Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Through the kindness of the authorities telegrams from abroad were marked, ‘Cable Indian Overseas Services,’ so a cable generally meant a cable to me from Madeleine. The cable I received that morning after returning home, of which I had perhaps a premonition, from having sat looking at the telegraph wires so long, came therefore as no real surprise, especially as Little Mother had just said on seeing me, ‘How well you look, Rama! What clarity and blood has come to your eyes.’ It was just then, when Little Mother had hardly gone in, that the telegraph peon handed the cable to me. I sat on the stone bench near the pomegranate bush and opened it, letting my cane fall beside me. The cable was from Tante Zoubie. It said that Madeleine had had to be taken to hospital suddenly for a caesarean to be performed. The boy died soon after. ‘Madeleine well’ it went on to say. ‘Don’t worry we will look after your wife. Get better soon. Chariot sends love…’ I could hear Saroja count the clothes inside the veranda — the washerman was there — three jubbas, four saris, ten handkerchiefs, four towels and I put the telegram into my pocket: it was addressed to the ants.

In the bathroom, later, when I stepped on the wash-slab I laughed. I was neither in pain, nor was I relieved; I felt above both, like a child looking at a kite in the sky; I thought of Georges, and laughed at Leibnitz and the monad and all that. I saw the yellow and white of the kite and the snake-like tail that the wind swept curling, whirling on itself and leaping up back against the sun. The winds blew cool and fresh. I laughed as a child laughs, playing with the subtleties of the breeze. I was happy. The world is a happy place for anyone to live in: look at the ants in the Lal Bagh. Vassita found peace with the Lord.

I laughed hilariously the whole afternoon, playing country- chess, first with Little Mother, and then with Saroja when she woke from her siesta. In the evening I took them all to the cinema.

News from Savithri was scarce. When letters came they were brief and full of humility: ‘This fat and foolish thing’—’I am unworthy — so uneducated a creature as I,’ and so on. It was just fear, I concluded, turned to nobler purposes.

Haemoglobules do perhaps have something to do with happiness, for my health improved steadily, so the doctors said. The monsoon abated, and the flavoursome Sravan winds began to blow. The earth was covered with wide yellow patches of rice and sugarcane, and the tanks were red with new waters. The cattle seemed lovely in their washed skins, and young betel leaves appeared at the market.

Sukumari had long ago been sent away, in the care of the cook, to Hyderabad, for colleges do not open according to our convenience, do they? Saroja’s husband wrote enthusiastic letters about Europe. It was his first trip abroad. ‘My sacred wife,’ he wrote, ‘you bring me good luck. Since you entered my house what a miracle it has all been: first I was transferred from the Refugee and Rehabilitation Ministry to the Financial Secretariat, and a month later I’m invited to go to Europe. Next time we will come here together. I long for you. I’ll tell you everything when I come.’ Saroja showed it to me as a proof that happiness can be.

Just as the cattle know when the rains will burst and fall, and Gangi and Gauri rush homeward, their ears pressed against their necks, so did I know the nimbed future of things. Savithri had not written to us for a month, but I knew she was back in India. ‘Some cloud must have told me,’ I wrote to her:

saṃtaptānāṃ tvam asi caraṇaṃ tat payoda priyāyāh

saṃdeçam me hara dhmapatikrodhaviçlesitasya

gantavyā te vasatir alakā nama yakṣeçvarānām

bāhyodyānasthitaharaçiraçcandrikādhautaharmy ā

You are the solace of those who are burnt

With anguish, O Giver of the rains!

Take then a message to my beloved,

Far distant through the wrath of Lord Dhanapathi.

You will go to the city of Alaka,

Abode of the princes of the yakshas;

In the parkland around resides Shiva Himself,

And the palaces are brightly lit with the Moon

Which shines from the head of the great God.

She was in Delhi, she wrote, with her father. They had taken a house in Mani Bagh, and the Raja of Surajpur was going to flatter the new gods in the same way as he had managed the British. Formerly it was a question of tiger- shooting and drink-parties; now it was nautch-parties and no tigers, please. Savithri seemed tired and sick of the world. ‘I may yet decide on the inevitable,’ she wrote. ‘Do not be angry with me. I am but a frail creature — like in the poem by W. B. Yeats you used to read to me. Woman is of the earth earthy, and if only you knew what an earthy creature I am. Pratap visits us regularly. He treats me like one does a deer at the zoo, offering me peanuts and green grass. I am not a gazelle, Rama, for I cannot leap beyond my nose. But, shall I tell you? — I love you, I love you. Protect me.’

The winds rose over the asoka trees as I read it a second time, at the Lal Bagh. On the other side of the lake five or six men were taking a bath. It was just before dusk; they must have come after some cremation. Beyond the crematorium was the madhouse; Dr Appaswamy, who was a friend of mine, once told me that some of the inmates were quite extraordinary in moments of lucidity — there was one, a professor of mathematics, who solved many problems there that he could not in his native town of Trichinopoly. Death, madness; Pratap, marriage; haemoglobules, telegraph wires above and stars beyond. Benares is everywhere you are, says a famous Vedantic text; Kapilavastu is the true home of mankind; each one of us has a Kanthaka at his door. Dare we leave the child by the mother, with his head under her curved hand, the light ‘lingering like moonbeams’ on her young seventeen-year-old face? Would angels shut the fissures in our being, that the world know not when we take the leap?

I became so tender, so understanding with Little Mother. She was the fifth of seven children, and her father, a court clerk, came home forever angry, snuff in his palm, and maybe eight annas in his pocket: ‘This is all, Sata, that wretched ryot gave for three hours of scribbling. Money does not grow on mango trees in the backyard.’ The children were scared by their father, especially the younger ones. He didn’t want them: she had them. So the coconut branch and the bicycle-pump were Little Mother’s real teachers. ‘When you’re married off I shall drink a seer of frothing warm milk, you widow!’ he would shout, if the water was not hot in the bathroom, or the clothes not dry on the bamboo.

‘Life to me, Rama, was like that municipal tap at the door, purring the whole night through. But at least, when women came in early in the morning, the tap heard someone sing, whereas I–I knew kicks and tears…’ Little Mother had never gone back to her father’s house again. ‘They are stranger to me than you are — whom I have known but these five or six years. People talk of the heart: the heart of some is made of cow-dung or old buttermilk. Worms rise out of it. Ashappa!’ And Sridhara was being patted into sleep. Saroja woke later in the night and said, ‘Little Mother, was I speaking in my dream?’

‘No, my child, I’ve been recounting my Ramayana to Rama. Sleep and dream of your new home and of your wonderful husband. He’s such a nice man, Rama, isn’t he?’

The doctors suggested that I could now go up to a hill- station, perhaps to Ooty or to Kodaikanal, ‘Crisp dry air will do you a lot of good.’

‘Come with me to Delhi, Brother, and then we’ll go to Mussoorie,’ said Saroja. But I was bent on going to Kodaikanal. I did not know it, besides, it would be very dry. I could work there, I was sure; I had to finish my thesis soon. I had to return to India.