat their own feelings out. Pity that a male prostitute is so anti-natural. For women possession is knowledge. To hold is to be: to love is to submit. Bondage is her destiny.

Not so with Savithri. Having accepted bondage she was free. To be a woman, she knew, was to be absorbed by a man. If such a man did not exist, then the masculine principle in all men — and in women when they were intelligent, for she had many women friends — could give food for her intelligence. She wanted to surrender to Truth — and he free. Life was too much sorrow: not joy was its meaning, but liberation. That is why when I taught her the Nirvana Shataka of Sri Sankara, she was so happy — and she could sing it with deep emotion. ‘Mano budhi ahankara,’ she would start and, closing her eyes, enter into herself. It led her to her own silence.