Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

At the station Madeleine looked so beautiful in her big womanhood, so sad, that I kissed her with warmth, certitude, and devotion. She was the tabernacle of my habitation. I would build a Paraclete yet.

~

The rest of the story is easily told. In a classical novel it might have ended in palace and palanquin and howdah, or in the high Himalayas, but I am not telling a story here, I am writing the sad and uneven chronicle of a life, my life, with no art or decoration, but with the ‘objectivity’, the discipline of the ‘historical sciences’, for by taste and tradition I am only an historian.

Yet even in history Catherine de Braganza marries Charles the Second, and so Bombay comes into being; or Marie de Médicis marries Henri IV, becomes a widow, and, stupid and resolute, fights against Cardinal Richelieu, dies in exile and in Cologne; or India de Travalcen marries someone, is taken prisoner by the Turks and becomes first the wife of Noureddin and then of Suldan. Or look at the marriages and widowhood of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but for whom there would never have been the troubadours, nor, perhaps, modern love (‘L’amour?’ said the famous French historian Charles Seignobos, ‘une invention du XII esiècle’), which means I might never have met Madeleine or married her — like a good Brahmin of the older generation I would have sat in meditation morning and evening and changed annually my sacred thread, for even in Aix-en- provence, though you cannot make pipal-fire, you can always make an olive-wood fire, draw the swastika on the wall, decorate the sanctuary with mandalas, light the sacrificial hearth and walk round Agni. You can get Ganges water by air every week for aspersions and mouth ablutions. And going back home, I would have gone seven times round fire again, and safely married some Venkatalakshamma or Subbamma, who would have borne me my heir and my funeral fire-lighter; and at the end I would certainly have held the tail of some bull or cow that my son had bequeathed for my further journey, and thus my story would have ended. Madeleine might have married some doctor from Rouen or naval cadet from Toulon, would have borne him two children and possibly even a third — it did not depend as in India on the stars, but on arithmetical figures at the Bank and the Caisse d’Epargne, and certainly this Roger Marbillon or Claude Carillon, would have accepted a safe and historical place at St Médard — but Madeleine married me, and this is the sad part of the story. For life is sad, whether you look at it from the bottom or from a backward-turning look, or from any side, in fact; and we roll our lives with events, and cover ourselves with history and position, till the last moment arrives. For whether you drive a carriage and four — or like that famous lakpathi of Lahore, who came to visit Guru Arjun with nine pinions to his carriage, because he owned nine lakhs in silver; and who was mischievously given by the saint the needle he was stitching with, and asked that this instrument of sewing be brought over to the next life — or whether we wear ribbons, medals, sacred threads, or tufts on the head, or like the Yorubas mark our faces with lines each time our heroism has shone by cutting off the head of another; or whether we get the Stalin Peace Prize and have a photograph printed in all the Soviet papers — for they all print the same things, simultaneously, say I the historian, and in every language of the eighteen or more Republics, including Tamlouk, Uzbec, or High Azerbaijan — be it any of these, but when you have to catch the bull’s tail you all catch it the same way, whether your heir has left one for you in Benares or not. Marriages are because death must be: the end implies a beginning. The fear of extinction is the source of copulation: you make love that the heir be born — the son who will light your funeral pyre. Even Stalin has a son, and he will do his job, don’t you worry, when the bell tolls… For the bell will toll even for Stalin, say I the historian.

So marriages are and marriages must be. For otherwise what would happen to the wife and children (or mistress and children) of Pierre Boissier or Jean Carrefour, greffier at the Mairie of the VIIIth Arrondissement, in charge of improving the national demography? To him you go and say: ‘Monsieur, here are my papers — here my papiers de coutume given by the Embassy, here my birth certificate (however bogus, for in India we do not yet have this municipal proof of having come to be), and here my bride’s; and here, may I permit myself to offer you most humbly, most courteously, three thousand francs, for your great, for your charming kindness; for without your assistance Madeleine Roussellin will never become my bride, my wife, the bearer of my heir’—and so Pierre Boissier or Jean Carrefour prepares a book of heirs, the three thousand francs having warmed his gullet and his bed. But what would become of him if all became Cathars, and talked of the corruption of the body, the sin of fornication, and the horror of birth? There would be no funeral fees to pay either, if everyone went to another Pure, took consolamentum and fasted in some caverne d’Orolac till sweet death, dovelike, benign messenger of the happy world came and took them away. For in that other world you do not need any bulls or cows: it is full of the loveliest firebirds, pigeons, nightingales… No you should not starve Pierre Boissier or Jean Carrefour.

Nor must any poor Brahmin of Benares be allowed to take his own child to the Ganges banks — for there he would pay nothing, not even the hire of four shoulders, being just a child, his own arms would do. Because whatever happens, the Ganges is always pure, and he has no money to buy firewood from all those clamouring scoundrels on the pathways to the ghats. ‘Oh, Panditji, I’ve received such fresh, dry consignments from the tarai — and I’ll sell it to you for two annas a maund less than that rascal, that robber, across the road.’ ‘Oh, Panditji, you know me, and your father knows me,’ says the other, ‘and did I ever sell you bad firewood? No, never. Whereas — ask the street-cleaner Panhan — yesterday the body would not burn with that fellow’s firewood, so they came running to me. And look at this deodar, heavy as gold…’ But he needs neither, for he can afford neither; so he takes the child, wraps him in the white of his shoulder-cloth, and muttering some mantra goes into the water, and lets the little one float down. ‘Float down, float down, little circles like flowers, and there is not even a tear in his eye, for who can weep? Why weep and for so many dead — what little circles like some flowers, and there is not even a tear in his eye, for who can weep? Why weep and for so many dead — what would happen to this poor Brahma Bhatta or Virupaksha Bhatta if our fathers did not die, and we did not have to take their ashes to Benares? Death and birth are meteorological happenings: we reap and we sow, we plant and we put manure; we smile when the sky shows rain, we suffer when it rains hail — and all ends in our stomach. There must be a way out, Lord; a way out of this circle of life: rain, sunshine, autumn, snow, heat and the rain once more, in gentle flowerlike ripples on the Ganges…

Little Mother wrote to me that Saroja had made up her mind to marry Subramanya Sastri. ‘He’s a very nice man, Rama, and one can have nothing but esteem for his purity, gravity, and deferential ways, but he’s not made for Saroja — so lovely, so sensitive, so sad… What can a woman do, Rama? You alone could have done something, were you here. Now it’s foolish to say anything — to do anything. Already the other-people treat her as one of their own. What invitations, gold, chains, diamond earrings, evening drives… But it gives me such pain in the heart, I know not why. Saroja somehow thinks, and it is a natural thing to think for a girl of her age, a girl and a stepdaughter, that I am her enemy. Rama, I have tried my best to treat everyone alike — after all, are you my own son? Yet what confidence I have in you. Rama, I wish Saroja would marry someone like our Rama… Come soon, we need you. And blessing to you, and to my daughter-in-law.’