Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

There never was time, there never was history, there never was anything but Shivoham-Shivoham: I am Shiva, I am the Absolute.

Walking back and forth in my Kensington room that day — it was a Thursday, I clearly remember, the day of Jupiter — I thought of the letter I should write to Pratap. For how could I have gone to Cambridge and seen so much of Savithri without dropping him a line, some concatenation of words (and images) that might give him hope. For hope he certainly could have. Savithri always talked of Pratap as one talks of one’s secretary — it must have come from the atmosphere of palaces — as an inevitable support in all contingencies, a certainty in a world of uncertainty. If she talked of him with a touch of condescension it was not because of social differences, it was just because she liked being kind to something, something inevitable, unknown, such as a lame horse in the stable or it might be an old bull, fed in the palace yard till it die; but meanwhile being treated as an elder, a palace bull, given the best of Bengal gram and the choicest of green grass. And when it died, for it would ‘die’, it would be given a music and flower funeral and have orange trees planted over its grave. And one day some virgin would light a lamp and consecrate it, and every day from that time on the sanctuary would be lit with an oil lamp, as dusk fell over the palace grove…

To speak the truth, I hated this attitude of Savithri’s. I felt she was so truly indifferent, so completely resigned to her fate— like all Hindu women — that for her, life was like a bullock-cart wheel: it was round, and so it had to move on night after night, and day after day, smelling chilli or tamarind, rice or coconut, over rut and through monsoon waters purring at the sides to the fairs in the plains; or to the mountains, high up there, on a known pilgrimage. What did it matter, she would ask, whether the sun scorched or the rain poured, or you carried tamarind or saffron? Life’s wheel is its own internal law. Nobody could marry Savithri, nobody could marry a soul, so why not marry anyone? And why should not that anyone be stump Pratap? It certainly could not be Hussain Hamdani; and thank heavens his vanity and self-interest took him to Pakistan and a good job — and Pratap was, anyway, so very clean, so gentle, so sincere. If one should have a husband at all, said Savithri, Pratap was the very best.

‘What do you think?’ she had asked me one evening, a day or two before my departure from Cambridge. We were not by the river, which was reserved for us, for our conjoint intuitions of poetry and history — of a song of Mira’s, and again maybe of some historical character from Avignon, Nîmes, Carcassonne, Albi, or Montpellier. But when we come out into the open streetlight we could talk of anything, of Nehru’s government, of Father’s despair at having three elephants instead of eight, a tradition which had come down from Rajendra Simha III, in the sixteenth century. Finally, in the heart of this extrovert world one can always dig a hollow, make oneself comfortable in a bus-shelter, an A. B. C., or with hot coffee at the Copper Kettle one can sit and talk of Pratap.

‘There’s such goodness in him. I have never seen anyone so good in life. Not even you,’ she had said, in mock severity.

‘I never said I was good.’

‘Of course not,’ she teased, ‘but you want to be called a saint.’

‘You say so,’ I laughed, ‘and that is your responsibility.’ I could hear the bells ring the hour on Trinity Tower, so gathering her notes we had jumped into a taxi at the Market Square and rushed off to deposit her safely at the gate of Girton.

‘It’s me,’ she said, with that enchanting voice, and even the gatekeeper did not seem to mind very much. ‘Am I very late?’

He had looked at the clock first, and then at me. ‘Well, Miss Rathor, the world does not always function by the clock, does it?’ he said, with a wink.

She laid the red rose I had bought her on his table, saying, ‘This is for Catherine,’ and turning to me she had added, ‘She’s such a nice girl, seven years old; we’re great friends. Goodnight, Ramaswamy, Goodnight Mr Scott. Goodnight.’

Back in the taxi I said to myself, ‘Catherine or Pratap, for Savithri it makes no difference. Both are dear because both are familiar, innocent, and inevitable in her daily existence.’

Thinking over all this, my letter to Pratap never got written. It was a damp day and I did not go to the British Museum for my work, but as it was already long past three, I took a stroll by the river.

What an imperial river the Thames is — her colour may be dark or brown, but she flows with a majesty, with a maturity of her own knowledge of herself, as though she grew the tall towers beside her, and buildings rose in her image, that men walked by her and spoke inconsequent things — as two horses do on a cold day while the wine merchant delivers his goods at some pub, whispering and frothing to one another — for the Londoner is eminently good. He is so warm, he is indeed the first citizen of the world. The mist on the Thames is pearly, as if Queen Elizabeth the First had squandered her riches and femininity on ships of gold, and Oberon had played on his pipe, so worlds, gardens, fairies, and grottoes were created, empires were built and lost, men shouted heroic things to one another and died, but somewhere one woman, golden, round, imperial, always lay by her young man, his hand over her left breast, his lip touching hers in rich recompense. There’s holiness in happiness, and Shakespeare was holy because Elizabeth was happy. Would England not see an old holiness again?

For me, as I have said already, the past was necessary to understand the present. Standing on a bridge near Chelsea, and seeing the pink and yellow lights of the evening, the barges floating down to some light, the city feeling her girth in herself, how I felt England in my bones and breath; how I reverenced her. The buses going high and lit; the taxis that rolled about, green and gentlemanly; the men and women who seemed responsible, not for this Island alone, but for whole areas of humanity all over the globe; strollers — some workman, who had stolen a moment on his way to a job, some father who was showing London to his little daughter, two lovers arm hooked to arm — how with the trees behind and the water flowing they seemed to make history stop and look back at itself.

London was esoteric and preparing for the crowning of another queen; and Englishmen felt it would be a momentous insight of man into himself. The white man, I felt, did not bear his burden, but the Englishman did. For, after all, it was the English who founded the New World, yet now it was America that naively, boastfully, was proclaiming what every Englishman and woman really felt — that the dominion of man, the regulation of habeas corpus or the right delivery of some jute bales on Guadalcanal Island, in the Pacific, was the business of these noble towers, clocks, balances, stock-books, churring ships, and aeroplanes above, and that there would be good government on earth, and decency and a certain nobility of human behaviour, and all because England was. That I, an Indian who disliked British rule, should feel this only revealed how England was recovering her spiritual destiny, how in anointing her queen she would anoint herself.

It was nearing six by now and knowing that about this hour Julietta would be at the Stag, I dropped in, took an orangeade, and sat waiting for her. Julietta was a great friend of Savithri’s. She had left Girton the year before, and though I had met her only once I felt I could talk to her about anything.