Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘Stop where you are for a moment,’ I begged.

‘I can go nowhere,’ she answered, ‘I belong to you.’

Gently, as if lost in the aisles of a large temple, I walked about my room, opened my trunk and slowly removed the newspaper cover, then the coconut, the betel nuts, the kunkum that Little Mother had destined for her daughter-in-law. ‘I, too, had come prepared for this morning,’ I said.

‘Really?’ she smiled, for in me nothing astonished her.

‘Yes, but it was a preparation made a very long time ago — a long, long time, Savithri. Not a life, not ten lives, but life upon life…’

‘Yes,’ she said; ‘This Cambridge undergraduate, who smokes like a chimney and dances to barbarian jazz, she says unto you, I’ve known my Lord for a thousand lives, from Janam to janam have I known my Krishna…’

‘And the Lord knows himself because Radha is, else he would have gone into penance and sat on Himalay. The Jumna flows and peacock feathers are on his diadem, because Radha’s smiles enchant the creepers and the birds. Radha is the music of dusk, the red earth, the meaning of night. And this, my love, my spouse,’ I whispered, ‘is from my home. This is coconut, this is betel nut, this is kunkum and these the toe-rings my Mother bare, and left for my bridal.’ Slowly I anointed her with kunkum from my home, offered her the coconut and the betel nuts — there were eight, round and auspicious ones. ‘And now I shall place the toe-rings on your feet.’

‘Never,’ she said angrily. ‘You may be a Brahmin for all I know. But do you know of a Hindu woman who’d let her Lord touch her feet?’

‘What a foolish woman you are!’ I said, laughing. ‘And just by this you show why a Brahmin is necessary to educate you all, kings, queens, peasants, and merchants. Don’t you know that in marriage both the spouse and the espoused become anointed unto godhead? That explains why in Hindu marriages the married couple can only fall at the feet of the guru and the guru alone — for the guru is higher than any god. Thus, I can now place them on your feet.’

So much theology disturbed, and convinced her, and she let me push the toe-rings on to her second toes, one on the left and the other on the right. The little bells on them whisked and sang: I was happy to have touched Savithri’s feet.

The toe-rings were the precise size for her. Little Mother was right: for Madeleine they would have been too big.

Savithri sat on my bed, and the sun who had made himself such an auspicious presence fell upon her clear Rajput face as she sang Mira.

Sadhā matha jā… Sadhū matha jā …

O cenobite, O cenobite do not go.

Make a pyre for me, and when I burn,

Put the ashes on your brow,

O cenobite, do not go…

We were at Victoria by nine o’clock. We were so happy and so sad altogether, as though no one could take us away from each other and nobody marry us again. We were not married that morning, we discovered, we had ever been married — else how understand that silent, whole knowledge of one another.

‘My love, my love, my love,’ she repeated, as though it were a mantra, ‘my love, and my Lord.’

‘And when will Italy be, and the bridge on the Arno, and the bambino?’ I asked.

She put her head out of the window of the train, and for the first time I noticed the collyrium that tears had spread over her cheeks and face.

‘I promise you one thing,’ she said.

‘And what, Princess, may that be?’ I replied, laughing.

‘Parvathi says she will come to Shiva, when Shiva is so lost in meditation that were he to open his eyes the three worlds would burn.’

‘Meaning?’ I was so frightened that my voice went awry and hollow.

‘I’ll come when you don’t need me, when you can live without me, O cenobite.’ I knew the absolute meaning of it, the exactitude, for Savithri could never whisper, never utter but the whole of truth, even in a joke. But it was always like a sacred text, a cryptogram, with different meanings at different hierarchies of awareness.

‘I understand and accept,’ I answered, with a clear and definite navel-deep voice. I can hear myself saying that to this day.

‘Italy is,’ she continued, relentless, ‘when Shivoham, Shivoham is true.’

‘Meanwhile?’

‘Meanwhile I go back to Allahabad and become Mrs Pratap Singh.’

‘And run the household of the new Governor,’ I added, to hide my knowledgement and pain. For by now Pratap had become Personal Secretary to His Excellency the Governor of some Indian Province. ‘Palace or Government House, they’re equal and opposite,’ I laughed.

‘And what will the learned historian do?’ she asked.

‘Finish the history of the Cathars, and well-wed and twice- wed, become professor of Medieval European History at some Indian university. India is large and very diverse,’ I pleaded.

‘I shall always be a good pupil,’ she joked. The train whistled, and took her away.

I took a taxi, went back to the Stag — or the Bunch of Grapes, for I do not remember exactly — and stood a drink to some bearded painter who talked abstract art and had a beautiful face. Holy is a pub when one is holy oneself.

Destiny is, I think, nothing but a series of psychic knots that we tie with our own fears. The stars are but efforts made indeterminate. To act, then, is to be proscribed to yourself. Freedom is to leave nothing of yourself outside. The whole of event is the eye of life, and eternity the ‘I’. Never can you escape eternity, for never can you escape that ‘I’. Even when you say you can, it is the ‘I’ saying it. Can the ‘I’ say anything? No, it cannot, no more than eternity can be seen in time. But time seeing itself is eternity, just as wave seeing itself is water. Meanwhile the winds lift and the monsoon blows, and white flakes of wavelets curve and rise, dash and demonstrate, and from crest to crest they cavalcade processioning to the shore. Not wavelet or crest, however breathless with foam is life: water is the meaning of life, or rather the meaning of life is li la, play.

Not achievement but self-recognition is pure significance. The extrovert confederates of action must stop, then we leap back to our own safety, our own desperation. The knots are thus undone, and calm as the Mediterranean is the effortless sea.

For the going inward is the true birth. He indeed the Brahmin who turns the crest inward; even if you are a pandit great as Jagannatha Bhatta or learned in logic as Kapila-Charya, the true life, the true Brahminhood commences when you recognize yourself in your eternity. At some moment you must stop life and look into it. Marriage or maternity, pain or the intimacy of success — love — may dip you into yourself. And as you go on dipping and rising in your inner Ganges murmuring,

‘Kashi Kshetram Shāriram

Tribhuvana jananim vayapim gyana Ganga’

My body, the holy site, is Benares,

Spreading within me as knowledge, the Ganges,

Mother of the three worlds.

you undo your knots. It is thus Benares is sacred, and Mother Ganga the absolver of sins. Sin is to think that in acting you are the actor: freedom, that you never could be the doer or enjoyer of an act. In the Ganges of such a life destiny dissolves — and you sail down to your own ocean…

As the ferry boat chugged and chattered through the English Channel, the blue of sky covering from crest of wave to shore, I thought there was the isolate, the holy realm of England, and on the other side, beyond the green water and waves, the wide sea of concussing humanity: France of the Revolution, France of les Droits de l’Homme; the romantic burst against slavery, the confusion of caste and confession; France, where ‘God sits at the crossroads’ warming his hands at the fire.