Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

When Saroja and Little Mother had left — Saroja spending a few days in Hyderabad on her way north — I went back to those lovely Kodai Hills, rich with new verdure, ancient, alone and with a rocking, sea-like solitude. I walked up and down the Observatory Ridge like a goat, and the doctors were very pleased with the result. ‘It is not always that heights are helpful,’ said old Dr Ruppart. He was a German, and had settled there forty years earlier, before the 1914—18 war. He was sure that in a few weeks I could return to Europe. ‘Lucky man,’ he said, ‘to have a French wife and live in Provence, and to be writing a thesis on the Minnesingers and Parsifal.’ Frau Ruppart played — oh, how badly! — that famous beginning of the Prelude. Strange, with the sound of servants speaking Tamil and the scent of thousand- petalled jasmines at the door, in that lucid moonlight to hear:

Then I remembered that the story of Mani was of Indian origin; so why not? But Dr Ruppart was sure it came from the Central Asian steppes, and was an original Aryan myth. ‘Why, if you read Frazer, you’ll find that perhaps it’s not only an Aryan myth, but is to be found among the people of the Toboggan Islands too!’

I was very serene at Kodai. It seemed as though happiness was just there, over the lake; some lotus would rise from the depths, and Lakshmi arise with it, and the elephant would stand beside her in those ‘taralata-range’ waters, a garland in its trunk.

Shvretambara dharé Devi nānalankāra bhūshité.

Jagasthithe Jaganmātha Mahālakshmi namosthuthé,

O Devi robed in white,

Shining with many and varied jewels;

O bearer of the universe, mother of Creation,

Great Goddess of Wealth, to thee I bow.

I repeated to myself.

Sorrow was, of course, like a shadow behind one, yet one could look out at the silver of the lake and know that light dwells in between one’s eyes. To be centred in oneself is to know joy.

Madeleine was full of concern and advice for me. ‘Don’t come back too soon,’ she begged. ‘I have grown so fat I will look like your Frau Ruppart, round and very red. Tante Zoubie threatens to send me to India if you cough once in her presence. What a kind, clever — devilishly clever — and charmingly inconsequent creature she is. For her joy is a biological need, as you would say. “If I do not laugh half an hour a day, I shall eat the head of Chariot away,” she says, laughing. And when she has nothing to do she composes humorous verse, that is recited at table— towards gastronomical ends, she proclaims. They are not at all bad and have a touch of Prévert : “Un jour le bois me dit, petit-frère je te montrerai l’enfer, et puis tu verras l’oignon gros comme le poivre, car le Paradis est circonscrit.” I shall now be a good Vassita.’

Letters from Madeleine rested me. They seemed to contain a hidden wisdom, some touch of sorrow that was lit, as it were, with a great, round, impersonal love. She seemed to have touched a point of awareness where she could press herself unto existence as such and have perhaps the assuredness that this identity nobody could remove or corrupt. I felt ashamed of myself, and tried to grow more self-reliant, indrawn, and earnest.

Savithri wrote more often now. Her letters varied with her moods, now chirruping away like a bird about some tour in the Tarai where they had been guests of the Raja Sahib of Tehri-Garhwal, or about some sickening news of governmental intrigue.

That is the beauty of Savithri. She is whole and simple wherever she is; for her there is only one world, one spot, one person even — and that is he who is before her. From her distant perch of the impersonal she offers him a spoon of sugar or a glass of whisky, as though her only concern were his joy. No one can be near her — except perhaps me, I told myself — for she is everywhere, and you had to be her to be by her.

Pratap could be her husband, if he so liked, but he stayed in the Audience Chamber and talked with her father. He could, if he so wished, go out on the terrace and see the changing of the guards at the palace — for by now they had gone back to Surajpur— or hear the seventh-hour music play on the Main Gate. The Royal Elephant might just be coming in, with Mohammed Ali piercing its ears, ‘Hettata — Het — ta …’ while Savithri would sit on a divan reading Bertrand Russell, or smoking a cigarette and throwing it away, trying to draw the evening into herself. She would go back into her silence and await there, for like some princess in the fables she would wed but he who could solve the riddle. The riddle was not in Sanskrit or in Hindi, it was in any plain language, and it said, ‘I want It, It, It. Pray Prince, pray Learned-man, what is the It I seek? The garland is there and the elephant, with howdah and the Nine-Musics. Solve me the riddle, Prince, and I’ll wed thee.’ She walked through life as though she were not looking at the world at all, but at the kunkum on her clear, bump forehead.

She wrote from Surajpur:

‘There was a young diplomat in Delhi who pursued me as though I were the queen of God. He was convinced I would bring lustre to his job and do good, in addition, to my country. Father himself was not averse to it, kind though he is to Pratap. A Delhi diplomat today is worth two private secretaries to an Indian Governor. I laughed at Father, at his childish selfishness, his enormous vanity, and his spacious goodness. Left to himself he would think of nothing less than the moon to marry me to. I keep him in good humour. I act the Cambridge lady, and that’s a great success. You’ll laugh if I tell you that at the Delhi Gymkhana my brother and I danced the boogie-woogie. You wouldn’t know what that is, but this is just to tease you. I even won a prize.

‘Rama, my love, as I write this to you, I lie by a lake in northern Surajpur. Father and others are away having a picnic on the lake. I stayed back at this rest-lodge, excusing myself with a headache. I think I wanted to think of you. The maid has just brought me one of those ancient palace lamps, with casto-roil, cloth-wick, and opening like a flower with five petals. “It’s not electricity for the memsahib,” she apologized. They think that now I’ve been to Cambridge I can only see with electric light. They do not know, poor foolish women, that I can see more splendidly now than ever before, for I have a light on my forehead, a hood of some noble serpent, whose seven-headed protection brings my breath down and establishes me in silence. “My daughter,” said Father to me the other day, “There’s a strange beauty about you now, as there was on the face of your mother when I first married her. She was seventeen and had never left the zenana. But, dear child, you seem so sad, as though you had gathered all the sorrow of dusk and had tied it at your sari-fringe. We are not of the servant-class that you should sorrow in life.” That is Father all over — why, when there is the elephant, and cannon at our door, and his own big, protective self, why is there anything to sorrow for? True, his friends the British have gone, but that sorrow was of short duration. Father is a pragmatist. “We, the Rathors, dealt with the Moghuls first,” he declared, “and then came the Lord Sahib. Now we can deal with a Brahmin or a Banya with equal ease. They may be the cleverest of all the world, but they are our own. We know their tricks — and they being new to the game we still have a chance.” Scheming and building imaginary empires is for Father like playing chess in the evening or going on picnic — always there is an ulterior motive. He will never do anything for anyone without being sure of a return — except perhaps for his daughter.