Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘Be it prosperous. Adored be He of the Three-Eyes, with Ganges in his Hair, etc., etc….

‘This day, in the year 1615 2of the victorious increasing Salivahana era, the year named Sri Mukha, on the 12th of the bright fortnight of Pushya, when King Virabhadra the Great, he who hath killed his enemies with weapons of the very Pandavas, valorous, young, splendid as the new sun of the northern-turning equinox, of the race of the Yadavas, king of the sacred lands south of the ever blue Krishna and north of the Cauvery, master of the eighteen sciences, learned, inexorable, kind, protector of the family Gods, He in his infinite Ocean of kindness whose foam is like the new moon; to the Venerable Three-Veda — knowing, bright, auspicious, like the very Himalayas in learning, as if the Goddess of learning sat in his throat, who beams wisdom like the sun beams light, Vishweswara Ramakrishna Bhatta; to him hath His Gracious Majesty, this village of Hastinapura given, at the auspicious time of Makara-Sankramana, with presentation of a coin and pouring of water; that acquiring the eight rights of full possession belonging to this village, namely, present profit, future profit, hidden treasure, underground stores, springs, minerals, actualities, and possibilities, yea, his offspring and descendants, as long as the sun and moon endure, that he fulfil the four duties of the Brahmin, keep learning aflame like the face of Brahma, that the said learned Brahmin and his sons and grandson, in undivided property, and for generations to come, keep from every foe and Turk; and may the Himavathy flow with noble abundance, for when the sacrificial fire be, plenty and righteousness also be. With horses, elephants, and chariots, did the great king, roaring like a lion in speech, whose very shadow frightens the demons in the underworld, He, His Majesty Virabhadra, made holy ablutions in the waters, the gentle, the soft, the fruitful Himavathy, daughter of the Srigiri Mountains, that rise like the very Himalayas on the Western Sea…

Sridhara listened to it all as if he understood every word, and when Aunt Sata poured ghee to sanctuary lamps, how Sridhara fell before the gods. The lizards knowingly clucked, and the cows came to ask for rice-water. The temple elephant gave a shout somewhere: I was back in Hariharapura.

In the afternoon Alur Sri Kantha Sastri came and took me down to the river. Grave she looked, Mother Himavathy, but what a rich vesture of gracious peacock-blue she wore. We washed, and since I could not bathe I wandered about thinking of where Grandfather Ramanna had taught me this or that, of Amara, Nirukta, the Isa and Kena Upanishads. Sri Kantha Sastri came to remind me where Grandfather had been cremated: Mother Himavathy had just waited for the fire to die down and then she had risen suddenly and washed away his sacred ashes.

Timma and Ranga brought us vegetables, and the cook gave us a magnificent meal that evening.

I gave priest Ranganatha three hundred rupees for the repairs of the Kenchamma temple. ‘And here’s a sari for the goddess,’ said Little Mother, producing a small worship-sari from her box. I was happy to see the cattle when they came home; Gauri was still alive, and so strong for her age — she was eleven years old. ‘She gave this calf but a year ago,’ protested Nanja, ‘and she still gives us three measures.’ Lali and Sethu had died of foot-and- mouth disease the year before.

When dusk fell the village elders came to invite us for the evening worship. How very splendid the Goddess looked, round, with her green eyes, and the serpent-belt that Grandfather, so they said, had given her after my birth. And when we went home after the circumambulations Mango-tope Siddanna came to discuss some boundary questions: the corner-house people had encroached on our elephant-fruit field, and they were not people to listen to kind words. ‘For just a question they’ll throw you into the Himavathy, but we know how to deal with their grandfathers,’ said Siddanna. Little Mother knew all the details about the lands, though she had been here but once; Uncle Seetharamu had given her detailed instructions.

Everybody asked about Saroja’s marriage. ‘What a wonderful family — a son in London, and a daughter in Delhi,’ said Bailiff Subbayya. ‘Now that the youngest has drunk of Mother Himavathy’s green waters, this child, too, will come back to us, for initiation and marriage,’ proclaimed Pattadur Patel Siddalingayya. In the night, as I lay thinking on my lands— this long stretch of Himavathy valley that had given us rice and sugarcane year after year, and the hills beyond that had fed us on coffee and jackfruit, cardamom, and honey, for decades, for hundreds of years — it seemed to me that they were a presence, a more continuous, inexorable presence than Little Mother, Sukumari, Sridhara or me.

We went back to Bangalore happy and refreshed after Hariharapura.

Saroja came to join us the week after. Her husband had been sent on a mission to London, and she was going to spend a few months with us. Never in my life have I been happier than during those six weeks in Bangalore. We took walks in the Lal Bagh, we went to hear music at the City Hall, we visited relations — Little Mother knew every one of them, and like Father she loved visiting all of them, morning, noonday, afternoon and dusk-fall — and we played country-chess at home and laughed all the time. Saroja came to understand Little Mother better, and often as I entered they changed their talk, as if they did not wish to worry me. ‘Brother, you get better first — and the rest is my affair,’ Saroja pleaded. Sukumari was happy too, for here she could go about with boys without people talking scandal.

‘In Bangalore,’ remarked Little Mother, ‘it is not as in Muslim Hyderabad. Here girls can go about with boys and nobody thinks anything of it. After all it’s Brahmin-land,’ declared Little Mother, forgetting that the benign Congress régime had abolished caste distinctions.

The air in the evening of Bangalore is cool, and in Basavangudi how enchanting the dusk hours, with the bells of the Bull Temple ringing, rich and long. We often walked up there when my breathing was not too hard — and let the evening fall on us across the rocks and the momentous hollows of the hills. Lights would suddenly shine out everywhere, and while the bats settled on the trees Little Mother and Saroja would go into the temple and bring back prasadam. Then with the smell of camphor mingling with the smell of champaks, we would go home, our nostrils rich, and our breath sacred. ‘Sambho-Sankara, Sambho-Sankara,’ repeated Little Mother, as though we were in Benares again.

Saroja had brought her cook from Delhi, for our own cook was no good at all. Appoo Nair made wonderful sambar and idlies. I was happy.

The doctors began to be more optimistic. They said it was my vegetarian habits that must have caused all this trouble.

‘In Rome do as Romans do, is a good adage,’ said Dr Bhimsen Rao to me. ‘It’s because Grandfather wouldn’t allow your father to die like the great Ramanujan 3that your own father was never allowed to go to Cambridge. But times have changed and you have gone to Europe. You must eat meat and drink wine,’ he advised. ‘If not why marry a European wife?’

What was there for me to say? I laughed and said, ‘I am a European Brahmin,’ and he seemed satisfied with my answer. Since that day he always introduced me to the nurses and X-ray assistants as ‘this European Brahmin, this French Vedantin.’ It made everybody laugh. In India we always laugh, at everything, auspicious or indifferent. It must do our lungs a lot of good.

Noble is the game of life and pentathlic the works of civilization. Birth and death, sowing and reaping, the communication of joys and sufferings; the subtleties of statistics, the names of loves; diplomatic determinations, subterfuges, losses, conquests; the crowning of queens (death of kings), the killing of dictators or of their fist-faced henchmen; all these follow one another, as if the magnificent line of ants at my feet in the Lal Bagh had any knowledge of other things than that the sun shines in between two gusts of monsoon winds, and have no premonition of the trees that wave their tops in jubilant youth, that aeroplanes hover above the earth, bearing people back and forth, and from all the lands and from round the roundsome globe, or that the telegraph wires which pass by me, have carried the destiny of men for decades: ‘Shamoo died?; ‘Subbu, succeeded exams’; ‘Lakshmana transferred to Dehra Dun, Military Depot,’ and they will carry it for several decades more, unless more simple means dispense with wires and conglomerate absurdities, so that important news does not reach us on a bicycle, with a blue coat and khaki trousers, and brick-coloured envelopes do not contain the amalgam of destiny.