Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

And yet love and sorrow create such an intimacy in one — at a certain level they seem so alike — that if Madeleine had asked, as she often seemed to ask me, with her deep-set eyes, ‘Rama, tell me — tell me, that you love me?’ I should have said to her, ‘Beloved, my beloved, don’t you see, I am near you? That which is within you is mine; I am mine and you, Madeleine, are — a chunk of truth, a reality — as the sun, the moon, and the space of the stars…’ It would have been exact, and I would have betrayed no one.

For, lying by Madeleine, I was overtaken by no remorse, no inhibitions, no eating back my own sorrow on thinking of Savithri. Savithri was there, not in me but as me; not as someone far, unreal, relegated to a country in rounded space, but as light which seemed never to fade, never to know where to go — like that constant sound the texts say which in the silence of things, the first vibration, the primary sound, the pranavam OM propounds itself, and from which all that is World is created. Savithri, as it were, was the meaning of meaning, Sabdharta; and everything read from her, because she was — she is — she will be.

But the texture of our lives, that of Madeleine and me, was woven with such respect for one another, that a false gesture, a sentimental note would have laid us aghast. If I wanted to kill Madeleine I had only to breathe an untruth. We seemed to have entered some magic being, made of thin, sure glass — and breath.

We breathed to each other as though in this respiratory movement we became united as never in flesh we could be. And in breathing with Madeleine I felt sometimes — I was breathing to her the breath of another, a known presence; the tender, compassionate hand of Savithri was perhaps there, and I was the outsider. Gently, and carefully, when I tried to remove my hand and slip back to my own bed, there would be a tender pressure from Savithri, as if to say, ‘Love, my love, do not go.’

One day, I sat and wrote to Catherine: I asked her to come. After all, it would be nice to have her there, I thought, and she would be so happy, I was sure, to see Georges again: in love, days and space pass so painfully, I did not tell Madeleine about the letter, and Catherine seemed to find some difficulty in convincing Oncle Charles about her coming.

‘We are not Indians,’ explained Catherine, when she did arrive a week later, ‘and Oncle Charles said, “You cannot be all the time living in your cousin’s house. Remember you have spent almost a month there. And they’re no millionaires, my daughter”.’

This attitude towards hospitality I understood, but I suffered a great deal from it. As Father said, ‘They who come will eat rice and dhal-water if we can give them nothing better; and sleep on a mat if I cannot spread them a bed in velveteen.’ Catherine was young, and she knew my real feelings; besides, it was natural that she should be back with Georges. They were going to get married in the spring soon after Easter, it was tentatively decided, so that Georges’s old father could come from Munich.

Catherine said, ‘And you, Rama, will not be there, as my godfather and Georges’s only brother.’

‘Oh, Catherine!’ I replied. ‘You know that after Father’s death this, my sister’s marriage, is the first marriage in the household. Besides, I have a vague hope that I may still stop Saroja making a mistake…’ But as I said it I knew that what was was, and Saroja would never go back on a mistake — it would be inauspicious.

Catherine drove all of us to Marignane Airfield, Madeleine sat behind, with her enormous, real and sad presence, and Georges sat beside her, smoking away. Lezo, good Lezo, looked even more like a schoolboy than ever before. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘I wish I could go to north India, and learn Bhutanese. There’s very little work done on that language, except for a small grammar by the Reverend Father Templeston, published in 1882.’ Georges seemed truly sad to leave me. Madeleine looked like someone drugged, or a pious woman telling her beads. Buddhism had given her a certain insight into her own nature, a protection from something smelly, foreign, and other — it gave her a step, a conscious foothold in India.

Georges, and all that she meant to Georges, only affirmed my own presence in her. ‘She will be under my care,’ said Georges, at the aerodrome, while we were going through the formalities. ‘N’est-ce pas, chérie?’ he asked Catherine, like an afterthought. ‘Madeleine will just be ready for the good news, as we shall also be thinking of good things,’ whispered Catherine, and kissed Madeleine on her bulging cheek. However holy maternity may be, ‘civilization’ has made it ugly: peasant women do not grow so fat. Little Mother had washed the vessels and was spreading wet, washed saris on the bamboos when the pains started; and in an hour the child was there, Sridhara was there. That is how it should be.

‘I’ll be back soon, Madeleine,’ I said, making her a long namaskar. I had never learnt to kiss goodbyes in public. Even to take Madeleine’s arm in public seemed a desecration to me. But with Savithri it was different. Why, I wondered, why indeed, as I left the barrier and went towards the waiting plane.

Once the door of the plane had closed behind me, I knew it would never be the same again. Something colossal and complete had happened to Madeleine, to me — to the world. Beautiful was the Mediterranean, green as a silken sari, and the world was covered with noble filigree sunshine.

Man cannot and should not be petty. The magnitude of Marcus Aurelius and his natural wisdom was permanent and universal; the discourses of Socrates everlasting. I thought how Alexandria had taught man medicine, geography, and oriental wisdom, and Eratosthenes, Alexandria’s famous librarian, had written an encyclopedic book on India. Ptolemy Philadelphus himself sent an Ambassador Dionysius to Pataliputra for the fame of Indian wisdom had spread far and deep, and Dionysius was ‘to put truth to the test by personal inspection’. Forget Cleopatra and her rage and think now of Carthage, I said to myself. Baal was cruel and so was Semiramis, but how sacred, how luminous the sky became, beyond the Persian Sea. Darkness had grown, a mountainous, sky-reaching darkness; a hot darkness between India and Greece. But the Mediterranean is an Indian sea, a Brahminic ocean; somewhere the Rhone must know the mysteries of Mother Ganga. India, my land, for me is ever, ever holy. ‘If only to be born in a land with so beautiful a shape, should make you feel proud and wise and ancient,’ Madeleine had once said to me. And I agreed with her.

The continent North of the Ocean

And South of the great snows

Is the holy land of Bharatha.

It’s there they live, the descendants of Bharatha,

Nine yojanas long,

And where all acts have their fruits

For those that seek liberation.

I found myself saying the Gayathri mantra as we landed at Santa Cruz. I had said it day after day, almost for twenty years; I must have said it a million million times: ‘OM, O face of Truth with a disk of Gold, remove the mist (of ignorance) that I may see you face to face.’ But this time I said it quietly, tenderly, as one speaks to something near, breathful, intimate. It was India I wanted to see, the India of my inner being. Just as I could now see antara-Kashi, the ‘inner Benares’, India for me became no land — not these trees, this sun, this earth; not those ladle-hands and skeletal legs of bourgeois and coolie; not even the new pride of the uniformed Indian official, who seemed almost to say, ‘Don’t you see, I am Indian now, and I represent the Republic of India’—but something other, more centred, widespread, humble; as though the gods had peopled the land with themselves, as the trees had forested the country, rivers flowed and named themselves, birds winged themselves higher and yet higher, touched the clouds and soared beyond, calling to each other over the valleys by their names. The India of Brahma and Prajapathi; of Varuna, Mithra and Aryaman; of Indra, of Krishna, Shiva, and Parvathi; of Rama, Harishchandra, and Yagnyavalkya; this India was a continuity I felt, not in time but in space; as a cloud that stands over a plain might say, ‘Here I am and I pour—’and goes on pouring. The waters of that rain have fertilized our minds and hearts, and being without time they are ever present. It is perhaps in this sense that India is outside history. A patch of triangular earth, surrounded by the three seas, somehow caught the spirit without time, and established it in such a way that you can see the disk of gold shine miles above the earth. And as the plane cuts through the night of the Persian Gulf, you feel a streak of gold, a benevolent cerulean green, that you want to touch, to taste, to rememorate unto yourself. You feel it belongs to you, be you Indian, Chinese, French, Alaskan, or Honduran. It is something that history has reserved for herself, just as humans reserve an area of their own being, known but hardly used, it exists, as it were, for one’s rarer moments: in the simplicity of dusk, in the breath after poetry; in the silence after death, in the space of love; in the affirmation of deep sleep; an area all known but atemporal, where you see yourself face to face.