Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

She must have followed my thoughts, for she said, ‘Do me a favour?’

‘What is it?’

‘Lakshmi and Sharifa have gone out to the cinema. Poor girls, they are alone. Will you take them out and give them a meal, for my sake? Now, let us come back to Communism.’

She lit a cigarette, and though she knew how offensive it was for me, the south Indian Brahmin, to see an Indian girl smoke, yet she continued to puff at it, not to convince me that she smoked, but to convince others she was just like most undergraduates. Her humility was to accept the common denominator of all. This explained, too, why she was never un- at-home anywhere. She slipped into events — and from event to event she slipped, as a fish slips from space to space of water. I looked on at life.

‘Communism is a positive movement. It is a spiritual movement. It moves in the direction of life. When the Americans wonder why Communism succeeds, they might just as well ask why ammonites and belemnites vanished in the Mesozoic but lamellibranches, members of the oyster family, continued to exist. Death is a leftover of existence. Nothing really dies: even death does not die. All continues. Ultimately nothing continues. For that which is itself cannot continue in itself. As the Great Sage has said: It needs space and time to make water into a wave. And what is it that can make life into a wave. It cannot make itself, and nothing else can.’

‘Then what happens?’ she asked. By now Swanston had lost all hope of intelligence. He thought we talked nonsense.

‘Nothing happens,’ I answered. ‘The question itself, as it were, becomes the answer.’

‘And Communism…?’

‘… Dies,’ I said.

‘And what remains?’

‘Truth,’ I answered, as though she knew what I knew.

She was doodling on the table with a spoon. Then she lifted her head and said, ‘So what, then, is history?’

‘History is like saying one’s name to oneself. It convinces you that you exist. C’est la carte d’identité de l’homme,’ I said, not to prove my knowledge of French, but to give my statement the aphoristic value which the French language offers.

‘And Communism?’

‘It’s the stamp of renouvellement.’

‘And Nazism?’

‘A wrong declaration crossed out. Annulée.’

‘And after Communism, what next?’

‘The king,’ I said.

‘The king?’ she pleaded.

‘The principle of man as ruler, as regulator of the kingdom; just as woman is mistress and doctor of the household. Kingship is a catalytic principle. It dissolves terrestrial contradictions, for us all to live.’

‘What a job!’ muttered Swanston.

‘The pyramid is a pyramid, whether it be in the deserts of Africa or in Red Square. Mummification is what ends the feminine principle made masculine.’

‘Now, what’s that?’

‘Materialism — the importance given to yin, or prakriti. It can only lead to the acknowledgement of the object as real.’

‘The object is real,’ protested Swanston, as though to himself. He was getting exasperated and bored.

‘Nobody has yet known an object — in the whole history of humanity,’ I added. ‘If they had known, there would be no Royal College or the Institut Curie.’

‘What nonsense!’ he cried.

‘Try to understand please, Michael. India still has the most ancient civilization on earth.’

‘Yes, with the whip, and five-rupee murders,’ he said, obviously quoting Savithri back to herself.

‘And Mahatma Gandhi!’ said Savithri, indignant. ‘And more than Mahatma Gandhi,’ I added, without further explanation. ‘Unless the masculine principle absorb the feminine, the world cannot be annihilated, and so there can be no joy. Joy is not in the thought, but as it were in the thought of the thought, in “ma pensée s’est pensée” of Mallarmé. In fact it is only in the stuff of thought, that is, where there is no thought.’ ‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed Savithri.

‘I am the only Indian royalist,’ I said, as though to give conclusion to my argument.

‘Well, when you are king, I shall be queen,’ added Savithri, not as it seemed, a joke, but as a dedication, a prophecy,

Cāntam idam ācramapadam sphurati ca bāhuh kutah phalam

ihasya atha va bhavitavyāniham dvārāni bhavanthi sarvatra

Calm this retreat, this hermitage:

Yet my arm throbs — what presage can it be?

For from this, from all that lies about us

Gateways open to future events.

It must be very late, I thought. I looked at my watch. It was twenty-five minutes past eight. I had to rush to meet Sharifa and Lakshmi at the cinema.

I think Savithri was sorry she had given me a job to do— was sorry I was going. I think she almost said, ‘Don’t go.’ But acceptance was so natural to her. For a moment only I think I saw a struggle in her, as if she wished there were no Governors of Indian Provinces with sons at Cambridge, no horrible jazz which had already begun to syncopate from the next room; no Communism and no Swanston, with his red tie and his shining, gold-rimmed glasses, which made him look like a tailor or a quartermaster; as if she wished only the Cam ran through the world, past Trinity with its square tower and many birds, and gargoyles — and night would fall, and the darkness would be filled with one’s unthinking thought, one’s breath.

But as I left her she had regained her positive existence: her feet almost started tapping on the floor — I had become a stranger already. Swanston stayed behind, saying, ‘May I join your party?’

Outside it was cold, and as I went along those rich and surprising alleyways of Cambridge, with churches, crosses, bookshops, bicycles, I recognized I had a strange feeling of which I could not be too proud: I wished I were alone and with Savithri. If I felt thus with Swanston, why not Lakshmi feel whatever she felt about Savithri and me. My masculine exclusivity thus made me kinder to Lakshmi. To possess seems so simple, so inevitable. Truth only dawns when you know you can possess nothing. We can at best possess ourself — and life is one long pilgrimage, one long technique of such a possession. I felt sorrowful and kind, I laughed a lot with Lakshmi and Sharifa. I took them to an Indian restaurant: the Taj Mahal.

My own countrymen, outside my country, terrify me. They somehow seem to come from nowhere — from no particular province, caste, or profession. They all look like Brahminee- kine left at some funeral, so that when the ancestors make the voyage on to the other side — as the Brahmin in Benares explains— they catch hold of a cow’s or bull’s tail to go to their lunar destination. Meanwhile the cow steals from this shop and from that, is fed with grass by a passer-by, is decorated with kunkum by a shaven widow, children touch her with fear and beg for jewels, clothes or husbands; until some passing policeman beats her on the back, and drives her to a lane. There she lies, and chews her cud, till the sun sets and the evening pilgrims come whispering mantras as if to themselves, caressing her with great worship and tenderness: ‘Gowrie, Ganga, Maheswari,’ and so on. Sometimes, too, the cow or bull has a great feast, when some late funeral meal is at last over. There are Brahmins, imagine, that do three funerals a day, so sometimes one has to wait a long time for them to come. Of course it is always an illness or a new arrival that has stopped them coming sooner, for they can only come on an empty stomach… but you know from their belchings and rounded bellies much food has already gone into them. Ah, brother, Benares is Benares, Kashi the Holy, and whatever sins you commit in Kashi — well, there even a dog, or a bull, or a four-shoulder Brahmin attains liberation.