Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I love rivers and lakes, and make my home easily by any waterside hamlet. I love palaces for their echoes, their sense of never having seen anything but the gloomy. Palaces remind me of old and venerable women, who never die. They look after others so much — I mean, orphans of the family always have great-aunts, who go on changing from orphan to orphan — that they remain ever young. One such was Aunt Lakshamma. She was married to a minister once, and he died when she was seven or eight. And since then my uncles and their daughters, my mother’s cousins and their grandchildren, have always had Lakshamma to look after them, for an orphan in a real household is never an orphan. She preserved, did Lakshamma, all the clothes of the young in her eighteenth-century steel and sheesham trunk, in the central hall, and except when there was a death in the house these clothes never saw the light of the sun. Some of them were fifty years old, they said. The other day— that is, some seven or eight years ago — when we were told that Aunt Lakshamma, elder to my grandfather by many years, had actually died, I did not believe it. I thought she would live three hundred years. She never would complain or sigh. She never wept. We never wept when she died. For I cannot understand what death means.

My father, of course, loved me. He never let me stray into the hands of Lakshamma. He said: ‘Auntie smells bad, my son. I want you to be a hero and a prince.’ Some time before my mother died, it seems she had a strange vision. She saw three of my past lives, and in each one of them I was a son, and of course I was always her eldest born, tall, slim, deep-voiced, deferential and beautiful. In one I was a prince. That is why I had always to be adorned with diamonds — diamonds on my forehead, chest and ears. She died, they say, having sent someone to the goldsmith, asking if my hair-flower were ready. When she died they covered her with white flowers — jasmines from Coimbatore and champaks from Chamundi — and with a lot of kunkum on her they took her away to the burning-ghat. They shaved me completely, and when they returned they gave me Bengal gram, and some sweets. I could not understand what had happened. Nor do I understand now. I know my mother, my mother Gauri, is not dead, and yet I am an orphan. Am I always going to be an orphan?

That my father married for a third time — my stepmother having died leaving three children, Saroja, Sukumari, and the eldest, Kapila — is another story. My new stepmother loved me very dearly, and I could not think of a home without her bright smile and the song that shone like the copper vessels in the house. When she smiled her mouth touched her ears — and she gave me everything I wanted. I used to weep, though, thinking of my own mother. But then my father died. He died on the third of the second Moon-month when the small rains had just started. I have little to tell you of my father’s death, except that I did not love him; but that after he died I knew him and loved him when his body was such pure white spread ash. Even now I have dreams of him saying to me: ‘Son, why did you not love me, you, my eldest son?’ I cannot repent, as I do not know what repentance is. For I must first believe there is death. And that is the central fact — I do not believe that death is. So, for whom shall I repent?

Of course, I love my father now. Who could not love one that was protection and kindness itself, though he never understood that my mother wanted me to be a prince? And since I could not be a prince — I was born a Brahmin, and so how could I be king? — I wandered my life away, and became a holy vagabond. If Grandfather simply jumped over tigers in the jungles, how many tigers of the human jungle, how many accidents to plane and car have I passed by? And what misunderstandings and chasms of hatred have lain between me and those who first loved, and then hated, me? Left to myself, I became alone and full of love. When one is alone one always loves. In fact, it is because one loves, and one is alone, one does not die.

I went to Benares, once. It was in the month of March, and there was still a pinch of cold in the air. My father had just died and I took Vishalakshi, my second stepmother, and my young stepbrother Sridhara — he was only eleven months old— and I went to Benares. I was twenty-two then, and I had been to Europe; I came back when Father became ill. Little Mother was very proud of me — she said: ‘He’s the bearing of a young pipal tree, tall and sacred, and the serpent-stones around it. We must go round him to become sacred.’ But the sacred Brahmins of Benares would hear none of this. They knew my grandfather and his grandfather and his great-grandfather again, and thus for seven generations — Ramakrishnayya and Ranganna, Madhavaswamy and Somasundarayya, Manjappa and Gangadharayya — and for each of them they knew the sons and grandsons — (the daughters, of course, they did not quite know) and so, they stood on their rights. ‘Your son,’ they said to Little Mother, ‘has been to Europe, and has wed a European and he has no sacred thread. Pray, Mother, how could the manes be pleased.’ So Little Mother yielded and just fifty silver rupees made everything holy. Some carcass-bearing Brahmins—’We’re the men of the four shoulders,’ they boast — named my young brother Son of Ceremony in their tempestuous high and low of hymns — the quicker the better, for in Benares there be many dead, and all the dead of all the ages, the successive generations of manes after manes, have accumulated in the sky. And you could almost see them layer on layer, on the night of a moon-eclipse, fair and pale and tall and decrepit, fathers, grandfathers, greatgrandfathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, nephews; friends, kings, yogins, maternal uncles — all, all they accumulate in the Benares air and you can see them. They have a distanced, dull-eyed look — and they ask — they beg for this and that, and your round white rice-balls and sesame seed give the peace they ask for. The sacred Brahmin too is pleased. He has his fifty rupees. Only my young brother, eleven months old, does not understand. When his mother is weeping — for death takes a long time to be recognized — my brother pulls and pulls at the sari-fringe. I look at the plain, large river that is ever so young, so holy — like my Mother. The temple bells ring and the crows are all about the white rice-balls. ‘The manes have come, look!’ say the Brahmins. My brother crawls up to them saying ‘Caw-Caw’, and it’s when he sees the monkeys that he jumps for Little Mother’s lap. He’s so tender and fine-limbed, is my brother. Little Mother takes him into her lap, opens her choli and gives him the breast.

The Brahmins are still muttering something. Two or three of them have already washed their feet in the river and are coming up, looking at their navels or their fine gold rings. They must be wondering what silver we would offer. We come from far — and from grandfather to grandfather, they knew what every one in the family had paid, in Moghul Gold or in Rupees of the East India Company, to the more recent times with the British queen buxom and small-faced on the round, large silver. I would rather have thrown the rupees to the begging monkeys than to the Brahmins. But Little Mother was there. I took my brother in my arms, and I gave the money, silver by silver, to him. And gravely, as though he knew what he was doing, he gave the rupees to the seated Brahmins. He now knew too that Father was dead. Then suddenly he gave such a shriek as though he saw Father near us — not as he was but as he had become, blue, transcorporeal. Little Mother always believes the young see the dead more clearly than we the corrupt do. And Little Mother must be right. Anyway, it stopped her tears, and now that the clouds had come, we went down the steps of the Harischchandra Ghat, took a boat, and floated down the river.